Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  Out of the traditional airs of Ireland, jazz and blues, and jump-started with American pop records, there was an explosion in skiffle and pop groups in Liverpool, particularly in Speke, from around 1957. None of us had been anywhere at the time and we didn’t know that Liverpool was different, that this explosion wasn’t happening as quickly in the rest of Britain. We could feel the buzz in the air. My mum came from a cosmopolitan background. Her family mixed socially with people like the bandleader Jack Hylton, and Hutch—Leslie Hutchinson—who had been Cole Porter’s lover. She wasn’t too fond of Elvis, but she liked Cliff and Buddy Holly and often popped into North End Music Store—run by a young man named Brian Epstein—when she was in town and bought us the latest record.

  Sinatra gave way to Elvis and Eddie Cochran, though to some extent, the different musical genres overlapped. At number three on the charts when the year began was Frankie Vaughan with his cover version of a song called “Garden of Eden.” This song, which was not a strong piece of songwriting, was interesting because it was covered by no less than three variety style artists. However, Frankie, who was Jewish and looked Italian, prevailed, probably because he had better management and TV exposure thanks to the leading TV boss, Lew Grade, nee Gradzinski (who would later buy the Beatles’ song catalog). Frankie had the number one with it, beating out the challenge of the other three. But a fourth challenger, who had also tried to make a break with the same song and got nowhere at all, was a Jewish crooner, a balding guy who had changed his name from Richard Leon Vapnick to Dick James. Later, he and Lew Grade would enter the Beatles’ lives in a big way.

  Yes, 1957 had started with a hangover from 1956 and good-looking, smarmy crooners like Guy Mitchell, Johnny Ray and Frankie Vaughan at numbers one, two and three. Guy was “Singing the Blues,” Johnny Ray was at number two, having hit the top over Christmas with “Just Walking in the Rain.” By February, Buddy Holly and the Crickets would blow people away with “That’ll Be the Day,” but skiffle was still big. Lonnie Donegan had five hits that year, mostly with American folk-blues things like “Cumberland Gap” and “I’m a Gamblin’ Man.”

  Soon there was a new pop music show on television called The Six-Five Special. Looking back it was a very sad program, though now it would probably have a certain kitsch appeal. It had a lousy theme song done by, as I remember, Don Lang and his Frantic Five, but it was on the BBC on Saturday night about six P.M. prime time. Television was shut down after the nine o’clock news, then it was cocoa and bed for the good folk. But despite this, the early legendary Mersey Sound was gradually evolving in the bedrooms of cramped houses in back streets, where young men like George, John and Paul were practicing their craft on cheap instruments. No one really taught them. They copied each other and watched carefully when pop bands played on television. I think Paul got hold of a copy of Bert Weedon’s how-to guitar book, Play in a Day, which practically became a bible.

  Poor old Bert—whom I came to meet—was the butt of many jokes among musicians over the years, but he had a great sense of humor. He’d give new members of a pickup band a lovely bound copy of the sheet music they were to play. “Here,” he’d say, “use this.” When they opened it, all it said inside was “Everything’s in G and Go Man Go!”

  We were part of a wide circle of bands in our age group, in their late teens or early twenties. Billy Fury was one of my brother Barry’s best friends, though his career didn’t take off until he went to London, like Georgie Fame, another northern lad, who started out a weaver in the cotton mills. People like Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer, the Fourmost, the Merseybeats, the Swinging Blue Jeans and a drummer named Pete Best started making names for themselves locally, playing in places like St. Barnabas Hall in Penny Lane, Bootle and Aintree Institutes, Knotty Ash Village Hall, or working men’s social clubs, like the British Railways Social Club where Gerry played quite often.

  The big halls and ballrooms didn’t allow beat groups in until the Beatles made it, though, because beat groups were considered the lowest of the low. Gerry came from Garston, a rough, slummy district. I knew him well because his girlfriend, Pauline, lived a few doors away from us and Pauline’s mum was friends with my mum. Gerry’s band was much in demand, playing every night of the week. During the day he worked hard on the railways with his dad, which goes to show that back then even a “successful” band didn’t make much money. What drove them to play was pure love of music.

  In March of 1957, when he was still sixteen, John formed his skiffle group, first named the Black Jacks, but changed after about a week to the Quarrymen after his school. Soon, a lad named Ivan Vaughn, who was in Paul’s class at school, joined them on the tea-chest bass. A few months later, on June 22, 1957, a big street party was held to celebrate the 550th anniversary of King John’s presentation of the Royal Charter to Liverpool, and the Quarrymen played their first gig on the back of an old coal lorry parked in Rosebery Street in the center of town. I was eleven. A huge crowd of us went, kids and parents, catching the 72 bus downtown to join in the activities and watch the lads play. According to John—when we reminisced years later—they were paid the princely sum of “Sweet fuck-all.”

  It was just as well that they didn’t have to wait for their money because we saw a crowd of Teds arrive at the end of Rosebery Street, bent on a fight. Liverpool was a tough city. Some Teds had flick knives and razors and even meat cleavers hidden away under their drape jackets. They studded their belts with heavy washers that they would file razor-sharp and use as weapons; they inserted razor blades under their lapels, so that if you grabbed them your fingers were badly cut. They would kick someone’s head in with their pointed steel-capped shoes. There were terrible gangs with names like the “Bath Hall Bloods” that would roam around and terrify the living daylights out of us. You would definitely cross the road if you saw them coming. Even their girlfriends, known as Judies, were feared. There was bad blood between the Teds and John. Of course we discussed it—why John? I think it was because there was something about the way John looked and stood and even walked that spelled sex and trouble. He was also very shortsighted but wouldn’t wear his glasses, so it looked as if he was arrogantly outstaring people. The Teds thought he was giving their girls the eye and they weren’t having any of that.

  Another reason the Teds picked on John and were always beating him up was because he dressed like them, but didn’t live the life or fight the fights. He just walked the walk. They also despised the fact that he came from a middle-class home and went to a grammar school, while they were genuinely tough working-class navvys working on the roads, or in factories.

  John, perhaps unintentionally, was a genuine misfit. George was just a bit of a Ted too, but a lot of guys were. At least, they dressed up and had attitude, but in a fairly mild way. It was the rebellious look rather than the violence that appealed. However, things escalated and John became a marked man. The Teds all knew him. They seemed to recognize him at a hundred paces.

  That day, the crowd split as the Teds shoved their way through. The Quarrymen spotted the gang, but continued playing to the end of the song. We were all on tenterhooks, convinced that there would be a bloodbath. Leaving it almost too late, I saw John and the lads grab their equipment and climb off the parked lorry, through the open window of the house behind—number 84, the home of Mrs. Roberts, one of the event’s organizers. We kids were in awe. John was quite a hero because of his incredibly cool appearance and daring exploits and here was another one being acted out before our eyes. After the Teds had slunk off out of hearing, we cheered like mad. Mrs. Roberts gave the Quarrymen a nice tea with scones and sandwiches until it was safe to leave via the back alley.

  They had enormous stamina, as did most of the fledgling groups. None of them had any money, and a car or van to get them about was usually out of the question. They went to gigs by public transport—even the drummer had to drag his cumbersome gear behind him. A few groups had what they grandly referred to as “managers”—older pals, d
ads or brothers, who would sometimes arrange the bookings, but they were never managers in the proper sense. Very few of them had phones and often they would pedal around to fix things on their bicycles. But, despite all the logistical difficulties, by August, the Quarrymen had graduated to their first-ever gig at the Cavern Club, which at that time was a jazz cellar. I wasn’t around: I was spending the summer at the seaside with my aunties as usual. Paul was at Boy Scout camp and George was at Butlin’s holiday camp with his family.

  A few weeks after the coal lorry episode, the Quarrymen did a skiffle gig at Wilson Hall. Afterward, John and Pete Shotton were riding the bus home when a gang of Teds caught sight of John on the top deck at the front. They gave chase and leapt on at the next stop. They weren’t after Pete and he ducked out of sight down behind a seat. John fought his way through the the confined space and fell down the stairs. The Teds dashed after him and jumped off the bus, believing that their quarry had escaped down the street. Pete sat there, fearing the worst, but when he went downstairs at his stop to get off, he saw John sitting very still and very quietly between two fat women. When John and Pete got off the bus they swung down the road, laughing, and the story became a sort of legend to us boys.

  But it wasn’t a game. When the Silver Beetles played at a hall in the rural Cheshire village of Neston, on the far side of the Mersey from Liverpool, a teenage boy was trampled to death in a surge of Teds toward the stage and once again the band had to fight their way out to escape through the emergency doors. Paul and George were both beaten up one night at the Hambleton Hall in Huyton; and John was always being battered. Rough areas like Litherland, Bootle and Garston were the heartlands of the Teds’ domains, where they ruled supreme. For a long time, these thugs were an ugly British phenomenon. They dressed nattily but they were dangerous and we tried not to go anywhere near them.

  John was okay, considered crazy maybe, but not violent. While the rest of us were still at the average schoolboy stage, John Lennon was something else. Not only was he considered a juvenile delinquent, but he had a propensity for wreaking havoc, all in the name of angst and art. “If you hang out with that John Lennon,” mums—including mine—would warn their sons, “you’ll get into trouble!” In fact, everybody probably did think that John was headed for Borstal, or even jail, and he did little to improve his image.

  I can still see John to this day, in his Quarryman period, summer of 1957, sitting on the roof of Halewood Village Hall where our youth club was run, flames shooting up, smoke swirling all around him. We kids were wide-eyed, watching, waiting for the roof to fall in and John to be fried to a crisp—while the vicar was demanding ladders and buckets of water and shouting at John to come down. Soon there was a large crowd, with John the focus of attention. When the fire engines showed up, John started a kind of pyromaniacal dance on the roof, cackling his head off. Of course, he had started the fire. John was always starting something—and that was his fascination for us. He was the rebel we longed to be. We could count on John putting on a good show, something we could later laugh about among ourselves. We just never knew what he would do next.

  At a young age John saw and heard things that nobody else did. Voices in his head and faces reflected in mirrors would talk to him. It was a bit like Snow White, where the wicked queen would stare into the magic mirror and ask, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” People were always talking about John. He was a born leader, a wild, yet charismatic boy, and the stories spread through a mixture of rumor, gossip and even John’s own mumblings. At times, he spoke in riddles, his conversation disjointed and almost incomprehensible, and when you were totally confused, he would laugh and go off on a tangent or say something really wise or witty or sarcastic. You never knew if he was telling the truth, and it didn’t much matter. He was simply mesmerizing.

  Everyone had their stories about him, in awe because he seemed to know so much about so many things and was almost fearless. Pete Shotton had his stories, Ivan Vaughan had his stories—we all had our stories. In later years when we grew close, John told me how he used to think he was going crazy. At home he said he would gaze into the mirror and ask when he would become rich and famous. “Soon John, soon,” the mirror would seductively reply. The visions were huge and all-encompassing and instilled in John the absolute conviction of his own greatness. He often said he was different from the rest of us—probably from another planet. I used to sometimes see him staring into the mirror in dressing rooms when he combed his quiff and there was something different about his expression. The other lads would preen and fix their hair without thought, like we all did, but John would seem to go into a trance. Then he’d shake himself out of it. He was like the Fonz before the Fonz existed.

  He could well have been psychic, or even the genius he was later thought to be, but to adults he was always just a pain in the arse at that time. He portrayed himself as a natural rebel, but I think he was quite unhappy. In fact, you could never really get close to John. Even when he was talking to you there was always a sense of isolation, a cutoff point beyond which he didn’t go, and you didn’t go.

  His sense of isolation originated because his parents had split up when John was five and he was never told whether they were alive or dead. His Aunt Mimi and Uncle George—who owned a dairy—brought him up quite strictly. When John discovered that his mother lived within half a mile of him on the other side of the golf course, a few hundred yards from the McCartney’s, he was shocked.

  John got into the habit of dropping by Julia’s house so he could spend some time in a rowdy, happy-go-lucky family atmosphere he missed, and at the same time, get to know his two younger half sisters, Julia and Jacqui. When he realized the extent of her natural talents, John almost hero-worshipped his mother. She was a brilliant pianist with a lovely voice and she taught John to play banjo, having been taught by his wayward father, Fred—who in turn had been taught by his own father. John’s Irish grandfather had been a professional in a black-and-white minstrel show traveling around America. As well as the piano and the banjo, Julia could play the harmonium and the harmonica. She could sing, paint and act—all abilities that John discovered he shared. The banjo seemed to give John direction in life and he practiced all the time, imagining that he would become the next George Formby, a music hall star. (I don’t know if George copied John, but he also loved George Formby and in turn, George would teach his son, Dhani, the ukulele.) It’s all a wonderful legacy of passed-down music and humor.

  But guitars were cooler and John wanted one. When he was fourteen he saw an advertisement for a guitar costing ten quid by mail order in Reveille, a trashy weekly newspaper. It was a Spanish-style flat-topped acoustic Gallotone Champion guitar made by the Gallo Company of South Africa and “guaranteed not to split.” Julia gave him the money and John sent away for it, giving her address because he knew Mimi would disapprove. (There is an interesting story connected with Gallo, which was a small family-run company. Years later, when the boys formed Apple Records they didn’t always distribute through EMI around the world but did a country-by-country deal. At the time, there were embargoes on trading with South Africa due to their apartheid laws, but, believing that music crossed class, color and creed and that there were no barriers in the music world, illegal as it was, Ron Kass flew out and did a deal with Peter Gallo to distribute Apple records. Uniquely—something that happened nowhere else in the world—Gallo was allowed to put their own local bands—in Swahili or whatever—on the Apple label. These South African Apple records are as rare as hen’s teeth and very few collectors even know of their existence. A further footnote: Peter Gallo comes to London every year and we always meet up for a drink.)

  John still didn’t know how to play his Gallotone properly, and Julia tuned it in the banjo way. She also encouraged John and his friends to come round and make music. Colin Hanton, Eric Griffiths, Rod Davies, Pete Shotton and Len Garry were all teenage boys who had improvised skiffle instruments, like a washboard from o
ne of their garden sheds, and a tea-chest bass strung with ordinary string tied to a broom handle. Their favorite place to play was the bathroom for its good echo. It was discussed when they were playing their gigs.

  “It doesn’t sound the same without the echo,” John would often complain, and the lads in the group would discuss how they could obtain the effect in a village hall or workingmen’s club. Of course it was impossible in those days.

  In the middle of 1957 skiffle and the Rock Island Line segued into Bill Haley’s rockabilly-based “Rock Around the Clock,” which segued into “Jailhouse Rock.” Rock ’n’ roll had arrived. Among the hip youth, tight jeans and a quiff replaced flannel bags and a short back-and-sides. I was cool; I dressed in all the latest gear, from jeans to leathers, and followed the trend with my hairstyle. In one respect, I was different from many local lads, because as soon as I got into long pants, I was also into suits, nicely ironed shirts and ties.

  At the age of fourteen George formed the Rebels with one of his brothers and a few mates from school. (After the Egmond split George bought a Hofner President, which he sold to Ray Ennis of the Swinging Blue Jeans. And later, in Hamburg, he bought a Hofner Club 40, like John’s.) Not long after the Rebels formed, the news went out that they were playing at the British Legion Club in Speke! It sounded so unlikely that we rushed around on our bikes to have a look. But it was true. The Rebels had gone to audition but since nobody else had shown up, they got the gig. It wasn’t so funny when they had to play all night and their tender fingers, unused to playing so much, started to crack and bleed. Sore or not, proud as Punch, George waved the ten-bob note they had been paid—between about six of them. Next morning, he was still full of it and told Paul on the school bus about their triumphant debut.