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Why I promised to cover up the last secret the tormented 'fifth Beatle' took to his grave, reveals biographer PHILIP NORMAN
There never was nor could be another pop manager like Brian Epstein, the young record salesman who discovered The Beatles and with them changed the course of music and culture for ever.
When Brian took them on in 1962, no one could understand his faith in what seemed the weirdest of pop groups with their fringed foreheads, eccentric repertoire (from Chuck Berry to Fats Waller) and left-handed bass player whose instrument resembled a violin mated with a giraffe. In The Beatles' giant wake, he signed up enough young Liverpool talent to constitute a 'Mersey Sound' and elevate him from manager into mogul: Gerry And The Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer, the Fourmost and Priscilla White, a market stallholder's daughter with a voice as carrying as a wartime air-raid siren, who was renamed Cilla Black. Over tea at Liverpool's once-grand Adelphi Hotel, Queenie told me of his erratic childhood and adolescence, how he'd attended eight expensive private schools without gaining a single qualification, been discharged from his military National Service under mysterious circumstances and nurtured vague ambitions to be a couturier and an actor before yielding to convention and going into the family business, seemingly for good.
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