#bug fights

“At the start of the year the Beatles didn’t have one bass player and now they had two, and comments were surely passed. Although Cyn would write of how Stu “restrained himself” when Paul was niggling him, there was one occasion when he didn’t, when the Top Ten witnessed an explosion, and yet another fight: Beatle on Beatle this time, Stu on Paul.

The fight’s origin is vague or varies in the telling, but everyone agrees that a tease or derogatory mention of Astrid set it off. Klaus says Stuart owed Paul some money, and Paul, nagging to get it back, made a flippant remark about Astrid being able to afford it. As Paul would remember, “I’d always wondered, if he and I ever had a fight, who would win? He was probably wondering too. I assumed I’d win because he wasn’t that big, but the strength of love or something entered into him because he was no easy match at all.”

Everyone was amazed by the manner in which Stu, so manifestly puny, could summon up such power, as if his every muted response to eighteen months of snipes and gibes accumulated in one eruption. As George put it, “Stuart suddenly got this amazing strength that Paul hadn’t bargained for.” Klaus says Stu “picked Paul up and put him on the piano.” Pete says Stu “landed Paul such a wallop that it knocked him off his stool. [They] began struggling on the floor, rolling around locked in the most ferocious battle … a fury of flailing fists.” Paul always speaks of it being “a silly fight—you just stay locked for about an hour, with nobody doing anything. All the old German gangsters were laughing, but it was very serious for us.”

It has never been explained how the fight ended or how they were able to work together afterward, because this wasn’t a skirmish that cleared the air and left the protagonists friends again. The situation remained awkward, and it was just as well Stu’s remaining days in the Beatles numbered in single figures. He, not Paul, was now the spare part on stage, and it was Paul, not Stu, who played bass when the Beatles went off to make a record.”