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Billy J Kramer: ‘Do I regret turning down Yesterday? No, I wanted a rock’n’roll song’

The Scouse heartthrob worked with The Beatles, once punched John Lennon and was managed by Brian Epstein. So why isn’t he a bigger star?

It’s a humdinger of a pub quiz question. Name a living Liverpudlian “Merseybeat” musician who’s in his 80s, who cut his teeth playing clubs in Hamburg, was managed by Brian Epstein, produced by George Martin, recorded his songs at Abbey Road, and topped the singles charts in the early 1960s with records penned by John Lennon and Paul McCartney… but was never a member of The Beatles. 
Stumped? Then meet Billy J Kramer, the proto-Beatle who had a string of hits written by music’s most famous songwriting partnership just as the Fab Four’s own career was taking off.  
Kramer was, for a while, a phenomenally successful pop heart-throb at the epicentre of a white-hot scene. With number one hits, matinee idol looks, a winningly wholesome voice and songs provided by The Beatles, he seemed bound for greatness. But it wasn’t to be. The hits soon dried up as Kramer battled an indifferent public as well as his own personal problems with drink and drugs. The music kept coming, some of it fantastic. But Kramer – naturally an introvert – could never replicate his first flush of fame.  
Drama was never far from the surface. There were tensions with his backing band, The Dakotas, from the start, plus an occasionally frosty relationship with producer George Martin, who he later likened in a book to the late Duke of Edinburgh. Kramer even had a punch-up with his good friend Lennon at McCartney’s 21st birthday party. In later years, he’s faced financial struggles. People talk about the rollercoaster of fame, and rarely has it been more apt; Kramer’s is a life characterised by tremendous highs and crushing lows.  
Speaking from Chicago, where years of living have done nothing to dilute a bone-shaking Scouse drawl, Kramer, 80, is sanguine about being one of rock’s great “shoulda-been” stories. Not selling records is “disappointing” and “obviously affects you,” he says. “What am I to do? I can’t bang the public on the head and say, ‘You’ve got to buy my next record.” And despite his woes, he calls those early days “the best chapter in pop history”.
Kramer was one of the roster of artists signed to Epstein’s management company NEMS Enterprises, alongside The Beatles, Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers. With the Dakotas, he released six Lennon-McCartney songs between April 1963 and July 1964, including the chart-topping Bad To Me in the summer of 1963, a song that was knocked off number one by The Beatles’ own She Loves You. Kramer also had a hit with Burt Bacharach’s Trains and Boats and Planes, and worked with the pre-fame Bee Gees and Harry Nilsson. 
But it’s The Beatles with whom his career will forever be entwined. It was even Lennon who suggested, prior to Kramer’s first single being released, that he add the initial “J” to his stage name (he was born William Ashton). “John said, ‘It’s more rock’n’roll. It’ll be more catchy for the public.’ I said, ‘I’ll take that.’” 
Born in Bootle in 1943, Kramer bought a £3 guitar aged 10 and formed various bands. He was a teenager when he went to the Aintree Institute venue in 1962 with his band The Coasters for an audition. There, he met The Beatles (with pre-Ringo Starr drummer Pete Best). “I thought there was something special about them right from the start. They were intelligent, very quick, with a great sense of humour,” he says.
Still amateur, Kramer was weeks away from starting a job with British Railways in Crewe when he came joint second in a popularity poll in Mersey Beat magazine. Number one were The Beatles, and Kramer caught the eye of their manager Epstein. He duly signed Kramer. Epstein replaced The Coasters with Manchester group The Dakotas and dressed them in suits. 
Like The Beatles, they were sent to Hamburg to sharpen their act. Punishing hours playing dank clubs in a strange city (“like a den of iniquity”) in late 1962 was like a boot camp. “Bands that went to Hamburg came back and they were either better or they’d packed it in,” Kramer says. There was a dark side: thinking he could “party round the clock”, Kramer came back from Germany addicted to amphetamines, he admitted in his autobiography.
This came on top of a difficult relationship with The Dakotas. While Kramer was working class, they were middle class, and he has claimed that they “showed no real interest in me”. He suggested in his 2016 book that they were perhaps jealous of “all the girls going crazy” about him. But it sounds like a sad story. In Hamburg, he ate meals on his own. “I had no friends among the Dakotas,” he wrote.
Kramer’s first single was the George Martin-produced Do You Want To Know a Secret, a song that Lennon had based on the track I’m Wishing from Disney’s Snow White film. Recording at EMI’s vast Abbey Road was nerve-wracking for a shy kid from Liverpool. Even in those early days, nerves would sometimes make him drink himself to sleep the night before a session. 
It’s revered now, but Abbey Road felt vast and corporate then. And then there was Martin. “Working with George Martin was a bit like going to work with the Duke of Edinburgh. He had a remote patrician attitude,” Kramer has claimed. In a 1990 book, Martin questioned Kramer’s vocal abilities, suggesting this the occasional froideur went both ways. Still, Kramer tells me he was “shocked” when Do You Want To Know a Secret went to number two. 
