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'I know about hit songs, hit numbers, hit sounds': The man who turned The Beatles into superstars

Brian Epstein,quina con3978 the Fab Four's manager, guided them from Liverpool's Cavern Club to global fame. When he died 58 years ago this week, the band was left suddenly adrift. Three years earlier, Epstein had told the BBC how he knew they would be "the biggest attraction in the world".

When The Beatles were told that their manager, Brian Epstein, had been found dead in his London home on 27 August 1967, they were sent into a tailspin. "It was shattering, sad, and a little frightening," Paul McCartney told Barry Miles in his 1997 biography Many Years from Now. "We loved him."

Epstein had been instrumental in the Fab Four's rise from playing local Liverpool clubs to being the biggest band in the world. He had shaped their early image, helped them get a recording contract, managed all their business affairs, and championed them relentlessly. And he had always believed in them. When the BBC's Panorama profiled him in 1964, the pop impresario said that when he signed the band in 1961, he already knew they would be "one of the biggest, if not the biggest attraction, theatrical attraction, in the world".

By the time of the Panorama interview, Epstein was managing a whole roster of artists, including Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cilla Black and Tommy Quickly. He had "unique judgement of what will be a hit and who will make it", said BBC reporter Michael Charlton. "When only one in 50 of the multitude of pop records catches on, Epstein's young stars have captured hit parades all over the world."

But Epstein had taken a curious route to the world of pop, and Charlton noted that he still seemed to be something of an outsider. "He himself doesn't seem part of this world, and yet he's genuinely absorbed by young people and young enthusiasms," Charlton said.

Born in 1934, Epstein was the eldest son of a Jewish family that ran a successful retail business in Liverpool. He hoped to pursue a career in something creative, but his family had other plans for him. "When I left school, at the age of 16, I had ambitions to be a dress designer, and also to be an actor, but my family weren't very keen on this, and I allowed myself to be swayed into going into the business," Epstein told Bill Grundy in a BBC radio interview in 1964. "I think I was more anxious to leave school than anything else, which I didn't enjoy very much."

While working at the family business in 1952, he was called up for his mandatory National Service, becoming a clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps. But the regimentation of military life made him miserable. After seeing an army psychiatrist, who recommended him for an early medical discharge, he left to rejoin the family firm. However, he hadn't given up on his acting aspirations, and persuaded his parents to let him enrol as a student at London's renowned Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) in 1956.

It was during this time that Epstein would acknowledge that he was gay. In the UK in the 1950s, homosexuality was illegal, and his life as a closeted gay man would leave him vulnerable to violent attacks, blackmail and the constant threat of imprisonment. In 1957, he was arrested by a plain-clothes policeman for "persistent importuning" outside the men's toilet at a London Underground station. He received a suspended two-year sentence, dropped out of Rada, and returned to Liverpool. This time, when his father put him in charge of the record department at the family's North End Music Stores (NEMS), he found his niche. His knack for predicting what would be a pop hit and his flair for creating eye-catching displays quickly turned the store into a magnet for Liverpool's teenagers.

When a boy came into NEMS requesting a record by the Beatles, My Bonnie, he decided to seek them out, Epstein told Grundy in 1964. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and their then drummer, Pete Best, had recorded the track as a backing band for singer Tony Sheridan while they were in Hamburg in 1961 – leading Epstein to believe that they were German. The Beatles had now returned to Liverpool, and Epstein went to see them play a lunchtime session at the nearby Cavern Club, primarily with the intention of finding out how to order their My Bonnie record.

As he walked into the dark, smoky cellar, he was transfixed by the music he heard. "I liked them enormously. I immediately liked the sound that I heard," he told Grundy. "I heard their sound before I met them. They were, sort of, rather scruffily dressed, in the nicest possible way, or I should say, in the most attractive way. Black leather jackets and jeans, long hair, of course, and rather untidy stage presentation, not terribly aware, and not caring very much what they looked like."

But Epstein was captivated by The Beatles' onstage charisma, raucous energy and ad-libbed humour. "And I thought that it was something that an awful lot of people would like. They were fresh, and they were honest, and they had what I thought was a sort of presence and – this is a terrible, vague term – star-quality. Whatever that is, they had it, or I sensed that they had it."

