The three-tunnel vaulted storage cellar had been used as an air-raid shelter during the Second World War, now it was vacant, and a young jazz fanatic, 21-year-old Alan Sytner, had seen the possibilities. The Sytner family took holidays abroad at a time when few others had the funds or imagination to see beyond the seaside; Alan was an habitué of Le Caveau jazz club in Paris, and when he shone a torch around the gloomy basement at 10 Mathew Street his imagination gleamed. “I was seeing a replica of Le Caveau. As Mathew Street looked like a little narrow street in the Latin Quarter in Paris, I felt I was bringing the Left Bank to Liverpool.”7 It was a heroic decision, as was his strict no-alcohol stance. Selling booze would have introduced problems Sytner didn’t need, and he declined on moral grounds the temptation to intoxicate young people for profit. Anyone wanting to drink could obtain a pass-out and try the two pubs within yards of the club: the Grapes and the White Star. Most of the musicians spent much of the evenings in one or the other, threading their way back through the Cavern throng when it was time to climb on stage.
The Quarry Men first played the Cavern on a date unrecorded. Many of the local skiffle groups performed as interval attractions, not mentioned in the venue’s Liverpool Echo adverts, and no club diary from that period has surfaced. John Lennon’s combo was getting itself together through the first two or three months of 1957. Rod Davis, an academic Quarry Bank schoolboy and former Sunday School classmate, had bought a banjo and joined them, playing alongside John and Eric Griffiths (guitars), Pete Shotton (washboard), Colin Hanton (drums) and Ivan Vaughan (bass). Wrapped up in his studies, however, Ivan didn’t stop long, and Len Garry—one of Ivan’s schoolfriends from Liverpool Institute, whom he’d carefully introduced into John’s gang a year or so earlier—stepped up to the tea-chest in his place. Nigel Walley was given the job of manager on an even share of whatever pittance they rarely received, and at a cost of 7s 6d had fifty business cards made by a Woolton printer:
Country · Western · Rock ’n’ Roll · Skiffle
The Quarry Men
OPEN FOR ENGAGEMENTS
LEOSDENE, VALE ROAD, WOOLTON, LIVERPOOL.
Little would be remembered of their Cavern debut, of how long they played (thirty minutes maximum, probably less), of which songs they performed, of what they wore or how they went down, but there is one credible and enduring anecdote. “We were doing skiffle numbers,” says Walley, “but then John started singing a rock and roll song. Alan Sytner sent a note up: ‘Cut out the bloody rock.’ ” Clearly, John Lennon on stage was the same as John Lennon off: he did what he wanted to do, and if it upset people that was their problem.
Bill Haley’s tour coincided with other musical landmark events in Britain. The week he played in Liverpool saw the first great breakthrough in the presentation of rock music on TV, courtesy of the BBC, which launched Six-Five Special on Saturday evenings. The show’s producer and presiding genius was Jack Good, an Oxford graduate and Shakespearean actor-director whose elemental enthusiasm for excitement had shifted toward rock after witnessing a cinema audience going wild over Rock Around the Clock. Good looked and sounded posh but he was the archetypal rebel, and he battled with the BBC to make Six-Five Special as exciting as possible, setting the template for rock on the box: singers and musicians performing while teenagers danced around them.
The week Haley arrived in Britain, two recordings of “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O” were in the top ten of the NME chart at the same time—Lonnie Donegan’s cover version (bought by John Lennon) and the Vipers’ ”original.” Thirteen months after “Rock Island Line” had kicked it all off, the first week of February 1957 was definitively the start of “the skiffle boom.” Groups were forming everywhere. Teenage boys nicked, begged or borrowed old washboards from mums, aunts and grannies, and they rummaged in attics, sheds and shops for tea-chests and broom handles.* They got guitars wherever and however possible, though demand far outstripped supply, emptying shops in an instant. Melody Maker reported on February 16, “The guitar is enjoying a boom period that surprises even the instrument manufacturers.” All this youthful activity was watched by adults who were bemused but didn’t mind really because “well, what harm can it do?”
