Rock ‘n’ roll did many things for British boys when it burst on the unsuspecting 1950s. For Paul, it turned a shell into a suit of shiny armour.
Jim McCartney’s collapse was short-lived. After Mary’s funeral–the Catholic one she’d requested on her deathbed–Jim dried his eyes and buckled down to his new responsibilities. Since their mother’s death, Paul and Michael had been staying with their Auntie Gin and Uncle Harry in Huyton. When they returned to Forthlin Road, their dad seemed back to his old disciplined, understated self.
On his small salary, there was no question of employing a housekeeper. So, at the age of 55, he had to teach himself to cook and do all the other household jobs that men of his generation, especially in the north of England, regarded as ‘women’s work’. His sons pitched in to help like the Boy Scouts they were, Paul now the proud holder of a ‘bivouac badge’ for building a fire and cooking over it. Their plentiful uncles and aunts rallied round with frequent morale-boosting visits and invitations to meals, Every Tuesday, Gin and Millie would clean the house from top to bottom and have a hot dinner waiting when Paul and Mike came in from school.
The home Jim created was rough and ready, but never gloomy. ‘The house was full of laughter,’ Mike McCartney says. ‘There was always music playing–Dad with his records or on the piano, or the relatives around for a sing-song. Dad could have his moments [of grieving for Mary] but Auntie Gin would be there, or someone else, and it’d soon be all right again.’
In the otherwise male atmosphere, Jim perpetuated Mary’s many hospital-inspired rules for hygiene and health–for example, only white tablecloths and towels because coloured ones got dirty without showing it. He also carried on her concern over her sons’ diet, urging them to eat healthily, with plenty of roughage, and inquiring every day whether their bowels were working satisfactorily. Unlike most bachelor establishments, too, the house always smelt of lavender, which Jim grew in the back garden, then rubbed between his fingers to unlock its scent.
Bereaved families often find a pet dog helps to ease the pain, but Paul and Mike had no need of that: the sound of barking from the nearby police training school went on almost around the clock. The wide grassy tract behind their house provided a constant spectacle of dogs being trained or stately police horses at exercise. There were regular public displays of horse-riding and obedience-trials, always culminating with the routine the boys had seen on their first morning–the pistol-firing fugitive pursued by an Alsatian, grabbed by his outsize glove and sent sprawling onto the grass. Paul and Mike would put chairs on the flat roof of their concrete garden shed and see the whole show for nothing. Paul particularly loved the vast chestnut police horses whose duties, in those riot-free days in Liverpool, were purely ceremonial. Watching them go through their dignified paces, he little dreamed of the thoroughbreds he himself would one day own and ride.
Jim McCartney might be a humble cotton salesman who’d left school aged 14, but he had a capacious mind and memory and a thirst for knowledge he’d always striven to pass on to his sons. He prided himself on his vocabulary and religiously filled in the crossword puzzles in his morning Daily Express and evening Liverpool Echo. When an unfamiliar word cropped up, he’d send the boys to check its spelling in the multivolume Newnes Family Encyclopaedia, which for him represented the fount of all knowledge. Paul, as a result, was the one in his class at the Inny who knew how to spell ‘phlegm’. His cousin, Bert Danher, caught the crossword bug from Jim sufficiently to become a puzzle-compiler in later life.
Jim was a treasury of proverbs and sayings, which in Liverpool can verge on the surreal: ‘There’s no hair on a seagull’s chest…’; ‘It’s imposausigable…’; ‘Put it there if it weighs a ton’ (shake hands); ‘You’re about as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest’. If ever Paul or Mike wanted to postpone a boring task, their father’s response was always ‘D.I.N.’, for ‘Do it now’; if they were quarrelling, he’d tell them to ‘let it be’, or forget it. Another oft-repeated maxim summed up Jim’s whole civilised approach to life: ‘The two most important “-ations” in life are “toler-” and “moder-”.’
‘Dad was always encouraging us to make something of ourselves,’ Mike McCartney says. ‘That was his mantra–giving us the confidence to go out there and be something in that big old world.’
