Paul McCartney (13 page)

In return for helping out around the pub, they were allowed to perform there as an acoustic duo. ‘Playing on Sat… billed as the Nerk Twins,’ Paul wrote on a postcard to his brother Michael, adding with almost equal excitement, ‘May be serving behind bar.’

They designed their own publicity posters and drew on Robbins’s experience as a holiday camp entertainments officer in deciding the playlist. His advice was not to plunge straight into Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’, as they’d planned, but to start with something melodic, like Les Paul and Mary Ford’s ‘The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise’, then work up to a rock ‘n’ roll climax.

The performance took place in The Fox and Hounds’ taproom, or lowest-status bar, with Paul and John seated on a pair of bar-stools. Their self-deprecating name–‘nerk’ in Liverpudlian means fool–had left unclear just what kind of entertainment was on offer, and just three people came in to watch them. A second show, at lunch-time on the Sunday, was only marginally better-attended.

But after they’d returned north, one of Mike Robbins’s regulars asked him: ‘Whatever happened to those Nerk Twins? They were bloody useless but at least they brought a bit of life into the pub.’

‘Just who do you want to be, Paul? Tommy Steele?’

Paul’s instincts as a PR man were already beginning to show. Some time in April 1960, he drafted a letter to a local journalist named Low who’d requested details about the band with a view to giving them some publicity. Whether the fair copy was sent, or produced the desired article, isn’t known. But the page and a half, in Paul’s neat hand, reveals that they’re still without a drummer or a name, and still pushing the ‘rhythm is in the guitars’ line:

Dear Mr Low

I am sorry about the time I have taken to write to you, but I hope I have not left it too late. Here are some details about the group.

It consists of four boys–Paul McCartney (guitar), John Lennon (guitar), Stuart Sutcliffe (bass) and George Harrison (another guitar) and is called the… This line-up may at first seem dull but it must be appreciated that as the boys have above-average playing instrumental ability they achieve surprisingly varied effects. Their basic beat is the off-beat, but this has recently tended to be accompanied by a faint on-beat; thus the overall sound is rather reminiscent of the 4 in the bar beat of Traditional jazz. This could possibly be put down to the influence on the group of Mr McCartney, who led one of the top local jazz bands (Jim Mac’s Jazz Band) in the 1920’s.

Modern music is, however, the group’s delight and, as if to prove the point, John and Paul have written over 50 tunes, ballads and faster numbers, in the last three years.

John–described as their leader, despite coming second in the initial personnel list–is said to be an ‘accomplished guitarist and banjo-player and an ‘experienced cartoonist’. Of his 18-year-old self, Paul says he’s reading English at Liverpool University and that, as well as the guitar, his specialities are piano and drums.

That fib about Liverpool University reveals his sensitivity about being the group’s last remaining schoolboy. Although a year his junior, George Harrison had by now left Liverpool Institute to become an apprentice electrician at Blacklers, a city centre department store. Like John and Stu, George could stay out as late and get as drunk as he liked, whereas Paul always had to be thinking about the next morning’s class and revising for his GCE A-Levels in July.

During the long hours when city centre pubs were closed, the still-nameless quartet hung out at a small coffee bar named the Jacaranda in Slater Street, where toast and jam cost only five old pennies, or 2p, per portion. At night, the basement became a club where prestigious bands like Cass and the Cassanovas and Derry and the Seniors would meet to unwind after their evenings’ gigs.

The Jacaranda belonged to 30-year-old Allan Williams, a chunky Welsh Scouser with curly hair, a piratical black beard and a Chinese wife named Beryl, who ran its kitchen. Williams at the time knew little about Liverpool’s music scene, and at first didn’t realise that the four ‘layabouts’ who monopolised seats in his coffee bar for hour after hour without ordering anything were a band.

What first caught Williams’s eye was Stu Sutcliffe’s talent as an artist. At the time, the Welshman was planning to stage a Liverpool Arts Ball, modelled on London’s Chelsea Arts Ball at the Royal Albert Hall, when Chelsea’s bohemian community gave Britain a rare glimpse of public drunkenness and nudity. For Williams’s far drunker and more abandoned version at St George’s Hall, he hired Stu to design and John, Paul and George to build and decorate the carnival floats that were ritually destroyed at the ball’s end. He also set them to work painting a mural in the Jacaranda’s ladies’ toilet.

