THE BEATLES IN HAMBURG, 1961

Fifty years on, Jürgen Vollmer recalls the images he shot and his close friendship with the bar band from Liverpool. Jonathan Wingate reports

THE BEATLES IN HAMBURG, 1961

In 1960, a steady stream of British bands headed to the red light district of Hamburg after German promoters realised that they were considerably cheaper to hire than their American counterparts. When they first arrived in the Reeperbahn in the back of their manager Allan Williams’ old van in the summer of 1960, John, Paul and George were accompanied by Stuart Sutcliffe on bass and Pete Best on drums.

From August to October, The Beatles were the house band at the Indra Club, where they performed for four hours a night and slept together in a tiny room above a local cinema. They eventually secured a regular slot at the nearby Kaiserkeller club, where local art student Klaus Voormann first heard them. Voormann was so impressed that he came down to The Beatles’ next show with his friends Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer in tow.

Voormann, Kirchherr and Vollmer were self-styled “exis” (existentialists), whose clothes and haircuts could not have been more different to the rock and rollers who frequented Hamburg’s clubs, but that didn’t stop them from immediately becoming firm friends with The Beatles. Kirchherr was a photography student who went on to shoot a series of hugely important pictures of the band, yet despite the fact that he had almost no experience, it was Jürgen Vollmer’s photograph of John Lennon …

by Jonathan Wingate
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