Having twice been away with George, this was Paul’s first holiday with John—and John’s first with either. They hitchhiked with some difficulty: each had his guitar and Paul also had the Elpico, and drivers didn’t want to pick them up (guitar players = delinquents). Once they realized the problem they hid the gear in a bush until finally someone stopped.43 They had to share a single bed at the pub, where (despite their age) Mike liked to come into their room and bid them good night. They helped out behind the bar, serving drinks and consuming a few too, and in return Mike said that, as they’d gone to the trouble of bringing their guitars, they could entertain his customers on Saturday night—April 23, St. George’s Day. They weren’t the Beatles this time, or Quarrymen, or Los Paranoias, but the Nerk Twins. Mike thought it was a good name for them, having also been a name from Paul’s younger years, used to describe him and his brother. More than that, it was a Goon Show name. Paul and John created some handmade posters to advertise themselves.44
They sat on high barstools in the Fox and Hounds’ tap room—the public bar, more basic and cheaper than the lounge, no carpet on the floor. Paul would recall how their idea to open with “Be-Bop-A-Lula” was given the thumbs-down by Mike; he suggested something faster, so they played a quick scuttle through Butlin’s favorite “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise,” the hit by Les Paul and Mary Ford. John played the rhythm and Paul the melody, but of course they weren’t equipped to produce a sound like the multitracked record. They later did a second song from the same pair, “How High the Moon,” but nothing else is remembered about the evening: how long they played, what other songs they sang, whether or not they were able to stop people drinking and chatting and pay them any attention. Still, close on three years after their meeting, this inauspicious yet special little performance was the first and only time Lennon and McCartney played in public as a duo. It was nothing more than a moment, here then gone.d Next day, they were hitching home, school and college resuming on the Monday.
As much as it can be known with any certainty, it was at about this time that Dot miscarried her baby. Information is inevitably and appropriately thin, but Dot has said she was about three months along when it happened. She went into the hospital. “He [Paul] seemed a bit upset but deep down he was probably relieved,” she has reflected, and it would be hard to imagine any other conclusion. He was let off the hook. All discussion of marriage as the honorable thing to do ended, but the relationship continued, and much as before.45
George, in the meantime, caught his second and third rock shows at Liverpool Empire in close succession. Dedicated to studying every guitarist going, especially Americans, he went first to see Duane Eddy, and then, on the day John and Paul were heading home from Caversham, he saw the Everly Brothers, who were backed by none other than the Crickets. The Everlys’ latest single, “Cathy’s Clown,” was zipping up the charts at the moment of their first visit to Liverpool, after which it spent nine straight weeks at the top, through all of May and June 1960. It was another sublime blending of harmony and melody, of great drama simply expressed; all the Beatles loved it and wanted to perform it.
George also paid a return visit to the Casbah. Mona Best had no qualms letting him in; while George was party to the Quarrymen walk-out, when they let her down, he was pretty much the quiet one, Paul and John doing all the talking as usual. (Never short of a word, those two.) His visit coincided with the breakup of the Blackjacks. They’d played just a handful of times, and Pete Best set aside his drums—and his only experience of being in a group—still very much a beginner.
His group’s dismantling coincided with some unusual events at 8 Hayman’s Green. In March 1960, just three months before sitting the A-Levels for which he’d spent eighteen months grafting, Pete suddenly quit school and (beyond saying he “got fed up”) never told anyone why.46 His friends would always be puzzled, but there was perhaps a deterioration in his spirit. Best was a strong and speedy player of rugby union, left wing for the Liverpool Collegiate XV; in March 1959, the school magazine Esmeduna profiled him as “a powerful wing, tenacious and aggressive: has had a splendid season and is an outstanding prospect for next season.” A year later he was named openly as one of three players “[who] have not touched last season’s form” and from whom the team had suffered “a loss for long periods.” And then he left. Pete’s plans to attend teacher training college—he was going to become a PE instructor—were tossed away. He didn’t leave to take a job, he just left and stayed quietly at home.
