What really happened with Stu Sutcliffe and The Beatles

[Lucy]

Backbeat: what really happened with Stu Sutcliffe and The Beatles

A new production, telling the story of the tragic ‘fifth member of The Beatles’, is coming to Glasgow this month.

http://entertainment.stv.tv/onstage/155184-backbeat-what-really-happened-with-stu-sutcliffe-and-the-beatles/

The Beatles are widely known as the most successful band of all time, but few people know the detailed background story of the group, and exactly what happened when they went to Hamburg with ‘fifth’ member, Stu Sutcliffe.

Backbeat, a new stage production based on the 1994 film of the same name, aims to shine the light on the mysterious character, who was a bassist with the band for 15 months, when The Beatles were on the verge of superstardom.

A world premiere, the play hits Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre from February 9 until March 6, and tells the largely unknown story of tragic Sutcliffe, who was torn between his love for a girl called Astrid Kirchherr, and his career with the band.

Explaining a bit more about the story of Backbeat, Andrew Knotts, who plays the role of the young John Lennon said: “The play centres around the early Beatles, and when they went to Hamburg. It’s kind of the untold story really, we kind of know everything that came after with The Beatles because it’s so well publicised…”

He added: “What happened was that McCartney got them (The Beatles) the gig in Hamburg, but they didn’t have a bass player. So John (Lennon) managed to convince his friend Stuart to come along and play bass in the band, so they did that.

“He was never the best musician, his heart wasn’t in it really, and he met a woman called Astrid when he was over there. So the play kind of focuses around the love triangles within it. John wanted Stu to be in the band, and Stu thought only of Astrid and didn’t really want to …”

Stu died after suffering cerebral paralysis aged just 22, the year before Beatlemania took hold. And it’s his sudden, tragic end in life, and the many questions that surround the mysterious character, that have left people wanting to know more about him.

Daniel Healy who plays Paul McCatney in Backbeat, said: “I think the thing about Stuart is he’s sort of an enigma. We don’t really know much about him, we don’t have any footage of him…this image we have in our minds of The Beatles, he’s not really a part of it, but he’s so much a part of the early story. And I think it’s just interesting because he is this enigma, and he was this artist and he was this guy who was completely different from the other guys who went down this path, and I think it’s just really interesting from a real human point of view…”

Backbeat, which charts the full story of Stuart Sutcliffe and the early Beatles, opens at the Citizens Theatre on February 9.

[beatlebangs1964]

It has been said that Stu was not really a musician and that he never really learned to play guitar. How much musical ability he had, I don't know and I don't think the world at large knows that.

He may have been very musically talented, but from all accounts, he did not ever go far in developing musically.

[Maia 66]

He added: “What happened was that McCartney got them (The Beatles) the gig in Hamburg, but they didn’t have a bass player. So John (Lennon) managed to convince his friend Stuart to come along and play bass in the band, so they did that.

This guy has no idea what he's talking about! :rolleyes:

[Lucy]

This guy has no idea what he's talking about! :rolleyes:

I know - terrible isn't it! Get your facts straight buddy!

[Lucy]

Some more press about the show....

And the Beatle goes on

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article7015469.ece

Backbeat, the film about Stuart Sutcliffe, the fifth Beatle, and the band’s Hamburg years, has been retooled for stage.

The practice room in Kensington doesn’t look much like a crucible of musical history, but that’s what it’s about to become. We’re a fortnight into rehearsals for Backbeat, Iain Softley’s stage version of his 1994 film about the Beatles in Hamburg, and the cast are running through a pivotal scene. It’s the moment in 1960 when the photographer Astrid Kirchherr descends into the Kaiserkeller nightclub and first sets eyes, and ears, on the band that would become the world’s biggest, and the man, Stuart Sutcliffe, who would become her fiancé.

“Good golly Miss Molly!” roars Andrew Knott, the production’s John Lennon, as the band launch into one of the rock’n’roll standards that were the Beatles’ meat and drink in their greasy-quiffed formative years in the Reeperbahn clubs. As Knott leans into the mike, it’s obvious why he was cast on the spot: he’s 30 but he channels the teenage Lennon with a ragged vim. Next to him, Daniel Healy has perfected the Paul McCartney head shake, his blond hair and eyebrows dyed brown for the opening night next week in Glasgow. And between them, hidden behind shades, his legs planted like Elvis, is 27-year-old Alex Robertson as Sutcliffe, the charismatic bassist and artist. Watching from the audience, Kirchherr (Isabella Calthorpe, resplendent in art-school bob) is rapt.

