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TL;DR: 

  • The Beatles’ Stuart Sutcliffe fell in love when The Beatles performed in Hamburg.
  • Paul McCartney and Stuart Sutcliffe didn’t always get along.
  • Paul McCartney said he worried Stuart Sutcliffe would come back to haunt him.
A black and white picture of Stuart Sutcliffe sitting in a chair. Paul McCartney stands at a microphone and plays guitar.
Stuart Sutcliffe and Paul McCartney | Collect/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images; Jeff Hochberg/Getty Images

Stuart Sutcliffe played guitar for The Beatles during their residency in Hamburg. While he wasn’t a well-trained musician, he became popular with the fans. Despite this, he was often the target of the band’s jokes. According to John Lennon, Paul McCartney could be particularly hard on him. This culminated in an onstage fight over something McCartney said about Sutcliffe’s girlfriend.

Stuart Sutcliffe fell in love in Hamburg

In 1960, The Beatles traveled to Hamburg to play a residency. Here, they met Astrid Kirchherr, a student who offered to photograph the band. She admitted that she had ulterior motives for this.

“I wanted to get to know Stu, that was the real reason,” she said, per The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “I’d fallen in love with him at first sight. It’s true. It wasn’t slushy romance and all that. I just had.”

Though Kirchherr could not speak English and Sutcliffe spoke no German, they began a relationship. Two months after meeting each other, the pair got engaged.

“From when we first started being able to communicate with each other we intended to get married,” she said. 

Paul McCartney got into a fight with Stuart Sutcliffe onstage

Sutcliffe was happily in love, but he wasn’t always content with his position in the band. 

“We were awful to him sometimes,” Lennon said. “Especially Paul, always picking on him. I used to explain afterwards to him that we didn’t dislike him, really.”

These tensions boiled over violently during a performance. McCartney’s needling went too far, and Sutcliffe attacked him.

“Paul was saying something about Stu’s girl — he was jealous because she was a great girl, and Stu hit him, onstage,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “And Stu wasn’t a violent guy at all.”

Sutcliffe was smaller than McCartney, but Kirchherr said he could become “really hysterical” when he was angry. This gave him the strength to take on his bandmate. 

“Stuart and I once actually had a fight on stage,” McCartney said. “I thought I’d beat him hands down because he was littler than me. But he was strong and we got locked in a sort of death-grip, on stage during the set. It was terrible. We must have called each other something one too many times: ‘Oh, you…’ — ‘You calling me that?’ Then we were locked and neither of us wanted to go any further and all the others were shouting, ‘Stop it, you two!’ — ‘I’ll stop it if he will.'”

Paul McCartney worried Stuart Sutcliffe would come back to haunt him

Eventually, Sutcliffe left The Beatles to pursue a career in art. In 1962, he died of a brain hemorrhage. In the band’s early days, they made a pact to visit one another from beyond the grave. McCartney admitted that he was at least a little fearful that Sutcliffe would hold up his end of the deal.

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John Lennon Went Into ‘Hysterics’ When He Learned ‘Soul Mate’ and Beatles’ Guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe Died

“If one of us were to die, he’d come back and let the others know if there was another side,” he said, per The New Yorker. “So as Stuart was the first one to go, we did half expect him to show up. Any pans that rattled in the night could be him.”

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