The Quarry Men were one of scores of Liverpool skiffle groups—perhaps as many as two hundred—strumming and plucking away in every suburb. Merseyside was suddenly a disorderly young male voice choir finding joy in the rhythmic work- and prison-songs of the American South. And also, since it was rarely just about skiffle, a shed-load of thumping US rock and roll.
With a more or less settled lineup, Quarry Men rehearsals were now taking place fairly regularly, and ever chaotically, at drummer Colin’s house … in guitarist Eric’s house … at banjo picker Rod’s house … in washboard strummer Pete’s air-raid shelter … in manager Nigel’s house … and most regularly of all in singer, guitarist and leader John’s mother’s house. They didn’t rehearse at Mendips because Mimi emphatically didn’t want the place full of kids, and also had to consider her lodgers who needed to study, but they were warmly welcomed by Julia, who was typically accommodating. Sessions often took place in the Dykinses’ none too spacious bathroom, John needing to hear his voice bounce off the shiny tiles, approximating the slap echo sound Sam Phillips had given Carl Perkins and Elvis at Sun Studio, Memphis.
It’s hard to imagine the Quarry Men’s sound being particularly impressive—Rod was a beginner on banjo, Colin was a novice on drums, the tea-chest bass was a crude instrument even in the most skillful of hands, and Pete was unmusical even with a washboard. Luckily, being skiffle, none of this mattered very much. John and Eric both had cheap guitars and could only play the banjo chords Julia was showing them, using four of the available six strings (they tuned to the fifth and John left the bottom E string loose, flapping about). Inevitably, this produced a thinner, more trebly sound than guitar chords. Aware of the problem, John and Eric found a guitar teacher in Hunt’s Cross (south of Woolton, midway between there and Speke), though the tuition was definitively short-lived. As John would recall, “I had one lesson, and it was so much like school that I gave up.”8
Richy Starkey had come to much the same conclusion. Practicing at home on his old secondhand kit from Romford not only annoyed the neighbors, it was deathly boring. You couldn’t drum songs on your own. Because he lacked any technique, and as it would be a chance to play, he was encouraged to have lessons. “I went to this little man in a house [who] played drums, got a manuscript and wrote it all down. I had about three lessons and never went back—I just couldn’t be bothered. It was too routine for me, all those paradiddles and that, I couldn’t stand it.”9
It’s likely these lessons highlighted a difficulty too, because when the man saw Richy playing he would have noticed a problem. It went back to his infancy, when superstitious Granny Starkey, convinced the boy’s left-handedness meant he was possessed by the devil, forced him into being right-handed. The mysterious work of “the voodoo queen of Liverpool” was effective when it came to changing his writing hand, but behind a drum kit his genetic programming was not so easily erased: it was custom to lead with the right but he always had to lead with his left. The combined forces of nature and Granny Annie’s meddling would, in time, give Richy Starkey an unusual, actually unique drumming style. Once asked to define it, he called it “some sort of rock lope.”10
Skiffle therefore arrived in Richy’s life with miracle timing: it was music that embraced the boy beginner. He already liked “Rock Island Line,” and “Take This Hammer” (by Ken Colyer’s Skiffle Group); now, with the boom, he became another of those hundreds of Liverpool lads rushing to join a group. While the Quarry Men were a grammar-school group, the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group were a works group—the house skifflers at H. Hunt & Son. Clayton (quickly adopted as a stage name) was really Edward “Eddie” Myles, two years Richy’s senior, an apprentice fitter at Hunt’s and already an accomplished musician, probably one of the best natural guitarists on Merseyside. He also happened
to be Richy’s next-door neighbor, living at 11 Admiral Grove. When Eddie put the word around that he was forming a group, enough of the other young lads at the factory stepped forward to fill the places: Peter Healey (second guitarist), John Docherty or sometimes Micky McGrellis (washboard) and Roy Trafford (tea-chest bass). And there was no more obvious contender for drums than Roy’s best mate, as he remembers. “Richy was always banging on the backs of chairs or tapping old coconut shells. He’d play on upturned biscuit tins with keys, he shook milk bottle-tops—he was always making a noise and he always had drumsticks very close. It was in him, and he had great rhythm.”11
Getting the group together for rehearsal presented no difficulty at all. Come lunchtime, the Windsor Street windows would rattle to the sound of skiffle. Roy Trafford again: “It was only half an hour dinner, a quick sandwich and down the cellar. We couldn’t wait to play the skiffle stuff, we just loved it. The other workmen were there and we’d play whatever songs came into our heads, sitting on bags of wood shavings. We were rough, but it got better.”
