“The Beatles in Hamburg”-Beatles document

The annals of each big city with pop -cultural claim contain one or two music clubs in which blood, sweat and drugs drop so thickly from the ceiling that it smells nationwide. Düsseldorf has the Punkschuppen Ratinger Hof, Munich Die Edeldisco P1, Frankfurt Das Techno-Mekka Dorian Gray, Berlin with Kitkat, Speror, Berghain dozens of party temples. But none of this is anything against Hamburg. After all, one of his quarters is only missing the roof to go through as a music club: St. Pauli.

Today, the gentrified workers with an attached amusing mile contains significantly more tourist bars than dance areas. Kaiserkeller, Star Club, Indra, however, have unchanged cosmopolitan sound because they unite something incomparable: the Beatles were already on every stage at a time when practically none of them heard outside of Liverpool. Long ago. Almost 65 years to be precise.

Nevertheless, the German flail years of the English band were so formative that Roger Appleton dedicates them to documentation. The British director looks back at the Roaring Sixties intensive, when Hamburg is also a global pop culture navel because the local concert organizer Bruno Koschmider asks the Liverpool colleague Allan Williams about bands in his hometown. At first, however, he only gets five pimple teenagers who are literally out of place.

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Until then, says Paul McCartney’s later friend Rosi in an interview, St. Pauli was the world’s largest red light district, “but for older people”. It was only when the Kaiserkeller opened in 1959 that the youth culture blooms in the neighborhood – although Koschmieder the Fab Four, at the time still with Pete Best instead of Ringo Starr and five instead of four members, after their arrival, send two entrances further into the smaller Indra. There the cover band changes with a strip show every 30 minutes evening. Sounds not very career -providing.

But because their predator gossensound attracts more guests with every performance, the Beatles move to the Kaiserkeller six weeks later, where they change the neighborhood, but above all forever. “We were born in Liverpool, but we grew up in Hamburg,” says John Lennon from off, and describes the importance of her youth hostel with Elbblick. Because musically they may only be mature elsewhere, habitually they did it in the beat of sex’n’drugs’n’gangcrimality of the port city.

When she had ended the last of her three long -term long -term stays with a New Year’s concert in the Star Club in early 1963 just eleven days before her first Tophit “Please please me”, “the Beatles were the Beatles,” Lennon said. “But our edges were sanded down.” Compared to their hometown, the foreign exile was finally a sins, the excessive nightlife of which was only bearable for inexperienced nightlife with the help of a mixture of alcohol and stimulants – but was also hellish fun.

But because their estranged gossensound attracts more guests with every performance, the Beatles move to the Kaiserkeller six weeks later.

“We were like children who were left away from the leash,” says Paul McCartney from the state of emergency Reeperbahn. “We only knew nice girls in Liverpool,” he adds happily. “But if you had a friend in Hamburg, she was probably a stripper.” Appleton puts this jump into the hot water in the visible mix of family album and found footage, old crime novels and anime, reenactment and a considerable selection of contemporary witnesses. Mit musician like Pete Best or Chas Newby, for example, or half a dozen local pioneers around Jürgen Vollmer and Klaus Voormann.

With their help, the documentary becomes the milieus study of an irretrievable era, as East Berlin was able to experience after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This also makes him an appeal to city planners of today, subculture not only to calculate economically, as even the red-green Senate does. In contrast to June 1961, when the aspiring band lost the fifth Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe to the progressive Hamburg art scene, the Hanseatic city in January 2024 was clinically dead with all residual creativity.

The lifestyle of the second largest cities of two nations, which were still deadly enemies, and still fertilized themselves across all borders as rare in music history, captures Appleton all the more intensely. “It was a good, clean fun,” says Paul McCartney at the beginning of Arte and corrected: “A good dirty fun”. Like this documentation.

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