At The End Of The Grosse Freiheit: The Beatles In Hamburg

„Life in Hamburg for these young Beatles was grim in a way which seems acceptable to lads in their teens and early twenties, and utterly degenerate in a way which must have seemed fantastic. Their first booking was at the Indra, a strip joint run by Bruno Koschmider, car-coated entrepreneur and veteran of a Panzer Division. Koschmider, a humourless man of porcine appearance and dubious connections, first had The Beatles sharing a bill with »dancers« whose gender was sometimes indeterminate, often up on the tiny stage for seven hours a night. The Indra's kindly toilet attendant, a middle-aged lady by the name of Rosa, provided handfuls of Preludin from a sweet jar stashed beneath a table, as well as condoms which - one assumes - they rarely bothered with, considering the rate at which they contracted various different forms of the pox. Beer was donated by grateful patrons, charmed by their brusquely passionate rejig of 1950s rock and roll; the sex was (usually) free as well. The Beatles' filthy hiding place became the scene of nightly bacchanalia, back when this was naughty but nice, and no one had to think too much about who was being used or exploited, and who was really happy.(...)

The club fills up with the kind of people you'd expect to come out for something like this, and Bambi Kino play 'Besame Mucho' and 'Kansas City' and 'Red Sails In The Sunset', and they're good, and they're loud, and they can really do it. They've even got the balls to sing 'Long Tall Sally' in its proper, caterwauling key of G (by the time he was about their age, Paul McCartney had dropped it to E, lest his vocal cords fly out of his mouth).

And, as Bambi Kino know, none of this bears any resemblance to what it's meant to be. For all their obvious love and care, they're a little too smooth to sound totally authentic, conscious of what's been and gone, and what will never be. They don't mach shau, as Bruno Koschmider once used to demand – there's no tomfoolery, or Preludin craziness, no grotesque and lurching mimickry of Gene Vincent's crippled leg. At no point do they greet their audience with stiff-armed salutes and cross-eyed cries of »Sieg heil, you fuckin' Nazi bastards! But then, they're not performing for a crowd of drunken sailors, chucking wooden tables at each others' faces until someone like Horst charges out of a back room with a cosh held high above his head. Horst, in fact, is sat in the beer garden under a giant golf umbrella, listening through the open doors as the late summer weather breaks. »They're good,«he smiles. »They do it very well. But if anyone tells me they're as good as The Beatles, I say 'don't talk to me any more!«”