Paul McCartney (9 page)

‘Chalkandcheese!’

He already knew John Lennon by sight; with homes only a quarter of a mile apart, they could hardly miss each other. But until now, the age gap between them had ruled out any socialising. Paul was only just 15 while John was three months shy of 17. Although still at school–just–he looked like a Teddy boy and displayed all the touchy aggression that went with it. ‘This Ted would get on the bus,’ Paul was later to remember. ‘I wouldn’t stare at him too hard in case he hit me.’

St Peter’s church fete seemed the least likely rendezvous with such a hard case. It was an event organised mainly for children, with its fancy dress procession, turn-outs by local Scouts, Girl Guides and Brownies and ceremonial crowning of a juvenile ‘Rose Queen’. Its chief musical attraction was the 25-piece military band of the Cheshire Yeomanry, but a skiffle group had been added to the programme to attract the parish’s teenaged element. The Quarrymen got the gig because, unlikely as it might seem, their leader had once attended the church’s Sunday school and sung in its choir.

Though the summer of 1957 was a gloriously hot, sunny one in Britain, Saturday, 6 July, turned out cloudy and humid. Paul arrived for the rendezvous by bike, wearing his silver-flecked oatmeal jacket and the narrowest black drainies he’d yet smuggled past his father. He later admitted he was thinking less about meeting John Lennon than his chances of picking up a girl afterwards.

Despite its closeness to the city, Woolton had some of the atmosphere of a country village. The neo-Gothic sandstone church stood on a hill, its 90-foot bell-tower crowned with four pinnacles said to be the highest point in Liverpool. The weathered headstones in its churchyard included one commemorating various members of a local family, among them:

ELEANOR RIGBY…

THE BELOVED WIFE OF THOMAS WOODS

… DIED 10TH OCTOBER, 1939, AGED 44 YEARS

Behind the church was a sloping field, littered with all the innocent paraphernalia of an English garden fete: stalls selling home-made cakes, jams and knitted tea-cosies, and amusements like quoits, skittles and ‘shilling-in-the-bucket’. Near the bottom was a makeshift stage on which the Quarrymen performed two sets, bookending a display by the City of Liverpool Police dogs–the same that the McCartney brothers could hear in the training college over their back garden fence.

Now at last Paul could inspect the tough guy of the 86 bus at leisure without fear of reprisals. He wore a plaid shirt and jeans, and played an undersized, steel-strung Spanish guitar, nowhere near as impressive as Paul’s own cello-style Zenith. Under the toppling Elvis quiff, his wide-set eyes stared challengingly at his juvenile audience, as if he’d gladly have picked a fight with any one of them. Unlike most skiffle vocalists, he didn’t try to sound American, but sang in a Liverpool accent whose thin yet resonant tone burned like acid through the ambient sounds of children’s voices, clinking teacups and birdsong.

The Quarrymen were better-equipped than many skiffle groups, having, in addition to the requisite washboard and tea chest bass, a second guitarist, a banjo-player and a drummer with a full, though undersized, kit. They did all the skiffle standards, including a version of ‘Puttin’ On the Style’ even more uproarious than Lonnie Donegan’s original. But their front man seemed always to be prodding them towards rock ‘n’ roll. Among his repertoire was ‘Come Go With Me’, a recent hit by an American doo-wop group the Del-Vikings, in which he twisted the doo-wop lyric into skiffleese: ‘Come, come, come, come and go with me… down to the Penitentiar-ee’.

After their second set, the group retired to the Church Hall, where they were also to play at a dance that evening. A few minutes later, Ivy Vaughan brought Paul in to meet John.

For someone without Paul’s instinctive showmanship, the encounter might well have led nowhere. He had only Ivy for backup–Ian James hadn’t yet arrived–while John was surrounded by fellow musicians who were almost all close cronies: washboard-player Pete Shotton, bassist Len Garry, guitarist Eric Griffiths, banjoist Rod Davis, drummer Colin Hanton and the group’s manager, Nigel Walley.

There were introductions, as stiffly formal as only teenagers know how. ‘John was always reserved, he never made the first move,’ Colin Hanton remembers. ‘People had to come to him.’

Paul broke the ice by picking up one of the group’s two guitars–whether John’s or Eric Griffiths’s no one now remembers–and launching into Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ in a perfect facsimile of Cochran’s voice with its Elvis quiver and softened r’s: ‘We-e-e-e-ll, I gotta gal with a wecord machine… When it comes to wockin’ she’s the queen…’ To sing and play the slap-bass rhythm simultaneously was impressive enough, never mind for a left-hander on a right-handed instrument.

