It needed some fixing: the top E string rattled in the tailpiece hole designed for the bottom E string, so Paul shaved a matchstick and wedged it in. There was only one problem he couldn’t remedy: the scratchplate (pick-guard) was in the wrong place, above rather than below the strings, but this didn’t affect the playing … which he now did, constantly. Mike McCartney has said of Paul and his first guitar, “He would get lost in another world. It was useless talking to him—I had better conversations with brick walls.” Paul played the guitar everywhere, even on the bus. At home he played it in the bath and sitting on the toilet. “The fine acoustic of the toilet area was always very appealing to me. And it was also very private, about the only private place in the house. I used to sit there for hours—there and the bathroom. Dad would shout, ‘Paul, get off that toilet!’ [And I’d reply] ‘I’m practicing!’ ”4
If the Quarry Men had bookings in this period, Paul wasn’t part of them. Rod Davis has a recollection of Paul dropping in to see a group rehearsal at (of all places) Mimi’s house, and Eric Griffiths says the group all went to Paul’s house one afternoon for a rehearsal together—something Paul has never mentioned. (Like almost everything to do with the Quarry Men, solid information is lacking.) The invitation to join them had come out of the blue for Paul, who’d never expressed an interest in being in a group. He had one ambition—“to be like Elvis,” to sing with a guitar and be a great star.5 His need to impress John Lennon had been merely to show off what he could do, to stir someone whose own talent he admired. It wasn’t an audition.
Paul had two sort-of partners at this time. Ian James says he and Paul struck up an informal musical duo: “We used to take our guitars around to parties and play a few numbers. Have guitar will travel—wherever we went our guitars went too. We played songs from that first Elvis LP: ‘Trying to Get to You,’ ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy,’ ‘Mystery Train’—the tendency was to go for the faster or more raucous ones. Nobody took any notice of us but I don’t recall being thrown out of anywhere.” His other collaborator was brother Mike, who didn’t have an instrument but was game to add harmony. Getting their voices together was something they’d started a year or so earlier, when Disney’s Lady and the Tramp was first on release. According to Mike, they enjoyed harmonizing on “The Siamese Cat Song,” which was their “turn” at family parties.6 Paul’s acquisition of the Zenith coincided with the arrival in the British charts of the Everly Brothers’ ”Bye Bye Love”; Paul became Don and Mike was Phil as they learned the parts together, Disney cartoon fun relegated in favor of this more mature piece.
On the last day of the school year, Paul took his Zenith into Liverpool Institute for the first time and treated his mates to the Little Richard act. “All the class gathered round as I stood on the desk and did ‘Tutti Frutti,’ I think it was.”7 Although Paul was friends with George Harrison, enough sometimes to visit one another’s houses and play music, year-by-year divisions at school held strong: boys stayed strictly within their own forms. Paul and George weren’t great mates—when Ivan Vaughan asked Paul to go to Woolton fete, Paul didn’t think to extend the invitation to George, no more than George had asked Paul to be a Rebel in their one and only performance.
