After the Beatles’ late-1960 Hamburg run came to a disastrous end, the band was back gigging in Liverpool in January 1961. As the story goes, Stuart Sutcliffe was brutally attacked late that month by a gang of local ruffians, who kicked him in the head before John Lennon and Pete Best broke things up (via The New Yorker). The Beatles then returned to Hamburg and played close to a hundred shows in the city from April to July, but they were short one man when they came back home.
Sutcliffe decided to stay in Hamburg, where he was focusing more on his relationship with Astrid Kirchherr and devoting more time to painting. Effectively quitting the Beatles by staying behind, Sutcliffe sold his bass guitar to Klaus Voormann (who later played for acts like Manfred Mann and the Plastic Ono Band) and started studying under Eduardo Paolozzi, a Scottish artist who was teaching at the Hamburg Art School.
Sutcliffe proved to be an excellent student, as Paolozzi described him as “imaginative, ultra-intelligent, and … open to everything.” However, the past few months had also seen his health become progressively worse. In July 1961, he complained about gastritis, lung problems, and a bad appendix in a letter to his mother. He also began to suffer from headaches and blackouts, which progressively became more frequent and intense as the months passed. At that time, he chalked it up to overwork, but even as he stopped attending school after collapsing in class in February 1962, the headaches just wouldn’t go away; they had become so severe that he had become prone to violent mood swings and temporary blindness.
