"With his shaggy hair, hepcat beard and racy poems touching on British youth’s anxieties, dreams of freedom and lust, he was hailed as Britain’s answer to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac..."

I'm reading "Royston Ellis, Bridge Between Beat Poets and the Beatles, Dies at 82 Making his name with a blend of poetry and rock ’n’ roll he called 'rocketry,' he straddled two eras of British youth culture at the dawn of the 1960s" (NYT).

Weaving his way into the bohemian underground of the Soho district of London, he was quickly drawing comparisons to the American Beat poets, although he later cited influences closer to home, in particular the British poet Christopher Logue, who provided inspiration with his “jazzetry” — poems read to a jazz accompaniment.

Look at this from 1959:

The connection to The Beatles:

In May 1960, Mr. Ellis headed north for a reading at the University of Liverpool. Once in town, he dropped into the Jacaranda, a coffee bar popular with local youth, and “got talking to a boy, George, in a striped matelot T-shirt and black leather jacket who told me his friends played music,” he later recalled in an interview with the website Classic Bands. George (last name Harrison) suggested that they head to 3 Gambier Terrace, the home of John Lennon, the leader of the band that had been calling itself the Silver Beetles. 

During his stay in Liverpool, Mr. Ellis befriended the rest of the band, which ended up backing him in a reading in the Jacaranda basement. The future moptops were fascinated by this louche literary star in their midst, soaking up his views on poetry, music and sex.... 

The working-class Liverpudlians found the homoerotic themes in Mr. Ellis’s work to be eye-opening, to say the least. Mr. Ellis, who was bisexual by his account, recalled that he gave them “a lecture about the Soho scene and said they shouldn’t worry, because one in four men were queer, although they mightn’t know it.” 

In response, Paul McCartney said, “We looked at each other and wondered which one it was.”

Paul gets off a good punchline, recounting that story. Who knows what anybody said (or did) at the time? 

Ellis claimed he was the one who got The Beatles to respell their name with an "a." True? He had a way with words and he was a Beat poet, so I choose to believe. It's more than a claim though, but an established fact, per Beatles scholar Mark Lewisohn, that Ellis introduced the Beatles to drugs... he showed them how to break into a Benzedrex inhaler.