Paul McCartney and Pete Best Were Arrested and Deported After Lighting a Condom on Fire
Before The Beatles were a global sensation, they played a lengthy residency in Hamburg, Germany. They credit the residency with teaching them about music and performance, setting them up for future success. While it was generally a good experience, they faced trouble in the city. Authorities deported George Harrison when they learned he was under the age of 18. Paul McCartney and original drummer Pete Best were also deported but on arson charges.
The Beatles had a residency in Hamburg in the early 1960s
Between 1960 and 1962, The original lineup of The Beatles played a series of concerts in Hamburg. Here, they grew tremendously as performers.
“Before Hamburg, we didn’t have a clue [laughs],” Harrison told Guitar World in 1992. “We’d never really done any gigs. We’d play a few parties, but we’d never had a drummer longer than one night at a time. So we were very ropy, just young kids. I was actually the youngest — I was only 17, and you had to be 18 to play in the clubs — and we had no visas. They wound up deporting me after our second year there.”
He noted that playing in Hamburg was almost like a pre-fame apprenticeship for the band.
“We had to learn millions of songs because we’d be on for hours,” he said, per the LA Times. “Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship, learning how to play in front of people.”
Paul McCartney and Pete Best were deported on arson charges
Harrison wasn’t the only one who got in trouble with the Hamburg authorities. McCartney and Best were arrested and deported after setting fire to a condom for some light. They nailed it to a wall and lit it when they were trying to move their belongings out of the place where they were staying. The owner of the club where they’d been playing, Bruno Koschminder, went to the police.
“He’d told them that we’d tried to burn his place down and they said, ‘Leave, please. Thank you very much but we don’t want you to burn our German houses,'” McCartney said in the book Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now by Barry Miles. “Funny, really, because we couldn’t have burned the place even if we had gallons of petrol — it was made of stone.”
Still, the authorities held McCartney and Best for a night in jail and then deported them, just as they had done to Harrison. Shortly after, John Lennon and Stu Sutcliffe left Hamburg as well.
Paul McCartney and Pete Best haven’t spoken since The Beatles fired the drummer
In 1962, The Beatles fired Best in favor of Ringo Starr. Not wanting to have the difficult conversation themselves, they had their manager Brian Epstein fire Best. Since then, McCartney and Best have not spoken. Best believes McCartney would like to meet up, but he would need his former bandmate to be the one to reach out.
“Paul has always hinted that he’d like to meet up,” he told the Telegraph in 2018. “The door’s always been wide open. I’m not the guilty person, you know? Whether he wants to do it on a public basis or a private one, it’s his call.”
If they did meet up, though, Best wouldn’t want their conversation to be contentious.
“We’re senior statesmen now,” he said. “How many years we’ve got left on the planet is really predictable. Let’s talk about things in general. Stick a bottle of Scotch on the table and let’s have a good old bash.”
