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While touring with The Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr faced fan attention so extreme that it put their safety at risk. Fans swarmed them at airports, broke through police barricades, and leapt on their cars. Luckily, they had some degree of practice for the chaos of Beatlemania. After their early shows, Lennon explained people were itching to beat them up. Here’s why.

A black and white picture of George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney of The Beatles posing against a brick wall.
George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney | Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

John Lennon said his band was in constant danger after shows

Before The Beatles, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were in the Quarry Men. At their earliest shows in Liverpool, the audience’s behavior hinted at the success they would eventually find. Unfortunately, the adoration toward the band irritated some people.

“You’d go and play at the dance hall, and the real Teddy boys didn’t like you, because all the girls would be watching the group — you had the sideboards and the hair and you’re on stage,” Lennon said, per The Beatles Anthology. “Afterwards the guys would try and kill you, so most of fifteen, sixteen and seventeen was spent running away from people with a guitar under your arm.”

He said this happened so often that he knew exactly how to evade the angry group.

“They’d always catch the drummer; he had all the equipment,” he said. “We’d run like crazy and get the bus because we didn’t have a car. I’d get on the bus with the guitar, but the bass player — who only had a string bass with a tea chest — used to get caught. What we used to do was throw them the bass or a hat and they’d kick and kill it, so you could escape.”

This hinted at their future success

This type of attention may not seem positive, but it hinted at the band’s bright future. Even at this early stage, before McCartney switched to playing the bass and Starr joined their group, people reacted strongly to their music. 

Girls in the audience loved them so much that it angered Liverpool’s Teddy boys. They likely reacted with violence because they saw that Lennon, McCartney, and George Harrison showed promise when they worked together. Even in their earliest iteration as a band, they proved they were capable of inspiring strong emotions.

John Lennon found himself in a similar situation with The Beatles as the band toured

The chaos The Beatles faced in their early days as a band was nothing compared to Beatlemania. Massive crowds met them wherever they went. While they were fans and not jealous peers, the weight of their attention could be dangerous. Once, fans nearly crushed them while they tried to find their car after a 1963 show.

“The police, thinking they were clever, moved the car slightly away from the front door, trying to conceal it,” Hunter Davies wrote in The Beatles: The Authorized Biography. “Which meant that when the Beatles did appear, shepherded by Neil [Aspinall], they had to search wildly for the car, then make a dash of fifty yards, almost being killed by the mobs in the process.”

For this reason, The Beatles decided to stop touring in 1966.

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