The Backbeat film was praised for its portrayal of the magnetic but doomed romance between Sheryl Lee’s Kirchherr and Stephen Dorff’s Sutcliffe. She introduces him and his friends to her arty crowd and the mop-top hairstyle, and he leaves the group led by his jealous best friend Lennon (a fiery Ian Hart), only to die from cerebral paralysis at 21. Softley’s movie had sex and death, love and friendship, envy and anger. But what it didn’t have was the immediacy of live music. The stage production, which opens at the Citizens Theatre and will move to the West End, re-creates the spell when the band were at their most visceral, when Lennon would sing himself hoarse doing Twist and Shout. “It would have been something that hit you in the chest, walking down into that cellar,” says Karl Sydow, the play’s producer.

The notion of staging the story struck Softley while he was making the film. “I always knew this worked in a live format,” the writer-director says as Jamie Blackley’s George Harrison and Oliver Bennett’s Pete Best (this was pre-Ringo) twang and clatter in the background. “As part of our rehearsals for the film we used to get the band to play for everybody and I was struck by how different it was, being in the room with it all happening.” He became “interested to see what it would be like with a new cast, to see how much the original cast were part of what it was . That was the most daunting moment in many ways.”

Especially when some of the band hadn’t picked up instruments since school — Robertson had never even played the bass. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell attributes the Beatles’ success to their intense apprenticeship in Hamburg — two years in which they would often play three gigs a night. Knott and company had three months. But, after a rock’n’roll boot camp led by the musical supervisor Paul Stacey, who has worked with Oasis and Black Crowes, they have the swaggering discipline of a real band.

Somebody overheard them when they were rehearsing and offered them a gig, and they have since played the 606 Club and the 12 Bar, where they had an audience jumping only last night. “There’s a certain arrogance that comes from knowing, ‘Hey, we can play this and people dance to us,’ ” Sydow smiles.

Lennon has been a dream role for Knott, who had a poster of him on his wall when he was 7. “It feels like I’ve been rehearsing for the part my whole life,” grins the man better known as Dirtbox in Gavin and Stacey. Contrast that with the RADA-trained Robertson, who has never owned a Beatles record. His lack of zeal is apt, as Sutcliffe’s haphazard commitment to the band is at the heart of the story. “There’s his best friend, music and Liverpool on one side,” Softley says, “Astrid, art and Hamburg on the other.”

It’s the urbane Softley’s first stage directing gig since his Cambridge days but “so far, touch wood, it’s been extremely creatively satisfying”. Of course, the stage is a different beast to the screen, for which he has directed films such as The Wings of the Dove and K-PAX, but there are parallels: “Rehearsing is like film-making in that you go through all the scenes, putting it together. When you come to the end of rehearsals, it’s like you’ve shot your rushes, and the actors do the edit job every night.”

But with Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy and the rerelease of the Fab Four’s back catalogue still fresh in the memory, is this a good time for another Beatles project? “There’s always anniversaries and things,” Softley shrugs. “Plus we never sell this as a Beatles project.” Like Nowhere Boy, Backbeat finds drama at the margins of a more famous story. Softley has compared it to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but now he goes farther: “It’s not only a story that deals with people who are traditionally seen as being on the periphery; their story in its own right is more interesting.”

In the longer theatrical version, the director and his co-writer, Stephen Jeffreys, have devoted more time to aspects of the story neglected in the film, to make it “as broadly appealing as possible”, Softley says. “Stuart’s art and Astrid’s photography weren’t explored as much as they are in the play.” Now there is an opening scene highlighting Sutcliffe’s struggle between art and rock’n’roll, excerpts from his letters, and a more nuanced depiction of his pursuit of Kirchherr, who had a German boyfriend, the artist Klaus Voorman, when they met. The sets, too, take their visual cues from Sutcliffe’s Abstract Expressionist splatter and Kirchherr’s “Bohemian, monochrome world”.