But even for a singular boy like Paul, the world of his boyhood seemed to hold little promise or excitement. Mid-Fifties Britain may have had a stability later generations would envy, but its downside was stifling dullness and predictability. The British had had quite enough excitement with the Second World War, and now wished only for everlasting peace to enjoy all the commodities that had lately come off the ration, like eggs, butter and sugar.
Youth had none of the power it would later enjoy–in fact, was barely recognised at all. Around the age of 16, boys turned into men and girls into women, dressing and talking like their parents, adopting the same values, seeking the same amusements, soon marrying and ‘settling down’ in their turn. Only university and college students, a tiny minority, were permitted any drawn-out transition from adolescence to maturity, albeit still in the same tweed jackets and frumpy frocks as their elders.
The war had made popular music a vital part of everyday life, but as yet it had no specific appeal to the young. The BBC’s Light Programme gave employment to dozens of dance orchestras and bands, all of whom performed live on-air, in programmes still with a wartime flavour: Calling All Forces, Workers’ Playtime, Music While You Work. Record-sales were already big business: the New Musical Express had started a ‘Top 12’ chart in 1952 and extended it to a Top 20 in 1954. Every new song was also issued as sheet music so that it could be reproduced, Victorian-style, on parlour pianos at home.
The biggest hits were by American artistes like Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine and Doris Day, though Sinatra-esque British crooners like Dennis Lotis and Dickie Valentine inspired large female followings. The songs–written by those mysterious ‘professionals’ for whom Jim McCartney had such respect–tended to be faux-Italian or -Irish ballads, themes from the newest Disney film or novelty numbers like ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?’
A few successful vocalists came from Liverpool, notably Frankie Vaughan, Michael Holliday and Lita Roza. But, like the comedians for which the city was more famous–Robb Wilton, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey–they were advised to lose their Scouse accents and never mention their birthplace in their acts. Showbusiness superstition held that anything glamorous or desirable had to come, or seem to come, from London. The last place it could conceivably come from was a sooty seaport on a muddy river, far away in the north-west.
Paul’s thirteenth birthday present from his father was a trumpet. The instrument with which Jim led his little dance band before the war still had greatest prestige on the bandstand, thanks to America’s Harry James and Britain’s Eddie Calvert, aka ‘the Man with the Golden Trumpet’. Calvert’s instrumental version of ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’, from the film Underwater, had been number one in Britain’s new Top 20 for four weeks in 1955.
However, Jim had no idea of launching Paul on a musical career, even one as modest as his own had been. Rather, the trumpet would be a social asset in a city where much of the best entertainment took place in private homes. ‘If you can play something, son,’ he advised, ‘you’ll always get invited to parties.’
Rock ‘n’ roll first crept up on Britain in the dark. During mid-1955, showings of an American film called Blackboard Jungle caused disturbances among young members of its audience that left a trail of wrecked cinemas across the country. This reaction was not to the film, which concerned delinquent high school students in New York, but to a song played over the opening credits, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets.
In hindsight, the record seems innocent enough, a conventional, intelligible tenor voice simply chanting the hours in the day when one can rock–i.e. dance. To adult British ears at the time, its slap-bass beat and braying saxophone were a din almost as destructively hideous as the recent war’s bombs. Indeed its consequences were to be almost as traumatic, and much longer lasting.
The war had not made Britain any less rigidly class-bound, and rock ‘n’ roll music initially affected only the working class. Its first enthusiasts, the instigators of those cinema riots, were Teddy boys: young men who defied the drab national dress code by sporting Edwardian-style velvet-collared jackets and narrow ‘drainpipe’ trousers, with accessories often including switchblade knives, razors, brass knuckles and bicycle chains. ‘Teds’ responding to rock ‘n’ roll awoke fears of a juvenile delinquency problem on the same scale as America’s, not to mention an older, darker fear of proletarian uprising.
But, as was soon apparent, the musical malignancy had spread much wider. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ went to number one in the new Top 20, and was followed by a string of further Bill Haley hits, all using ‘rock’ in the title and all unleashing further mayhem. When Haley visited Britain in 1956, arriving by ocean liner, he was greeted by crowds that even the young Queen would hardly attract. That was his big mistake. In total contrast with his music, he proved to be a chubby, benign-looking man with a kiss-curl plastered on his forehead and not the faintest whiff of danger or subversion. When, soon afterwards, his record-sales went into decline, Britain’s parents breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the crisis had passed.