When it came to the follow-up, Lennon turned up at Abbey Road with the track Bad To Me. “I never thought he’d show up because Beatlemania was on the go then,” says Kramer. “He sat at a piano and played Bad To Me. I thought it was a great song. Then he said, ‘I want to run something else by you and I want your honest opinion of it’, and he played I Want to Hold Your Hand. I said, ‘Can I have that one?’ He said, ‘No, we’re doing that ourselves.’” Even so, Bad To Me reached number one and sold over a million copies.
It may seem strange that The Beatles were giving hit songs to others while trying to have hits themselves. But Liverpool’s cultural melee provided the pair with an opportunity to refine their songwriting chops. “At the time John and Paul were very into being known as songwriters. I think that’s what they saw their future as,” says Kramer.
Epstein was “bright”, “courteous”, and “a gentleman”, Kramer says. He has no truck with the assertion in Peter Brown and Steven Gaines’ Beatles biography The Love You Make that Epstein, who was gay, had a “crush” on Kramer. “I really resent the fact that the only thing people want to talk about is the gay side,” he says. “Brian never came off like that to me. I’ll be honest with you, at the time it must have been a terrible thing to be gay” – homosexuality was illegal until 1967 – “With me, that was a side of him that he kept to himself.”
On one occasion Kramer felt Lennon’s famous temper. At McCartney’s 21st birthday party at the bass player’s aunt’s house in Huyton in June 1963, a furious Lennon emerged from the house having had a fight with DJ Bob Wooler. “John, his temper up, came out into the marquee. He headed for me and the girl I was with and tried to grab her breasts,” Kramer wrote. “I told him to get off, and he tried to punch me. He started shouting, ‘Get out of my f—–’ way, Kramer, you’re nothing and we’re the greatest!’” He bundled the refreshed Beatle into a cab. 
In 1964, after another top five hit with Lennon and McCartney’s I’ll Keep You Satisfied, Kramer was worried about being pigeon-holed. So he turned down the pair’s One And One Is Two to record Little Children by two American writers. “I thought I can’t hang on their coattails for ever,” explains Kramer. Little Children was another number one and was dislodged by The Beatles’ Can’t Buy Me Love. The following year, after yet another Lennon and McCartney hit and success with Trains and Boats and Planes, McCartney made him a tantalising offer.
“I was in Blackpool and I went to see The Beatles at the ABC Theatre. I asked Paul for a song and he played Yesterday,” says Kramer. But having just had success with Bacharach’s mid-paced song, Kramer was after an up-tempo number. So he declined. “I said, ‘I want a rock’n’roll song.’” Matt ‘Born Free’ Monroe covered it instead (“Matt Monroe and a thousand other people,” quips Kramer), while the Beatles’ own version topped the US charts. “Do I regret it? No,” he says. “I always say, you can never tell [with songs]. You give it your best shot – and it’s down to the public and the man upstairs.” 
Trains and Boats and Planes would be Kramer’s last hit. The brooding Neon City should have been one but wasn’t. In 1967 Kramer stopped recording with The Dakotas. He could only watch as The Beatles went stratospheric. The main problem was that Kramer didn’t write music. It was hard. 
“I was so lucky to be working with The Beatles and get those great songs because I didn’t have a clue about how to find material or original stuff, I didn’t write songs, The Dakotas didn’t write songs. I was in a very good place. [Then] when [The Beatles] became ultra-successful and I was thinking about going my own way, it was very difficult,” he says. A whimsical track called Town of Tuxley Toy Maker Part One, written by the young Bee Gees (“fantastic musicians”), flopped. With hits scarce, Kramer did pantomimes and became a fixture on the nightclub, ballroom, theatre and TV circuit. 
His relationship with Epstein had changed since he’d shunned The Beatles to record Little Children. The manager was also busy with his main act. Even so, when Epstein died in 1967 Kramer was left without his key ally. In the decades that followed Kramer succumbed to alcohol addiction and prescription drug abuse – “amphetamines, uppers and downers”, as he wrote. He’d sometimes drink until he blacked out, and was known to sit at a bar drinking lager glasses full of Tequila with bandmates. Kramer continued working throughout, eventually getting clean in 1986. He admits that life has sometimes been tough. “I think I made some good records in the Sixties. I think I’ve made better records since. Some of them I’m happy with, some of them I’m not and some of them I think to myself, ‘I don’t know why I bothered.’” 
In October 2021, after the death of his wife Roni, Kramer started a GoFundMe as he was in need of financial support until he could get back on the road again. He now has a new partner, Rose, and lives happily in Illinois. Kramer released his latest album – Are You With Me? – in June.  
Kramer is back in Abbey Road’s famous Studio Two on 2 August as a special guest at the studio’s Stories in Sound event, which is open to the paying public over three days. Despite his nerve-wracking early sessions there, Kramer will be answering questions. 
And what of the surviving Beatles? Is he still in touch with McCartney and Starr? Kramer saw McCartney when he performed on Long Island in 2017: “I wanted to see Paul because I hadn’t actually said to him, ‘Paul, thank you for all the help you and John gave me.’” McCartney’s reaction to the man who all-too-briefly went toe-to-toe with him was touching. “He was very warm about it. He introduced me to his wife and said, ‘This is Billy Kramer. John and I used to say ‘Billy needs a song’ and we’d sit down and write one.’ Then he started singing Do You Want to Know a Secret.”
Stories in Sound runs from August 2-4. Tickets: abbeyroad.com/stories-in-sound

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