Since his death, Sutcliffe’s paintings have been recognised as having real significance. “That he was in the Beatles got in the way of how great he was as an artist,” Softley says. As he did for the film, Softley interviewed Sutcliffe’s mother Pauline, Kirchherr and Voorman. They challenged the popular wisdom that Sutcliffe was a rotten bass player — more, says Softley, a “driving, rock’n’roll bassist”.

But it was Sutcliffe’s artistic spirit that affected his friend most profoundly. “Stuart was a major inspiration to John,” Softley insists. His decision to leave the band and his subsequent death meant that Lennon turned instead towards McCartney and world domination, but that influence never died. Softley says: “When asked years later about playing live, John replied that it’s not just about music, it’s about art.”

Backbeat opens at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow (www.citz.co.uk; 0141-429 0022), on Feb 12

[Lucy]

John, Paul...and Stuart

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/stage-visual-arts/john-paul-and-stuart-1.1003883

It would be easy to assume that Iain Softley simply caught sight of the massive band*wagon rolling by and leapt on.

In recent years, the trend for reversing cultural precedent by taking major films and transforming them into theatre shows has been highly lucrative; think The Graduate, Hairspray, Mama Mia! or The Producers.

So it would have made great business sense had writer/director Softley revisited his 1994 Beatles in Hamburg film Backbeat, with a view to simply making serious dosh. But that’s not the story at all. His film, which tells the story of the relationship triangle between John Lennon, bassist Stuart Sutcliffe and his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr, had long been screaming out – almost liter*ally – to be made into a stage play.

“The idea for the theatre piece actually came about when I was rehearsing the film,” he recalls. “At the end of the day’s rehearsals we’d get the musicians who performed as the band to put on a show for the cast and crew. And I was struck with the sheer punk-like energy of this pure rock n’roll.

“Yet, it wasn’t until a few years after the film came out I had the opportunity to get the original cast together, and I did a public reading of the screenplay in a fringe theatre off Leicester Square. It went down extremely well – so well in fact it convinced me that my hunch for a stage play could work.”

Softley’s Backbeat storyline – a teen angst tale developed from interviews with Kirchherr and her close friend Klaus Voorman – reduces the pre-moptop Beatles’ adventures in Hamburg’s sleazy night club scene in 1960 to a sub-plot. Instead it focuses on tortured artist Sutcliffe, a young man pulled apart. Art or rock n’roll? His best friend or his existentialist photographer lover? Lennon’s role is largely the jealous guy. And just for added frisson, we get to wallow in the dynamic between Lennon and Sutcliffe, a friendship so close and so intense that it blurred the lines of sexuality.

“Yes, we do get an insight into the confusion perhaps that went on in John’s mind,” says Softley. “He certainly loved Stuart, but of course sexual preference is not always black and white. And John was probably in love with Astrid as well.”

There have been script changes in the ‘re-imagining’ from film to theatre stage.

“What still stands out is John’s voice. John was always coming out with great one liners, whether talking to Stuart or Paul. And we knew we had lots of great material to work with. But we have expanded John’s relationship with the rest of the band, referring more to the connection between John and Paul, as a counterpoint to the relationship between John and Stuart.

“We’ve also added in some new material, thanks to letters given to us by Stuart’s sister, Pauline, written by Stuart to Astrid.”

Softley is ideally placed to being a powerful aesthetic to the production, which has its world premiere at the Citizens. Originally an artist and theatre designer he moved to television to make documentaries. (It was while at the BBC he searched for a rites-of-passage story to make into a feature film and came across photographs of the strikingly handsome Sutcliffe. The photos became the inspiration for Backbeat.)

“I wanted to make the stage

version as expansive as possible,” he says. “I’ve been trying to keep the fluidity that we had with the multiple scenes in the film and that’s why we have several locations in the play, the docks, Hamburg station, and we have some great sets, all very stylistic, so it will look good.”

And the music. The Beatles, or rather the group of actors who’ve learned to play instruments and sing “to an amazingly high level” is an audience winner.

“Yes, we hope that the energy of the live performances will also come across, but the great music isn’t at all a guarantee.

“The success of the project depends on whether or not the story is good and how it’s presented. We’re certainly not taking anything for granted. We’re working very hard.”

And having great fun in the process, it seems. The excitement in Softley’s voice is as amplified as McCartney’s rendition of Long Tall Sally. On the subject of that classic song, McCartney was a major critic of the movie when it appeared – and not just because he was reduced to a supporting role. He pointed out Backbeat featured Lennon singing Long Tall Sally. A huge mistake.

