The Beatle who vanished
He stood in for Ringo on their first world tour — and enjoyed 12 days of riotous hedonism. But, as a new film will reveal, Jimmie Nicol’s brush with fame wrecked his life ...
One summer’s morning in 1964, Jimmie nicol was woken by the phone at the shabby rented flat in Barnes, South-West London, where he lived with his wife Patricia and their young son, Howie.
On the line was George Martin, who, as the producer behind The Beatles, was one of the most powerful men in pop.
‘What are you doing for the next few days?’ he asked.
nicol, who earned a crust playing drums in Soho nightclubs, knew enough about the music business to reply that his diary appeared to be empty.
‘Then come to Abbey Road studios at 3pm,’ said Martin. ‘The Beatles want to run through some numbers with you . . . Ringo Starr is ill and we want you to take his place on their tour. Would you mind going to Australia?’
The date was Wednesday, June 3, and it was the start of a surreal fortnight that would briefly turn the little-known 24-year-old into a household name.
In a few short hours, nicol was thrust from obscurity to the epicentre of the greatest celebrity circus in modern history, becoming a member of the Fab Four on their first world tour.
Greeted by vast crowds in Denmark, Holland, Hong Kong and Australia, he was engulfed by a crazy world of screaming girls, private jets, hysterical Press conferences, TV chat shows and debauched parties in hotel suites.
He played ten sold-out concerts across three continents to several hundred thousand fans, earning overnight celebrity as what the headline writers called ‘the fifth Beatle’.
Then, almost as quickly as he’d risen to the cusp of fame and fortune, Jimmie nicol vanished. While the rest of the group went on to become some of the most recognised figures of the 20th century, his career quickly foundered.
Within a year, his marriage ended in divorce, he was declared bankrupt, was sleeping on his mother’s sofa and had become estranged from his only child.
Repeated efforts to resurrect a pop career ended in ignominy, amid allegations that drug addiction was causing him to squander his talents.
After living in Mexico in the late Sixties, where a second marriage also ended in divorce, he returned to the UK in the mid-Seventies, and spent the ensuing decades in obscurity, doing odd jobs as a builder.
Today, the ‘fifth Beatle’s’ exact location is a mystery.
Last interviewed in 1987, he resisted all temptations to cash in on his fleeting brush with global celebrity, making just one public appearance (at a 1984 Beatles convention in Amsterdam), which he soon regretted.
Old friends and family say they have no idea where he’s living or even if he’s still alive. THe
last known photograph of nicol was taken in 2005, wearing overalls and a greying ponytail and wandering the streets of West London. The most recent reported sighting was outside a rented flat in Kentish Town, where he lived until five years ago.
Some believe he’s back in Mexico. Others suspect he’s fled to Holland. To all but the most committed Beatles fan, his name has been largely forgotten.
Yet that could be about to change. For, more than half a century after his stint as Ringo Starr’s replacement, Jimmie nicol is set to see his name up in lights again, with plans for a Hollywood movie about his life and times.
The project is the brainchild of Alex Orbison and Ashley Hamilton, the film producer sons of the Sixties pop star Roy and the Hollywood actor George. It will be based on a biography of nicol called The Beatle Who Vanished, which bills itself as a tale of ‘betrayal, substance abuse, bankruptcy and an eventual disappearance, which has led many to question whether he is dead or alive’.
So, who is the mysterious man at the centre of this bizarre tale? What derailed his efforts to achieve rock ’n’ roll stardom? And how and why did he vanish?
James George nicol was born in (the then) working-class London neighbourhood of Wandsworth in 1939, the son of a messenger who worked for the Inland Revenue.
He got his first drum kit at the age of 14 from a local pawn shop and, after leaving school two years later, he gravitated to Soho in search of gigs supporting performers in pubs and clubs.
In 1957, he was in a moderately successful touring pop group called The Cabin Boys, and by the early Sixties was earning between £30 and £40 per week (more than double the average wage) as a talented session musician.
Then opportunity knocked, in June 1964, when The Beatles were topping the charts in both the UK and U.S.
On the eve of their first world tour, Ringo Starr collapsed during a photo-shoot and was taken to hospital, suffering from tonsillitis and pharyngitis. Rather than cancel or delay the tour, Beatles manager Brian epstein decided to hire a replacement.
He remembered nicol from a recent recording session with another Scouse rock ’n’ roll star, Tommy Quickly. Within hours, nicol was packing his bags.
‘A wardrobe lady came to my flat and a hairdresser cut my hair into a mop-top,’ he recalled in that 1987 interview with Beatlefan magazine. ‘In the mirror, I cut a mean figure as the new Beatle.’