‘He gave a great performance–showing off, really, but not in a big-headed way,’ Colin Hanton says. ‘And you could see John thinking “Yes, you’ll do.”’

The Quarrymen’s leader, in fact, had a rather shaming handicap. ‘John found it really hard to play the guitar at first,’ Hanton continues. ‘His guitar was tuned for banjo chords [i.e. using only four strings] and he found it really hard to figure out guitar chords. In fact, I believe he was thinking of ditching the guitar, so when Paul turned up and played “Twenty Flight Rock” with all those six-string chords… well, that was it. John wanted to learn everything he could from him.’

Paul had something else to show in that perfectly judged ‘not big-headed’ way of his. Standing at the Church Hall’s old upright piano, an instrument hitherto never resonating to anything stronger than ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, he began pounding out the rolling bass boogie of Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On’.

The last of John’s reserve melted and he joined Paul at the keyboard, revealing himself a fellow piano enthusiast in a guitar-mad world. These close quarters also revealed that, in defiance of the fete’s strict teetotalism, he’d managed to get hold of some beer. ‘I remember John leaning over,’ Paul says, ‘contributing a deft right hand to the upper octaves and surprising me with his beery breath.’

Soon afterwards, Ian James turned up and everyone went to a nearby coffee bar. ‘I seem to recall the Quarrymen being told their appearance at the dance that night had been cancelled,’ James says. ‘So I decided to go home.’

The dance appearance wasn’t cancelled, and Paul hung out with the Quarrymen until early evening, getting a first flavour of what hanging out with John could mean. First they went to a pub where no one but the drummer, Colin Hanton, was old enough to be served alcohol and Paul had to lie that he was aged 18 along with the others. Then they received word that some tough Teds from Garston were coming over to Woolton, thirsting for skiffle-players’ blood. Having set out that day to attend a church fete, Paul felt he’d ended up ‘in Mafia land’.

After making such an impression, he might have been expected to go onstage with the Quarrymen at St Peter’s Church Hall that very night. But John was in two minds about recruiting someone whose superior musicianship would inevitably overshadow him, maybe even pose a threat to his leadership. ‘I’d been kingpin up to then,’ he would later recall. ‘The decision was whether to keep me strong or make the group stronger.’

Walking home later, he asked washboard-player Pete Shotton, his closest crony, whether Paul should be let in, and Shotton emphatically voted yes. They agreed that the next one of them to see Paul would extend a formal invitation.

This didn’t happen until a couple of weeks later, when Shotton came out of his family’s house in Vale Road to see Paul cycling by. ‘He stopped and we passed the time of day, chatted for a while, then I suddenly remembered what John and I had decided,’ Shotton recalls. ‘I said, “Oh, by the way Paul, do you want to join the band?” He thought for a moment, very casually, then said “Okay”, jumped on his bike and rode off.’

In reality John Lennon was not the hard case he seemed, still less the ‘working-class hero’ he would one day style himself. His father Alfred, a ship’s steward, had disappeared when John was seven and his mother, Julia, unable to cope, had given him over to her childless older sister, Mary, known as Mimi. He had grown up in Mimi’s spotless Woolton home, provided with every comfort but ruled by his aunt’s strict discipline and rigid social snobbery. Almost everything he did, or would ever do, was a kick against that repressive middle-class milieu.

He early proved himself a gifted boy, with the same talent for art and writing as Paul. The difference in John’s case was his extreme shortsightedness, for which he was prescribed powerful spectacles he hated and refused to wear. The challenging stare he turned on the world was actually his constant effort to bring it into focus. His myopia largely accounted for the surreal quality of his pictures and prose and his compulsion to turn every other word into a pun.

He had attended Dovedale Primary School, near Penny Lane, then gone on to Quarry Bank High School, a grammar school of the same aspirational stamp as Liverpool Institute. There, abetted by Pete Shotton, he had been a notorious rebel and subversive, doing no work and running out reams of highly creative stories and cartoons lampooning his teachers.