Perhaps it was because Myles lived next door that the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group were able to grab additional rehearsal time at Richy’s house. (At least this neighbor wasn’t going to be offended by the noise.) Everyone somehow squeezed into the truly minuscule front room at number 10, even spectators. As Richy would remember, Elsie’s best mate Annie Maguire liked to predict that one day he’d reach the very top of the entertainment tree, saying, “See you on the Palladium, son. See your name in lights!” It was, of course, ridiculously unlikely. The venue was the established pinnacle of all British show business, even more so now that Lew Grade’s ATV channel was beaming Britain’s most popular television show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium, live from there every week. Yet with Annie Maguire’s encouragement, even though it was a joke really, Richy nurtured the dream of making it to London and waving from the theater’s famous rotating stage at the end of the TV show. “There was nothing bigger in the world than making it to the Palladium [so] I’d say, ‘Yeah, sure Annie, that’s where we’re going to go!’ ”12
If the internationally renowned London theater was the top of the tree, the stump was the Labour Club on the corner of Peel Street, Dingle. The first public performance of the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group happened here one evening in spring 1957 and it was a debut to remember. Playing for your workmates at dinnertime was one thing, it was quite another to feel the adrenaline rush of performing in front of people—people who expected not only to be entertained but to dance. As Richy would recall, “We had no idea you had to keep the same tempo all the way through. We used to start off performing Maggie May at the right tempo and end up like an express train, we were all so excited. People had to dance to this!”13
He was playing without his full kit, unable to get around what would be his predicament for a long time to come. It was impossible for Richy to drag his drums around Liverpool: he couldn’t afford taxis, and the journey to many venues necessitated changes of bus. Also, he well knew that no matter which end of Admiral Grove he exited, the moment he stepped out onto High Park Street or North Hill Street carrying his precious kit, he’d be set on by Teds—even by his own gang—and that would be the end of it. So Richy started playing in public with the bare minimum of gear, whatever he could run with: a snare drum on a hi-hat stand, hit with sticks or more often brushes; and because carrying a drum stool was impractical, he stood. Nothing for this boy ever came easy. If he did get to play a full kit it would be someone else’s, begged off the drummer of another group on the bill. It was rough going, but, as he was the first to realize, good learning experience, and he was hungry for that.
The Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group did many of their early bookings for nothing, so great was their love of playing. This first one, in the Dingle, was for £1 a man—but, as Richy remembered, “People were drinking, and when the time came to be paid the manager of the club was so drunk he refused to pay us. It was such a letdown. My mother was there—everyone’s mother was there—and all the aunties, and they got on the manager’s case. He paid us two days later.”
• • •
Paul McCartney and George Harrison weren’t in a group but both were certainly big skiffle fans. First it was Lonnie and now the Vipers. Paul headed back to his old stamping ground one evening, to the Speke estate, and followed George up to his bedroom where they tried to make sense of his guitar manual. Its technicalities had sapped even George’s considerable reserves of patience: unable to work it out, he’d become angry and flung it into a cupboard. When he and Paul got their heads together they managed to glean some chords from it, C, F and G7, enough to be able to play “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O.” George only had his ropey old Egmond guitar and Paul didn’t have a guitar at all; Paul remembers they tried to make one, but never finished it.14
It was in this time frame that Paul formed a closer friendship with Ian James, an Institute boy (in his year) he’d known since 1954. Ian was also into rock and skiffle and he’d recently been bought an acoustic guitar by his grandparents, at whose house he lived in the Dingle. (Every guitar had a maker’s name: his was a Rex.) The two boys became good pals on the strength of it. While they tended not to see each other in the evenings, because they lived some distance apart, Paul often went to Ian’s house for an hour or two after school—they walked there together down the hill from the Institute—and Ian sometimes went to Forthlin Road at weekends, taking his guitar with him.
Ian James held a triple attraction for Paul: he was an intelligent, decent and affable lad, he had some rock records, and he had a guitar—an unbeatable combination.
