When the Beatles played Dundee: Gabriel Quigley on her new drama about the Fab Four in Scotland
In Perth Theatre’s rehearsal room, they have made a display of early-1960s paraphernalia. It is to get the cast in the mood for There’s A Place, a new play by Gabriel Quigley set exactly 60 years ago when The Beatles enjoyed a brief holiday on the banks of Loch Earn. In the middle of the display is a picture from the Rutherglen Reformer of a teenage Irene Brown who, with her friend Margaret McGowan, set up the Scottish Beatles fan club.
Now living in Edinburgh, Brown is one of several women Quigley has consulted to ensure the authenticity of her play. It is about a gang of Beatlemaniacs who camp out across the loch in the hope of meeting their heroes whose tour took them to Dundee’s Caird Hall on 20 October 1964. For Brown, there is nothing fanciful about Quigley’s story. Only a year earlier in June 1963, she had done pretty much the same thing.
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Hide AdAt the age of 14, she and Margaret were looking forward to seeing The Beatles at the Glasgow Odeon, but had also got wind that the band was recording a session at the old STV studios in Hope Street earlier in the day. Playing truant and still in their school blazers, they went in search of the stage door.
“There was not a soul in the street,” says Brown today. “That wouldn’t have happened any time after that – Beatlemania hadn’t quite taken off.”
They spotted presenter Paul Young who offered to get the band’s autographs. With the confidence of youth, they said they would rather meet them. Young admitted they were at the front entrance. “It was like one of these slow-motion films,” laughs Brown remembering them racing around the building. “We were 14 and looked about 12 and were completely awestruck. And there they were in their Crombie coats.”
Gerry Marsden of Gerry And The Pacemakers was also there and signed their autograph books, as did George, Paul and Ringo. “But the main event was John,” says Brown. “He could have walked away and gone, ‘Two wee lasses in their school blazers.’ But he didn’t. He hung about because he had the fan mentality. He remembered what it was like to be a fan and go, ‘It’s Chuck Berry!’ He walked with us on either side of him and chatted to us. We walked down the Cowcaddens and we asked him how to start the fan club and he told us who to get in touch with. On top of that, he sang A Wee Deoch An’ Doris to us.”
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Hide AdThey got in touch with Frida Kelly, president of the official Beatles fan club, who allowed them to set up their own branch. “In my bedroom, writing hand-written letters,” she says. “It was a joke! Why they allowed us – they didn’t even say, ‘Do you have a typewriter?’ I think they were just glad someone would do it. The fans would write in and send postal orders and we would buy their tickets to the concerts. Some people treated us like pen pals.”
“The pen-pal aspect is a big theme in the play,” says Quigley. “Young women – and some young men – talking to each other. In the letters page of Beatles Monthly you can see them starting to communicate with each other, then as The Beatles get bigger the letters start to expand globally. The girls in my play go, ‘Iceland this week!’ It was a precursor to the internet.”
Listening to Brown’s story, Quigley is fascinated by what it says not only about The Beatles (she is a massive fan), but also about a generation of female fans. The fictional girls in her play are not quite as ahead of the curve as Brown was, but they have watched the STV broadcast and bought Love Me Do and see The Beatles as their own.
“The Beatles are a package,” says Quigley. “It’s not just the phenomenal level of the music, it’s also the working-class triumph of it. They were breaking down the door of the class system. They spoke in their own accents, didn’t kowtow to anyone and were really confident.”
“You just loved them,” says Brown.
“They mean freedom,” says Quigley.
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Hide AdAs the austere 1950s blossomed into the optimistic 1960s, There’s A Place looks back at the impact social changes had on young people. It is also about fandom and friendship.
“It’s about being a fan and the support that gives you,” says Quigley, who adapted Muriel Spark’s The Girls Of Slender Means at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum earlier this year. “It looks at what it was like for girls in 1964 and at women’s rights. It’s a coming-of-age play. The proximity of The Beatles makes them go, ‘What am I going to do?’ This future is there and they feel they are on a precipice.”
In the all-female play, directed by Sally Reid, Quigley has modelled each character on a member of the band. She never reveals their real names, referring to them only by the name of their favourite Beatle. “What if The Beatles had been girls?” she says. “What would have been a female John or a female Paul if they were that funny and that talented?”
There’s A Place acknowledges that poverty, pregnancy and poor education would hold some young women back, but it also celebrates this early manifestation of girl power. “That was a golden period,” says Brown, who kept the Scottish fan club going until she was 17. “Even living through it, I remember thinking, ‘This is a good time,’ knowing you had decent housing, there was employment and there was hope.”
There’s a Place, Perth Theatre, 17 October until 2 November
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