This same last day of term, while Paul was doing his Little Richard act, George may well have been entertaining his own crowd. (He did in 1958. It’s not clear whether it happened in 1957 too.) It was around this time that George ditched his ropey old Egmond and splashed out on his first really good guitar. Though younger than Paul, he was always at least one step ahead guitar-wise. The new model was another acoustic, a Hofner President, endorsed in music press ads by Tommy Steele and on sale for a handsome 32 guineas.8 It represented a considerable upgrade, one careful owner having no plans to drive it beyond 25 Upton Green, but George’s passion for guitars had so eclipsed everything in his life that the price didn’t seem to matter, provided he could pay it off. He now spent most of his school lessons drawing impressive little sketches of guitars in his exercise book—cello guitars with f-holes (like his new President) and little solid-bodied guitars with cutaways—and when he wasn’t doing this he was imagining himself playing one: “[I was] looking out the window, thinking about how I could be practicing a guitar, while they were trying to teach me Pythagoras.”9
The curtain came down on John Lennon’s five eventful years at Quarry Bank on July 24. The O-Level results wouldn’t be through for another few weeks but Mimi wasn’t waiting: she went up to Quarry Bank for a meeting with the headmaster. Mr. Pobjoy made the error of asking her what she was going to do with John after he left, and she shot back, “No, what are you going to do with him? You’ve had him five years, you should have his future ready.” The head had just one thought, the one pressed on him by his enthused English master Philip Burnett: that John should go to Liverpool College of Art. Pobjoy relayed this to Mimi and offered to write a letter of reference. “I had to say that he was ‘suitable’ without doing too much violence to my conscience,” he would recall.10
John wasn’t especially keen on the idea of going to college, but he had no other plans and it would put off having to work for a few more years. In their final meeting, Quarry Bank’s headmaster told him frankly that if he didn’t go then he may as well “give up life.” John bristled at that, but agreed to assemble a small portfolio of material and go along for an interview, which he did in his late Uncle George’s suit, shirt and tie. “I thought it would be a crowd of old men but that I should make the effort to try and make something of myself … [I had] an idea I might finish up drawing gorgeous girls for toothpaste posters.”11 A letter arrived at Mendips soon afterward, offering him a position on a four- to five-year course. His tuition fees would be free until the academic year 1959–60 and Mimi agreed to finance all his materials and daily expenses, and also to continue to provide at home. She’d come to John’s rescue again, and tied herself to maintaining him to some extent until he was 20. This wasn’t the future she’d foreseen when he started at Quarry Bank in 1952, but in the words of the popular phrase she herself uttered with some frequency, any old port in a storm.
Sales of skiffle records had petered out by autumn 1957 as the genre exhausted itself, but grassroots interest remained, especially on Merseyside: whatever the musical fashion, it’s always first in/last out in Liverpool. Richy Starkey was getting good experience as the drummer with the Eddie Clayton group, whose prowess as one of the best in town was emphasized when they qualified for the final of the Cavern’s summer skiffle competition on the evening of July 31, along with another local group, the Bluegenes. It was a big night for the new club, including too the Miss Cavern bathing beauty contest, which spectacle may be the cause of no one being able to recall the winning group. Another could be the drink: the Cavern was always a night on the town for Richy and Roy. As Richy would say, “At the Cavern we’d get a pass-out, go to the pub—and then go back in and pass out.”12 Though underage, they knew where they’d be all right. “The Lisbon on Victoria Street and the Beaconsfield on North John Street were our regulars,” says Roy. “We drank black velvet—pints of cider and Guinness mixed, and rum and blacks [blackcurrant] if we had any money. You think you can drink it all at that age—molten lead, anything—but we were only young lads and we’d be falling asleep when we went back in the Cavern. I didn’t smoke but Richy did. He tried to get me on it but I just didn’t like it. He hardly ever had one out of his hand.”
One week later, on August 7, the Quarry Men played the Cavern again, and this time—for the first time—they were named in the Liverpool Echo ads.† Rod Davis wasn’t there because he’d gone on holiday with his parents, and come September there’d be an unspoken parting of the ways. Where once there’d been four Quarry Men at Quarry Bank High School now he was the only one; out of sight, out of mind, Rod’s days in the group were over. Also, Pete Shotton was making one of his last appearances. John had a way of making it plain if he felt someone wasn’t up to scratch musically: in Pete’s case, he engineered
a blazing argument while they were out riding their bikes. Then, when the group played at a private party, they both got completely drunk and John smashed the washboard over Pete’s head. Its center section was pushed right out, leaving it framed around Shotton’s neck. “That solves that then, Pete,” the leader declared. Their great friendship—the bulwark in John’s life since the year he’d turned six—would remain intact, but it was weakened by events. Now they’d left Quarry Bank, their lives headed in separate directions: John went to art college and Pete into the police force, a career choice that came as a complete shock to John, who greatly scorned it. And now that he was leaving the group, Pete’s place at John’s side on stage was taken by Paul McCartney. John and Pete would never forget the hundreds of great times they’d shared as the very best of buddies, but they were approaching the end of a chapter. And the Quarry Men, a six-piece group when Paul was invited to join them, was now a five-piece group with him: John, Eric, Paul, Len and Colin.
