![How I taught the Beatles to dance]( "How I taught the Beatles to dance")
How I taught the Beatles to dance
RICHARD PARR
24 December 2007 08:15
Forget Strictly Come Dancing - a Norfolk woman told last night how she taught the biggest stars in pop history to dance 40 years ago this Christmas.
It was Boxing Day, 1967 when the Beatles unveiled their long-awaited surreal TV musical, Magical Mystery Tour, including scenes of the Fab Four gliding effortlessly in a spectacular white-tie and tails routine.
And it was dancing legend Peggy Spencer, of King's Lynn, who taught them the fancy footwork - and made Paul McCartney's dream come true.
The call to turn the Beatles into ballroom hoofers out of the came out for the blue and Peggy couldn't quite believe it when the voice at the other end of the line said he was Paul McCartney and asked if she could give them dancing lessons.
During that summer the group had released Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and appeared on a satellite broadcast singing All You Need is Love to 350 million viewers world wide.
The Beatles wrote, directed and starred in Magical Mystery Tour, which was the most anticipated TV treat that Christmas.
A whole new generation of Beatles' fans will be able to see the film next year when it is released on DVD.
Now aged 87, Peggy, vividly recalls that phone call and the challenge she was given by McCartney.
He asked Peggy if she could choreograph the scene, provide 100 dancers and teach the Beatles how to dance and she only had two days to arrange it all.
In the 1960s, Peggy Spencer was a well-known personality in own right running a successful dance company in South London with her late husband, Frank.
They appeared regularly on the original BBC TV series Come Dancing. The couple had 21 winning formation teams and trained more than three thousand dancers each year in their ballroom.
Last night she recalled what Paul had said to her in that phone call.
“For some reason Paul called me Pegotty and told me he had had a dream of a white staircase going to heaven with a white piano at the top and dancers in beautiful dresses coming down the stairs with The Beatles in immaculate white tail coats. He asked me if I could make this become a reality”.
“I remember it very well because I had to get all my teams' dresses out of the cupboard and arrange for the dancers to be rehearsed. We had to rehearse at 10.30pm in an old aircraft hangar in Kent because they were all working so were not available during the day.”
Peggy then had to sort out the arrangement with Paul using the Beatles' song Your Mother Should Know but things didn't go as smoothly as planned because there was only one side of the staircase so carpenters had to be brought in to build one.
“That black hangar, the staircase, the piano at the top, it was all so surreal but it's a vision that has never left me, bringing all this back has been the best Christmas present I could have wished for,” she said.
Peggy recalled that as the Beatles came down the staircase, she was ahead of them, out of camera shot, dancing their steps so that they could follow her.
And she revealed that the biggest problem was that George Harrison and John Lennon were in meditation and did not always have all their wits about them.
“The boys were not dancers, they were musical people and I had to knock them into shape. This was sometimes quite difficult because two of them were constantly in meditation. Paul was the one who was alive, on the ball and bright all of the time,” she said.
Peggy's vivid recollections of dancing with the Beatles were re-kindled with the help of Gary Howman, of King's Lynn, a collector of Beatle's memorabilia. “It has been fabulous to hear Peggy's eye-witness accounts of her involvement with the Beatles and she has such vivid recollections,” he said.
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