Have a Fab Christmas! Inside The Beatles’ surreal, seasonal singles

A Rare Cheese, Podgy The Bear and The Ballad Of Jock And Yono? Join us on a seasonal journey through the lost Beatles Christmas singles – a tale that involves surreal pantos, long-suffering fan club secretaries, unhinged experiments and Kenny Everett. And which tells, in a strange new way, how John, Paul, George and Ringo charmed the world with their in-jokes and irreverence, and how they slowly fell apart, while keeping up a festive front…

“The Beatles did routines”

For The Beatles, Christmas didn’t just come once a year – in December 1963, it arrived on no fewer than 30 separate occasions. A few weeks earlier, the group had lined up behind a barricade and shaken hands with fans at a convention in Wimbledon. Now, at shows supported by Cilla Black, The Fourmost and Billy J Kramer, they proved to be the gift that kept on giving.

Rather than a pure rock’n’roll event, the two-shows-a-night, 16-night stand that their manager Brian Epstein arranged for them at London’s Finsbury Park Astoria in December was all about displaying Beatle-related versatility at the festive season. NEMS Enterprises, newly moved to the capital, was not, after all, solely The Beatles’ management office, but an outfit that nurtured the careers of a wide roster of talent. Nor, in turn, were these simply pop stars – they were personalities, rounded entertainers, such as you might see on television.

“We didn’t just play the songs,” remembers Billy Hatton from The Fourmost. “The Beatles did some routines, we did some of our impersonations – to prove the versatility of the Liverpool fellers.”

“The crowd could see the movements”

As conceived by their director, Peter Yolland, the shows were “to change the concept of the pantomime”. In practice, they were a difficult fusion of theatre and rock’n’roll. The sets were wobbly, and the glittering performers’ rostrums so unstable they occasionally cut the power cables. Into this chaos then periodically emerged The Beatles, performing sketches in advance of their closing 30-minute set. The one sketch everyone remembers was one in which John Lennon (as the villainous “Sir Jasper”) tied a helpless damsel (George Harrison) to the railroad tracks.

“It was obvious it was the first time The Beatles had done anything like that, but they did it well,” remembers Peter Langford from The Barron Knights, who were on the bill backing Cilla and compère Rolf Harris. “The crowd could see the movements. But because of the screams it was impossible to hear what was going on.”

Screams, however, were inevitable. The Christmas shows rounded off a year that had seen Beatlemania spark with the August release of “She Loves You”, and catch light with the band’s October appearance on Sunday Night At The London Palladium. By the time John Lennon had told rich guests at the Royal Variety Performance to rattle their jewellery in early November, the phenomenon was out of control.

“Their humour was very insular”

For Brian Epstein, whose theatrical ambitions led him to produce Alan Plater’s play Smashing Day, and even to buy a London theatre, the Saville, the Christmas shows were a vindication of his belief not just in The Beatles, but in a certain type of Beatles, positioned at the very heart of the mainstream.

He had seen the characterful, showbiz-appropriate charmers under the scowling leather-clad rockers, and now delighted in revealing them to the world. Wobbling scenery, screams, Rolf Harris and all, the Christmas shows (another followed in 1964) allowed Beatles fans to have as full an experience of the band’s characters as possible. They also showed the wisdom in Epstein’s central conviction: if he added professionalism to their abundant charm, nobody would be able to resist them.

“When they first started out their humour was very insular,” says Billy Hatton. “They used to have jokes, but they were in-jokes. They broadened it out – they were trying to improve themselves.”

“A dirty bookshop”

It would not always be practical for them to play Christmas shows, but reaching out to their fans at this time of year would always be a responsibility The Beatles took seriously. Even when there was barely a Beatles to do so.

In 1963, remembers Tony Barrow, PR to The Beatles between 1962 and 1968, the popularity of the band could be measured by the sackful. On each of the stairs that connected the ground floor of 13 Monmouth Street, London WC2 (“a dirty bookshop”) to the one-and-a-half rooms above (Epstein’s London HQ until March 1964), there were bags of unopened mail.

Without the attention of someone like Freda Kelly – who ran The Beatles Fan Club from Liverpool and who had remained there when the office moved south, an enjoyable situation – the band’s growing popularity was creating an administrative nightmare. Barrow envisioned a mob of angry parents. Where were the fan club memberships for their children? What was the likely fate of their postal orders?

“A damage-limitation exercise”

His solution was inspired. Reasoning that fans had made their first connection with The Beatles via records, he now proposed to give them one for nothing, to thank them for their patience. Taking his cue from Reader’s Digest, who advertised their own boxed sets of records using “paper” discs – what we now call “flexidiscs” – he placed a call to Lyntone, the London company that manufactured them.

In doing so, he didn’t only take steps to solving his immediate problem, but also helped create a fascinating alternative canon. Through it, you can observe a humorous and satirical Beatles, a Beatles becoming more confident and autonomous in the studio, even a Beatles drifting apart. These, now with a lively online fanbase, were The Beatles’ Christmas records.