Something else unusual happened about the same time. Since leaving Liverpool Institute, Neil Aspinall had begun training as an accountant. He had a razor-sharp mind with a keen eye for detail and could do the work without difficulty, except that the job and his staid middle-aged colleagues bored him rigid. Earning a steady weekly wage, Neil bought himself a smart Sunbeam Alpine car and spent a good deal of time with the Bests. One day, as Bill Barlow recalls, “We all had a big trip out together, going up to Southport in various automobiles, and Neil finished up with Mrs. Best at the end of the day. It was a great shock and surprise to everyone, quite mind-blowing for kids our age. We were all staggered by it.”47
Neil wasn’t the only young person powerfully attracted to the magnetic Mona Best, but this went beyond. She was 36 and married, he was 18 and the best friend of her eldest son, to whom she was intensely close. Neil and Mona shared characteristics: both were steadfast, single-minded, mentally iron-strong. They would keep their relationship as discreet as possible, but if it upset anyone (and it did) that wouldn’t stop them. It was another family secret—something else for Pete to keep mum about. Neil left his parents and siblings and moved in with Mona, Pete, Rory and Mona’s mother Mary Shaw, who was dying of lung cancer.48 Johnny Best was gone now. Pete and Neil stayed every bit as close as before, so Pete evidently accepted his best mate having a full relationship with his adored Mo, and that they all lived together in the rambling big house in West Derby. As Pete pointed out in a lawyer’s interview, taped in New York in 1965, “We’ve virtually become brothers.”
It was to Johnny Best’s Liverpool Stadium—Britain’s first purpose-built boxing hall—that all eyes turned on May 3, when Jacaranda Enterprises staged its great rock show starring Gene Vincent. From a recently bought secondhand Morris minibus, Allan Williams had been illegally fly-posting the event all over Merseyside and broadcasting the availability of tickets. The Stadium was abuzz with activity the entire day: Larry Parnes was in town and stars were up from London. Brian Epstein, dressed pin-sharp, broke off from planning the imminent Nems shop on Whitechapel to look around, accompanied by his junior manager Peter Brown. Brian was maintaining his now-established policy of checking out all the shows that came to Liverpool. Brown specifically recalls Epstein and Parnes meeting, but knows nothing of what was said.
The stage was the boxing ring, ropes removed, wooden boards covering and stabilizing the canvas. The musicians could only face one way, so the audience occupied just half of the arena. It hadn’t been a sellout and Williams made no money, but everyone enjoyed a night to remember: acoustics lousy, atmosphere electric. While an Empire audience knew instinctively about order, the Stadium crowd was disorderly from the start and, inadequately marshaled, became unruly.
Liverpool outfits filled the first half, rock boys flexing their considerable muscle. Inevitably, the Hurricanes had the most eye-catching act. They were already up and playing before Rory made his grand entrance, sprinting to the ring from the boxers’ dressing room. Cheniston Roland, a photographer friend of Allan Williams and Stuart Sutcliffe, took pictures throughout the show. Rory is the action man at the front, his three guitarists fill the second row, and Ringo is behind, sitting at his kit in an oversize matching dark jacket and black bow tie, a meaty quiff hovering above giant dark glasses—a pose of admirable magnitude. Eight years later, he recalled the night with unchecked enthusiasm—“It was great. All the Teds were throwing pennies.”49
Which Beatles were watching is ag
ain unclear. Paul and John never said they were here, and as one or both had seen Gene Vincent only a few weeks earlier they may not have bothered again. (If John was here he would have come down the hill from the art school, because it was on May 3 that he resat a key part of the Lettering exam he’d failed so dismally in 1959. If he didn’t pass this time there’d be no place for him in the next academic year.) Stuart is known to have been at the show because a Cheniston Roland audience photo happens to include him, and George was definitely present. He’d always recall this night for a specific thought, one that—while irrational—was nonetheless common to all the Beatles:
We were nothing, just out of school, and we were amateur and we were hopeless, and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes came on at the Stadium and he was big. He came on amazing [doing] “What’d I Say” and the band rocking, all doing the dance steps with the suits on, and he’s jumping about like a loony—and even then I just remember thinking Well, we’re better than all them! even though we hadn’t done anything. And it wasn’t an ego thing, it was with no qualifications at all, but there was something about us that was cocky, that knew something was going to happen. I remember thinking how we’d got to get our band together.50
The show’s second half had the professional talent, and here at last was Gene Vincent—gut full of liquor, eyes full of mania, body full of pain—throwing himself about the stage in psychotically energetic defiance of his injuries and grief, just seventeen nights after surviving the death crash. Audience compassion spilled into pandemonium, and as people tried to climb into the ring Larry Parnes and Allan Williams—in his top hat—nipped around treading on fingers to keep them off.
