The following article appeared in New Musical Express on June 21, 1963, page 8
"If there's anything that you want", teased The Beatles...and nearly 5,000 screaming fans responded at New Brighton's Tower ballroom as performing Liverpoplians faced adoring Liverpudlians-writes Chris Hutchins. I travelled to Merseyside last weekend to see the first joint appearance of The Beatles and the Pacemakers in their home territory since "I Like It" and "From Me To You" crashed into and up to the top of the charts.
You could have boiled an egg in there as the temperature soared. Girls were plucked from the front row in a state of collapse and carried across the stage to a team of first-aid workers who had more on their hands than they could tackle. It was a fantastic night and one that echoed the success of these hit makers.
Later, as they sipped ice cold drinks in their dressing room, The Beatles settled down to talk about their friends, the fans. One by one they recalled incidents, like the occasion when Ringo Starr's home in the district of Dingle was surrounded by more than two hundred fans.
"I had already left for a show but my father wasn't able to convince them I wasn't there. In the end he had to take my mother out for the evening because they couldn't hear the telly for the noise outside!" Ringo recalled.
Fans who called recently at George Harrison's house were greeted at the door by the Beatle himself. But apparently unrecognised, he was merely asked if Paul McCartney lived there and was promptly left alone on the doorstep when he answered "No!"
Personal calls at their now well-known homes are becoming more frequent. Nine times out of ten the request to their parents, brothers and sisters is the same: "Is the Beatle at home?"
More often then not fans are admitted and take tea in the household like visitors to a stately home, scanning the rooms for a glimpse of something that belongs to "him"!
"But our homes have suffered a bit from souvenir hunters," John told me. "In my front garden they've stripped off much of the bark from a tree and started on the branches."
"Our car suffers, too," pointed out Paul. "It frequently loses mirrors, radio aerials, door handles, and other removable parts. Often our road manager Melvyn has to walk to a garage to get a missing part and arrives back to find something else has gone!"
"What sort of scrap book can they put those things in?" queried George.
On tour, too, the fan fever runs high in one Northern town on their recent stage tour a boy leapt on stage doing the Cavern stomp (yes, it's a new dance craze) in front of John yelling out, "The Beatles are fabulous!"
In another town two boys hid in one of their hotel rooms for seven hours just to shake The Beatles by the hand when they came back from the theatre.
It seems that not all the The Beatles fans are suvenir takers. Some are givers. The group is daily swamped with assortments of presents ranging from bugs to jelly babies to a giant teddy bear with a music box inside.
Literlly scores of presents had arrived for Paul at the McCartney home in time for his twenty-first birthday on Tuesday. Liverpool's other favourites were there to watch him start opening mounds of parcels which poured in from all parts of Britian.
"It's a wonderful life and we wouldn't be missing it for the world," John told me. "Though they seem to be with us day and night now, we love the fans and wouldn't like to think we had lost a single one of them."