The fifth Beatle

I didn't mean to hurt you

I'm sorry that I made you cry

Oh, no, I didn't want to hurt you

I'm just a jealous guy

(John Lennon)

    Everybody knows the Beatles, but not as many know their early member Stuart Sutcliffe. In a BBC documentation, that was first broadcasted on the 19^th of august 2008, Prof. D. Kuspit (Art critic and historian) called him an „almost […] exemplary tragic, romantic artist.“ Who was Stuart Sutcliffe, who died on the tenth of april 1962 from an aneurysm in his brain's right hemisphere at the age of twenty-one in Hamburg? And have you ever noticed a sense of somebody missing in Lennons lyrics? „I hope someday you'll join us / And the world will be as one“. Did Lennon miss his „best friend“ (BBC) from his early days when he wrote this song?

     During the time with the Beatles in Hamburg from august 1960 till 1962 Sutcliffe fell in love with the photographer Astrid Kirchherr, left the band and decided to become a professional painter. His sister Pauline Sutcliffe said „It has overshadowed Stuart […] being a Beatle.“ (BBC) and that he is not enough recognized as an artist. He was very ambitious: The mother of Astrid found him sometimes in the morning „asleep on a stool“ (BBC), because he had worked all night in his studio. Stuart did not want to be a Rock 'n Roll-Star on the Reeperbahn. He did not even like the city - „Hamburg has little quality. […] It's nothing, but a vast immoral jungle.“ (BBC).

     But he stayed after the band had left and studied in the class of future pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi at the Hamburg College of Art. Maybe because he had got a scholarship, which was very rare for a foreigner at the time (BBC) or because he loved Astrid more than his friends. Was he the artistically most talented of the beatles? What might have become of the young man, who worked as „a late abstract expressionist“ (Prof. D. Kuspit)? Nobody will ever know. When hearing of Stuarts early death, John Lennon, who envied Sutcliffs talent (BBC) and officially called him his alter ego „just freaked out. He freaked out as far as laughing until tears came.“ (Astrid Kirchherr).