When it was all over, performers and Parnes returned to the Jacaranda for late refreshment. It had been an exhilarating night, and educational too, for in the words of Adrian Barber, the lanky young Yorkshireman who was lead guitarist with Cass and the Cassanovas, the Vincent show was the primary force in binding together the individual ingredients of the Liverpool rock scene. “None of us knew of any other groups until Allan Williams’ gig at the Stadium. I’m sure we were vaguely aware there was something going on, but we weren’t a community by any means. At that Stadium show we became aware of all the other bands in Liverpool, about twelve in total.”51
Parnes was also pleased. He realized that this man Williams, a stranger not a month earlier, was the gatekeeper to a field of unharvested talent—and inexpensive too, because what the Liverpudlian believed to be a good wage was less than a Londoner’s. One problem with managing solo singers was the continual quest for reliable backing musicians. Two of his boys, Duffy Power and Johnny Gentle, were—separately—booked to play the ballroom circuit in Scotland in June and both needed a backing group.e Parnes had just seen four in the Stadium show who would fit the bill admirably. He and Williams talked business late into the night, exploring ways they could work together.
Two days later, Mark Forster of Parnes’ company L. M. P. Entertainments phoned Williams to say Larry had been having a further think. As he needed a backing group for Billy Fury too—for Meet the Beat, his summer season on Great Yarmouth pier—he wanted to return to Liverpool, bring Fury, and see again the same four groups with a view to all three situations: Power, Gentle and Fury. Williams agreed to round them up for an audition session, and a day later the arrangement was fixed by phone: Parnes and Fury would be in Liverpool the following Tuesday, the 10th. It was all happening fast.
It was in the Jacaranda on May 6 or 7 that John Lennon said something that took Allan Williams by surprise: “Allan, why don’t you do something for us?” Williams didn’t quite get his drift. “I said, ‘How do you mean “us”? Who’s us?’ So he explained how he and Stuart had a group, and said if there was going to be an audition for Billy Fury then couldn’t they be part of it? I said, ‘Sure. What’s your group’s lineup?’ He told me the lineup and missed out the drummer. I said, ‘Who’s the drummer?’ and he said, ‘We haven’t got one.’ So I said I’d try to find them one.”52
When Williams next saw Brian “Cass” Cassar in the Jac he asked if there were any drummers looking for work. Cass knew one, Tommy Moore, who’d played with a modern jazz band at the Temple in Dale Street and whose hero was Jack Parnell, the drummer-bandleader whose records were produced by George Martin for Parlophone. An older man, Moore had genuine technique, holding the sticks through his fingers in the conventional dance-band manner. He also had a job, working shifts on a forklift truck at the Garston Bottle Company factory. He agreed to play with the Beatles at the audition, and—without referral to Parnes, it seems—Williams went ahead and added them and also two others (the Pressmen, and Cliff Roberts and the Rockers, both from Wallasey) to the four main groups.
