Hell-raising guitarist was an early influence on Beatles
Recorded a version of My Bonnie with band in Hamburg
Tony Sheridan, who has died at age 72, was the hard-driving rock ’n’ roll guitarist and singer teamed with the Beatles on their first recording session, when they backed him on My Bonnie in 1961.
The Liverpool foursome ran into Sheridan in Germany, where they had been booked to play the Indra, a sleazy club in the red light district of Hamburg. Sheridan was the resident British attraction at the nearby Top Ten club, a larger-than-life figure who invariably turned up late, drunk, sometimes with — but often without — his guitar.
When he did get himself and his act together, he often forgot the lyrics, and was notoriously unpredictable, tumbling off the stage onto the dance floor, where he would moon at the gyrating fans and contort himself into obscene poses.
The Beatles, which then included Pete Best on drums, went to see him play every night after their show and quickly fell under his spell.
When they moved to the larger Kaiserkeller club nearby, it was Sheridan who directed them up the Reeperbahn to the store where they kitted themselves out in the sleek black leather Luftwaffe-style bomber jackets and handstitched cowboy boots that became their signature “bad boy” look until Brian Epstein became their manager and ordered them into suits.
But more significantly, Sheridan was a decisive influence on the Beatles’ early repertoire, introducing them to R&B records imported from the U.S. by such artists as Little Richard that Sheridan covered in his own set. The Beatles covered several numbers from these recordings on their own early albums.
For all his shortcomings as a polished act, Sheridan was regarded as a consummate rock musician, wielding a fatbellied Martin Dreadnought guitar with an electric pickup jammed under the strings as effortlessly if it were a knife and fork, working his sandpaper voice until “it cracked like old plaster” (as one chronicler put it) and hosting wild parties every night in his flat above the club.
When the Top Ten’s young owner offered the Beatles a residency as his house band to accompany Sheridan, they jumped at the chance — even though the contract required them to play for seven hours a night, seven nights a week. Sheridan had no problem fuelling this relentless schedule: He would dole out handfuls of amphetamines to keep himself and the Beatles awake.
Backed by the Beatles, Sheridan raised his game. His marathon sets became deafening extravaganzas of rock and roll, and could last for several hours. They attracted the attention of the bandleader and Polydor talent scout Bert Kaempfert, who offered Sheridan a recording contract to include the Beatles as his backing group. Because the German slang word “pidels” — pronounced “peedles” — meant “tiny willies,” Kaempfert changed the group’s name to the Beat Brothers.
Not wishing to alienate his somewhat staid core audience, Kaempfert insisted that the first Sheridan-Beatles recording sessions should cover mainstream standards, which is how My Bonnie came to be released on Polydor in September 1961 with Sheridan taking lead vocal. The release of My Bonnie was immortalized when Epstein invented the story — now accepted as apocryphal — that he discovered the Beatles when a customer asked for a copy at his Liverpool record shop a few weeks later.
Tony Sheridan was born Anthony Esmond Sheridan McGinnity on May 21, 1940, in Norwich. By the time he was seven, he had learned to play the violin. At Norwich School he played in the orchestra, sang in the choir and appeared in productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. In 1956, having also mastered the guitar, he formed a skiffle group and ran away to London, where he was soon playing in the Two I’s club by night, and sleeping in doorways by day.
His fortunes improved when he appeared on the BBC’s pop show Oh Boy! He was reputedly the first British musician to play the electric guitar on television (the BBC had hitherto banned the instrument), in rock classics such as Blue Suede Shoes and Mighty Mighty Man. The U.S. journalist Bob Spitz later described him as a guitarist of extraordinary flairn.
But by the time Sheridan released his solo album Just a Little Bit of Tony Sheridan in 1964, he had moved away from rock and roll to a bluesier, jazzier sound. In any case he had been dismayed by the hysteria of the Beatlemania phenomenon and felt drawn to the political and social problems of the day.
The album’s liner notes say Sheridan planned to visit the southern United States “to hear at first hand the original Negro music and experience the atmosphere that has been instrumental in creating Negro jazz and the spiritual, for which he has a great liking.”
During the Vietnam War, Sheridan performed for U.S. troops with a specially formed band, one of whose members was killed by enemy fire. Initially, the Reuters news agency reported that Sheridan himself had died, and newspapers worldwide published his obituary.
Sheridan released a new album called Vagabond in 2002, mostly of his own material, but also including a new cover version of Skinny Minnie, a rocker number he had recorded for his first album nearly 40 years earlier.
He is survived by his wife, Anna, and a son from an earlier marriage, the rockabilly musician Tony Sheridan Jr.