This Cavern booking would have been Paul’s Quarry Men debut but for him being away with the Boy Scouts at summer camp—another ten days of wet feet, wind and Woodbines. The 19th City troop’s destination this year was the Peak District—Callow Farm, Hathersage, Derbyshire—and both McCartney brothers went. Paul (inevitably) carted his Zenith along with his sleeping bag and tin mug. Almost as soon as they’d pitched tents, Mike had an altercation with an oak tree, badly breaking his arm; he was taken to the hospital in Sheffield while Paul remained at the camp and entertained around the fire with Elvis’s “Trying to Get to You.”13
Mike was in the hospital four weeks, his plastered arm in a sling, and on the day of his release—the last full week of the school holidays—Jim arrived in Sheffield with Paul and revealed they were all heading straight off to Butlin’s. Bett and Mike Robbins had fixed them seven days at Filey, on Yorkshire’s east coast. Both were working there for the summer, Mike as a Redcoat and Bett as general factotum: it was her jolly voice that began each day with “Wakey-wakey! Rise and shine, campers!” crackling over the Tannoy.
Ever the keen photographer, Mike operated the camera single-handedly to take a fascinating photo of Paul on Filey beach with Bett Robbins and her infant son Ted. Paul is perched on Ted’s pushchair and playing the much-traveled Zenith. The photo could be the closest taken to the date he met John Lennon, showing a 15-year-old who’s come through his chubby period and is looking good: slim and like a real teenager—no longer a boy, not yet a man. He’s wearing his white sports coat and his hair is piled high off the forehead, a keen youngster singing Elvis into the North Sea breeze at Filey Bay.14
A hero to the McCartney boys, Mike Robbins supervised the thrice-weekly morning auditions for campers wishing to try their luck in Butlin’s National Talent Contest (sponsored by the People newspaper). Paul, probably in his white sports coat, urged Mike to go up with him, but Mike, technically too young anyway at 13, didn’t feel like it, pointing out that he’d look a bit of a berk with his arm in a sling. Paul walked alone to the stage with his guitar, but just as Robbins was about to introduce him he whispered something … whereupon Robbins announced, “This youngster is going to be joined on stage by his brother, a lad with a broken arm, so give him an extra round of applause!” Against his better judgment, realizing Paul had yet again engineered just what he wanted, Mike went up and joined him. Robbins urged the audience to “give a big hand for the McCartney Brothers” and they went into their “Bye Bye Love” duet. Then, says Mike, “As soon as we’d finished and Paul’s confidence had returned he shoved me off and went straight into his Little Richard routine.”15 On whatever grounds the contestants were judged, the McCartneys—single-act or duo—got no further in the competition. However, it was here, around the last day of August 1957, at the Gaiety Theatre on site at Butlin’s, Filey—rather than in the Cavern, Liverpool—that Paul McCartney first appeared on stage as a rock and roller.16
The Butlin’s week came at a crunch time for Paul. He’d received his GCE results, and having taken Spanish and Latin a year earlier than most boys, he passed only the former. In the coming school year he’d go into the Removes, not progressing into the Lower Sixth like so many of his friends and contemporaries. Effectively, he was being kept back, stuck with boys a year younger, and he deeply resented both this and his lack of choice in the matter. In fact, Paul so hated it he considered quitting school completely—and being 15, he could have done. Jim felt sure Paul had failed Latin deliberately because he’d made such a strong point about it being necessary for university entrance—a proud attainment for a working-class family. “He was always good at Latin but when I said he’d need the Latin for university he started slacking up. When he knew what was in my head Paul tried to stop himself doing well.”17 Jim was certain Paul should stay on at school, and the Institute felt the same; while this made Paul think even harder about leaving, he didn’t because he couldn’t imagine what job he would do, and he wanted as much time as possible to play guitar.
