Frieda Kelly: My life with the Beatles

They didn’t have a set list, Kelly says. People would shout out the songs they wanted to hear and The Beatles would play them.
“They used to just look at each other and decide right there. It was so relaxed. It wasn’t like a concert, and that’s why I loved the Cavern. It wasn’t packed either so you had room to appreciate them.”

She’d have a cheese buttie or just soup in a cup for a shilling, and she’d stand and watch The Beatles. It’s the kind of experience that fans would kill for, and she enjoyed it all for a shilling.

“They’d play ‘Three Cool Cats’ and I used to love when John sang ‘Anna,’ which is on the first LP. I knew they were special but not like they went on to be. Nobody did.

“All the girls, we always had a gut feeling they would make it, but our version of making it was Cliff Richard level. I thought they could be as big as that. I never dreamed of what actually did happen.”

The band’s legendary manager Epstein hired Kelly in 1962 when he started representing the band. “There were three of us -- Epstein (who she still calls “Eppy”) another secretary and me.”

Kelly became his most trusted assistant. “At the time he was the manager of a record shop in Liverpool called NEMS (North End Music Store, the biggest record store in the north of England). So I got to know him to say hello to and he offered me the job as his secretary,” Kelly recalls.

But Kelly’s old school Irish father wasn’t impressed with the longhaired rockers, and he disapproved of her career choice.

“My father hit the bloody roof. I was his only child and he was very protective. Everyone in his family was a civil servant,” says Kelly.

“He’d seen the lads and he didn’t like them at all. Unbeknownst to me he went down to see Brian and he came back and told me not to take it. There was no future in it, he said. But I told him I’d give it a year, then I’d knuckle under and work for the civil service.”

But instead of a thankless desk job, she took a trip with the biggest and most transformative band in the history of rock music, at the right hand of the band’s manager. She had just turned 18.

“We didn’t have Beatlemania in England in the beginning, and when it hit we were amazed. I remember we were all on edge in the office, we didn’t know how America was going to take them, we didn’t have mobile phones then and we were waiting on the call.
“Then Eppy rang the office and just said, ‘They’ve gone mad over here, they love them.’”

The whole world had gone crazy for The Beatles, but Kelly was not going to lose the run of herself.

“There were people in the inner circle they knew they could trust who didn’t worship them. We were there in the beginning,” Kelly said.

​
Nster.com