In Liverpool in 1960, Allan Williams was the man who made things happen. With John’s one remark the Beatles’ fortunes took a decisive upward turn. They’d been drifting for months, in need of a sharp kick to get them moving, and Williams provided it. Yesterday they were a drummerless group writing awkward and possibly unsent letters in the hope of getting a single booking; today they were preparing to audition for Larry Parnes, a beat away from the touring circuit, TV, fame and “fortune.” It was true the Beatles didn’t think highly of Fury, but the opportunity was great regardless. Cyn says John was “ecstatic” at the prospect and no doubt he was: here was a possible way out of the nine-to-five brummer striving he dreaded but which was looming large in his life. They devoted themselves to concentrated rehearsal.53
They also had to get new clothes. Every group strove for the uniform look, and in the available three or so days, despite having very little money, the four Beatles obtained shirts, trousers and shoes that more or less matched: black shirts with silver edging, jean-like trousers with white-edged front and rear pockets, and bumper shoes with a rubber sole and a canvas top with wire netting. As John would remember, the ensemble was “direct from my art school. We looked arty compared with other groups, who looked like clerks or dockers. We looked like students … so we had a bit of a classy touch straight away, which was different.”54
The audition took place that Tuesday, May 10, starting around 10AM. Most of the musicians got time off from jobs, honestly or otherwise; the Beatles were the only school/college students present, the three of them all sagging off (George probably claimed sickness and didn’t go into Blackler’s). The venue for all the hopes and dreams was the empty Wyvern Social Club, at the top end of Seel Street. Williams had bought the lease for his nightclub venture, which he’d decided to call the Blue Angel, after the Marlene Dietrich film. Work to convert the Wyvern into the posh new “Blue” was suspended for a day; there was no stage, just an area of ground-floor space near the door with a few tables and chairs.
While Mark Forster came up from London on the morning train, Parnes and Fury traveled together on the overnight sleeper—and now here they were, the renowned manager looking sharp in his sharkskin suit and tie, Billy smoking, cool in an open shirt, the collar of his jacket upturned. Really he was one of them, down-home Dingle boy Ronnie Wycherley, Arthur Kelly’s cousin, in the same class as Richy Starkey at St. Silas primary. But no, he was Billy Fury, schoolgirl pin-up, TV hero, chart artist, sports car owner, a source of scandal through his “revolting sexual antics” on stage. He was a pop star, elevated, no longer one of them at all. As Johnny Gustafson recalls, there was much jostling for space in front of Fury and Parnes by the Liverpool rockers: “We all had wild desires to be rich and famous.”55
The day included a fair amount of waiting around, and here the Beatles mingled among their contemporaries for the first time, small fry angling to swim with big fish. Though Rory Storm and the Hurricanes had withdrawn from the audition—their Butlin’s season approaching, it was pointless going for jobs they couldn’t fulfill—Rory and Johnny turned up to look cool, meet Fury and check out the competition. Tommy Moore would be arriving later, after he’d finished work, and as the Beatles stood and wondered what he even looked like, they got talking to th
e man who’d suggested him, the little hustler that was Brian Cassar. His Cassanovas were all big lads but Cass was a darting pocket dynamo at 5ft 1in, a 24-year-old who’d done his National Service and never wanted for an opinion. When he asked John what his group was called and was told “Beatles,” Cass denounced it as rubbish. It meant nothing and wasn’t a real group name—it wasn’t Someone and the Somethings. Unbidden, Cass invented and handed them a new one on the spot, which, in acknowledgment of his age and their subordinate position, they didn’t rebuff. Recognizing John as the leader, and reaching back for inspiration (as British males often did) to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, John became Long John Silver, his group’s name similarly adapted.
Quite what it added up to is subject to the fluctuations of memory. John would recall the Cass-coined name as Long John and the Silvermen, Paul as Long John Silver and the Pieces of Eight, and also as Long John and the Silver Beatles, George as Long John and the Pieces of Silver.56 It isn’t clear which they settled on for the audition, most likely Long John and the Silver Beatles. However appended or spelled, they were still the only group in Liverpool smart enough to include the word “beat” in their name.
When he wasn’t covering his ears from the amplified sounds bouncing around the empty room, Cheniston Roland took photos of all the groups as they played. One exposure in between acts captured the moment John Lennon handed Billy Fury a drawing and asked him to autograph it. All the time, Long John and the Silver Beatles begged to go on last because Moore hadn’t arrived. In the end, when Parnes could wait no longer, they had to plead with Johnny Hutchinson—chisel-jawed “Hutch” of the Cassanovas—to drum for them. He said yes, but wasn’t happy about it. Johnny Gustafson reflects, “Hutch didn’t like them and he showed it. In fact, he hated them and thought they were posers.”57
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