The next afternoon, nicol was stepping out of a plane in Copenhagen with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, cheered by 6,000 fans.
A police escort took them to the city’s Royal Hotel, where they stayed in a palatial suite recently vacated by the Soviet leader nikita Khrushchev. Another 2,000 fans had gathered outside.
That night, the group played a sports arena with nicol wearing Ringo’s suits — though the trousers were much too short.
‘ Hurry up and get well,’ McCartney told Starr via telegram. ‘Jimmie is wearing out all your suits.’
In Amsterdam the following day, 30,000 teenagers lined the streets to watch The Beatles being given a tour on a barge.
That night, after playing a sold- out gig, nicol and Lennon are reputed to have spent the night in a local brothel.
‘The day before I was a Beatle, girls weren’t interested in me at all,’ nicol later remarked. ‘The day after, with the suit and The Beatles cut, riding in the back of a limo with John and Paul, they were dying to get a touch of me. It was strange and quite scary.’
nicol also later shed light on The Beatles’ romantic activities during their brief acquaintance, remarking that McCartney ‘was not the clean chap he wanted the world to see. His love of blonde women and his general dislike of the crowds are not told’. LennOn
drank to excess, while contrary to his reputation as one of the quieter band members, Harrison ‘was into sex and partying all night’.
‘I was not even close to them when it came to mischief and carrying on,’ he said. ‘I thought I could drink and lay women with the best of them, until I caught up with those guys.’
The fun continued in Hong Kong and Adelaide, where a crowd of 300,000 gathered to greet the group. But when the band touched down in Melbourne, nicol discovered that his fairytale was over: Starr had recovered.
On June 15, 12 days after George Martin had hired him, nicol was dropped back at Melbourne airport, where he was given a cheque for £500 in wages, a gold watch, a Beatles branded flight bag, containing his belongings — and a first-class ticket back home to London.
Greeted at Heathrow by Press photographers, he initially hoped to leverage his new-found fame into pop stardom, and quickly signed a record deal, bought a Jaguar and started a band called The Shubdubs.
But their singles flopped and a number of performances he bankrolled ended up being played to empty rooms.
Within a year, nicol was declared bankrupt, with debts of £40,000 against assets of £30. He was also taken to court for unpaid child maintenance by ex-wife Patricia, who’d divorced him after learning that his brush with fame had brought with it sexual infidelity.
‘everyone in showbusiness told me I couldn’t miss. I was the hottest name there was,’ he told the Mail in 1965.
‘But after the headlines died, I began dying, too. no one wanted to know me any more.’
Rather than face the music, so to speak, he joined a Swedish group called The Spotnicks, who were playing a residency at an hotel in
Mexico City. But he was kicked out a year later.
‘Jimmie began using heavy drugs,’ singer Peter Winsnes would recall. ‘One night, he was so stoned he fell off his drum seat. Our manager had to call for a new drummer.’
During the next decade, Nicol stayed in Mexico, releasing the record Los Nicolquinn with a musician called Eddie Quinn (it flopped) before marrying and swiftly divorcing dancer Julia Villasenor.
He then quit the music business and briefly set up a company making buttons, before returning home in the late Seventies.
He worked as a jobbing builder and was briefly reconciled with son Howie, now 58, a successful sound engineer.
Wrongly rumoured to have died in 1988, Nicol was tracked down by the Press in 1995 and 2005, when pictures of him featured in a book about The Beatles.
Then living in West London, he told reporters: ‘I don’t want to know, man. I don’t care about any book.’
Apparently, McCartney once said he understood Nicol’s refusal to talk about his time as a Beatle: It wasn’t easy for him to stand in for Ringo and have all that fame thrust upon him. And the minute his tenure was over, he wasn’t famous any more.
Indeed, when he was asked how he coped with the pressure, Nicol is reported to have said: ‘It’s getting better’ — which inspired The Beatles track Getting Better on their album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band.
Recent news that his life is to be turned into a film will prompt renewed speculation about his whereabouts.
Last week, The Times spoke to a former neighbour in Kentish Town, where he’s thought to have lived, who said Nicol and a woman called Josefina, believed to be his wife, left in 2013, saying they were moving to her native Mexico.
Other rumours say he’s been sighted in Holland.
Meanwhile, Howie, thought to be his only surviving relative, claims not to know his father’s location, saying: ‘He gave me instructions as to what to do when people come knocking: the best thing you can do is tell people you are dead and they’ll go away.’
Maybe they will. But with a Hollywood film planned, will the now 77-year-old Nicol really want to carry on being known only as The Beatle Who Vanished?