Mal Evans

Malcolm Frederick Evans was born in Liverpool on 27 May 1935 to Frederick and Joan Evans and grew up in Waldgrave Road, Wavertree, Liverpool, along with his three sisters, Pam, June and Barbara.

He married a Liverpool girl, Lily, in 1961 after meeting her at a funfair in New Brighton opposite Liverpool on the Wirral. Their first child, Gary, was born in the same year.

While working as a telecommunications engineer in 1962, Mal stopped off at The Cavern in Liverpool on his way back to the post office after lunch. He had never been in the Cavern before. At the age of 26, he considered himself a bit past it.

He loved the music so much that he began regularly spending his lunchtimes at the Cavern, eventually dropping in most evenings, too.

He especially liked The Beatles.

Mal left the club one night at the same time as George Harrison, and the two began talking. He invited George home to listen to some records,  and Harrison suggested that Mal get a job at the Cavern working on the door: “Then you can hear the groups play AND make some money in your free time”.

While working at the club, Mal met Brian Epstein, who – by the following year – had come to rely on Mal to fill in on the door at all the regular ballroom dates cropping up for The Beatles.

Things snowballed from there, and in mid-1963, Eppy asked Mal if he would like to be the road manager for the group.

The hours were long and odd, and Mal was frequently separated from his wife and young son. He worked a seven-day week as The Beatles got bigger and bigger and saw less and less of Liverpool.

Mal was the one who drove the group from London to Liverpool one freezing cold night in a car with a smashed windscreen without one word of complaint.

He was always ready with spare guitar strings, fuse wire, cups of tea and anything else that was needed.

He also acted as a bodyguard to Paul, John, George and Ringo, protecting them from their own fans at the height of Beatlemania.

His tough 6′ 2″ frame also came in handy when anything requiring strength cropped up – like the time when the revolving rostrum with Ringo and his drums on it broke down at a show in Washington (USA), and Mal made his first public appearance on stage pushing the rostrum round manually.

When The Beatles stopped touring, Mal continued assisting them in the studio and in their private lives. He accompanied them to India to visit the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram and travelled on holiday often with Paul McCartney or George Harrison.

When Apple was formed in 1968, he was promoted from road manager to personal assistant (although his weekly £38 salary remained the same).

When The Beatles played on the roof of Apple’s offices in Savile Row, Mal was told to delay the policemen who had arrived to stop the concert for as long as possible (which he did).

He enjoyed an executive position at Apple until 1969, when Allen Klein was hired as a manager to reorganise the company.

Klein fired Evans the following year, but he was reinstated after McCartney, Harrison, and Starr complained.

Mal separated from his wife in 1973 and moved to Los Angeles where John Lennon had moved to live with May Pang after his own separation from Yoko Ono. While there, he performed chimes, handclaps, and backing vocals on Lennon’s first post-Beatles single, Instant Karma!

By 1976, he was working on a book of memoirs called Living the Beatles’ Legend, which he was due to deliver to his publishers on 12 January. Mal was depressed about the separation from his wife (who had asked for a divorce before Christmas) even though he was then living with his new girlfriend, Fran Hughes, in a rented motel apartment at 8122 West 4th Street in Los Angeles.

On 5 January 1976 – despondent, doped-up and groggy – he picked up an air rifle at his apartment and wouldn’t put it down. Hughes phoned the police and told them that Mal was confused, had a rifle, and was on Valium.

Four police officers duly arrived. They later reported that as soon as Evans saw them, he pointed the rifle at them. The officers repeatedly told him to put down the weapon, but he refused.

The police fired six shots, four hitting Mal and killing him. He was just 40.

His biographer Kenneth Womack argued that the death was a “suicide by cop”, as Mal had written a will the night before.

Mal Evans was cremated on 7 January 1976 in Los Angeles. None of the former Beatles attended his funeral, but Harry Nilsson, George Martin, Neil Aspinall and other friends did.

George Harrison arranged for Evans’ family to receive £5,000, as Evans had not maintained his life insurance premiums and was not entitled to a pension.