Video: 'THE BEATLES IN TENERIFE MAY 1963'

(Sunday, April 28, 1963) — The Beatles set off today on their first vacations of 1963. John Lennon accompanied manager Brian Epstein to Barcelona and Torremolinos, Spain, while Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr headed for Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, in the Canary Islands off Spain’s coast, meeting up with old friends from Hamburg, Klaus Voormann and Astrid Kirchherr.

Audio: '1963 John Lennon Demo (Bad to Me)'

John recalled: “‘Bad To Me’ I wrote for Billy J. Kramer. Specifically for Billy J. Kramer. I was on holiday with Brian Epstein in Spain, where the rumours went around that he and I were having a love affair. Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.

It was my first experience with a homosexual that I was conscious was homosexual. He had admitted it to me. We had this holiday together because Cyn was pregnant [sic], and I went to Spain and there were lots of funny stories. We used to sit in a café in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I’d say, ‘Do you like that one, do you like this one?’ I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: I am experiencing this, you know. And while he was out on the tiles one night, or lying asleep with a hangover one afternoon, I remember playing him the song ‘Bad To Me.’ That was a commissioned song, done for Billy J. Kramer, who was another of Brian’s singers. From Liverpool.”

Video: 'The Hours and Times (1991)' (a fictionalized account of what may have happened when John Lennon and Brian Epstein went on holiday together to Spain in 1963) (

Video: 'John and Brian - A Tribute to "The Hours and Times"'

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The Beatles would all return to London on May 9, 1963.