Allan Williams’s emergence as a possible benefactor sharpened their need for a stage name that would stick. After more fruitless collective brainstorming, a decision was made privately by John and Stu and presented to Paul as a fait accompli one evening as they walked along Gambier Terrace towards the cathedral. In homage to Buddy Holly’s Crickets, they had decided on the Beetles, but spelt with an ‘a’ as in beat music and beatnik. In a pun within a pun, it would be spelt ‘Beatals’ to suggest beating all competition.

Neither Paul nor the unassertive George offered any objection, But among the bands who congregated at the Jacaranda, the name received a unanimous thumbs-down. Brian Casser, charismatic front man of Cass and the Cassanovas, said they were mad to depart from the usual formula of so-and-so and the such-and-suches. They should use their leader’s first name to create a Treasure Island effect and become Long John and the Silver Beatles.

John refused to identify himself in any way with the peg-legged villain of R.L. Stevenson’s seafaring classic. However, a flash of bullion seemed to modify the entomological element that everyone so disliked, so they settled on the Silver Beatles.

They still lacked a drummer–but that was no longer their only handicap. Stu Sutcliffe was supposed to have filled the void with his expensive Hofner President bass, but Stu turned out to have no aptitude whatsoever for the instrument and, despite lessons from John, still had trouble in laying down even the most basic rhythm. His lack of skill so embarrassed him that he’d stand with his back to the audience to hide his inept fingering. Often the others would secretly unplug his amp, leaving him mute. Paul was becoming increasingly annoyed by having to carry such a passenger, convinced it would keep the band in its gig-less limbo for ever. But John would not hear a word against his artistic and cultural mentor and seemed unbothered by even the worst of Stu’s fluffs.

Paul, in any case, had a weightier matter on his mind. Early in 1960, his steady girlfriend, the elfinly pretty Dot Rhone, had told him she was expecting a baby. She was 16, he was 17.

In those days, pregnancy outside marriage still carried the same stigma it had in Victorian times, nowhere more so than in Britain’s respectable working-class north. And generally for the young man responsible, the only option was a hasty marriage to save the unborn child from being labelled, as it surely would be, ‘a little bastard’.

Paul behaved well, never trying to claim the baby wasn’t his–which anyway, with a girl like Dot, would have been an impossibility–nor proposing any of the degrading, often dangerous means by which unwanted pregnancies used to be terminated. The ordeal, especially for super-shy and unconfident Dot, was facing their respective families. As they were both little more than children themselves, there had to be a meeting between Dot’s mother, Jessie, and Jim McCartney at Forthlin Road about what should be done. Mrs Rhone favoured giving up the baby for adoption, saying her daughter was ‘too young to push a pram’. But Jim, lovely man that he was, threw his arms around Dot and told her he’d be proud to see her pushing his grandchild in one.

It was settled that Paul and Dot would have a quiet wedding at a register office, before the baby’s birth that autumn, then live at Forthlin Road with Jim and Mike. Dot loved the prospect of joining the warm, party-loving McCartney clan, so different from her own violent father and troubled home. But the implications for Paul were clear: with a wife and baby to support, he’d have to leave school, forget all about further education and find a ‘proper’ job which could have nothing whatsoever to do with music.

It wasn’t to be, however: three months into her pregnancy, Dot suffered a miscarriage. Paul was loving and attentive, rushing to her bedside with flowers and trying to conceal his relief. The stairway to Paradise still stretched ahead.

America’s pioneer rock ‘n’ rollers whose careers had collapsed in their homeland continued to command a fanatical British following, and in March 1960 two of the most cherished, Gene (‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’) Vincent and Eddie (‘Twenty Flight Rock’) Cochran, toured the north together, stopping off for six consecutive nights at the Liverpool Empire.

The tour’s promoter was Larry Parnes, at that time Britain’s only notable pop music impresario. Parnes had discovered Tommy Steele, Britain’s first rock ‘n’ roll star, but–since such a career couldn’t possibly last–had swiftly turned Steele into an all-round entertainer and film actor. He now managed a string of pop vocalists in the new, blander style with stage-names designed to tickle the adolescent female psyche in every possible mood: Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Dickie Pride, Duffy Power, Johnny Gentle, Vince Eager. His habit of boarding them at his Kensington flat led them to be dubbed ‘the Larry Parnes stable’.

