Recording: My Bonnie, The Saints, Why, Cry For A Shadow

This was The Beatles’ second of two consecutive days of recording with singer Tony Sheridan at Friedrich-Ebert-Halle school in Hamburg.

The Beatles had been approached by orchestral leader and Polydor agent Bert Kaempfert, who wanted them as the backing band for Sheridan. On this day they were recorded, not at a professional studio, but at Hamburg’s Friedrich-Ebert-Halle.

The venue served as a function hall for the town of Harburg, and as an assembly hall for the local grammar and high schools. A number of musical performances took place there, including some skiffle and jazz shows, but rock ‘n’ roll was a rarity. The good acoustics, however, meant that it was often used by Polydor and Philips for recordings.

The Beatles and Sheridan recorded four songs over the two days: ‘My Bonnie’, ‘The Saints’, ‘Why’, and ‘Cry For A Shadow’. The latter was an instrumental, whereas the others all featured Sheridan on vocals.

We always used to have a little joke on the Shadows. Because in England, Cliff Richard and the Shadows were the biggest thing, they were like the English version of the Ventures. And it was a time when – we were lucky because we didn’t get into it – everybody had matching ties and handkerchiefs and suits, and all the lead guitar players had glasses so they looked like Buddy Holly, and they all did these funny walks while they were playing.

Well, we went to Hamburg and got straight into the leather gear. And we were doing all the Chuck Berry and Little Richard and that kind of stuff – and just foaming at the mouth because they used to feed us these uppers to keep us going, because they made us work eight or ten hours a night. So we used to always joke about the Shadows, and actually in Hamburg we had to play so long, we actually used to play Apache or whatever was their hit. But John and I were just bullshitting one day, and he had this new little Rickenbacker with a funny kind of wobble bar on it. And he started that off, and I just came in, and we made it up, right on the spot. Then we started playing it a couple of nights, and it got on a record somehow. But it was really a joke, so we called it ‘Cry For A Shadow’.

The musicians were John Lennon on rhythm guitar, George Harrison on lead guitar, Paul McCartney on bass and Pete Best on drums. The musicians’ instruments and amplifiers were set up on the stage, and engineer Karl Hinze operated the twin-track stereo recording equipment.

The first song to be recorded was ‘My Bonnie’, a beat version of the old standard ‘My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean’. Harrison performed lead guitar, although Sheridan played the solo, which was later spliced in from a different take. Two edit pieces were also recorded for the introduction, in English and German – the translation was by Bernd Bertie.

It was followed by ‘The Saints’, a new arrangement of another old song, ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’. The musicians also recorded Sheridan’s self-penned ballad ‘Why’, and ‘Cry For A Shadow’, a Lennon-Harrison original which appeared on 1995’s Anthology 1.

Sheridan has also claimed that he and The Beatles recorded versions of ‘Some Other Guy’, ‘Kansas City’, and ‘Rock And Roll Music’, although these have never been found.

The Beatles were given 300 marks for the two sessions, and the ‘My Bonnie’ single – credited to Tony Sheridan and The Beat Brothers – was released in October 1961. It reached number five in the German charts.

A third day of recording took place at Studio Rahlstedt in Hamburg on 24 June 1961.