Paul McCartney (10 page)

John led the Quarrymen not only onstage but also in regular masturbation sessions, usually at Nigel Walley’s house, in which Paul was now included. They would settle themselves in armchairs, put out the lights and each would wank independently, encouraging himself and his neighbours by calling out the names of sex-goddesses like Gina Lollobrigida or Brigitte Bardot. Often at the crucial moment, John would spoil the mood by shouting ‘Winston Churchill!’

‘When Paul joined the band, things changed… but it wasn’t an overnight change,’ Colin Hanton remembers. ‘Paul was shrewd. He realised from the start that John liked to think of himself as the dominant force, but he needed Paul to teach him proper guitar chords, which was the way in to playing more rock ‘n’ roll material. He recognised John was the power in the group and that the best way to take him on was to do it subtly.’

Nothing could be done about those group-members who, possessing only the rudimentary musical talent of skifflers, were an obstacle to any meaningful further development into rock ‘n’ roll. Pete Shotton and his washboard were the most glaring example but, as John’s partnerin-crime since toddlerhood, Pete’s position was unassailable.

Nigel Walley was another Lennon childhood friend; originally the group’s bass-player, now their manager, sending handwritten letters to potential bookers and giving out business cards (‘The Quarrymen–Open for Engagements’) yet still receiving a musician’s share of their earnings. Paul suggested that Nigel’s cut might be reduced to something more like a manager’s 10 per cent but when John seemed unreceptive to the idea, he said nothing more about it. ‘In those days, Paul was keen not to overstep the mark with John,’ Colin Hanton says. ‘I mean, he was the new boy and he had to be careful.’

In many ways, Paul and John were not the total opposites they appeared. Both had the same passion for rock ‘n’ roll and ambition to play it to the same standard as their American heroes. Both were artistic, bookish, fond of language and addicted to cartooning; both had the same sense of humour, nourished by the aural anarchy of Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers on BBC radio’s Goon Show, although John’s was ruthlessly cruel while Paul’s was subtler and kindlier.

Paul’s most immediate effect on the Quarrymen was in their presentation. ‘You could see he had this show business side to him,’ Colin Hanton says, ‘while John just lived for the music.’ The group had always worn what they liked onstage, but now John accepted Paul’s suggestion of a uniform: black trousers, white Western-style shirts and black bootlace ties.

On 23 November, they had a return booking at the New Clubmoor Hall, where Paul had previously mucked up ‘Guitar Boogie’. He was determined to cut a better figure this time. ‘He had this sort of oatmeal jacket–he’d worn it to the Woolton fete–and he let it be known to John that when we did the gig, he was going to wear the jacket,’ Hanton remembers. ‘So the gig got nearer and then one day John turned up and he had got a cream jacket that was lighter than Paul’s. It was John’s way of saying “Hey, I’m cooler than you.”’

That night, a photograph was taken of the Quarrymen onstage that would be endlessly reproduced in years to come. John is singing lead, with Paul apparently harmonising. They are the only two in the line-up wearing jackets. The others strum and plunk away in shirtsleeves, unaware that an officer class has been born.

With Paul’s arrival, rehearsals became more frequent–and more serious. Mostly they took place at his house which, in itself, gave him a certain air of authority. With Jim McCartney banished to the kitchen, the tiny sitting-room at 20 Forthlin Road took on the appearance of a serious band room. Not wanting Mike to be left out, his father had got him a banjo first, then a full-size drum-kit in pale blue, which he set about mastering with his usual exuberance. Considerate as always, Paul would always go outside to check that the noise wasn’t audible beyond a couple of houses’ radius. However, the break in Mike’s arm had left it permanently weakened, and he was never a threat to the Quarrymen’s existing drummer, Colin Hanton.

The welcome was more uncertain when John called a rehearsal at his Aunt Mimi’s house in Menlove Avenue, Woolton. Mimi had always been bitterly hostile to his music, refusing even to have a piano in the house because it would remind her of vulgar pubs. She could not see–nor, in fairness, could anyone her age–how skiffle might ever lead to a worthwhile career. ‘The guitar’s all very well, John,’ she famously advised him, ‘but you’ll never make a living from it.’

