Jim Greenhalf recalls the first night of the Beatles’ first UK package tour – at Bradford’s Gaumont Theatre

It was 50 years ago this month that the Beatles featured bottom of the bill in a touring package show at Bradford’s Gaumont Theatre – the Odeon that was.

Teenager Helen Shapiro, who had a surprise hit with Walking Back To Happiness, was top of the bill. On February 2, 1963, John, Paul, George and Ringo were just a rumour spreading out from Liverpool’s Mathew Street, location of the subterranean Cavern club.

Though they had a bit of a hit with Love Me Do, their first single on EMI’s green and white-sleeved Parlaphone label, they were nine days away from recording their first LP at Abbey Road Studios and changing the direction of popular music.

In those days, guitar-based musicians formed groups, not bands. They wore shirts and ties and usually suits. Long before the availability of technology that made supergroup arena shows possible, pop groups were bussed round the country’s cinemas and ballrooms for twice-nightly shows.

Each group had 15 to 20 minutes to do their stuff, depending where they were on the bill. There were seven acts on the bill that cold and snowbound winter’s day in Bradford in February 1963. The Beatles sang Chains, A Taste Of Honey, Keep Your Hands Off My Baby and, reportedly, Please, Please Me, which was to be the signature track of their debut LP. Only in America, where radio stations proliferated, were long players (LPs) called albums. In the winter of 1963, the BBC dominated the radio airwaves. There was no Radio 1 or 2.

If you wanted to hear what was really going on you had to tune into Radio Luxembourg or other overseas stations in Europe where American troops were based.

The Beatles developed their repertoire from American records that came in via Liverpool docks. Their stage show was honed over a year or so in the clubs along Hamburg’s Reeperbahn.

When The Beatles returned to the Gaumont 11 months later on December 21, they were on their way towards pop stardom’s stratosphere. From bottom of the bill they were previewing their own Christmas show, which was to have 17 performances at London’s Astoria cinema.

Their second album was out. With The Beatles had a distinctive Hamburg-style cover of the mop tops in black roll necks, a taste of things to come.

Their third and final concert at the Gaumont occurred on October 9, 1964, John Lennon’s 24th birthday. There is a T&A photograph of the paper’s showbiz correspondent Peter Holdsworth scratching his neck beside John Lennon, who nicked the reporter’s cap and larked about.

This time their repertoire of ten songs consisted of seven Lennon and McCartney numbers and three covers, including Paul McCartney’s rip-snorting performance of Long Tall Sally.

That was the year The Beatles conquered America, and had five of their own compostions at the top of the US chart. They were a slipstream on Bradford’s horizon.

But for the thousands of youngsters who queued round the Gaumont in the cold, some of them overnight, for a ticket to those shows, those were the days.