Ken Brown’s chances of fame and fortune with the Beatles ended on a windy night in October 1959. He was playing with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison in a group called the Quarrymen and they were booked to perform at the Casbah Coffee Club in Liverpool as part of a weekly residence that Brown had arranged. When Brown turned up with an injured leg, it was agreed that he was not fit to play, and so the three future Beatles went on to perform in the club’s cellar bar, while Brown rested his leg upstairs.
At the end of the evening the coffee bar’s owner, Mona Best, divided the group’s £3 fee equally between the four Quarrymen, handing Brown his 15 shillings and arguing that as he had turned up he deserved to be paid. McCartney objected and Lennon and Harrison supported him, saying that Brown’s fee should be split between the three musicians who had actually performed.
Best refused and the row that ensued resulted in the end of Brown’s tenure in the group and the cancellation of the Quarrymen’s residency at the Casbah. A week later Lennon, McCartney and Harrison appeared without Brown as Johnny and the Moondogs at the Liverpool Empire in an audition for the show TV Star Search. Less than a year later they had changed the group’s name again — to the Beatles.
Ken Brown was born in Enfield, Middlesex, in 1940, and moved with his family to Liverpool a year later. He took piano lessons from the age of 10 but when the skiffle boom erupted in the mid-1950s he took up the guitar.
Playing in skiffle bands he regularly met Lennon, McCartney and Harrison performing as the Quarrymen at gigs. By August 1959 the Quarrymen were inactive, and Harrison had joined Brown in the Les Stewart Quartet. Brown persuaded Mona Best to give the group a regular gig at the Casbah, which she opened in August 29, 1959. Before rehearsals that afternoon a row broke out and Stewart walked out. Harrison suggested Lennon and McCartney as replacements.
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The four played that night as the Quarrymen, appearing with one microphone, Brown’s ten-watt amplifier, an all-guitar line-up and no drummer. They played songs such as Three Cool Cats and Long Tall Sally, the gig was deemed a success, and Brown and the Quarrymen played every Saturday at the Casbah for the next seven weeks, with 300 and more teenagers packed into the club’s tiny basement. Then came Brown’s fateful injury on October 10, which resulted in him missing the gig and his ejection from the group.
Brown described what happened to a newspaper interviewer at the height of Beatlemania in 1965: “Just as everyone was going home I was in the club when Paul came back down the steps. ‘Hey, Ken, what’s all this?’ he said. ‘What?’ I asked him. ‘Mrs Best says she’s paying you, even though you didn’t play with us tonight.’ ‘That’s up to her,’ I replied, as Paul bounded back up the stairs, still arguing with Mrs Best. They all came downstairs to me. ‘We think your fifteen bob should be divided between us, as you didn’t play tonight,’ said Paul. So of course I didn’t agree. ‘All right, that’s it then!’ shouted McCartney, and they stormed off down the drive towards West Derby village, shouting that they would never play the Casbah again.”
With the club left without a band, Brown formed the Blackjacks with Chris Newby and Mona Best’s son, Pete, on drums. The group continued to play regularly at the Casbah until Pete Best was asked to join the Beatles immediately before their first Hamburg trip in 1960.
The Blackjacks broke up and Brown moved to London, although he claimed that when the Beatles returned from Hamburg without their bass guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe at the end of 1960, Best suggested that he should be asked to rejoin. According to Brown, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison had not forgotten the row over payment at the Casbah and vetoed the suggestion. His fellow Blackjack, Newby, played several gigs with the group instead.
Brown never made it as a professional musician, but later wrote an autobiography, Some Other Guy, in which he detailed his role in the early Beatles story. He sold his tiny amp that the Quarrymen had used at the Casbah at Sotheby’s and in recent years recorded some songs, which he made available via his website.
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Brown was reunited with Best and Newby to play at the Casbah in 1999 to celebrate the club’s 40th anniversary. The club has been designated a Grade II listed building by English Heritage.
Ken Brown, musician, was born in 1940. He was found dead at home on June 15, 2010, aged 70