One of their first breaks came in 1960 - not for the opportunity that it was, but for the effect it was to have in honing their craft. The Beatles were offered a gig Germany, to play in a seedy bar in Hamburg where the manager was looking for an English group. For this they needed a permanent drummer, and as John tells it, “We knew of a guy and he had a drum kit, so we just grabbed him, auditioned him, and he could keep one beat going for long enough, so we took him.” His name was Pete Best (replaced later by Ringo). Conditions in Germany were terrible. They all slept in one room, atop a cinema, where a public toilet was their only bathroom. They played for hours on end, playing all night, night after night. This resulted in continuous practice in front of a very rowdy audience, and the need to learn many songs. To fill their repertoire, they started playing and developing many of the songs they had written earlier as teenagers. As John tells it “It was Hamburg that did it. That’s where we really developed. To get the Germans going and to keep it up for twelve hours at a time we really had to hammer. We would never had developed as much if we’d stayed at home. We had to try anything that came to our heads in Hamburg. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best and the Germans liked it as long as it was loud.”

It was a wild time in Hamburg, and when the Beatles returned to Liverpool, they continued with a rowdy style that set them apart from the local groups. Their popularity grew, and they realized that they had something - they realized that crowds were coming in to see THEM, rather than just to dance. It was a fun and exciting time for the budding group, and gigs were getting easier to get. By April of ‘61 they were summoned once again to continue their apprenticeship in the “anything goes” atmosphere of Hamburgs night clubs, now playing at a better club, and with greater confidence. It was then that they adopted their Beatle hair cuts, dispensing with the vaseline “Elvis” hairstyle of the time in favor of the “mop-top” hairdo that was to become a trademark of the mid ‘60’s, where every self-respecting teenage boy in America grew his crewcut out, ever longer, to the eventual hippy look that typified the crowd at Woodstock in 1969.