John Lennon Said The Beatles Got Violent and Destructive Onstage Out of ‘Frustration’

In the earliest years of The Beatles, John Lennon frequently grew aggressive with the people around him. He’d fought his way through school and continued to get into fights as The Beatles began performing. He also let out his aggression while onstage, but he said all his bandmates got in on it. Lennon shared why they would all but destroy the stage during their Hamburg performances.

John Lennon said The Beatles liked to let their aggression out onstage

In the early 1960s, The Beatles began performing shows in Hamburg, Germany. They played multiple shows a day and slept in small, dank rooms. In order to stay awake for their performances, the band began taking stimulants. Lennon took more than the other Beatles, and they often made him aggressive.

“The things we used to do!” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “We used to break the stage down — that was long before The Who came out and broke things; we used to leave guitars playing onstage with no people there.”

He explained that this aggression was a combination of alcohol and general frustration. They shouted at their audiences and even got into fights amongst themselves — Lennon recalled throwing a plate of food at George Harrison during a show.

“We’d be so drunk, we used to smash the machinery,” he said. “And this was all through frustration, not as an intellectual thought: ‘We will break the stage, we will wear a toilet seat round our neck, we will go on naked.’ We just did it, through being drunk.”

George Harrison said John Lennon would lash out at all the Beatles

As noted, Lennon did not keep his frustration confined to the stage. Harrison said that while they did not get into brawls, his bandmate would throw things at them.

“John threw all kinds of stuff over everybody over the years,” he said, adding, “There were times when he did throw stuff. He got pretty wired. he down, adverse effects of drink and Preludins, where you’d be up for days, were that you’d start hallucinating and getting a bit weird. John would sometimes get on the edge.”

Lennon said that they argued often, but they were always trivial. 

The band felt that the only way to stay awake was to take pills

Though the drugs seemed to make Lennon aggressive and irritable, the whole band continued to take them. They felt it was the only way to stay awake.

“This was the point of our lives when we found pills, uppers,” Ringo Starr said. “That’s the only way we could continue playing for so long. They were called Preludin, and you could buy them over the counter. We never thought we were doing anything wrong, but we’d get really wired and go on for days. So with beer and Preludin, that’s how we survived.”

Harrison said club owners gave them Preludins to perk them up for performances.

“We were frothing at the mouth,” he said. “Because we had all these hours to play and the club owners were giving us Preludins, which were slimming tablets. I don’t think they were amphetamine, but they were uppers. So we used to be up there foaming, stomping away.”