This time around however it will be “Paul” who is belting out his signature song. “There was a reason why it looked like John was singing it in the film,” explains the writer, smiling. “The song was being performed at the time in the club when the band were taking speed. Now, I understand where Paul was coming from, but we weren’t trying to take the song away from him. It was more about John joining in because he was out of his head. But we’ve changed that moment in the theatre show.

Now, it’s Paul singing – with John joining in.”

Softley, who has also directed 1995 computer nerds movie Hackers and sci-fi K-Pax starring Kevin Spacey, makes no apologies for the fact that Paul is under-represented.

“I think that’s an inevitability because the film – and the play – is about Stuart, Astrid and John. But I also think in telling this story we do acknowledge Paul’s musical contribution and the special relationship between John and Paul.”

He adds with a wry grin: “There’s a ticket waiting for Paul should he wish to take it up.”


Backbeat, The Citizens’, from February 9 to March 6.

[Lucy]

WIN Premiere tickets for Beatles play


http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/yb/140904965

BACKBEAT, the 1994 Beatles film, has been adapted for the stage - and we have teamed up with the producers to offer five readers the chance to win tickets to see the world premiere of the play in Glasgow this month.
Each winner will receive a pair of passes to the performance at the Citizens Theatre on Monday, February 15.

Backbeat tells the little-known story of "the Hamburg years". The Beatles, on the verge of becoming the most successful band in modern times, provide the subplot for the main story - a triangular relationship between Stuart Sutcliffe, the band's originalbassist (played by Alex Robertson), John Lennon, his best friend (Andrew Knott), and Astrid Kirchherr, the stunning German photographer who Stuart falls passionately in love with (Isabella Calthorpe). The play is directed by original film director IainSoftley, co-written by Iain and Stephen Jeffreys and produced by Karl Sydow.

For more details, ring the box office on 0141 429 0022 or visit www.citz.co.uk.

HOW TO ENTER

Answer this question: Name the member of The Beatles who was married to Yoko Ono?

Then call 0904 026 0158 and follow instructions or text DRCOMP05 followed by a space, your answer, name, house number and postcode to 84080.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Competition closes at noon on Wednesday, February 10, 2010.

Competition closes at noon on Wednesday, February 10, 2010.

BT landline calls cost 60p per minute for two minutes maximum. Calls from other networks may be higher. Texts cost pounds 1.50 each plus standard network rate.

Open to UK residents aged 18 and over only. The Editor's decision is final.

Daily Record rules apply - see www.dailyrecord.co.uk/rules.

Service Provider: Eckoh UK Ltd, PO Box 206, HP3 9ST. Helpline: 01442 450 707 - national dialling rates apply. For a list of winners for all Daily Record contests, log on to

[Lucy]

Another article on this play...

Theatre preview: Backbeat

http://news.scotsman.com/entertainment/Gig-preview-Backbeat.6050295.jp

RINGO Starr said Backbeat got the sound of The Beatles exactly right. That was a big compliment for Iain Softley, but also a surprising one. The writer and director of the 1994 movie had set out to capture the spirit of the Fab Four in early 1960s Hamburg rather than attempt a note-perfect tribute. For Ringo to say he got it right suggests Softley's instinct was spot on, even though authenticity was never his aim.
"What I wanted was to recreate the impact these guys had on the people that saw them," he says. "We just picked musicians who had a similar attitude – at the time, it was Dave Grohl from Nirvana, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and Mike Mills from REM. The result was that when Pete Best (The Beatles' original drummer] did his documentary, he used our soundtrack as the best indication of how the band sounded. The funny thing was we didn't set out to do that at all."

Softley is taking the same approach to the stage version of the film, which has its world premiere this month at Glasgow's Citizens' Theatre before a hoped-for London transfer. As we approach the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' first trip to the low-life nightclubs of the Reeperbahn, he is aiming to create a sense of the rough-and-ready excitement the band generated, without being too concerned about historical accuracy.

"It's not straitjacketed in history," he says. "It's not trying to be a reproduction, a restaging or a tribute. I've taken the energy and the essence of the story and I've launched the actors and musicians at this idea."

