Music Appreciation

highplainsdem

(63,703 posts) Thu Jun 25, 2026, 04:49 PM 6 hrs ago

For Global Beatles Day - Klaus Voormann, the German artist & bass player (Manfred Mann) who inspired the Beatles haircut

and who hadn't ever paid any attention to rock'n'roll until the night in 1961 that he stumbled across the Beatles playing in a sleazy club in Hamburg, to which he returned night after night with friends, including the girlfriend who left him for Beatle Stu Sutcliffe, the first Beatle to copy Klaus's haircut. A club where Klaus actually subbed for Stu one night, joining the Beatles on stage when Stu wanted more time with Astrid.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Voormann

More info: https://lifeofthebeatles.blogspot.com/2009/05/beatle-people-klaus-voormann.html

Klaus, Astrid Kirchherr, and Stu (right) in very early 1962, dressed for carnival at a Hamburg art school.

Astrid talking about Klaus's haircut, starting at 5:36 in the video below:

My boyfriend Klaus had a big problem, because his ears used to stick out, but in any other way he was the most beautiful boy the world has seen. So I thought, How can you get this to go, these big sticking-out ears? And then I had the idea to just grow the hair over them. Which he did, and it looked absolutely beautiful. So when the boys saw Klaus, Stuart was the first one who said, "Oh, I would like to have that hairstyle." And because their hair was very long, I could do it in one night, which I did, and Stuart was the first one who performed on stage with the so-called Beatles or Klaus haircut.

(laughter from the interviewer, who said she'd never heard it called the Klaus haircut before, and then asked how the other Beatles switched to it)

When they finished playing in Hamburg, they went back to Liverpool and I visited Stuart there. And then George came up to me and said, "Could you please cut my hair like Stuart's?" So I did that, but the other two didn't want to know about it, John and Paul. And Pete couldn't have the hairstyle anyway because he had curly hair. But George had beautiful hair and it went absolutely great when I cut it for him, and he was so pleased.

But a little bit later John and Paul went to visit an old friend of ours, another German photographer, called Jurgen Vollmer. He used to live in Paris and was assistant to William Klein, a very famous photographer. And Paul and John visited Jurgen, and he persuaded them to have their hairstyle changed. So they came back from Paris looking like the rest of the Beatles.

Or looking like Klaus Voormann. Whose looks got a lot of attention. And not just from his former girlfriend Astrid.

I ran across this info on Voormann last night, but not because of Global Beatles Day. I'd been googling for recent news on Oasis, and one of the results that popped up was a journalist reprinting his USA Today interview done when Liam Gallagher's first solo album was released. Klaus had done some of the artwork for that album, which the journalist asked about. Liam told him he'd never met the artist, but added that Klaus "sounds like a nice man. He looked very cool in the Sixties and Seventies."

Which made me curious, so I read some articles, and looked at a lot of videos. And discovered that Carly Simon had been stunned by Klaus's looks when she met him, when he played bass on some of her records, including You're So Vain, where he'd stunned her again with the intro that got a shocked "Son of a gun!" reaction from her. What Carly said about their first meeting, reminiscing for a documentary done decades later:

Klaus came in the first day of the session and I was overwhelmed by his appearance. He was just strikingly handsome and he was very, very modest, almost retiring in his modesty.

About as far as you could get from the vain men the song was about.

I'll post that Carly Simon song and a clip from the documentary below, but first I want to post four videos of Klaus when he was appearing on German TV, playing bass with Manfred Mann and doing backup vocals and occasionally sharing lead vocals with Mike d'Abo. Klaus had bought Stu's bass guitar and taught himself to play (he'd learned to play classical guitar earlier), and although a trio he'd belonged to in the early '60s hadn't been successful, both the Moody Blues and the Hollies had tried to get him to join before he joined Manfred Mann. He also invented a new type of guitar, the vootar: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-vootar-the-strange-one-off-innovation-by-klaus-voorman/

Klaus with Manfred Mann, videos from German TV in 1966, 1968 and 1969:

You're So Vain, with that great intro and Carly's reaction:

Part of that documentary on Klaus, with Carly talking about their first meeting at 2:49: