24 April 1963
Concert:
Majestic Ballroom, Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park, London
Another NEMS-sponsored Mersey Beat Showcase, with Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, The Big Three, and Gerry and the Pacemakers also on the bill. Earlier that day at Abbey Road, Gerry and the Pacemakers had recorded an unreleased version of Lennon/McCartney's "Hello Little Girl".
The Big Three
"Giorgio [Gomelsky] has another story he can tell about the Beatles. Peter Clayton had written for Jazz Beat and done liner notes for Decca in the 60s. By the 70s he was a columnist with London's Sunday Telegraph, an establishment paper. In 1971 he wrote a funny "confession," "How I Didn't Join the Beatles," that began:
Normally I keep quiet about how I didn't make a film with the Beatles in 1963...
The near miss began when a man named Giorgio summoned me to his flat near the West London Air Terminal... [On arrival] I went into a living room where four young men were sitting around eating omelettes off their laps. I suppose I should remember some of those tart witticisms which became such a feature of Beatles Press conferences, but all I can recall are the omelettes, each in the centre of a big plate, like a stranded yellow fish, and the Beatles' pale faces and grey suits and prolific hair (by today's standards, of course, they were short-haired; you could see their ears.)
Giorgio's idea was to make a day-in-the-life film about the band. "They are fabulous," Clayton remembered him enthusing. "So hip. Part of a new culture; they are going to be enormous and we are going to write a film for them." He and Clayton, with the Beatles' help, did in fact produce "a detailed synopsis of a story which I'm still convinced would have worked," Clayton wrote, and "in April 1963, we were ready to make the first Beatles film. All that was needed was the approval of Brian Epstein..." But the Beatles' manager, whom Clayton recalls exhibited "a combination of shyness [and] profound suspicion of the ways of showbiz," "probably mistook Giorgio's explosive enthusiasm for just another attempt to stampede him into something," and their film never got made.
"Can you imagine sitting there with the four Beatles and inventing a funny, 'dadaistic' film, off the cuff?" Giorgio reminisces. "Apart from anything else, we had a great time. But Epstein didn't know his ass from his elbow in those early days. He came from Liverpool, the sticks really, compared to London - although he had wanted to become an actor, and even studied in London for a while, I think...
"A few weeks after our meetings, United Artists, which was run by hustling American producers who wanted a quick 'in' in the nascent London scene, and were ready, as usual, to fork out big money to buy themselves a lion's share, offers the Beatles a three-picture deal. There was no way we could compete with that - our budget was $20,000 and our esthetic approach well outside studio conventions. But in any case we didn't get the opportunity to even compete. Epstein, naively - and unethically, in my opinion - just gave them our treatment without ever informing us."
And that becomes A Hard Day's Night.
"A couple of years later Epstein wrote me a letter, which unfortunately I misplaced somewhere, in which he apologized. He said he didn't know, he was naive, blah blah.""
Source: New York Press, 26 April 2000
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