These visits showed Paul the full panoply of middle-class gentility in which John had been raised. Mimi’s 1930s semi-detached villa had a name, ‘Mendips’, rather than just a number; the interior resembled a miniature stately home with its grandly-named ‘morning room’, faux Tudor beams, stained glass windows and ceremonial displays of Spode and Royal Worcester china-ware. Some of the rooms even had bells with which, in pre-war times, the householder would ring for a maid.

The very name ‘Mimi’ to Paul suggested a Noel Coward world of fur stoles and long cigarette-holders (though her real name was Mary, like his late mother’s, and she too had once been a nurse). Mimi, for her part, regarded everyone John brought home as a potential bad influence, to be set alongside her special bête noire, Pete Shotton. Paul fell into this category simply because he’d once lived in the social no-go area of Speke. ‘When I caught sight of him, when John brought him home for the first time, I thought “Oh-ho, look what the cat’s dragged in,”’ Mimi later recalled. ‘He seemed so much younger than John–and John was always picking up waifs and strays. I thought “Here we go again, John Lennon… another Shotton.”’

Even Paul’s immaculate manners could not thaw her. ‘Oh, yes, he was well-mannered–too well-mannered. He was what we call in Liverpool “talking posh” and I thought he was taking the mickey out of me. I thought “He’s a snake-charmer all right,” John’s little friend, Mr Charming. I wasn’t falling for it. After he’d gone, I said to John, “What are you doing with him? He’s younger than you… and he’s from Speke!”’

After that, when Paul appeared, she would always tell John sarcastically that his ‘little friend’ was here. ‘I used to tease John by saying “chalk and cheese”, meaning how different they were,’ she remembered, ‘and John would start hurling himself around the room like a wild dervish shouting “Chalkandcheese! Chalkandcheese!” with this stupid grin on his face.’

By far the Quarrymen’s jolliest rehearsals were at the home of John’s mother, Julia, on the Springwood estate, a couple of miles from Menlove Avenue, where she lived with her man friend, head waiter John Dykins, and their two small daughters. There John’s group could always count on a welcome from the vivacious, auburn-haired woman who was just about his only grown-up ally.

Julia and John had lived apart for so many years that she’d become more like his older sister than his mother. Her comfortable, chaotic house in Blomfield Road was his bolt-hole whenever the wax-polished perfection of ‘Mendips’ and Aunt Mimi’s anti-rock ‘n’ roll diatribes became too much for him. That Mimi called it witheringly ‘the House of Sin’ only added to its allure.

At Julia’s, they tried rehearsing in different rooms, but found their puny acoustic instruments rang out loudest in the tiled bathroom–still more so if they stood together inside the actual tub. Julia made no objection to this hijacking of facilities which her small daughters, Julia junior and Jacqueline, made doubly essential. Even if she happened to be bathing the little girls together, she’d hustle them out of the tub and empty it so that the Quarrymen could climb in. When Paul joined, he was made as welcome as the others, and thought Julia ‘gorgeous’. Often, after he’d left, she would shake her head sadly. ‘Poor boy,’ she’d say. ‘Losing his mother like that…’ He soon wouldn’t be the only one.

The main change to the Quarrymen that Paul got past John, early in 1958, was George Harrison.

Over the past year, he had become not just friendly but friends with the Institute boy in the class below his who shared his daily bus journey to school and his obsession with guitars and rock ‘n’ roll. George was only 14, and looked even younger in his Inny uniform, but he passed all Paul’s exacting tests of personality: he was thoughtful, observant, dryly humorous and a quiet rebel against authority in any form. Outside school hours, he dressed at the height of fashion: Italian-style high-buttoning suits, cuffless trousers and pointed shoes known as winkle-pickers because they looked sharp enough to pick the meat from that tiny, convoluted shellfish.

Paul and George were close enough to have been on a camping holiday together to the faraway south of England, carrying only a small backpack each, hitching rides and living on tinned spaghetti and creamed rice. One truck that picked them up had no passenger seat so George had to perch on the gearbox cover while Paul sat on the battery. They hadn’t gone far when Paul let out a cry of agony. The battery had connected with the metal zips on his jeans’ back-pockets, searing two zipper-shaped scorch marks into his buttocks.

They got as far south as Paignton in Devon, where they slept rough on the beach, then hitched back up to North Wales, hoping to make contact with Paul’s cousin, Mike Robbins, who now worked at the Butlin’s holiday camp in Pwllheli. They couldn’t get into the camp, so moved on to Chepstow, by now so impoverished that they had to ask the local police to lend them a cell for the night. Denied even this, they ended up sleeping on a wooden bench at the town’s football ground.

