The sort of pop songs John did listen to, when he listened to any, were by Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine. ‘But I didn’t take much notice of them.’
Nobody took much serious notice, at least not boys in Britain of John Lennon’s age. Pop music, up to the midfifties, was all somehow remote and had no connection with real life. It all came from America and was produced by very show businessy professionals in lovely suits with lovely smiles who sang lovely ballads, mainly for shop girls and young mums.
Then three things happened. On 12 April 1954, Bill Haley and his Comets produced ‘Rock Around the Clock’. It took a year for it to have any effect on Britain. But when it did, as the theme song in the film Blackboard Jungle, rock and roll hit Britain and cinema seats started to be ripped up.
The second event occurred in January 1956 when Lonnie Donegan produced ‘Rock Island Line’. This had little connection with the wild rock music, despite the title. What was new and interesting was the fact that it was played on the sort of instruments anyone could play. Lonnie Donegan popularized skiffle. For the first time, anyone could have a go, with no musical knowledge or even musical talent.
Even the guitar, the hardest instrument in a skiffle group, could be played by anyone who mastered a few simple chords. The other instruments, like a washboard, or tea chest bass, could be played by any idiot.
The third and in a way the most exciting event in pop music in the 1950s and the most influential single person in pop at any time, until the Beatles themselves, was Elvis Presley. He also appeared in the early part of 1956. By May his ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was top of the charts in 14 different countries.
In a way it was obvious that someone like Elvis should happen. You just had to look at Bill Haley in the flesh, podgy, middle-aged looking and definitely unsexy, to realize that this new exciting music, rock’n’roll, eventually had to have an exciting singer to go with it.
Rock was the music that excited all kids. Elvis was the exciting singer singing the exciting songs. ‘Nothing really affected me until Elvis,’ says John.
All the Beatles, like millions of boys of the same age, were affected. They all have the same sort of memories, of groups springing up in every class at school and in every street at home. There were overnight about a hundred dances in Liverpool with skiffle groups queuing up to perform. It was the first time for generations that music wasn’t the property of musicians. Anyone could get up and have a go. It was like giving painting sets to monkeys. Some of them were bound to produce something good sometime.
John Lennon didn’t have a guitar or any instrument when the craze first began. He took a guitar off a boy at school one day but found he couldn’t play it, so he gave it back. But he knew that his mother, Julia, could play the banjo, so he went to see her. She bought him a secondhand guitar for £10. It had on it ‘guaranteed not to split’. He went for a couple of lessons, but never learned. Instead Julia taught him some banjo chords. The first tune he learned was ‘That’ll Be The Day’.
He had to practise behind Mimi’s back at home. She made him stand in the glass porch at the front, playing and singing to himself. ‘The guitar’s all right, John,’ Mimi used to tell him, ten times a day. ‘But you’ll never make a living with it.’
‘We eventually formed ourselves into a group from school. I think the bloke whose idea it was didn’t get in the group. We met in his house first time. There was Eric Griffiths on guitar, Pete Shotton on washboard, Len Garry, Colin Hanton on drums and Rod on banjo.
‘Our first appearance was in Rose Street — it was their Empire Day celebrations. They all had this party out in the street. We played from the back of a lorry. We didn’t get paid or anything.
‘We played at blokes’ parties after that, or weddings, perhaps got a few bob. But mostly we just played for fun.’
They called themselves the Quarrymen, naturally enough. They all wore Teddy Boy clothes, had their hair piled high and sleeked back like Elvis. John was the biggest Ted of all, which was another reason why mothers warned their sons about him, once they saw him or even when they didn’t see him but just heard the stories.
In these first months of the Quarrymen in late 1956, when John was supposedly sticking in hard at school, it was all very halfhearted and irregular. They wouldn’t play for weeks. People were always coming and going, depending on who turned up at the party, or who wanted to have a go.
‘It was all just a joke,’ says Pete Shotton, ‘setting up a group. Skiffle was in, so everybody was trying to do something. I was on washboard because I had no idea about music. I was John’s friend, so I had to be in.’
With John being the leader, there were constant rows, which also led to people leaving. ‘I used to row with people because I wanted them out. Once you had a fight, that was the end and you had to leave the group.’ One regular was Nigel Whalley, who played now and again but mainly tried to get them dates, acting as a manager.
Over at the Liverpool Institute, the same sort of thing was happening, groups growing up like mushrooms, though Ivan Vaughan had brought Len Garry over from the Institute into John’s group. It seemed to go down well.
On 6 July 1957, he took along another friend from his school to meet John. ‘I knew this was a great fellow,’ says Ivan. ‘I only ever brought along great fellows to meet John.’
The occasion for the meeting was the Church Fête at Woolton Parish Church, not far from John’s house. He knew the people there and had got them to let his group perform.
Ivan had talked a lot at his school about John and his group. He knew that his friend was interested in that sort of thing, though Ivan himself wasn’t.
‘Mimi had said to me that day that I’d done it at last,’ says John. ‘I was now a real Teddy Boy. I seemed to disgust everybody that day, not just Mimi.
‘I was looking the other day at the photograph of myself taken at Woolton that day. I look such a youthful young lad.’
What happened that day is a bit cloudy to John. He got drunk, though he was still several years under age. Others remember it very well, especially the friend Ivan brought along — Paul McCartney.
‘That was the day,’ says John, ‘the day that I met Paul, that it started moving.’
3 paul
Paul was born James Paul McCartney on 18 June 1942, in a private ward of Walton Hospital, Liverpool, the only Beatle to be born in such luxury. His family were ordinary working class and it was the height of the war. But Paul arrived in state because his mother had at one time been the sister in charge of the maternity ward. She was given the star treatment when she went back to have Paul, her first baby.
His mother, Mary Patricia, had given up hospital work just over a year previously, when she’d married his father, and had become a health visitor. Her maiden name was Mohin and, like her husband, she was of Irish extraction.
Jim McCartney, Paul’s father, began his working life at 14 as a sample boy at A. Hannay and Co., cotton brokers and merchants in Chapel Street, Liverpool. Unlike his wife, Jim McCartney was not a Catholic. He has always classed himself as an agnostic. He was born in 1902, one of three boys and four girls.
It was considered very lucky when he left school and got a job in cotton. The cotton industry was at its height and Liverpool was the centre of its importation to the Lancashire mills. Getting into cotton, you were reckoned settled for life.
As a sample boy Jim McCartney got six shillings a week. He had to run round prospective buyers letting them see bits of cotton they were interested in buying. Hannay’s imported the cotton, graded it and classified it, then sold it to the mills.