Scotland was very primitive, but that was OK...so were we
After playing to 13,000 ecstatic fans in one of the most iconic concert halls in 2018, Sir Paul McCartney remembered another gig, 58 years before, in Alloa Town Hall. Then known as The Silver Beetles, the band played there on May 20, 1960.
After his gig at the Hydro in Glasgow, Macca told The Sunday Post how the group split their £60 fee with then-bass guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe and drummer Tommy Moore as they took on the job of backing band for Liverpool heartthrob singer, Johnny Gentle.
Macca said: “We’d never really travelled anywhere. We’d pretty much always been in Liverpool, maybe only ever taking a little trip to Southport, half an hour away.
“So coming up to Scotland was like travelling to a foreign country.
“It was very primitive. But it was OK because we were primitive – we didn’t have any equipment apart from guitars and a couple of amps.
“The audiences didn’t know who we were, nobody did. We were just Johnny Gentle’s backing band. They didn’t even know who he was.
“But it was good fun, and as we’d never done it before, we were thrilled that anyone wanted to treat us like we were stars.”
For the seven-date tour – which included gigs in Inverness, Fraserburgh and Nairn – two of the band even changed their names to make them sound more glamorous.
George was known as Carl Harrison, as a tribute to his hero, US rocker Carl Perkins, while Paul adopted a more exotic alter ego.
“I remember some Scottish girl saying: ‘What’s your name?’ And I said Paul…Paul Ramon,” he recalled. “She replied: ‘Ooh, that sounds very good’. It was exciting to change your name and it made us look like London showbiz guys.”
But The Silver Beetles nearly came a cropper when their van was involved in a collision near Banff.
Even so, the tour proved pivotal in the development of the group soon to be The Fab Four, when Ringo Starr joined two years later.
Lennon once said: “That tour was the first time we had actually seen what it was like to be on the road.
“Scotland gave us a taste for whatever it was we were looking for. It was a turning point.”