The 1961 recording session produced the single “My Bonnie.” It was released on the Polydor label in Germany only and never hit the top charts. But the tune led directly to the Beatles’ discovery back home, a contract with EMI the following year and their first hit, “Love Me Do.” The contract, valued at $150,000, will be the centerpiece of a Beatles collection spanning the band’s entire career to go on the block on Sept. 19. The collection is being sold by the estate of Uwe Blaschke, a German graphic designer and noted Beatles historian who died in 2010. “Not many people know that the Beatles started their careers in Germany,” said Beatles expert Ulf Kruger. “The Beatles had their longest stint in a club in Hamburg at the Top Ten Club. They played there three months in a row, every night. The style they invented in Liverpool, they cultivated in Hamburg.” The stints in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962 enabled the group to hone their musical skills, said Dean Harmeyer, Heritage Auctions’ consignment director for music memorabilia, who said the band was “a ramshackle, amateur band” when they first went to Germany. Their booking agent fortuitously ran into a club owner looking for rock ’n’ roll bands to perform in his Hamburg nightclub. The Beatles were not the agent’s first choice and wound up going only after other bands declined. When the Beatles — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and original drummer Pete Best — were later hired to be the backup band for British singer/guitarist Tony Sheridan at the Top Ten Club, German record producer Bert Kaempfert signed them and Sheridan to record a rock ’n’ roll version of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” “My Bonnie” netted the Beatles about $80. Other auction highlights and their pre-sale estimated values: a 1962 autographed copy of “Love Me Do” valued at $10,000; a 1960 postcard Ringo Starr sent to his grandmother from Hamburg, $4,000; a Swiss restaurant menu card signed by the Beatles while they were filming Help! in 1965, $12,000; and a set of four psychedelic posters commissioned by the German magazine Stern in 1966, $5,000.
Elton John has slammed the conservative mayor of Venice, Italy, over moves to remove from public preschools books dealing with gender issues and featuring same-sex couples. The singer, who has a home in Venice, called Mayor Luigi Brugnaro “boorishly bigoted” in an Instagram post after the removal of some books from preschools pending an evaluation of their appropriateness. Brugnaro shot back on Tuesday on Twitter, saying “The challenge is to give real resources for saving #Venice,” adding in dialect: “Let’s get to facts, out with the cash #Elton John.” In a statement last month, the mayor voiced reservations about the books Little Egg, whose protagonist meets nontraditional families, and Jean Has Two Mothers. He said it would be decided over the school break who would make the selections “to avoid further diatribes.”