Paul had long marked down George as a potential Quarryman. He now owned a magnificent Hofner President guitar–worth several weeks’ of his bus-driver father’s salary–on which he was doggedly decoding the solos and riffs on American records that most British boy guitarists still found impenetrable. The Quarrymen’s numbers were by now drastically reduced. Ivan Vaughan, despite his ebullient slogan ‘Jive with Ive the Ace on the bass’, had left to concentrate on his academic studies, as had banjo-player Rod Davis. Peter Shotton, the least musical of them all, had taken the hint when John broke his washboard over his head, and was now a cadet at the police academy in Mather Avenue whose training-field backed on to the McCartney home. But the third guitarist’s place, behind John and Paul, was still filled by John’s old school friend, Eric Griffiths.

Paul made John aware of George with the same subtlety that he acclimatised his father to new pairs of tapered trousers. George would turn up at Quarrymen gigs, seeming more faithful follower than potential recruit. Between times, Paul enthused to John about his school friend’s prowess at ‘single-string stuff’, pointing out that to be taken seriously as a rock ‘n’ roll band they needed a proper lead guitarist, like Cliff Gallup in Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps, rather than just their present collective skiffle strum. The problem was that George was two and a half years John’s junior and, even when togged up in his sharpest box jacket and winkle-pickers, still looked absurdly young. To John, he became ‘that bloody kid, hanging around all the time’–a view which would take many years to change.

In the end, musicianship won the day. George knew how to play a new American instrumental hit, Bill Justis’s ‘Raunchy’ (a word which nobody in Britain then realised meant ‘sexy’). John was so impressed that he made him play it again and again like a serious-faced wind-up toy. So Eric Griffiths was unceremoniously dumped, and ‘the bloody kid’–or, more importantly, his Hofner President guitar–was in.

John, too, had been trying to write songs, but with the same conviction as Paul and his father: that it was an art which could only be properly practised by ‘professionals’. Then both at once had their minds changed by an American rock ‘n’ roll act named after insects. These were the Crickets, a four-man group who scored a string of British hits from late 1957 into 1958. Their 21-year-old leader, Buddy Holly, not only sang in a unique stuttery, hiccuppy voice but also played heavily electrified lead guitar and wrote or co-wrote most of their material.

Holly came as a godsend to the Quarrymen, as to every other skiffle group struggling with the transition to rock ‘n’ roll. For all its thrilling novelty, his sound was built around basic guitar chords and simple sequences that they already knew. He recorded both with the Crickets and as a solo artist, which made him unusually prolific; within a few months, he’d given his British pupils a whole repertoire.

Biographical information about American music stars was scarce, and for some time almost nothing was known about Holly, not even his colour. Surprisingly, he turned out to be white, a gangling Texan who played a solid-body Fender Stratocaster more like a space ship than a guitar and wore thick black horn-rimmed glasses. With that, the schoolboy stigma of wearing glasses–which made John Lennon prefer to blunder around in a half-blind state–was wiped away. John immediately acquired some Holly-style horn-rims and, in Paul’s words, ‘saw the world’. But he wouldn’t wear even those onstage or in public.

Both of them loved Holly’s music: the guitar that could conjure such drama from its simple chords, the stuttery voice that was so easy to copy, the experiments with echo, multitracking and instrumentation never heard in rock ‘n’ roll before. But what fascinated them most was the idea of Holly as a songwriter. Here was no jaded middle-aged hack, rhyming ‘moon’ and ‘June’ in a Tin Pan Alley garret, but someone young and cool, turning out songs for his own band to play, each one more innovative and exciting than the last.

Summer 1958 brought Buddy Holly’s barnstorming ‘Rave On’–and a further sign of the Quarrymen’s increased professionalism since Paul’s arrival. Until then, they’d had no means of preserving their music so that they could listen to themselves at leisure and pick up mistakes. Other groups owned tape recorders and sent out tapes to prospective bookers. But the bulky reel-to-reel recorders of 1958 were hugely expensive. On their £2 gigs, the Quarrymen couldn’t dream of such a luxury.

Then John heard about a Liverpool electrical retailer named Percy Phillips who operated a private recording studio not far from the city centre. Anyone could book time there and then get their recording made into a disc–a far more impressive calling-card than a tape.