The Beatles Stayed Awake Through Early Gigs by Taking Slimming Pills
When they were teenagers, The Beatles performed for hours at a time. According to John Lennon’s ex-wife, Cynthia Lennon, most band members took slimming pills to stay awake. Here’s what we learned from her 2005 memoir John.
When did the Beatles form?
Before they were even The Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison began writing and rehearsing music as the Quarrymen. At the time, Lennon was attending college, with McCartney and Harrison in high school, (and their band name a nod to Quarry Bank High School).
The Beatles played hours-long gigs in their early days
As John Lennon’s then-girlfriend, Cynthia Lennon got an inside look at life on the road for the Beatles. That includes one of their first “big breaks,” which was performing a six-week stint in another country.
In the Beatles’ early days, the band would appear at gigs in Germany that were hours long. Their performances were extended from ending at 12:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. After moving to a bigger venue, they would alternate with another band, playing for an hour at a time, for 12 hours.
“It didn’t occur to me that the boys would take drugs,” Cynthia Lennon wrote in her 2005 memoir John. “It was only after they got back that John told me they’d learned to stay awake through the night by swallowing slimming pills.”
At the time, the Beatles were still teenagers. Ringo Starr had not yet joined the band — McCartney and Lennon already began their journey as a songwriting duo, with Harrison playing the guitar.
“Pete had refused to try them, but the others thought they were great and soon graduated to stronger pills, amphetamines called Black Bombers and Purple Hearts,” she noted. “They barely slept and didn’t eat properly, but they were having the time of their lives and their contracts were extended several times.”
Is The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ about LSD?
Although some Beatles songs may reference drug use among the band, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” wasn’t inspired by a hallucinogenic. In a 1971 interview on The Dick Cavett Show, John Lennon addressed the rumors.
“My son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around and I said, ‘what is it?’ He said, ‘it’s Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ and I said, ‘that’s beautiful,’” Lennon said. “I immediately wrote a song about it.”
“The song had gone out, the whole album had been published, and somebody noticed that the letters spelled out LSD, and I had no idea about it,” he noted. “And of course after that, I was checking all the songs to see what the letters spelled out. They didn’t spell out anything. None of the others, and it wasn’t about that at all.”
