The moment The Beatles had a fight live on stage
Back in their Hamburg days, when their lineup looked a little different, The Beatles once erupted into a fist fight live on stage in front of their audience.
(Credits: Bent Rej)
Music » From The Vault
Mon 3 February 2025 18:00, UK
The Beatles were fighting. When hearing that statement, their later period probably comes to mind. Captured in the footage of the Get Back sessions, the band in the late 1960s and early 1970s was in a seemingly permanent state of tension that could burst from passive aggression into a brawl at any moment. But while they got nasty at the end, at the start, it was all just good fun, as the Liverpool lads were fine with some harmless play fighting.
Also, when hearing the statement that the Beatles were fighting, four men come to mind. Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison. That’s the lineup the world remembers and reveres, but it wasn’t the only lineup they ever had. When the band first began, it looked a little different. First, there was no Ringo Starr as Pete Best was behind the kit. But for a while, there was even a fifth member.
The term the ‘fifth Beatle’ has been attached to several people in the band’s history. Their producer, George Martin, gets it a lot, or regular collaborators like Billy Preston. Paul McCartney once said, “If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian,” talking about their manager, Brian Epstein. But for the first year of the band’s existence, there literally was a fifth, and official, Beatle – Stuart Sutcliffe.
Playing bass for the band, Sutcliffe was there in the earliest days, during the group’s Hamburg years. He’s also the man credited with giving the band their name as they spent time performing under different ones until Sutcliffe suggested the one that stuck. But there was always a sense that he was the odd one out, or a fifth, unnecessary wheel. Paul McCartney was more than capable of playing bass, so Sutcliffe was kind of pointless in the lineup, and McCartney often made that known. One night, it erupted into a fight live on stage.
“Stuart and I once actually had a fight on stage. I thought I’d beat him hands down because he was littler than me. But he was strong, and we got locked in a sort of death grip on stage during the set,” he recalled as audiences got a bit more than the rock and roll they were expected. “It was terrible,” McCartney said years on, still somewhat embarrassed of the public outburst.
But what else would be expected of a gaggle of young lads? Barely adults and let loose into the music world, enjoying those early years of nice treatment backstage and admiration from the audiences, there was a whole gaggle of hormones and egos at play. That one night, it simply boiled over. “We must have called each other something one too many times: ‘Oh, you…’ – ‘You calling me that?’ Then we were locked and neither of us wanted to go any further and all the others were shouting, ‘Stop it, you two!’ – ‘I’ll stop it if he will’”, McCartney remembered.
According to Lennon, it was all over Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer they’d met in Hamburg. She and Sutcliffe had fallen in love and would later get engaged before his tragically young death in 1962. “Paul was saying something about Stu’s girl – he was jealous because she was a great girl, and Stu hit him on stage,” Lennon recalled, claiming their original bassist was merely defending her honour.
Either way, the bust-up helped the band take the shape the world knows them as. Sutcliffe decided to leave the group and stay in Germany with Kirchherr to study art instead, while the remaining four, eventually with Starr in two, went on to world domination.
Related Topics
Paul McCartneyStuart SutcliffeThe Beatles