He knows a show like this will depend on the conviction of the musicians, which is why band rehearsals began as long ago as December. It's also why they've been warming up with live appearances at clubs including Glasgow's McChuill's. With sometime Oasis guitarist Paul Stacey as musical director, the creative team is putting everything into perfecting the energy of raw rock'n'roll.

"I went to see them rehearse, it was only the third time they'd played together and they were fantastic," says Isabella Calthorpe, who plays Astrid Kirchherr, the German photographer who captured the heart of original bass player Stuart Sutcliffe in 1960. "I couldn't believe they hadn't been playing together forever to have a real chemistry so early on. It was really exciting."

Softley agrees. "They are a great rock'n'roll band now. Paul Stacey has honed them into a fantastic performing unit. They ripped the place up in their Glasgow gig. The difference between the film and the play is you're in the same room as the guys playing."

The director, however, is quick to point out that Backbeat is no jukebox musical. He chose to launch the show at the Citizens' because of its reputation for straight drama.

Far from being a lightweight sing-along-a-Beatles show, his play focuses on the tragic story of their bass player. Sutcliffe had stunning looks but was no great shakes as a musician and, having fallen in love with Kirchherr, he left the band to pursue his vocation as a painter. It was a vocation cut cruelly short by a fatal brain haemorrhage at only 21.

"At the same time as the electric atmosphere created by the music, the experience is of the dramatic story," says Softley. "It's about the choice Stuart Sutcliffe has to make between his best friend, John Lennon, and his girlfriend, and between rock'n'roll and art."

Coming hot on the heels of Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy, about Lennon's childhood – not to mention the hype of The Beatles Rock Band video game – Backbeat is a historical record that can still connect to a young audience. For those familiar with the story, what this retelling offers is an insight into the band's eventual transition from teen sensations to sonic pioneers. Hamburg gave them more than the mop top haircuts that defined their early image. It also gave them a taste for art, not least through their friendship with Kirchherr and her ex-boyfriend Klaus Voormann, who would go on to design the sleeve for Revolver.

"The band was honed in the creative furnace of Hamburg, both musically and in terms of the exposure to the bohemian art world and the ideas of Astrid Kirchherr and her German art school friends," says Softley. "It created the first art band. A few years later they commissioned Peter Blake to do the cover of Sgt Pepper and almost immediately John Lennon was moving away from the idea of being a conventional performing act. The play will show people visually what the world was, but it will feel as if you've gone back in a time machine and it is happening in the present."

Backbeat, Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, Tuesday until 6 March www.citz.co.uk

[DizzymissLizzy909]

For me, the thing with Stu Sutcliffe is that he seems like such a mystery, as does that period when he was with the Beatles.... few photos, no recordings (that I know of??), no interviews. I think so many fans have their own idea about what Stu was like, and what role he played in the development of the band. It'd be interesting to see how the stage play portrays him.

[Lucy]

That was part of the reason I enjoyed reading his sister's book - I learnt a bit about his childhood and other things that I didn't know. Also it included letters that he had written to his family when he was living in Germany so you could read about things from his perspective...and see his hand writing!

Regarding the recordings, there is no clear evidence either way as to whether he played on anything included on the first anthology. The Sutcliffes were paid some money for it - although they felt that they were entitled to more. They didn't wish to try and take on something as huge as The Beatles in a court battle so accepted the settlement that was offered.

So yeah - there may or may not be recordings and you may or may not have heard them!

[Lucy]

I'd be interested to read what a fan thought of this play. Has anyone been to see it or know of anyone that has? I would like a fan-review!

[citizenstheatre]

The show only had its first public preview last night. It opens officially on Friday (12th Feb). A link to your thread has been posted on our Facebook page (http://bit.ly/9Al67S).

Some folk who saw the show have already posted their comments on our website - you can read them here (http://bit.ly/2a48Ac).

It's on until 6 March, so hopefully you and/or we will get plenty more audience responses before then.

[Lucy]

Thanks for that info and for joining our forum!

I hope the preview went well! Looking forward to hearing more about it.

[Lucy]

Another article on the play....

How they became fab

http://www.bigissuescotland.com/features/view/221

It’s only February, but 2010 already seems destined to be yet another year of The Beatles. An avalanche of Fab Four-themed nostalgia in 2009 included the release of both The Beatles: Rock Band computer game and EMI’s stereo box set of the band’s entire back catalogue. This year brings the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club nationwide touring show and BBC Four’s Lennon Naked biopic, starring Christopher Eccleston.