Paul later described being in the Removes with younger boys as “horrible,” but it’s no coincidence that from September 1957 he suddenly became much closer to George Harrison.18 (George was now in class U5E. Paul was in RB, as were mates Neil Aspinall and Len Garry.) The curtain that had kept them apart was lifted, and there was a general shift in all Paul’s school relationships. Separated in their daily activities, Paul and Ian James lost the closeness in their friendship and it became Paul and George instead. Ian was surprised by this. “They seemed totally different personalities. George always seemed a bit moody, morose, whereas Paul was lighthearted—he probably could have been a comedian if he’d wanted, he can tell a tale so well. George was nothing like that. I found it really strange that they were friends. He and Arthur Kelly were hard-knocks: George always walked round with long hair and wore drainpipe trousers to school, and probably beetle-crusher shoes.”19
Paul didn’t replace Arthur Kelly as George’s closest mate but was happily admitted to the circle, as Arthur remembers:
Paul was great. He was full of fun and desperate to be Elvis. He did all the hair and everything, and he had a similar facial look, only he was prettier than Elvis. He didn’t sag off like George and I did but we’d always see him in smokers’ corner, and he drew great cartoons of members of staff—as soon as you looked at them you knew who they were. I stood next to Paul in assembly. There’d be the lesson for the day and the headmaster’s speech, when he named whoever he wanted to thrash with his cane, and in every hymn we sang I never heard Paul sing the melody—he always did the harmony line. I used to stand there and think, “How the fuck does he do that?”20
Paul and George’s friendship was not a perfect fit. Paul had a need to remind George, one way or another and often without much subtlety, that he was “nine months older,” ensuring George didn’t forget who held the aces. George, meanwhile, was still hitting out when he felt the need. Living on the Speke estate was keeping him “handy,” as the saying went. One day Paul was in the playground with Keith Ritson (“Ritter”)—a boy his own age but now in the Lower Sixth—when George wandered along and Paul introduced them. For no reason, or a reason Paul never knew, George suddenly head-butted Ritter. “Young George was a bit of a terror—him and his quiff,” says Paul. “We were all talking and this guy must have said something to annoy him, so bouff, he nutted him.”21
Musically, Paul and George and the other more hip “Inny” students had loads to talk about again this new term. Great new artists were pouring from that ever-open valve America. The Everly Brothers—siblings from Shenandoah, Iowa—sang in unusual harmony, parallel thirds, taking lines that could stand alone but sounded better blended. From the first strum of “Bye Bye Love,” their charmingly melodic country/rock ode to teenage romance, they had the top respect of every aficionado. Its impact on Merseyside was notable: while the record had entered the NME Top Thirty at 19, impressive in itself, it went straight in at the top of Disker’s local Liverpool Echo list. (There was also much resp
ect for its B-side, “I Wonder if I Care as Much.”)
Like so many of the new stars—Gene Vincent with “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” Elvis Presley with “That’s All Right Mama,” Eddie Cochran with “Twenty Flight Rock” and Carl Perkins with “Blue Suede Shoes”—the Everlys hit the ground running with their first release, as did the Coasters, a distinctive black vocal group from Los Angeles whose debut on the New York label Atco gave parent company Atlantic Records its first US million-seller. Issued in Britain on July 12, “Searchin’ ” c/w “Young Blood” was another of those imperative buried treasures: in terms of British sales it made almost no splash, but it gave deep joy to a dedicated few, establishing a prolonged interest not only in other Coasters records but also in the wittily inventive and quirkily rhythmic songs of composing team Leiber-Stoller, who could write rock and roll as radio melodrama.‡
There was also a singer called Larry Williams, whose record “Short Fat Fannie” was clearly in the Little Richard vein and, judging by the wording on the London record label, came from the same source, Specialty Records of Hollywood. And then there was a stunning piece from a singer whose name was as new as his sound: Jerry Lee Lewis. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” was released in Britain at the end of August in perfect time to be number 1 in schoolyard conversation. Here the London label said “Recorded by Sun, Memphis” so its pedigree was definitely A1, coming from the same studio as Carl Perkins and Elvis. It wasn’t a guitar tune either, it was piano, a thumping boogie with Lewis rolling his hands up and down the keys. Paul was soon unleashing it from the piano at 20 Forthlin Road … much to Jim’s restrained disdain. As Paul recalls, “Dad didn’t like rock and roll, but [because] his dad didn’t like his music he was very tolerant—he knew I had to do something he wasn’t going to like. He’d say, ‘That’s very nice, son,’ but he never really liked it.”22
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