Pete Best

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Pete Best was the drummer of the Beatles from 1960 to 1962. He was born in 1941 in Madras, in British India, and grew up in Liverpool. His mother, Mona Best, ran the Casbah Coffee Club in the basement of the family home, where the group, then still The Quarrymen, gave early performances. In August 1960, just before their first run of performances in Hamburg, the Beatles asked him to be their regular drummer.

Music and breakthrough

In Hamburg the band played in several clubs, until the members were expelled from the country at the end of November 1960. In January 1962 they auditioned for Decca but were turned down. Later that year they ended up at EMI, where the producer George Martin felt that Best's timing was not good enough for the studio and preferred to use a session drummer. In August 1962 the manager Brian Epstein dismissed him, and Ringo Starr took his place. Various stories exist about the reasons: criticism of his drumming, relations within the band, quarrels between his mother and Epstein, and his popularity with the fans.

Influence

After the Beatles, Best played in other groups without much success. He stopped playing music for about twenty years and worked as a civil servant in Liverpool. In 1988 he started the Pete Best Band. In 1995 he received a substantial sum from the sales of Anthology 1, which contains ten tracks on which he drums. John Lennon later said that the group had behaved cowardly over his dismissal. In 2025 Best stopped performing.

Listening

In School of Rock

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• Mixtape 3: The Beatles^NL Reader