Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe (23 June 1940 – 10 April 1962) was a Scottish-born painter and musician best known as the original bass player for the Beatles.
. Sutcliffe left the band to pursue his career as a painter, having previously attended the Liverpool College of Art. Sutcliffe and John Lennon are credited with inventing the name, "Beetles", as they both liked Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets. The band used this name for a while until Lennon decided to change the name to "the Beatles", from the word beat. As a member of the group when it was a five-piece band, Sutcliffe is one of several people sometimes referred to as the "Fifth Beatle".
On arriving at Hamburg Airport on April 11 for a tour, the Beatles were greeted by Astrid Kirchherr and the news that Stuart Sutcliffe, the bassist who had left the group to stay with her in Germany, had died the previous day of a suspected blood clot on the brain. He was only 21.
Although they hadn't been seeing as much of each other lately as during the previous year, John and Stu had regularly kept in touch by letter. Stuart was engaged to Astrid and after that trip decided that he was going to leave the band and live in Germany
The last thing that John had expected, however, was for him to die so suddenly, and his reaction was two-fold: First, echoing the situation when Uncle George Smith had died almost five years earlier, John burst into a fit of hysterical laughter (hardly what Astrid -- having arrived at the airport straight from the hospital -- could have needed).
On 10 April 1962 Stuart Sutcliffe was rushed to hospital in an ambulance, with Kirchherr by his side, but died before its arrival. The cause of death was cerebral paralysis, as a result of bleeding in the right ventricle of his brain.
The sister of the "fifth Beatle" Stuart Sutcliffe has long accused John Lennon of having killed Stuart with a kick to the head.Sutcliffe died in Hamburg in April 1962 due to a cerebral hemorrhage, but the autopsy found no disease. Since then, some claim that the young man died as a result of internal injuries - never diagnosed - suffered during a 1959 dispute with Lennon, in which the latter struck him in self-defense.
When Stuart came in, it felt as if he was taking the position away from George and me. We had to take a bit of a back seat. Stuart was John's age, went to art college, was a very good painter and had all the cred that we didn't.- Paul McCartney- Anthology
He wasn't really a very good musician. In fact, he wasn't a musician at all until we talked him into buying a bass. We taught him to play twelve-bars, like Thirty Days by Chuck Berry. That was the first thing he ever learnt. He picked up a few things and he practised a bit until he could get through a couple of other tunes as well. It was a bit ropey, but it didn't matter at that time because he looked so cool. We never had many gigs in Liverpool before we went to Hamburg, anyway. -George Harrison - Anthology
