Pete Best

He met Kathy, who was a staff at a Woolworth's store, at a Beatles party in the Cavern in 1962. He had watched her dancing and fell in love with her. The duo married in 1963 and has two daughters.

The city of Liverpool has named two new streets ‘Pete Best Drive’ and ‘Casbah Close’ in his honor.

Randolph Peter Best was born in Chennai (then Madras) to Donald Peter Scanland, a marine engineer and Alice Mona Shaw, a doctor training to serve with the Red Cross. He has two siblings, Rory and Vincent Roag.

In 1945, the Best family set sail to Liverpool on the last troop ship to leave India. On arrival, Mona started the ‘Casbah Coffee Club’ in the basement of their family house where the Beatles used to play before their heydays.

Pete Best was the drummer for the ‘Black Jacks’. His skill at playing all four beats in the bar and the huge female fan following convinced McCartney to recruit him for ‘The Beatles’ for the 1960 season of bookings in Hamburg.

In 1961, this drummer worked with the Beatles when they were recruited as a backing band for Tony Sheridan, who was signed under Polydor Records. He released the single, ‘My Bonnie’, which appeared in the German charts under the name ‘Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers’.

In the summer of 1962, when the Beatles signed their first record deal with EMI—‘Love Me Do’, and their first single, was to be made in a month—Epstein, the manager, was asked to fire Best from their group.

After he was ousted, he formed ‘The Pete Best Band’, with Wayne Bickerton and Tony Waddlington, and regularly toured the United States with them. He did not enjoy commercial or critical success with the quintet then released: ‘Best of the Beatles’, which to the disappointment of listeners was not a compilation of songs by ‘The Beatles’.

In 1968, he decided to quit showbiz and he finally landed a job filling a bread factory van with sliced bread.

‘Anthology 1’, which released in 1995, featured some of the best drum work by Pete Best. The album entered the Billboard 200, with 855,473 copies sold in its first week. It was also certified 8x Platinum.

‘Haymans Green’, released in 2008, in which he plays drums and co-wrote all of tracks, is perhaps this artist’s most important solo work. Although the album did not do well commercially, it enjoys a cult following among rock fans.