But by now America had a new rock ‘n’ roller of a very different stamp. Like Bill Haley, the bizarrely-named Elvis Presley wore a guitar but, unlike any vocalist–that is, any white vocalist–he used his body, especially his hips and buckling knees, to underline the amorous fervour of what he sang. He was, in other words, raw sex on crêpe soles. While Haley’s deleterious effect had largely been on males, Presley’s was overwhelmingly on females, rousing previously decorous, tight-corseted Fifties young womanhood to hysterical screams, reciprocal bodily writhings and an apparent common compulsion to tear the singer’s clothes from his back.
Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, recorded in January 1956, was the first rock ‘n’ roll song truly reflecting the adolescent psyche in all its self-dramatisation and self-pity. Presley did not (and never would) follow Bill Haley’s example of meeting his British public, but film footage showed him to be the ultimate Teddy boy, with black backswept hair, brooding eyes, a top lip permanently curled as if in disdain for the entire adult world that hated, feared, mocked and execrated him. Over the next two years, he would enjoy a run of UK hits no other act would match until the following decade.
Paul was an instant convert to Elvis, hereafter known by Christian name alone. ‘I first saw his picture in a magazine–I think it was an ad for “Heartbreak Hotel” and I thought, “Wow! He’s so good looking… he’s perfect. The Messiah has arrived.”’ When thoughts of his mother began gnawing at him, ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Teddy Bear’, or especially ‘All Shook Up’ (with its glorious–and prophetic–mumble of ‘Mm-hm-hm hm yay-yay-yeah’) were infallible balm.
He also loved Little Richard, the first black rock ‘n’ roller, who combined a demented shriek with outrageous camp that went completely over most British heads. Though Paul’s voice was the lightest alto, he found he could do spot-on imitations of both the Presley mumble and the Richard scream. The crowd now gathered round him in the Inny playground not to hear a radio but a rock show.
Today, pop music is an unavoidable element of daily life, playing on perpetual loops in shops, offices, bars, restaurants and public spaces, buzzing in the earpieces of bus- and train-travellers, thumping out of cars, ringing around construction sites, whispering inside lifts and tinkling down telephone lines. But in rock ‘n’ roll’s early days in Britain, it received public airing only in the disreputable haunts of Teddy boys–espresso bars, bikers’ cafes, pinball arcades and fairgrounds.
In America, it had received instant circulation via the country’s hundreds of commercial radio stations. But British radio was the monopoly of the traditionally stuffy, puritanical BBC which–with all those conventional bands and orchestras to protect–excluded it completely. Its sole mouthpiece was Radio Luxembourg, beamed from far away in mainland Europe, which operated a nightly English language service playing all the new American releases, somewhat blurred by intrusive French or Belgian voices and static.
Like most families in that pre-transistor era, the McCartneys had only one radio, a bulky, valve-operated apparatus housed in a wooden cabinet and known as a ‘wireless’. Unfortunately, this was sited immovably in the sitting-room, where Jim McCartney liked to play his kind of music on the gramophone during Luxembourg’s evening transmission hours. An inveterate handyman, Jim kept a drawer full of electronic oddments he thought ‘might come in useful someday’. One evening, he came up to Paul’s and Mike’s rooms–they’d stopped sharing by then–and presented each of them with a set of black Bakelite headphones.
‘There were wires disappearing through the floorboards to the radio below, so that we’d be able to listen to Radio Luxembourg in our bedrooms,’ Mike McCartney remembers. ‘So Dad would have his Mantovani downstairs while upstairs we’d have Elvis, Little Richard, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry… and our kid [Paul] would be singing along or trying to write down the lyrics. I sometimes think that if it hadn’t been for those Bakelite headphones, there wouldn’t have been any Beatles.’
