Paul, John, George and Jimmy: the Beatles in 1964

For my Baby Boomer generation, born after our fathers were demobilised in late 1945, the Beatles story was an open book. I personally knew every word of every Beatle song, every harmony, every wife and girlfriend.

Yet the ABC produced a television programme in Australia called When The Beatles Drove Us Wild (2015) that tells a new story. Never-revealed footage of the Beatles’ 13 days in Australia and New Zealand in 1964 showed their 20 concerts, their after-concert sex lives and a new Beatle. The film proposed that this tour single-handedly changed Australia’s clothes, hair dos, music, parent-teenage relationships and our concept of public mass demonstrations.

But a new Beatle?? I remember that year with crystal clarity, but I had never heard of a new Beatle.

In June 1964, excitement about Beatle music was heating up as the band prepared for its first tour to Denmark, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. But the day before the Beatles were to leave, Ringo Starr was suddenly hospitalised with tonsillitis. With hotels and concert halls booked and thousands of tickets sold, manager Brian Epstein realised that cancelling the tour would have created a huge financial loss.

They rushed to find a replacement for Starr. John Lennon and Paul McCartney accepted that hiring a replacement drummer was nec­essary to ensure the tour went ahead, but George Harrison wanted to remain loyal to Ringo. Epstein had to urgently find a good drummer who could successfully play with the biggest group in the world.

Paul, John, Jimmy and George

Melbourne,

June 1964

Jimmy Nicol, a London drummer born in 1939, was that man. Ep­st­ein and McCartney already knew him and hired him after just one aud­ition. Nicol was given a moptop haircut, Ringo Starr’s own suit and a tick­et for the flight to Denmark the next day. Iron­ically Starr was feeling terrible about Nicol replacing him, just as Starr had replaced Pete Best as the Beatles’ drummer two years earlier.

Nicol became a full-fledged Beatle for just 13 days, participating in press conferences and enjoying the adulation of fans. Nicol played the drums in ten, fast-moving concerts:
Copenhagen        4/6/1964
Amsterdam         5/6/1964
Blokker Neth      6/6/1964 (2 concerts)
Hong Kong         9/6/1964 (2 concerts)
Adelaide          11/6/1964 (4 concerts)

Eventually Ringo Starr recovered and rejoined the Beatles in Melbourne, where he performed for the first time on the 14th of June. The next day Nicol did his final tele­vision interview as a Beatle. Despite having been mobbed by a quarter of a million fans in Melbourne a day earlier, Nicol sat tot­ally alone in the airport on his way home. The footage of a lonely, depressed man was heartbreaking.

Perhaps he was comforted by a handsome cheque and a gift inscribed “From the Beatles and Brian Ep­stein to Jimmy – with appreciation and gratitude.” Probably not; for Jimmy Nicol, it was over :(

On 21st June 1964, The Beatles touched down in New Zealand. Keith Holyoake was Prime Minister, the pubs all closed at 6 o’clock and TV was still in black and white. Recent touring performers of note had been The Vienna Boys Choir, pianist Arthur Rubenstein and Vera Lynn.

Endless thousands of fans turned up at the airport and soon the group make their famous appearance of the balcony of the St George Hotel. New Zealand Beatlemania was insane.. and everywhere!! Clearly the Beatles' twelve shows in four major cities over seven days had a seismic cultural impact on this previously conservative nation. Alas Jimmy Nicol knew nothing of screaming New Zealand teenagers.

Quarter of a million teenagers fill Melbourne's main street

to welcome the Beatles to the town hall

Very early on his second morning in Melbourne

Jimmy Nicol was at the airport alone, going home to the UK.

One book on the subject, The Beatle Who Vanished, was written by Jim Berkenstadt and published by Rock And Roll Detective Publishing in 2013. Nicol’s life apparently spiralled out of control after he left Melbourne. Nicol had two solo bands in the immediate post-Beatle era but they did not sell any records, despite some radio and TV appearances. Alas he had spent all his money on these bands. Less than a year later he was declared bankrupt with large debts, his wife divorced him, he became estranged from his son Howie and he was living in poverty.

This sad part of the Nichol story is well covered in The Rock and Roll Chemist blog. The author showed how limited the influence that Nichol had on the Beatles was: mainly their 1967 song "Getting Better"

When the Swedish group Spotnicks offered him concert work in 1965, Nicol was unemployed and accepted the group’s offer gratefully. The Spotnicks toured with him around the world and made him a full member of the band, but he apparently developed a drug problem and vanished again.

I can find little trace of Nicol for the next 20 years, until he agreed to participate in a Beatles event in Amsterdam in 1984 and was interviewed by the promoter. At that Amsterdam event, Jimmy was still saying that being a Beatle back in June 1964 had been both a curse and a blessing. 

Then silence again.

Fin­ally the music world believed (wrongly) that he had died in 1988. In 2004 The Weekend Australian newspaper located Nicol in a flat in a north London industrial estate, where he was living as a virtual recluse.