John and Paul were naturally at the Empire to see their two greatest musical heroes after Elvis and Buddy in the flesh. Paul would never forget the moment when the curtains opened to reveal Eddie Cochran with his back to the audience, running a comb through his hair. In fact, he was so drunk that the microphone-stand had to be threaded between him and his guitar to keep him upright.

The same evening marked Allan Williams’s transition from coffee-bar owner to pop music entrepreneur. Untroubled by his total lack of experience, he struck a co-promotion deal with Larry Parnes to bring Cochran and Gene Vincent back to Liverpool on 3 May for a show at the city’s boxing stadium. His role was the recruitment of top local bands like Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Cass and the Cassanovas to support the American stars. But, despite their ‘in’ with Williams, the just-hatched Silver Beatles had no hope of being included without a drummer.

On 17 April, Cochran was fatally injured when his chauffeur-driven car hit a lamp-post en route from Bristol to London. Even so, it was decided the Liverpool boxing stadium concert should still go ahead with Gene Vincent–who’d suffered a broken collarbone in the crash–as sole headliner. To bulk out the programme, Allan Williams hastily booked further hometown attractions like the former Gerry Marsden Skiffle Group, now called Gerry and the Pacemakers. Even with the net thus widened, John, Paul, George and Stu resigned themselves in advance to being left out and watched the show miserably from the (standing) audience.

The event showed Larry Parnes that Liverpool possessed a wealth of good amateur musicians whom he could use to back his solo singers at attractively lower rates than London professionals. Less than a week later, he came back to Allan Williams with a request that galvanised every guitarist and dazzled every drummer on Merseyside: he needed a group to go on tour with the biggest name in his stable, Billy Fury. Williams was to organise a general audition at which Parnes and his star between them would choose the lucky sidemen.

Fury was Britain’s leading male pop star after Cliff Richard: a 20-year-old combining the smoulder of Elvis with the pathos of Oliver Twist. He was actually a Liverpudlian, born Ronald Wycherley, who’d worked as a Mersey tugboat-hand before Larry Parnes discovered him at a concert in Birkenhead and rebaptised him. Obedient to long-time show business convention, however, he spoke in a vaguely American accent and his publicity omitted all reference to his birthplace. Most interestingly to John and Paul, he was the first British pop idol to bypass the professional songsmiths of Tin Pan Alley. Others had penned the odd original track but on Fury’s debut album, The Sound of Fury, currently in the shops, every one was his own composition.

This time, the Silver Beatles wouldn’t miss out; for, thanks to Brian Casser, they had a drummer at long last. He was Thomas Moore, a forklift truck-driver at the bottle-making factory in Garston. At 29, he seemed middle-aged to the two students, the apprentice and the schoolboy; nonetheless, they gobbled him up like bulimic piranhas.

The auditions took place on 10 May, in an old social club in Seel Street which Allan Williams planned to convert into an upscale nightspot. The cream of Liverpool’s bands went through their paces as Parnes and Fury sat at a table taking notes like adjudicators at a music festival. To provide a photographic record, Williams had hired his Slater Street neighbour, Cheniston Roland, whose subjects were normally celebrities staying at the Adelphi Hotel, such as Marlene Dietrich and jazzman Dizzy Gillespie.

For this breathtaking opportunity, the Silver Beatles made a special sartorial effort: matching black shirts, black jeans with white-piped rear pockets and two-tone Italian shoes which Larry Parnes, in the twilight, mistook for ‘tennis shoes’. They were painfully in awe of the star whose backing band they aspired to be, calling him ‘Mr Fury’ and reacting like scandalised maiden aunts when the photographer Cheniston Roland addressed him as ‘Ronnie’; in earlier years, he’d been Roland’s newspaper delivery boy.

Their new drummer, Tommy Moore, didn’t arrive with them, having gone to fetch his kit from a club on the other side of town. When their turn came, Moore still hadn’t appeared, so they were forced to borrow the Cassanovas’ drummer Johnny Hutchinson, a noted tough guy who made no bones about disliking John and thinking the Silver Beatles ‘not worth a carrot’.

Cheniston Roland’s famous shot of them in mid-performance shows John and Paul frantically bouncing around in their little two-tone shoes as if trying to compensate for their bandmates’ woodenness–serious-faced George; Stu Sutcliffe with his heavy bass, as usual turning away in embarrassment to hide his ineptitude; ‘Johnny Hutch’ on drums, in ordinary street-clothes and clearly bored to death.