![]() The peaks of Beatlemania were fuelled by uppers, and their mood-changing properties did much to establish the exuberance that seduced and delighted so many fans around the world. ![]() Pep pills kept them going through the long days of touring, recording, public appearances and interviews. The Beatles continued taking stimulants well beyond their Hamburg days. Paul McCartney Many Years From Now, Barry Miles Something to do with my Liverpool upbringing made me exercise caution. So I suppose I was a little bit more sensible than some of the other guys in rock ‘n’ roll at that time. I’d wake up at night and reach for a glass of water and knock it over. I tried all of that but I didn’t like sleeping tablets, it was too heavy a sleep. ![]() This was good because it meant I didn’t have to get into sleeping tablets. So you’d find me up just as late as all of them, but without the aid of the prellies. I always felt I could have one and get as wired as they got just on the conversation. Or I’d maybe have one pill, while the guys, John particularly, would have four or five during the course of an evening and get totally wired. They’d be on the prellies and I would have decided I didn’t really need one, I was so wired anyway. I went along with it the first couple of times, but eventually we’d be sitting there rapping and rapping, drinking and drinking, and going faster and faster, and I remember John turning round to me and saying, ‘What are you on, man? What are you on?’ I said, ‘Nothin’! ‘S great, though, isn’t it!’ Because I’d just get buoyed up by their conversation. I sensed that you could get a little too wired on stuff like that. So we’d let it be a joke, and we’d drink the schnapps and they’d occasionally send up pills, prellies, Preludin, and say, ‘Take one of these.’ It appealed directly to the German sense of humour, that did. ‘Oh, zee Peedles! Ha ha ha!’ They loved that. They made fun of us because our name, the Beatles, sounded very like the German ‘Peedles’ which means ‘little willies’. There were gas guns and murderers amongst us, so you weren’t messing around here. They made a bit of fun of us but we played along and let them because we weren’t great heroes, we needed their protection and this was life or death country. So you’d do that, because these were the owners. Looking back, they were probably thirty years old but they seemed fifty… They would send a little tray of schnapps up to the band and say, ‘You must do this: Bang bang, ya! Proost!’ Down in one go. The speed thing first came from the gangsters. ![]()
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