The Beatles Used to Wreak Havoc in Villages After Recording Sessions: ‘Freaked Everybody Out’
The Beatles spent hours in recording sessions, and they had pent-up energy when they got out. They found it fun to speed around in their cars, racing and using microphones to call out to one another. While this was entertaining to the musicians, it was less so for the residents of the towns they drove through.
The Beatles raced cars through villages after recording sessions
Once John Lennon got a driver’s license, he outfitted his Rolls-Royce with oversized ashtrays, a record player, a custom horn, and a microphone system with speakers in the wheel wells. He used the microphone frequently.
“You could ask people to cross the road a bit faster which scared the daylights out of them,” Beatles associate Tony King said, per Rolling Stone.
Lennon encouraged his bandmates to race him in their cars. The Beatles did this after recording sessions, despite the fact that it was often past midnight.
“After recording sessions, at two or three in the morning, we’d be careening through the villages on the way to Weybridge, shouting ‘wey-hey’ and driving much too fast,” Paul McCartney said in The Beatles’ Anthology documentary. “George would perhaps be in his Ferrari — he was quite a fast driver — and John and I would be following in his big Rolls-Royce. John had a mic in the Rolls with a loudspeaker outside and he’d be shouting to George in the front: ‘It is foolish to resist, it is foolish to resist! Pull over!'”
McCartney acknowledged that this likely alarmed the people trying to sleep in their homes.
“It was insane,” he said. “All the lights would go on in the houses as we went past – it must have freaked everybody out.”
The Beatles didn’t just wait for recording sessions for this behavior
While Lennon and The Beatles were unintentionally scaring residents in the villages they drove through, they liked to purposely scare people they knew.
“I remember being in Hyde Park, coming back from John’s house in his big chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce … We were driving through the park, and ahead of us was Brian [Jones’] Austin Princess,” McCartney said in the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “We could see his big floppy hat and blond hair and we could see him nervously smoking a ciggie in the back of the car. So John got on the mic and said, ‘Pull over now! Brian Jones! You are under arrest! Pull over now!’ Brian jumped up. ‘F***ing hell!’ He really thought he had been busted. He was s****ing himself!”
Lennon pulled a similar prank on Beatles manager Brian Epstein. He pulled up behind him in the car and pretended the police were there to arrest him.
John Lennon and Ringo Starr had a scare that put their car racing to an end
Lennon often pushed for his bandmates to race cars. He stopped doing this after a frightening experience with Ringo Starr, though.
“Their enthusiasm for amateur drag racing was to be abruptly dispelled when Ringo, hurtling along in his Facel Viga at one-hundred and fifty miles per hour, managed barely to avoid slamming directly into the back of a car that had suddenly switched into his lane at a mere seventy miles per hour,” Lennon’s longtime friend Pete Shotton wrote in the book The Beatles, Lennon, and Me. “Though nobody was seriously hurt, both Ringo and John were deeply shaken by the experience, and John, at least, seemed content to let others do his driving for him from that point on.”
It was for the best. By all accounts, Lennon was not a good driver.
