In 1960, the Beatles arrived in the German port city of Hamburg. Inexperienced, keen and – in the case of George Harrison – underage, they were at the start of a two-year spell that would become a key part of Beatles lore, a time when the band honed their skills while entertaining rowdy sailors.
The Hamburg stint, during which the band played more than 250 gigs between 1960 and 1962, is the focus of a new BBC drama, Hamburg Days, which will tell the story of how the band were beaten into shape by performing near the notorious Reeperbahn.
Jamie Carragher, who wrote the script for the six-part series, told the Guardian it will include an often overlooked part of the story: the role of Lord Woodbine, the band’s early co-manager and mentor who will be played by the Sherwood actor Jorden Myrie.
“He’s represented as very much the friend and partner of Allan Williams,” says Carragher, referring to the first manager of the group. “Woodbine was older than the Beatles, but also played music himself. He knew about music.”
Woodbine, real name Harold Adolphus Phillips, was a Trinidadian calypso musician whose connection to Liverpool began when he came to Britain in 1943, during the second world war, serving as a Royal Air Force flight engineer.
After the conflict he returned to the Caribbean before coming back to the UK on the Empire Windrush; Phillips stood beside Lord Kitchener in the famous footage of the calypsonian singing London Is The Place For Me at Tilbury Dock.
“McCartney and Lennon respected him in a musical sense,” says Carragher. “There weren’t many people in their lives at this point who wrote their own songs, and Lord Woodbine did that via the calypso tradition.”
While Kitchener eventually made his way to Moss Side in Manchester, Phillips went back to Liverpool to seek out his wartime sweetheart, with whom he started a family in Toxteth.
The academic and author Malik Al Nasir researched Phillips for the British Library’s Beyond the Bassline exhibition, highlighting how he – and by extension black Liverpool’s influence on the group – had been “airbrushed” out of history.
Phillips managed the Jacaranda club and, along with Williams, became the co-manager of the Beatles early in their career. “They used to come and offer to clean and collect glasses for Woodbine,” Al Nasir says of Lennon and McCartney. “In return Woodbine would feed them and help them out by teaching them chords.”
One of the first songs John Lennon wrote was called Calypso Rock.
Phillips worked as a builder and decorator around Merseyside, and tended bar in the clubs of Liverpool 8 – the postcode which was home to one of the oldest black communities in the country.
Some histories claim that Phillips initiated the move to Hamburg, driving the Beatles to Germany in a beaten-up Volkswagen. “I don’t even know if Woodbine even had a contract with the Beatles,” Al Nasir said. “But he certainly picked them up when no one else cared; he took them to Hamburg, a place that nobody else really thought about.”
After the group began being managed by Brian Epstein, his influence and legacy were mostly left out of the official Beatles story. He briefly appeared in the 1994 Channel 4-funded film Backbeat, played by Charlie Caine.
In 1992, while attending a Beatles-themed play in Liverpool, Phillips saw a group photo used on stage from a Hamburg trip but he had been removed. “When I saw that it hurt me,” he said in 2000. “That was the end of the Beatles memory and me.”
Phillips died in a house fire, aged 72, in 2000. Last summer his family unveiled a plaque from the Windrush Foundation dedicated to him outside the Jacaranda in Liverpool, which recognised his cultural impact.
The BBC show, which is being shot in Liverpool and in Germany, is inspired by the memoirs of Klaus Voormann, who met the band in Hamburg as a young artist and eventually designed the cover of their seventh studio album, Revolver, which was released in 1966.
Sam Mendes’s four Beatles biopics are also due in 2028, with each of the films dedicated to a different member: Paul Mescal will play Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson will play John Lennon, Joseph Quinn will play George Harrison and Barry Keoghan will play Ringo Starr.