“That first record was a damage-limitation exercise – designed to get a lot of fans and their parents off our backs,” remembers Tony. “We didn’t want people to be disappointed or disillusioned with The Beatles. So if they were presented with a record that was exclusive to them, that the general public could not buy, this would go a long way to appeasing everybody. Paid-up members were gobsmacked to receive a record of The Beatles talking to them. It was important to keep the fan club on side.”

“I bet you’ve ripped me apart”

Rather unlike every fan club since, The Beatles club was designed not as a shop, but as an information service – a mission into which the Christmas record fitted perfectly. In Liverpool, Freda Kelly – arguably one of those most in the know – illustrated the need for such a record. It wasn’t until Cilla Black dropped into her Liverpool office one day that she discovered that The Beatles had not only made a fan club record – they had made one mentioning Freda. Not having heard the record, and knowing the band to have a caustic sense of humour, she thought this a potentially dubious honour.

“I said to John, ‘I bet you’ve ripped me apart’,” remembers Freda today. “And he said, ‘’Course we have.’”

In fact, the mention of Freda (a brief but respectful thanks, from George Harrison) was very much in keeping with what Tony Barrow envisaged for the project: for the band to convey gratitude to the faithful for their support, in their own vaguely surreal manner. Ultimately, though, the record helped burnish the utterly original proposition made by The Beatles: that they were characters as much as beat musicians, their appeal not confined to their songs, but also the personalities beyond them.

“They were more than happy to do it”

“What I was keenest to project of the band was their humour,” says Tony. “We could only really expose that through interviews: whether that was TV, radio or written media.”

As he had for their early press appearances, for the Christmas record Barrow had written a script for the band to work to, but as it proved, they quickly departed from it. The idea of an annual broadcast evidently caught their imagination: though Barrow considered it a one-off, the band approached him in 1964 about another possible recording date.

“They were more than happy to do it,” Tony remembers. “Again I provided a script for them. They sent it up and as a result they made it a far funnier record: they thanked the fans, then went into comedy routines. They were ahead of their time in terms of the comedy they could produce at the drop of a hat.”

“Peter Sellers became a close friend of George’s”

As tempting as it might be to imagine that The Beatles combined not only an unbeatable ear for melody, but also a gift for family-friendly humour, it’s worth listening to outtakes of the 1965 record as a corrective. Painfully, the group attempt to improvise “bits” to the sound effects being fired at them. The arguable highpoint is John and George alighting on an idea for tinned, sliced babies (“the limbs and head go into Pal kennel meat…”) and John saying that for spots he uses a product called “Gumtree’s Arseholes”.

In the background Barrow can be heard attempting to lift the band’s spirits by saying that with judicious editing, they may be able to use a few seconds of this largely dire material. “Those Christmas records show a lot of things that influenced them,” says Ken Scott, second engineer on the 1965 record. “They all adored the Goons. Peter Sellers became a close friend of George’s. Those recordings take a lot from the silliness of the Goons – it’s the kind of thing that led to George getting involved with Monty Python later on.”

Taking a proposition and testing its boundaries – if it was what The Beatles did with their music, then it was what they did with their seasonal obligations, too. From 1963 to 1965 the group had progressively stretched Tony Barrow’s original concept of a “thank you” record, but kept the idea essentially intact. The following year, they broke free of it completely.

“A McCartney piano knees-up”

Taking a proposition and testing its boundaries – if it was what The Beatles did with their music, then it was what they did with their seasonal obligations, too. From 1963 to 1965 the group had progressively stretched Tony Barrow’s original concept of a “thank you” record, but kept the idea essentially intact. The following year, they broke free of it completely.

The public seemingly isn’t much on The Beatles’ minds for their 1966 record, “Pantomime”. Much of the same good humour is there: the record is bookended by a McCartney piano knees-up called “Everywhere It’s Christmas”, and elsewhere features a sequence of disconnected, humorous bits. As it has across the arts, here narrative has been replaced by collage. The tone ranges from Milligan-esque absurdity – one segment’s called “A Rare Cheese (Two Elderly Scotsmen)” – to satire of documentary TV.

If there is a halfway house between The Goon Show and Monty Python, it’s probably to be found here. It’s not awfully funny, but it is a self-confident, hermetic product of the studio – just like the Beatles records you could buy. If, as Hatton thought, Beatle humour had become a way of drawing people in, here it had reverted to insularity. They certainly weren’t thanking anyone for buying their records.

“They’d like to thank you for a wonderful year…”

For The Beatles, the studio was a paradoxical kind of retreat: a haven from the more arduous duties of public life, but also a place from which they could reach, and define their audience. In July 1967, the One World broadcast invited 400 million worldwide TV viewers to watch them perform “All You Need Is Love”. Even if it couldn’t manage it on the same scale, the Christmas single of that year conveyed a similar sense of empathy and fraternity at the festive season.

At the end of the record, George Martin announced, “They’d like to thank you for a wonderful year…” In the six-and-a-half minutes before, the band delivered a gift to their fans as priceless as Tony Barrow had originally conceived: something that sounded of a piece with their work of that year. This, thought lost, then discovered at at the time of Anthology in 1994, was “Christmas Time Is Here Again”.