Despite having no experience, Epstein was convinced that he should be The Beatles' manager, and proposed a business meeting at his shop. But when the time came, only three of the band members turned up. After Epstein had waited for 45 minutes, McCartney was still nowhere to be seen. "I asked one of the boys to get on the phone to him and he came back, and he said, 'Well, he's just got up, he's in the bath,'" Epstein told the BBC in 1964. "So I sort of, you know, shouted about a bit, and I thought, this is very disgraceful indeed, and how can he be so late for an important thing, and George just simply replied, which is very typical of them, 'Well, he may be late, but he's very clean.'"

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The Beatles agreed to be managed by the older, well-spoken Epstein, although he left their first contract unsigned so that they could break it if he was unable to prove himself to them. He then set about securing larger, better venues for the band to play. He understood that they needed to clean up their image if they were to reach a broader audience, especially on television, so he persuaded them to adopt the matching suits they would later become known for, and to stop swearing, smoking and drinking on stage.

"I would say that it was due to the five of us, rather than to me," Epstein said. "I encouraged them at first to get out of leather jackets and jeans, and I wouldn't allow them to appear in jeans after a short time, and then after that step, I got them to wear, I think, sweaters on stage, and then, very reluctantly, eventually suits… I'm not sure that they didn't wear their first suits for a BBC broadcast to a live audience."

Unlike other band managers at the time, Epstein didn't presume to tell them what songs to play or how they should sound. "I don't know about music," he confessed to Grundy in 1964, "but I think I know about hit songs, hit numbers, hit sounds." At the same time as organising the logistics of their concerts and engineering publicity to raise their profile, he began visiting numerous record labels with the aim of securing them a recording contract.

After he met with music producer George Martin, The Beatles landed a deal with Parlophone, a subsidiary of the recording company EMI. Martin, too, would prove to be vital to the band's success, helping them to hone and develop their sound and working with them to realise their musical ideas. When Lennon, McCartney and Harrison decided they needed to replace Best with Ringo Starr, they turned to Epstein to fire their original drummer. Despite his reservations, he trusted the "boys", as he called them, as well as Martin's musical judgement.

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As their manager, Epstein formed a deeply personal connection with The Beatles, especially Lennon. It was Epstein who was Lennon's best man when he married his first wife Cynthia Powell in 1962, paying for their celebratory meal afterwards and providing his flat on Falkner Street in Liverpool for the couple to live in rent-free while they had their first child, Julian. "I think they're all great people, and I really mean that," Epstein told Grundy. "It was recently written about me that I probably enjoy best the company of my artists, and I think that's quite true, actually. It was written in a context where I don't have much of a social life and that most of my time is spent with my artists."

Within 10 months of Epstein starting to manage The Beatles, they had released their first single, Love Me Do. In March 1963, their second single, Please Please Me, from their album of the same name, would reach number one in the UK charts. By the end of 1963, Epstein was negotiating to secure The Beatles their first US television appearance on Ed Sullivan's top-rated CBS entertainment show. The band's February 1964 performance would prove to be a cultural watershed, drawing some 73 million viewers. There was an explosion of fan hysteria, with The Beatles simultaneously holding the top five positions on the Billboard chart by April.

But in the years that followed, as The Beatles grew ever more successful internationally, Epstein's personal life became increasingly chaotic. To cope with his workload, he began to take stimulants, which he would then balance with sedatives to help him sleep. By the end of 1966, the band themselves were fatigued and decided to stop touring. Throughout 1967, while The Beatles worked on their groundbreaking Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, Epstein would be in and out of a private clinic in London, the Priory, in an attempt to deal with his drug dependency. But he would still keep up his demanding schedule, leaving the Priory to host the Sgt Pepper's launch party at his Belgravia, London home in May 1967, and negotiating for The Beatles to perform of All You Need Is Love for 400 million viewers in 25 countries on the world's first satellite television link.

A little over a month after his father died, Epstein was found dead at the age of 32 in August 1967, having taken what was ruled to be an accidental drug overdose. The Beatles were left reeling. While the wisdom of some of his business decisions has been questioned, not least by The Beatles themselves, he had kept the band on track. "I knew that we were in trouble then," John Lennon told Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner in a 1970 interview. Lennon believed that Epstein's death had triggered the band's disintegration. "I didn't really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared. I thought, 'We've had it now.'" Less than three years after his death, The Beatles had broken up.

"What [Epstein] did was enable them," historian Mark Lewisohn told the BBC's Great Lives podcast in 2019. "The talent was theirs, but he gave them every opportunity to use it, and they then took those opportunities and did extraordinary things with them."

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