First though, and marking the 50th anniversary of the Fabs first leaving Liverpool to embrace existentialism and a darker side of life on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, the story of The Beatles formative years is being retold in Backbeat, a stage adaptation by Iain Softley of his 1994 film of the same name.

The complex relationships between John Lennon, then band mate Stuart Sutcliffe and the enigmatic German photographer Astrid Kirchherr are detailed as the young characters grappled with jealousy, fallouts and the slow realisation they might be the greatest band of all time.
Culminating in the shocking death of Sutcliffe at the age of 21 from a brain haemorrhage, Backbeat is a challenging work with high aspirations. Which is just as well, given the intense scrutiny it’s about to be put under by every Beatles fan in the country.

“Ever since I directed the film I saw it as something that could be brought to the stage,” Softley explains. “I always knew that would be an exciting prospect and that it would give us something we could never do on screen – live music.”

The actors playing the young Beatles in Backbeat learned Merseybeat and 1950s rock ‘n’ roll standards for the play’s live performance scenes. The desire to create a stage version of a pivotal moment in The Beatle’s early days is one thing. Dealing with the mountain of critical dissection that threatens to overwhelm every movement made by a young cast handling the biggest name in music history is quite another.

Led by relatively unknown English actor Alex Robertson as Stuart Sutcliffe, The Beatles’ first bassist and doomed love interest of Kirchherr, the eyes of the world – and maybe even a certain ex-Beatle – will be keeping a watchful eye on the Backbeat cast when the show debuts at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre next week.

Backbeat also casts Salford-born History Boys actor Andrew Knott as John Lennon and English model-turned-actress Isabella Calthorpe as the German photographer. Softley, perhaps wary of Sir Paul McCartney’s stinging critique of the Backbeat film, which he branded “sugarcoated”, argues that his creation is not another Beatles biopic. Rather, he says he based the stage play on interviews he conducted with the photographer about her and Sutcliffe’s time in Hamburg in the early 1960s.

“Backbeat is not a biographical piece about John Lennon. It’s not even a biographical piece about Stuart Sutcliffe. It’s a drama about three young people’s lives,” he says.

Softley admits finding Lennon and Sutcliffe’s encounters with the enigmatic, effortlessly chic Kirchherr “fascinating material”, but he vowed to steer well away from creating mere Beatles nostalgia. “The choices Stuart made, between his best friend and his lover, between rock ‘n’ roll and art, between Liverpool and Hamburg, are the dramatic centre of the story,” the director says.

“The material asks universal questions. What do you do with your life? How do you live with the choices you make? Who are you going to be in this world?”

These are all questions Stuart Sutcliffe was never granted time to answer. His harrowing death became a significant turning point in The Beatles career. But the exact circumstances of his death are still subject to conjecture. Plagued by intense headaches that often left him temporarily blind, he collapsed during an art class in Hamburg on April 10, 1962 from a cerebral paralysis and died on the way to hospital. He was just two months short of his 22nd birthday.

The reason for Sutcliffe’s paralysing headaches have never been determined, although Beatles biographers surmise it was triggered by a skull fracture he suffered in January 1961 when a fight broke out after a gig in Lancashire. It is believed Sutcliffe refused medical help and never saw the results of a later X-ray. The two events may have sealed his devastating fate barely six months later.

“I think it’s possible Stuart needed Astrid more than she needed him,” Alex Robertson says of his on-stage character. “Astrid was more of a free spirit and I think Stuart got very jealous of her and they’d argue. He has insecurities and, like many artists, he needed to be constantly reminded how much he was loved. His death was devastating for John, Paul and Astrid. What the play tries to show is how these friendships changed them.” Roberts admits he only recently discovered The Beatles, but now says he appreciates it wasn’t only their music that changed the world. Meanwhile, Andrew Knott says he has thrown himself into playing Lennon, a role he feels he’s been “spending years preparing for”.

