How did The Beatles get their name?
Sixty years later the foundation story is still not straight
The word Beatle— and its odd spelling — is part of our mental furniture.To early interviewers it was puzzlingly quirky. Fellow rising star Dusty Springfield, cuts straight to the chase on the British TV show Ready, Steady Go, broadcast in October 1963.
Dusty Springfield: John, this is a question which you’ve probably been asked a thousand times before, but you always…, all of you give different versions, different answers, so you are going to tell me now. How did the Beatles get their name?
John Lennon: I just thought of it.
Dusty joins the studio audience in a groan of disbelief. Even Lennon himself is seems unconvinced:
DS: You just thought of it…? Another brilliant Beatle!
John: No, no, really.
At this point Dusty changes tack.
DS: Were they called anything else before?
John: Called, the uh, Quarry Men.
The ‘uh’ seems like a tell — Lennon is so used to inventing answers that he stumbles over revealing simple factual information. Even he is unsure of just how the school group he formed became one of the most widely recognised words in the English language.
The name for original group formed by John Lennon is easily explained. The Quarrymen is a play on Quarry Bank High School, the school the original members went to. That was fine until all bar one of those (very young) quarrymen dropped out out of the band.
Time for a new name? Easier said than done as many a dreary meeting has discovered. The Quarryman (Plus Two From the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys & Various Others) was not ideal for posters or persuading booking managers of church halls. Many unlikely alternatives, like Johnny and the Moondogs were road tested. None worked out.
By 1960 the name problem was becoming more pressing. According to John Lennon’s then wife, Cynthia, this lead to a drunken ‘brainstorming session’ in a Liverpoool pub. At this Stuart Sutcliffe as came up with Beetles as a jokey tribute to to Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Cynthia suggests that what John ‘thought up’ was reversing French term les beat to create a new word.
This word-play wizardary still required market testing. The Beatals, Silver Beetles, The Silver Beats and the Silver Beatles all crashed and burned. Finally, in August 1960, they settled on The Beatles. This would be the name that would appear on the contracts they signed with Brian Epstein and Parlophone, with the spelling the world would see on a billion discs.
Alternative Theory
The Beatles publicist, Derek Taylor, offers an alternative foundation story. In his memoir As Time Goes By (1973) he suggests that it was the Marlon Brando film ‘The Wild One’ (1953) that directly inspired the name.
There are interesting links. In ‘The Wild One’ there is scene in which Marlon Brando talks to his gang of ‘young beetles’ in a way that mirrors Lennon’s relationship with the other band members. And the Brando look (leather jacket, cap, scowl) is close to the image The Beatles projected before Brian Epstein dragged them to Liverpool’s finest tailor.
Derek Taylor’s self -confessed wild lifestyle may, however, have impaired his memory. The problem with The Wild One theory is that the film was banned in Britain until 1967. Lennon was certainly aware of the film but it is very unlikely that he had seen it.
Unless, of course, he travelled into the future and watched it on YouTube.
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