Though his mother had given him away to her sister, she remained a powerful presence in his life, living not far from Aunt Mimi’s with a man friend by whom she had two further children. In contrast with her brisk older sister, Julia Lennon was glamorous and high-spirited, an accomplished amateur entertainer who could sing and play the banjo and ukulele. When John became smitten by Elvis and rock ‘n’ roll, Julia bought him a guitar and taught him his first chords, albeit only the four-string banjo kind. It was enough for him to form the Quarrymen, initially from among his classmates at Quarry Bank High School, taking the name from the school song in which the students hymned themselves as ‘Quarry men, strong before our birth’.

By the time John met Paul, his guitar and rock ‘n’ roll were all he cared about. He had just crowned his school career by failing his GCE O-Level exams in every subject, and was about to embark on a form of higher education at that time easily available to such academic non-achievers. That September, he was to begin a course at Liverpool College of Art.

As things turned out, almost three months passed before Paul took his place among the Quarrymen. He had other commitments for the rest of his school holidays, including Boy Scout camp with Mike in the Peak District of Derbyshire and a week at Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey, Yorkshire: the boys’ first time back at Butlin’s since their mother’s death.

As a result, he missed the Quarrymen’s August debut at a Liverpool cellar club called the Cavern, at that time an enclave of traditional jazz. Skiffle was seen as a branch of jazz, and so tolerated at the Cavern, but rock ‘n’ roll was banned. When John started up Elvis’s ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, he was passed a note from the manager, Alan Sytner, ordering him to ‘cut out the bloody rock’.

At Butlin’s in Filey, one of the entertainments team, known as Redcoats, was Paul and Michael’s cousin by marriage, an ebullient, mustachioed man named Mike Robbins. During their stay, one of Robbins’s duties was emceeing the camp’s leg of a national talent contest, sponsored by the People newspaper and offering ‘cash prizes of over £5000’. Paul, who had his guitar with him as always, entered himself and Michael as ‘The McCartney Brothers’, modelled on America’s close-harmony Everly Brothers, Phil and Don.

The effect was rather spoiled by the younger McCartney Brother, who’d broken his arm at Boy Scout camp just before coming on holiday, and still wore it in a bulky sling. The pair did the Everlys’ hit ‘Bye Bye Love’, then Paul soloed on Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’. They were under the contest’s age-limit, and even their Redcoat relative couldn’t save them from being disqualified. As a consolation, they came offstage to discover they’d acquired a fan, a girl named Angela from Hull. It wasn’t Paul she turned out to fancy, however, but his wounded sibling.

Thus his first paid appearance with the Quarrymen didn’t come until 18 October, when they played at the New Clubmoor Hall, Norris Green. Alas, nothing could have been less like his impressive display at the Woolton fete. John had granted him a solo instrumental spot, Arthur Smith’s ‘Guitar Boogie’, a seeming doddle for someone who could simultaneously play and sing ‘Twenty Flight Rock’. But midway through, he suffered an attack of sticky fingers and messed it up completely.

The Quarrymen at this point were getting two or three gigs a week if they were lucky, in one or other of the numerous urban villages that make up greater Liverpool. They travelled by double-decker bus, their guitars and washboard on their knees and Colin Hanton’s drum-kit packed into the luggage-recess under the stairs.

The venue would be some municipal or church hall where, more than likely, Paul’s father had fronted the Jim Mac Jazz Band 30 years earlier. The promoter was invariably a middle-aged man, with slicked-back hair and too-strong aftershave, who hated all young people’s music and was simply cashing in on the brief time it surely now had left. The Quarrymen seldom received more than a couple of pounds between them, grudgingly counted out in half-crowns, shillings, pennies and even halfpennies. Some promoters gave them schoolmasterly written reports on their performance; all were vigilant for any excuse to cut their fee or withhold it altogether.

Their audience would be teenage girls in mumsy-looking full-skirted dresses and cardigans, with waved or ‘home-permed’ hair, jiving with boys still mostly wearing nothing more adventurous than blazers and grey flannels. Dancers and musicians alike kept a weather eye on the door in case the dreaded Garston Teds should suddenly arrive like drunken cowboys riding in to shoot up Dodge City. There were also occasional engagements at golf clubs, factory socials, private parties (no fee but free beer and food) and, once, at an abattoir.

After the show, a selection of their female followers would be usually waiting, game for a snog, a grope or, on very lucky nights, a ‘knee-trembler’ up against a wall. There were never enough for John, whose sexual appetite seemed insatiable and who boasted of having once masturbated nine times in a single day (so failing to win a bet with Pete Shotton that he could reach double figures).