Chapter 1 High Noone

Meet the Beatles Part One

By Peter Noone

Pete Novac and the Heartbeats

The real leader of this young group (Pete Novac and the Heartbeats), was a chap called Alan Wrigley. There was Alan Wrigley on bass guitar, Steve Titterington on drums, Keith Hopwood on guitar and Karl Green on guitar. I was Pete Novac. The name was a mixture of my name and Kim Novak who I was in love with, but had no way of letting her know. Yet!.The Heartbeats was inherited from Malcolm’s group, and I had replaced him.

Alan was the person who organized everything. He got the bookings, and he got the van, and he and I became very good friends. Although my musical tastes were more like Keith Hopwood’s, Keith had something that kept him busy. A job. Keith was a telephone engineer. Karl was an engraver.

So Alan Wrigley and I became the two unlikely lads. We were window cleaners. Gardeners. Cement pourers. Newspaper vendors. I sold programs with Campbell Latchford and Roy Bergin (2 school mates) and we were good at everything. This provided us with the ammunition necessary to tell our parents that we were going to be professional musicians. Yes we needed a job that earned money, unlike show business.

Our first concert as Pete Novac and the Heartbeats was at Urmston Football Club and I can recall we also had a guitarist at the time called Al Chadwick. We stole the show. We were the only act. We were awful. We were paid 4 pounds, which was about $6. We all ate fish and chips and put petrol in the van. Our first success behind us, and we were off on the road to our destiny.

Our first ever concert watched by13 very bored looking girls whom we all knew by name, and their parents whose names were Mr. and Mrs. Something or other or Beryl’s Mum and dad. My sister Denise, and her friend refused to even come until she had auditioned us for coolness, because they had been humiliated when I had played that one time in The Cyclones. I have forgotten the occasion completely almost.

Then one day, the Beatles played on the field outside what was our sort of residence. Urmston Football Club. Can you imagine having the Beatles play on a field outside your little local teen club?

This was of course the thing that would change my life, and the truth is I only went to see the openers Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. I can never forget the strange feeling I felt as I watched Mel and Neil (both who would later become almost as famous as the Beatles would), push Ringo’s drum kit forward. I knew that this was something special.

What was this I asked myself? A drum riser? I had never seen anything so pompous in my life. Did they think their drummer was important like Sandy Nelson or Gene Krupa?

Then, they began to position 3 microphone stands. 3? What on earth was this?

Wait. The drummer has a mike too. These show offs had so much money, that they were even giving the drummer a mike? They must be rubbish, and have to flash lots of expensive electronic equipment onstage to impress the audience I thought to myself. I always used to think to myself, especially when I was thinking about girls.

I have to mention, that the girls at this show were absolutely unmoved by all the bravado taking place on the stage. Only the local members of beat groups as we were called, were paying any attention. The local girls were of course checking to see if any of the fair workers had managed to stay out of jail long enough to have one of his 45 tattoos removed, but this was not the fair for them.

Then, the announcer said (as if he was annoyed that he had to stop eating his pork pie), “Here they are, from Liverpool, The Beatles”.

Being musicians ourselves we pretended to applaud, at the same time as we hoped these blokes would trip over one of the cables of their 4 microphones, or get struck by lightning and fall into one of the portable toilets right by the stage. Better still, we hoped they would be very spotty, and have the sort of zits, which could possibly explode during a guitar solo.

With incredible casualness, I watched as these 4 lads nonchalantly plugged in their guitars and went about the set up part of their show.

Suddenly, I was absolutely transfixed. This was something completely different. I was witnessing the thing that would make these four lads the biggest musical event since Elvis Presley. Here it is necessary for me to say Elvis is and was my most favourite person and the greatest singer ever, and the Beatles would agree, so this moment was sort of important. (I met Elvis a few years later, and will get to that soon).

They began with a song called “Some Other guy”, and I will remember that moment forever. Then they did Ernie Maresca’s “Fortune Teller”. The rest is a blur. As you already know I am a wholly man, and always was, but the music and the energy and charisma of these four young men was something indescribable. At the same time as acting casually, they were also making eye contact with everyone in the small audience, and even Angela Denner (the coolest local girl that week), was smiling and forgetting how beautiful she was, in order to try to catch the eye of the lead singer. In the early Beatles days John Lennon was the clear leader, and Paul was still a handsome second fiddle. George looked the coolest, and the youngest, which drew all the pretty girls towards his edge of the stage, because the other 20-year-old Beatles were WAY too old for their tastes.

Ringo was a drummer, so no girls tried to catch his attention because he was so busy leading the band.

John was the one who captured all my attention, because he epitomized everything that I liked about what was then called Rock and Roll music. He has the thing that all big stars need. Charisma. Plus the thing that makes the charismatic ones useful. Attitude. He was able to move quickly from casual nonchalance to really aggressive and mean snarly stuff.

He was also the funny one, and the other three clearly were his followers. Paul was the best looking man I had ever seen, which was not to his advantage, and even if he was the best bass player in the world that day, I hated him for being so totally cool, charming, cute, handsome and talented too. How could G-d have allowed these 4 people to meet and destroy all my hopes of ever being in the music business? Why me Lord?

The guitarist (George), is young handsome and 35 years ahead of the one in my band. Did that mean that my guitarist wasn’t actually playing the guitar for hours on end in his bedroom??? What was he doing all day up there anyway?

This bass player (Paul as he was later to become known), had one of the greatest pretty voices I had ever heard and could also do Little Richard. AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. The bastard. He must have made a deal with the devil. Nobody can sing and play the bass that well.

Ringo had replaced Pete Best, and Pete had told me that Ringo was a great drummer, but that he had no fans.

There was a rumor that they wrote songs too, but I had heard that they were no good. Just as this thought had settled in my tiny mind, they did “From me to you”.

This was when I decided to quit the music business and become a doctor.

There was no way I would ever be able to compete with THIS. This was cheating. They were so much better than anything I had ever seen, that I was speechless.

This was when Alan Wrigley uttered these magic words. “F----ing ’Ell”.

Actually he said it maybe 25 times as they began and finished a song that knocked our socks off, and also shriveled the parts of our bodies which we desperately wanted not to become shriveled.

Is it possible to be musically emasculated? Flacid?

“F----ing Ell”;.

We were the first flacid heads!

Then Allan said the words which were to change our lives.

“No more f----ing around Pete!”

Words to that effect. Alan always used the f word when he couldn’t express his feelings properly, which was always. I was able to connect better words together so I said “From this day hence (we pronounced), no member of our musical enterprise would be allowed to have another job. No more part timers.” We had seen the truth. The Beatles were it. We had seen the real competition. This is not to say that The Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Undertakers, or any of the other bands that we had seen recently were not great too, but these Beatles were er... FAB.

That was the day we began to get serious. Alan and I had work to do. Luckily we had Keith and Karl who wanted to be great too. We would of course need a name and a new style to go with our new idea. We couldn’t do Some Other Guy any more or Fortune Teller. So...?

Chapter 1 High Noone

Meet the Beatles Part One

Pete Novac and the Heartbeats

—Peter Noone

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