“I don’t think you can over research things, but you also have to trust the scripts and your judgment,” he says. “John went through so much at such a young age; his dad was never around and his mum couldn’t cope [Julia Lennon died in a car accident in 1958 when John was 17]. All these things he dealt with very young and I think subconsciously they created feelings of rejection.
“You had to be fucking tough to survive in Liverpool in the 1950s,” Knott adds. “Like most young lads with his background, he had a chip on his shoulder and didn’t understand himself. But by the end of the play you can see the influence Hamburg had on him.”

For Calthorpe, Astrid Kirchherr’s influence on the young Beatles is underestimated. Most famously, she was credited with creating The Beatles “mop top” haircuts, but it’s arguably what was inside their heads that she changed the most.

“She was a huge influence on them psychologically. Ultimately the play is a powerful love story with a tragic ending,” she says. “Stuart’s death was out of the blue and Astrid lost the love of her life. They were such different people; their upbringing, the way they dressed and even the language they spoke – their families were on opposing sides in the war. But their chemistry was instant.”

For Softley, Sutcliffe’s true legacy has been overshadowed by his untimely demise. “He died on the eve of fame. He would never know how The Beatles story was going to end,” he says. “There was an innocence about him; he was neither tainted nor blessed by the enormity of what was to come.

“I think more people are now realising what happened in Hamburg and how it made The Beatles what they are – their eyes were opened in Hamburg. It’s now 50 years since they were there. Backbeat is ultimately Stuart and Astrid’s story, but it’s one I think many people can relate to.”

[Lucy]

Theatre reviews: Backbeat

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/features/Theatre-reviews-Backbeat--The.6082293.jp

THE government, the company, the whole rotten lot. If ever there was a suitable moment for rebellion against those who hold power in society, then this is it; and although we live in compliant times, Scottish theatre this week is full of reminders of the uproarious satirical spirit of past generations, and of how much we need it again now.

"This noise will travel round the world, and people will see, and hear, and breathe differently," says the young John Lennon, in the world premiere production of Iain Softley and Stephen Jeffreys' Backbeat, playing to packed houses at the Citizens Theatre; and anyone who watches this play-with-songs based on Softley's 1994 film about The Beatles' early days in Hamburg is bound to be reminded of just how true that was.

In the days before Lennon and Paul McCartney formed their songwriting partnership, the five-strong group – including the doomed hero of Backbeat, Lennon's friend and hero Stuart Sutcliffe – were already scooping up the thrilling sounds of American rock'n'roll, from Roll Over Beethoven to Twist And Shout, and giving them a raw, revolutionary British guitar-pop edge that drove a generation wild with excitement. It was rough, it was liberating, it pumped an explosive blast of homegrown energy through the convention-bound world of post-war Britain and nothing was ever quite the same again.

As a stage show, Backbeat sometimes seems to be trying to achieve too much in its brief two-and-a-half-hours. It's part doomed romance, as the stylish Sutcliffe – who was to die of a brain haemorrhage in Germany in 1962 – woos and wins the gorgeous Hamburg photographer Astrid Kirchherr. It's partly a serious and interesting play about the dynamics of the formation of the most successful band in history. "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal," says Sutcliffe, quoting Nietzsche like any self-respecting 1960s art student; and this story is full of "bridges", as the musically untalented Sutcliffe plays a decisive role in shaping The Beatles' world-changing style. And the show is partly a straightforward tribute musical, too, with high-clapping girl groupies encouraging the audience to get on their feet for a final, celebratory Twist And Shout.

Whatever we make of this slightly messy collision of genres, though, Backbeat emerges as a hugely entertaining show, featuring fine performances from Isabella Calthorpe as Astrid, Alex Robertson as an eerily lookalike Sutcliffe, Andrew Knott as Lennon, and Jamie Blackley and Daniel Healy as Harrison and McCartney. There's a superbly effective set by Christopher Oram, beautifully lit by Howard Harrison, that perfectly captures the early-1960s atmosphere of post-industrial grunge combined with an emerging, clean-lined modernism, and Sutcliffe's wild, red rush of abstract expressionism. And the music is grand, the cast-turned-band finally achieving a really luxurious yet still edgy guitar-pop sound. Knott looks disturbingly like the troubled and brilliant Lennon as he strums and sings those final numbers; and if he never quite sounds like him – well, in the end, who ever did?

[dogman]

what really happened to stu'? didn't he receive a good kicking to the head at one stage, which further down the line caused his death?

thats what i've read in the past, true or not?