John Lennon left Hamburg, Germany, without the other Beatles. The government had deported George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Pete Best, and Stuart Sutcliffe remained in Germany with his girlfriend. Lennon did not enjoy his time alone in the city and liked his trip back to England even less. He shared why he felt terrified on the journey.
John Lennon made his way back from Hamburg without the other Beatles
After Harrison, McCartney, and Best left Hamburg, Lennon remained for a brief time.
“They were all deported and I was left in Hamburg, playing alone with another group of musicians,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “It was quite a shattering experience to be in a foreign country, pretty young, left there all on my own. We’d spent our money as we went along. I didn’t have any to spare and being stuck in Hamburg with no food money was no joke especially just around Christmas.”
He left not long after his bandmates did, but he wasn’t sure he would ever see them again. Lennon was afraid he would never make it back to England.
“I was feeling really sorry for myself and it was a pretty hungry business working my way back to Liverpool,” he said, adding, “I had my amp on my back, scared stiff I was going to get it pinched … I was convinced I’d never find England.”
He did not reconnect with his bandmates when he got back to England
Lennon, of course, made it back to Liverpool safely. Still, he didn’t immediately reach out to his bandmates. The experience in Hamburg had been exhausting, so they all remained apart for a time.
“After Hamburg it wasn’t too good,” McCartney said. “Everyone needed a rest. I expected everyone to be ringing me to discuss what we were doing, but it was all quiet on the Western front. None of us called each other, so I wasn’t so much dejected as puzzled, wondering whether it was going to carry on or if that was the last of it.”
It didn’t take long for Lennon to begin wanting to perform, though.
“Anyway, after a while I got to thinking that we ought to cash in on the Liverpool beat scene,” he said. “Things were really thriving and it seemed a pity to waste the experience we’d got, playing all those hours every night in Hamburg.”
John Lennon realized that Hamburg made The Beatles better musicians
Though some parts of their Hamburg experience were miserable, Lennon acknowledged that it made them better musicians. Crowds reacted to them differently upon their return.
“Suddenly we were a wow,” he said. “Mind you, 70% of the audience thought we were a German wow, but we didn’t care about that. Even in Liverpool, people didn’t know we were from Liverpool. They thought we were from Hamburg. They said, ‘Christ, they speak good English, which we did, of course, being English.”
He realized they were actually good musicians and had grown from their experience in Germany.
“It was that evening that we really came out of our shell and let go,” he said. “We stood there being cheered for the first time. This was when we began to think that we were good. Up to Hamburg we’d thought we were OK, but not good enough. It was only back in Liverpool that we realized the difference and saw what had happened to us while everyone else was playing Cliff Richards s***.
