Stuart Sutcliffe Death — Hamburg, Germany

Stuart Sutcliffe — the original bass player of the Beatles and John Lennon's closest friend — died of a cerebral haemorrhage on April 10, 1962, in Hamburg, Germany. He was 21 years old. He had left the Beatles in 1961 to pursue his career as a painter, remaining in Hamburg with his fiancée Astrid Kirchherr while the rest of the band returned to Liverpool. He had been suffering from severe headaches and had collapsed several times in the months before his death. An ambulance was called but he died on the way to the hospital.

Sutcliffe had joined the Beatles (then the Quarrymen) in 1960 after Lennon persuaded him to buy a bass guitar with the proceeds from selling a painting. He was by all accounts a limited musician but a magnetic visual presence — tall, handsome, and stylish in a way that influenced the band's early image. It was Kirchherr and Sutcliffe who introduced the mop-top haircut that became the Beatles' trademark. Sutcliffe's art — strongly influenced by the Abstract Expressionists — has been increasingly recognised since his death, and exhibitions of his paintings have been held at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and Tate Liverpool.

Sutcliffe's death in Hamburg, just months before the Beatles' breakthrough, remains one of the great what-ifs of popular music. Had he lived, he almost certainly would have pursued art rather than music, but his influence on the Beatles' visual identity and on John Lennon's emotional development was profound. He is buried at Huyton Parish Church Cemetery in Merseyside.