Biography

Was closest to Stuart Sutcliffe, of any of the Beatles, but was disappointed that Stuart was the one who wrote him from Germany, to say the band was letting him go as their manager. (He had no contract with them; many of his business papers were lost in a fire, at one of his other ventures.) Nonetheless, he mourned Stuart as an old friend, when he died the next year.

Was The Beatles' first manager, who met them when they frequented his coffee bar in Liverpool, called the Jacaranda.

Arranged the early Beatles trips to Hamburg, and he drove them personally on their first visit, ferrying his van across the English Channel.

John Lennon endorsed his autobiography, 'The Man who Gave the Beatles Away', saying that he was the right man to tell their early story. The book is a candid, thoroughly detailed, bittersweet account of his days as a band manager in Liverpool and Hamburg, and the people he knew.

Years after his involvement with the Beatles ended, Williams discovered an old tape while salvaging a deserted music office, of a latter-day Beatles New Year's Eve show in Hamburg. (Fellow rocker Ted "Kingsize" Taylor had made the recording, on an ordinary Philips machine; the now-closed company had hoped to release the tape as an album.) He was able to have the tape released (after remixing; the original quality was poor) through Lingasong Records, in the late 1970s.