In the front room at home I had a table-top portable record player, three speed. I remember playing “Blueberry Hill” by Fats Domino over and over, just the first line and then I’d pick up the needle and put it back at the start. I also had Elvis Presley’s first album, which we played time after time after time, with “That’s All Right Mama,” “Trying to Get to You,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You),” “Mystery Train” … Elvis was the one to copy, he was the hero. He had everything: the charisma, the looks, the voice. Frank Sinatra had only one style but Elvis could do anything—gospel, blues, rock and roll, romantic ballads. There was nobody else like him. Paul and I talked about Elvis all the time.15
The Rex guitar was ever at hand. Ian showed and reinforced to Paul those three chord fundamentals that would get him started, C, F and G or G7, the basis for pretty much every song they loved. “With those chords you could play most of the rock and skiffle stuff,” Ian says, having found what every budding guitarist in Britain was simultaneously thrilled to be discovering. Though naturally left-handed, Paul learned the chords as a right-hander—but still he was a very fast learner, a musical natural. Ian watched as Paul whooshed past him in no time at all.† But better though he was, Paul always had the frustration of going home to a trumpet and a piano. Somehow, he now knew, he had to get a guitar of his own.
John Lennon’s first own guitar, to replace the one he’d borrowed, was bought for him by Julia. It’s been said (though it’s far from certain) he asked Mimi to buy it, but with his exams looming she was never likely to say yes. More likely he just asked Julia. (Nigel Walley remembers, “If John needed new socks or a new shirt or some vests he’d say, ‘I’ll go down Mum’s and get them.’ ” Julia had also just bought her beloved “Stinker” his first colored shirt, checked red and white.) Because the skiffle boom had temporarily stripped guitars from the shops, retailers were having to source them with greater cunning. John’s was bought from a south London mail-order firm advertising in the popular lowbrow weekly magazine Reveille. The ad appeared in the issue of March 7, 1957:
ROCK ’N ROLL GUITARS, REAL PROFESSIONAL, SENT FOR 20/-
That was enough to grab the eye, but the small print uncovered the real cost: it was £1 down and then twenty-one fortnightly payments of 20s 3d, for a total of £22 5s; or one instant payment of 19 guineas pl
us 5s carriage, total £20 4s. This was expensive. John (who always remembered it costing £10) later said it was bought “on the never-never,” which must mean Julia was committing to a shade over a pound from Bobby Dykins’ wage-packet every two weeks all the way to the start of 1958.
For the mail-order company, the key was to find stocks of guitars in countries where rock had yet to catch fire. John’s was shipped from Durban, South Africa. Though the ad made it sound like a dream machine, the Gallotone Champion was actually three-quarter size, made from laminates instead of solid wood, and its general tone and playability were poor. A sticker inside, visible through the soundhole, said GUARANTEED NOT TO SPLIT and (in Afrikaans) GEWAARBORG OM NIE TE BARS NIE. John conceded “it was a bit crummy” but played it constantly, regardless of its quality or Mimi’s curt words. A virtuoso he was not: “All I ever wanted to do was vamp,” he’d recall. “I only learned to play to back myself [singing].”16
John wrote his first song at this time—a calypso. Between the US and Britain, the flow of musical fads was strictly one-way: America never followed British trends and so stayed largely unaware of skiffle, but Britain always picked up on America’s, and as the current obsession of the US music business was Caribbean calypso so it was confidently expected to arrive on British soil any day. CALYPSOMANIA! “It’s on the way, but will it stay?” pondered the Daily Mirror on March 21, 1957. An insatiable reader of the press, John was well aware of its coming. “The first six months I got interested in rock, when Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ came out in England they were saying ‘rock is going to die—is calypso going to take over?’ ”17 John’s first song was called “Calypso Rock”—though this is probably all that’ll ever be known about it. The composition he usually talked about as his first was a subsequent piece; “Calypso Rock” he mentioned in only two interviews, and, apart from the title, all he said was that he could recall nothing more of it. He’d no means of recording and hadn’t thought to come up with a way of memorizing his ideas. “The trouble was, I could never remember the song the next morning. What I had to learn to do was play the same phrase over and over again until it stuck and then go on to the next bit.”18
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