Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn on Royston and the Beatles: Also dropping into the Gambier Terrace pit was a special guest, Royston Ellis, “King of the Beatniks.” The bearded bard, who featured in TV documentaries and press articles whenever an offbeat teenage angle was needed, was in Liverpool to read his poetry at the University on June 24/25, and he swiftly found himself drawn into the Beatles’ company. The conduit was George, who (with nothing else to do while John, Stu and Paul were in school) was hanging around the Jac when the wandering coffee-bar poet traipsed in, drawn by hip radar to “the happening place.” Avowedly “trying everything,” Ellis was an active bisexual in this period of his life and he took an immediate fancy to George: “He looked fabulous with his long hair and matelot-style striped T-shirt, very modern, which is why I deliberately spoke to him. I was nineteen and he was seventeen and we clicked right away.” George took Ellis, his typewriter and his duffel bag back to Gambier Terrace to meet John and Stu. A rapport was quickly established and Ellis was invited to “crash” for a few days - yet another occupant for the filthy back room.
Born in February 1941, Ellis was younger than John and Stu but had broader life experience, having grooved around the country, appeared on TV and radio, been published as a poet and writer, and experimented with sex and drugs. To the Daily Mirror he was “a weirdie from weirdsville” but to John Lennon he was “England’s answer to Allen Ginsberg,” speaking something like their language. He’d said young people not seeking work weren’t layabouts but “prospectors,” and that no self-respecting teenager should marry a virgin. (“That remark alone generated fees to keep me comfortable for a year,” he recalls.) Also, he was friendly with Cliff Richard and, in particular, with Cliff’s backing group the Shadows (formerly the Drifters). They provided a rock soundtrack when Ellis recited his poetry at occasional public readings, sessions he called “Rocketry.”
His Liverpool University audience didn’t dig him at all. The Beatles were much more his kind of people, and - in an unadvertised appearance down the Jac - they stepped into the Shadows’ shoes and backed him in a spot of Rocketry. Paul really enjoyed the experience but was taken aback by some of the words, like this stanza from the poem “Julian”:
Easy, easy,
break me in easy.
Sure I’m big time,
cock-sure and brash,
but easy, easy,
break me in easy.
Surely this was queer sex he was talking about! Paul worried it was about “shagging sailors” while attempting to find the right guitar notes to set it off.
Ellis’s bisexuality was an eye-opener for the Beatles, as he remembers: “There was an expression, ‘Do you still love me?,’ and I think I must have said it to John because all the eyebrows went up ‘What?!’ And I gave them a lecture about the Soho scene and said they shouldn’t worry, because one in four men were queer although they mightn’t know it.” The remark bit deep. As Paul says, “We looked at each other and wondered which one it was. ‘It must be one of us, because there’s four of us…Oh fucking hell, it’s not me, is it?’”
Most memorably of all, Royston Ellis gave the Beatles their first drugs experience. Not long afterward, he would write of his amazement that they didn’t know of the Benzedrine-impregnated cardboard strip curled inside a Vicks nasal inhaler, and how it produced a high when chewed. Several were present in the flat, including John, Stu, George, Paul, Rod Murray and Bill Harry, but the idea of taking something to feel euphoric, or in some way altered, appealed most especially to John. He was the closest to Ellis in outlook: he wanted to try everything life could offer, and maybe, only maybe, ask questions later. His art school friend Jon Hague vividly remembers a night in the Cracke when John poured pint after pint down his throat and remarked, “If only we didn’t have to drink all this liquid” - in other words, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a quicker way to get out of your head?”
John always recalled the Benzedrine event with enthusiasm: “Everybody talked their mouths off for a night and thought, ‘Wow, what’s this?’” George was keen too: “We cracked open a Vicks inhaler, ate it and sat up all night until about nine o'clock the next morning, rapping and burping up the taste.” But Paul was reticent. “Probably they didn’t give me that much, probably they kept it for themselves,” he says, indicating he passed up the opportunity…not entirely, but more or less. He was by nature more cautious than George and considerably more so than John, the great experimentalist who always tried everything with complete abandon. (Something’ll happen.) Paul knew a little about drugs because his mum had been a nurse, and again he was also mindful of his age in this company. Ellis, although just sixteen months older, seemed far more mature; Stu was no longer a teenager, having turned 20 the week before; and John was on the cusp. George was never concerned by his youth but Paul was. “I was…thinking 'I’m really hanging out with a slightly older crowd here.’ So I was always cautious.”
The night passed in a blur of banter. Ellis says he developed a particular rapport with John and Stuart and that they discussed poetry, art and London. When he left, they spoke of doing it again sometime: “We were talking about how I wanted a band to come to London and back me on my Rocketry performances, and they were thrilled at the idea.” Art school studies finished the following Friday, July 1, marking the end of Stu’s fourth year and John’s third and last because the college was waving him goodbye. […] As for Ellis, so much was he enthused by the possibility of appearing with them again that he soon got the Beatles their first mention in a music paper. It was the July 9 edition of Record and Show Mirror, where a supercilious little article about “the bearded sage of the coffee bars” ended “he’s thinking of bringing down to London a Liverpool group which he considers is most in accord with his poetry. Name of the group? 'The Beetles’!”
▪ Mark Lewisohn, “1960”, The Beatles - All These Years: Tune In
Greetings, book hounds! We've been busy here at Kicks Book with our latest Bad Seed big-book HALBSTARK BABY-BABY HALBSTARK which focuses entirely on Swiss youth gangs of the 1960's, with photos culled from the lost scrapbook of pack leader Dieter "Igel" Ehrlich and text by Lukas Mueller. We are grateful to translator Olivier Groth and to Karlheinz Weinbger Foundation's Bruce Kackney, and also to Rolf Rieben. This summer, we celebrated with a book launch in Chinatown at Frosch and Co Gallery, showcasing (for five days!) several of the photographs, thanks to the incredible support of the Consulate of Switzerland here in New York City. Stay tuned for info about Fall gallery shows! Giclee archival prints are available for purchase, also framed.
