Hamburg • Sunday, June 26, 1966 • 3pm show

About

On this day, The Beatles travelled from Essen to Hamburg, by night and by train, arriving shortly after 6 am. They hadn’t been to Hamburg since January 1, 1963, following their third and final residency at the Star-Club.

Hamburg was chosen as a stop purely for the sake of nostalgia. We traveled by plane and private train, the Beatles talking excitedly the entire time about old times on the Reeperbahn. But like much of the rest of the world, Hamburg had lost its charm for them. They could no longer walk the streets unrecognized, gaping at the sex shops and the window-ledge hookers. There were no night-long bacchanals, watching the dawn come up over the Herberstrasse rooftops. The bars and clubs where they once played—only a short four years before—were closed; the Star Club was shuttered up with boards. What had once been tempting and exotic in the night was tawdry and tired in the light. Astrid Kirchner, the beautiful young photographer and girlfriend of Stu Sutcliffe, who so dramatically affected the Beades’ appearance, was now a barmaid in a transvestite bar. She had never been paid a cent for the now world-famous photographs she took of the boys in leather and cowboy hats, nor was she in any way recompensed for her famous haircut, which began a revolution in men’s grooming. In her small apartment she kept one room shrouded in black velvet where she burned candles underneath a haunting photograph she took of an ethereal Stu Sutcliffe.

Peter Brown – From “The Love You Make“, 2002

We had an old booking that had to be honoured. It was strange to see all our old friends in Hamburg. It was as if we’d mutated into something different and yet we were still just the boys. But we knew and they knew that we’d got famous in the meantime, and that we shouldn’t really be playing that sort of gig. It was good, though. I remember it being a very crazy evening, very steamy. There was a lot of crying from our German gangster friends, nostalgia for the old days. I’m not sure how good a gig it was from a musical point of view, but it was quite nice to go back one last time.

Paul McCartney – From “The Beatles Anthology” book, 2000

They performed two concerts at the Ernst Merck Halle, the first one at 3 pm, and the second one at 7 pm, and held a press conference between the sets. Also appearing on the bill were Cliff Bennett and The Rebel Rousers, The Rattles, and Peter and Gordon.

From Wikipedia:

The Beatles’ return to Hamburg was viewed as a homecoming due to their past connections with the city. On 26 June, the band played two shows at the 5,600-seat Ernst-Merck-Halle and reunited with old friends such as Astrid Kirchherr and with Bert Kaempfert, a German arranger and composer who had briefly worked as the Beatles’ producer. Lennon was heard to say during one of the Ernst-Merck-Halle concerts: “Don’t listen to our music. We’re terrible these days.” A scheduled group outing to St Pauli, the area of Hamburg where the Beatles had been based in the early 1960s, was cancelled due to the potential security risk. Lennon and McCartney nevertheless made a late-night visit to familiar sites along the Reeperbahn in St Pauli.

The band members had a mixed experience in Hamburg. Harrison later said that “a lot of ghosts materialised out of the woodwork – people you didn’t necessarily want to see again, who had been your best friend one drunken Preludin night back in 1960.” McCartney commented: “It was as if we’d mutated into something different and yet we were still just the boys. But we knew and they knew that we’d got famous in the meantime …” The Beatles had also tired of the generally inane questions put to them at press conferences throughout the German tour, with only McCartney attempting to humour the local reporters. At the between-shows press conference in Hamburg, Lennon’s impatience was palpable, leading a female reporter to ask why the band had become “so horrid and snobby”.

[…] Even by two o’clock the crowd outside the hotel had grown from a mere thirty to about two hundred, and so they shouldn’t be disappointed the boys stepped out onto the balcony, looking very fresh and wide awake.

Backstage at the Merck Halle in Hamburg it was just like a reunion. Bettina was there, and so was an old girlfriend of Paul’s named Cattia. Gibson Kempe arrived with his girlfriend Astrid, who was once the girlfriend of Stu Sutcliffe — she was greeted by all four Beatles with great warmth and affection. Bert Kaempfert popped in with his wife, and as he entered the room John sang the opening line of “Strangers In The Night”.

As you can imagine, Hamburg held an extra something for both the Beatles and the people who came to see them, and as usual they went down fantastically with just that extra something.

After two very exhausting shows and a press conference it was back to the hotel for a quiet evening with just a couple of friends and not as everyone had anticipated an evening at the Star Club — for reasons which I think are quite obvious. And so the Beatles’ return to Germany ended.

From The Beatles Monthly Book – August 1966

Last updated on October 22, 2023