SCOTS PERCUSSIONIST PAID FIVER FOR PLAYING DRUMS ON BEATLES' DEBUT SINGLE LOVE ME DO

Andrew "Andy" White

IN his career spanning 60-years, drummer Andy White has contributed to songs by Lulu and Tom Jones, as well as playing live for Rod Stewart.

TO generations of music lovers, it’s two minutes and 22 seconds of perfect pop music that changed the course of rock ’n’ roll history.

For Scots drummer Andy White, The Beatles’ debut single Love Me Do was just another three hours of session work that earned him £5.

The Glasgow-born percussionist was brought in to play drums on the song by a producer who wanted the experienced skins man to cover for Ringo Starr, who had joined the band weeks earlier.

So while Ringo is famed for his work with the Scouse legends, it’s actually Andy’s work you hear on Love Me Do, as well as B-side PS I Love You.

Andy, now 82, had hardly heard of the band before he turned up for work at the EMI studios in London.

Within minutes of meeting John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he knew they were doing something special.

In a 60-year career, Andy contributed to seminal hits, such as Lulu’s Shout and It’s Not Unusual by Tom Jones, as well as playing live with Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Marlene Dietrich and Rod Stewart.

But as fans celebrate the 50th anniversary of the legendary Beatles hit this month, Andy said there are few projects he is as proud to have been associated with – even if all he saw from the global success was his £5 session fee.

“I was working in London and doing a lot of TV. One Friday I got a call asking if I could do a three-hour job at EMI on the Monday,” he said.

“That’s all I knew about it. I had heard of The Beatles by then because my first wife Lynne was from Liverpool and had mentioned the name, but I didn’t know much about them.

“But those guys were great, and I worked closely with John and Paul while we tried to get the routines all worked out. They hadn’t written anything down as music, so we just worked through it together.

“They were great. Ringo and I didn’t have much between us, all my time was taken up learning the routines and he was playing the tambourines so he was only there for the take. I mostly spoke to John and Paul because they were the writers.

“It was a really enjoyable experience, and what impressed me was they were doing some really good stuff, but it was all their own stuff and was really new.

“Everything else at the time was a copy of music from the States, which was very successful, but they were doing something new and you could tell it was something different and very special. But I didn’t know just how special it would become.”

By September 1962, Andy had become one of the most dependable go-to performers in London. He started off drumming as a 12-year-old in a Boy Scouts pipe band near his home near Shawfield in Glasgow, and after four years making coal mining equipment, he decided drumming was more fun.

Andy toured the world for many years during his successful career

 

His first gig was with the Andy Cowie Band at holiday camps, but he graduated to London gig work after getting to know bands who played Glasgow.

When he was 21, he joined the jazz outfit The Vic Lewis Band and toured the US in the late 1950s.

He said: “We toured the US, and I was on rock ’n’ roll shows with people like Bill Haley and the Comets, with Chuck Berry. Can you imagine that?”

Andy took up work with acts like Bob Miller and the Millermen, as well as working on some of the burgeoning rock ’n’ roll TV shows, cashing in on the music craze of the day.

One of the TV producers, Ron Richards, was the man who brought Andy into The Beatles gig. The band had replaced original drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr, and Andy thinks he was brought in by Ron because he knew his work from other gigs.

Andy said: “The Beatles were under recording contracts, I was just paid as a session man on that day, which is what happened – unless you had your own contract, you wouldn’t get residuals. The royalties on that one would have been very nice though.”

After Love Me Do, he kept time on It’s Not Unusual by Tom Jones and Shout by Lulu. Andy said: “She was great, she was just starting, and I did a recording of Shout, and we used to have a great laugh with our Glesga accents. I don’t know if anyone else understood us.

“I did Tom Jones’ It’s Not Unusual – he was very good. A great professional, a real Welshman and what a voice.

“I then went on to tour with Marlene Dietrich and Burt Bacharach for 11 years. Marlene was wonderful, and Burt was her conductor before he hit it big with songwriting. They were all great to work with.”

The jet-set lifestyle slowed down somewhat in 1975 when the German singer broke her leg on tour in Australia, and never performed again.

Andy ended up back in Glasgow, spending four years with the BBC Scottish Radio Orchestra.

He divorced, then married Thea, from Caldwell, New Jersey. The town is best known as the setting for TV smash The Sopranos and he settled there in the mid-1980s.

He worked as a teacher for the many local Scottish and Irish pipe bands in the area before enjoying another golden era with Rod Stewart.

Andy recalled: “Working with Rod Stewart was fun, he’s very proud of his Scottishness and he always had a pipe band playing when he toured.

“So when he came round this way, he would get us in for half an hour before the show, and then at the intermission as well.”

Now 82 and enjoying semi- retirement, the sometime Beatle is loving the quiet life. When he gets the chance to dust off his sticks he is more than happy to take to the stage and his illustrious career is not lost on some of his New Jersey neighbours.

He was called in by David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, to help teach an actor to play drums. Andy worked with former Sopranos actor (and E Street Band guitarist) Steven van Zandt, who paid his own tribute to the unsung hero of the rock n’ roll world, saying: “He is just a miracle worker.”