“You can count on one hand the sessions that were fun, but this was one of them,” remembers Richard Lush, second engineer on this and many Beatles recordings between 1966-1968. “Some things like ‘Mr Kite’ went on for three or four days just to get the backing track done. I wouldn’t say they were serious… but they were seriously concerned that something had to be right.”

“They became schoolkids again”

“Christmas Time Is Here Again” is a joyous composition in which the title is repeated ad nauseam, interspersed with some enigmatic additional words (notably: “O-U-T spells ‘out’”…). It has the feel of a Lennon song, though Richard Lush feels it “typical of Paul”. First engineer Geoff Emerick thinks it could have been done entirely on the hoof. A point on which all are agreed are its joyful nature, a group of one mind, at the peak of its powers, having fun.

“When they got round the vocal mic they became schoolkids again,” remembers Emerick. “Someone would say something mundane, another one would pick up on it – and that’s how it would happen; they would run down the stairs to the studio.” Spontaneity seems to have characterised the whole session. The fact the record was recorded in EMI’s smaller Studio 3 suggests it was a last-minute decision, another artist using their customary Studio 2. Likewise the time slot: between 10pm and 2.45am.

“If you worked with The Hollies you knew you were going to work from 2pm to 10pm because they would want to go to the pub,” remembers Richard Lush. “With The Beatles, they might say they were going to start at 2pm but not turn up til 7pm – then they would go ’til four in the morning. They were the only people who would go that late.”

“A really good vibe”

“Christmas Time Is Here Again”, as Lush remembers it, joins a select band of Beatles tracks (“Hey Bulldog”, “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide…”) particularly blessed by the mood in the room. “They’re examples of sessions where everything came together quickly and they had a really good vibe. They were in a great mood and played great. The ‘Pepper’ reprise is another one. There was never any pressure on that session – they were just having a laugh.

“It was a favourite of Geoff’s and mine during that period,” says Lush. “Probably because it was happy.”

Maurice Cole, the young Liverpudlian who rose to broadcasting infamy as Kenny Everett, was once a shy and retiring creature. When he accompanied The Beatles on their ’66 US tour (with a view to his presenting nightly Beatle radio programmes by phone), his bosses at Radio London feared young Kenny would get drowned out among the loud voices, sport coats and pork pie hats of the US DJs also on the tour plane, and come back with nothing. Tony Barrow received a phone call: “Do look after the lad.”

“An appetite for substances”

As it turned out, Radio London’s fears were justified, and on the tour plane, Kenny got nothing. But The Beatles’ empathy for a fellow Liverpudlian meant that they went out of their way to accommodate him on their own time. “He got an in that the others didn’t,” remembers Tony Barrow. “When The Beatles were relaxing, I’d be taking Kenny along to their hotel suites, where he would have them to himself for an hour or until he had what he needed – that in turn fostered a closer relationship between him and The Beatles. And they all shared a, how can I put it, an appetite for substances.”

Everett’s intimacy with The Beatles and his talent for tape collage made him the only candidate to put together the band’s last two Christmas singles. With Epstein dead, NEMS a fading administrative adjunct to Apple, and bandmembers piloting divergent courses, The Beatles were increasingly separate entities that needed help to be stuck together. In this instance, literally.

“Kenny did a very fine editing job on them, at a time when it was hard to get four Beatles in a room for a commercial recording, never mind a fan club Christmas record,” says Tony Barrow. “What he did was a marvellous jigsaw job with what he’d collected from them individually.”

“They weren’t goody-goodies”

What’s most remarkable about the last two Christmas singles isn’t their changed tone, which can veer from stiff upper lip (Paul), deadpan approaching bitter (George) to manic and jokey (John), but that they exist at all. Their new company Apple was an escape hatch through which The Beatles might abscond from being The Beatles.

Yet still the records emerged through the fan club – tacitly honouring the fans, the policy of a previous administration, and their former selves. “They weren’t goody-goodies but they did care for their fans and that proved it,” says Freda Kelly. “That’s why when I closed the fan club, the leaving present [to the fans] was the LP with all the Christmas singles on it.”

“They gave more than the average pop star of the 1960s,” says Tony Barrow. “The whole team of us, with a few exceptions, was exiled Liverpudlians and we all stood together. We all got a kick out of it.

From Then To You

“Caring about their fans was the way they’d been brought up, I think,” Barrow continues. “There was quite a logistical difference between what they did at the Cavern and what they did at Shea Stadium – but whether it was half an hour at Shea or three hours at the Cavern, they were still trying to communicate more closely with their fans. In the Cavern that meant taking a ciggie from a girl in the front row. At Shea that meant projecting themselves across this great divide. It was still communication.”

The Christmas singles compilation that Freda Kelly sent out to the fans in 1970 was called The Beatles’ Christmas Album, but the LP also bore a punning subtitle: From Then To You. It was a memorial for an era, and a reminder of how much had changed, of course. But it also served to remind how much about The Beatles had stayed the same.