As the old adage goes, “All press is good press,” which we suppose we could apply to one of the Beatles’ wildest interviews from 1963 when their star was quickly ascending across the U.K. Long-time entertainment journalist for the Daily Mirror, Donald Zec, interviewed the Fab Four right as Beatlemania was spreading fast across the pond to the U.S.
His conversation with the young musicians came out months before the Beatles would make their iconic Ed Sullivan Show debut in the States. They were, for all intents and purposes, still on the rise—and very much at the whim of Zec’s colorfully descriptive language.
Revisiting The Beatles’ Interview From 1963
In hindsight, a Beatles feature in a newspaper is hardly out of the ordinary, particularly at the height of Beatlemania. But what makes Donald Zec’s September 10, 1963, interview so hilariously fascinating is how he described the quartet that was quickly on their way to becoming one of the most famous, influential rock bands in musical history.
Take, for example, the story’s headline: “Four frenzied Little Lord Fauntleroys who are making £5,000 every week.” It’s hard to imagine a time when the Beatles, whom Zec also described as “four cheeky-looking kids with stone-age hair styles,” would receive press that was as much of a schoolyard roast as it was a musical write-up. Nevertheless, Zec managed to incorporate both in his piece.
“One of them merely has to shake his primeval-styled head or shake a spidery leg, and a forest of hands wave and quiver imploringly towards the stage,” Zec wrote of the Fab Four’s 1963 performance at the Odeon Theatre in Luton. “They are the Beatles: the smash hit, refuse-all-imitations, Number One Group in the sensational Beat craze now devastating, if not deafening the British Isles.”
A Snapshot Of A Still-Green Fab Four
Before their Icarian rise and fall from skiffle musicians to international superstars to estranged former colleagues, part of what made the Beatles so alluring was the obvious friendship the four men shared. Donald Zec’s Daily Mirror article from 1963 offers a glimpse into that iteration of the Beatles—one seemingly unmarred by the effects of fame.
First, Zec delivered with yet another round of wildly imaginative if not mildly offensive descriptions of the musicians: “John Lennon is the dry-witted one,” Zec wrote, “with a half-smile that seems to have fallen asleep on his droopy eyed face. Paul McCartney, a sort of unofficial spokesman for the quivering ensemble looks like a young David Tomlinson in search of a barber.”
“George Harrison is the quiet one,” Zec continued. “He appears to be wearing a wig borrowed from a slightly larger head than his, and his black eyebrows writhe to join forces across the top of his nose. Ringo Starr, who with his dark features and formidable nose, resembles the “heavy” in a teenage Western, beats the drums.”
The Liverpudlian lads talked about their parents’ reactions to their musical success in between discussing band dynamics, past performances, and razzing one another. “You know the way people begin to look exactly like their dogs,” Lennon said at one point. “Well, we’re beginning to look like each other.”
However unsavory the physical descriptions of the Beatles might have been, the Daily Mirror article served as another helpful boost for the Fab Four’s burgeoning career. Decades later, it serves as a comical retrospective of the earliest days of one of the most enduring musical legacies of all time.
Photo by Sharok Hatami/Shutterstock
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