The Beatles went on to conquer the World, as the most influential pop musicians of the 20th Century.
Herr Henkel developed a passion for jazz and now present “JazzBrunch mit Hans-Olaf Henkel” at 12 am every Sunday on JazzRadio. He takes up the story:
“I tried to date a beautiful blonde, her name was Astrid Kirchherr. I found out that she often went to the Top Ten Club on The Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s infamous red light street. That’s where I often listened to The Beatles, who at that time did not play any better than other bands from England, such as Rory Storm’s, The Undertakers or Tony Sheridan’s.

“The Beatles at that time consisted of five musicians: Paul McCartney, who often played the piano, George Harrison, who was already then an excellent guitar player, John Lennon, who was obviously still learning how to play his guitar, but could sing quite well, Pete Best, the drummer (Ringo replaced much later by Ringo Starr) and Stuart Sutcliffe, who played bass guitar.
“Unfortunately, Astrid was in love with Stuart and not with me, although I tried hard to change that. Once in a while, my brother-in-law, Horst Ansin, offered them a beer so they would play “Ain’t She Sweet”, which was always sung by John.
“Astrid was a photographer then and one day, she made The Beatles and myself change our hairstyle. I have still funny photographs of myself being a sort of “Pilzkopf” (Moptop). Stuart died at the end of 1961 and I left Hamburg to start my own career in IBM.

I am still convinced that it was Astrid who initialized the breakthrough of the Beatles by changing their hairstyle. Suddenly, they were different from the other rock bands. You may remember that in the early years, in Germany they were more referred to as “Pilzköpfe” than as “Beatles”. A few years ago, I met Astrid again, together with Cynthia Lennon and Pete Best and we reminisced about “the good old days”.

*(Extracted from an interview with Hans-Olaf Henkel for jazzradio.net, to be published on this website next week in full).