Louise Harrison, mum to Beatles legend George, said Beatlemania left her feeling ‘ashamed to be female’, a newly unearthed letter has revealed.
The late Mrs Harrison, who died in 1970 aged 59, penned several letters to fans of The Beatles in the 1960s and many of them are now up for sale.
Many of them were written during the height of Beatlemania, a phenomenon that swept the globe during the early years of The Beatles’ success.
Starting in 1963 in the UK, it quickly spread to the United States where the band broke TV viewership records and played sold-out concerts.
At the height of that fame, Louise responded to a letter sent by a teenage fan named Janet, bemoaning the ‘hysteria’ directed at her son’s band.
‘Last Wednesday I went to Manchester. I was really disgusted at the way the so-called fans just screamed right through the whole of the Beatles act,’ she wrote.
Mrs Harrison continued: ‘Nobody with any sense would pay and queue for a ticket just to stand on a seat and scream and not hear one sound from the stage.’
At the end of the note, Harrison’s mum devastatingly wrote that she was ‘ashamed to be female’, reflecting the social attitudes among adults of the era.
One of The Beatles’ most famous performances, on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, is notable for the deafening sound of screaming fans.
In other letters, Mrs Harrison also gave Janet life advice and asked her to reconnect with her own mother, and let her know Harrison hadn’t been hurt in a car crash.
‘Janet, this will have to be short. George was home for two days, or rather nights – out all day rehearsing at Blackpool. George was not hurt, thank god, in a crash.’
After the crash, many fans of The Beatles went to the scene and took pieces of glass from the shattered windshield of Harrison’s car as treasured souvenirs.
The letters are being sold at the annual Liverpool Beatles Auction, which has been running for over 30 years on Mathew Street in the Merseyside city.
Fans of the band won’t have long to wait to hear what is likely to be the last ever ‘new’ Beatles song, with Paul promising that AI will be used to clean up an old demo, written by John Lennon before his death in 1980.
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