Rock
The Beatles
The Beatles were seemingly not welcome into one particular London club.
The Beatles were welcomed with open arms in any club in the world in the '60s - except one, it seems.
That was the Soho club The Two Decks, which was owned by Alfie Teale, a former associate of notorious East London gangsters The Kray Twins, Ronnie and Reggie.
Teale remembered his encounter with the band - made up of Sir Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Sir Ringo Starr and John Lennon - in the early '60s, as quoted in The Times obituary: "I turned away these four long-haired youths with Liverpudlian accents because they were too scruffy."
The Beatles in 1967 - (L to R) Sir Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Sir Ringo Starr and John Lennon
Teale - who began his association with the Krays in 1959 by running “errands” for the twins - has just died of a short illness, aged 86.
With Teale seemingly not keen on allowing John, Paul, George and Ringo into The Two Decks, the Krays, however, sought a bid to replace Brian Epstein as manager of the quartet.
The late gangsters were allegedly angered that their plot failed, and it has been claimed that they blackmailed Epstein after the twins got their hands on “compromising photos” of him with other men, provided by his former lover, Diz Gillespie.
The Kray Twins - (L to R) Reggie and Ronnie
Epstein being homosexual was an open secret amongst his closest circle, however, it was not publicly known until after his death from an accidental combined alcohol and barbiturate overdose at the age of 32 in August 1967.
The claim was made by the manager's other flame, the late Larry Stanton, in his 2020 book, Hide Your Love Away: An Intimate Story of Brian Epstein.
It read: "Reggie approached him at a club and told him he knew all about his little escapades with his ‘boy-toy Diz’. Reggie also mentioned that he had compromising photos of Brian that he received from Diz.
The Beatles manager Brian Epstein
"A shockwave went through Brian’s body! Sex photos in the hands of the Kray twins made his heart stop beating. He could only assume the worst-case scenario.”
Ronnie was himself homosexual - which was illegal for most of the 1960s in the UK until the Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalised private, consensual acts between men over 21 in England and Wales - and made a point of flaunting his relationships with men, which was highly unusual in the East End criminal underworld.
Lennon had always denied that he and Epstein hooked up during a 1963 trip to Barcelona, but in 1980, Lennon told Playboy magazine that it was "almost a love affair, but not quite".
And in March 2026, McCartney claimed that Lennon's wife of 11 years, visual artist-and-musician Yoko Ono, told him she thought Lennon "might have been gay" in a phone call after John's assassination in December 1980.
However, McCartney, 83, rejected 93-year-old Ono's suspicions because he had seen that John had "a lot of girl action".
John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono
In an interview conducted in 2015 for the book Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, which has now been published in full by Vanity Fair magazine, McCartney said: “I swear [Yoko] rang me shortly after John died and said, ‘You know, I think John might have been gay.’
“I went, ‘I’m not sure.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. Certainly not when I knew him’... because we’d been in the ’60s. We’d been around with loads and loads of girls. And I bumped into seeing him jacking … a lot of girl action.”
McCartney insisted he had "no reason" to believe the Imagine hitmaker had been attracted to men.
He added: "And I’d slept with John very often, but there was never anything. There was never a gesture, never an expression. It was nothing.
"So I had no reason to believe this at all."