Though the music no longer destroyed cinemas, the press kept up an unremitting tirade against it, supported by opportunistic politicians, teachers, clergy and ‘real’ musicians of Jim’s generation. Its lyrics, mostly nonsensical enough to have been written by Lewis Carroll, were condemned as ‘obscene’ and its rhythm as ‘jungle-like’–a racist allusion to its origins in black rhythm and blues. Rock ‘n’ roll singers were ridiculed as inarticulate morons, controlled by unscrupulous managers (all too true in most cases), whose fraudulence was summed up by their inability to play the guitars they flourished and spun about them. Every commentator agreed: it couldn’t be long before young people saw through the con-trick that was being perpetrated on them and the whole noisy nuisance blew over.
But there was no going back. Thanks to Elvis, and the Teds, British boys en masse had discovered something previously unknown in their stodgy, sleepy country, except to a tiny metropolitan elite. They had discovered style. So Paul joined the queue at Bioletti’s barber shop, beside the Penny Lane roundabout, waiting for his former boyish tousle to be shaped into a toppling Elvis quiff and combed back at the sides into the two interwoven rear flaps known as a ‘duck’s arse’, or DA. Unfortunately, like many another 14-year-old would-be Elvis, he spent his weekdays in a school uniform whose cap was designed to be worn squarely on the head, to the ruination of any coiffure let alone this springy, aerated one.
The Institute had a strict dress code, personally enforced by its headmaster, J. R. Edwards, popularly known as ‘the Baz’ (short for ‘bastard’). Nowhere was he more of a baz than over caps, which had to be worn at all times on pain of severe punishment. The only way Paul could do so without harming the precious cockade was to clamp his cap onto the back of his head like a Jewish yarmulka.
Grammar school boys, too, now craved the Teds’ drainpipe trousers that British parents hated almost as much as they did rock ‘n’ roll music. Even the easy-going Jim could not abide ‘drainies’ and insisted Paul’s dark grey school trousers should retain their billowy 24-inch cuffs (although in Jim’s own pre-Great War boyhood, every Englishman from the prime minister downwards had been slim-shanked).
Other boys were having furious arguments with their fathers on the subject–but not Paul. Few men’s outfitters yet sold tapered trousers ready to wear; the usual thing was for an alterations tailor to ‘take in’ a conventional baggy pair. Paul had his school ones taken in a little at a time, first to 20 inches, then 18, then 16, so that Jim wouldn’t notice the erosion.
He found other ways of taking in his dad as well, without ever actually lying. ‘Near my house there was a tailor who’d do the job while you waited,’ Ian James remembers. ‘Paul used to leave for school wearing ordinary-width trousers, then have them altered at lunch-time. If Jim said anything about them when he got home, he’d say, “They’re the same pair you saw me go out in this morning.”’
Most days on his bus journey to school, Paul sat next to a fellow Institute pupil, a pale, solemn-looking boy named George Harrison who lived in Upton Green, Speke, not far from the McCartneys’ former home in Ardwick Road, and whose father, Harry, worked as a bus-driver for Liverpool Corporation. Often, when the number 86 stopped on Mather Avenue to pick up Paul, Mr Harrison would be behind the wheel, so he’d get a free ride.
George was a year his junior and in the class below his at the Inny, so during the day there was a wide social gap between them. But on the journey to and from school they could be friends. Paul was much impressed by an episode illustrative of their very different families. After some misdemeanour, George had received the Inny’s commonest corporal punishment, one or more strokes on the palm of the hand with a wooden ruler. ‘The teacher missed his hand and caught him on the wrist, and made a big red weal. The next day, his dad came to the school and punched the teacher on the nose. If I’d complained to my dad that I’d been beaten, he’d have said, “You probably deserved it.”’
After ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ came out, much of Paul and George’s conversation revolved around Elvis–his astounding voice, his amazing clothes, the guitar that seemed his indispensable accomplice in whipping up female frenzy. George revealed that his bus-driving dad had learned to play the guitar while serving in the Merchant Navy and that he himself now possessed one. Paul in return made the rather less sensational announcement that he was learning the trumpet.
Out of school hours, his main friend continued to be Ian James. They were both good-looking, and both equally obsessed by their hair and clothes. Among the new records currently on Radio Luxembourg was ‘A White Sport Coat’, by the American country singer Marty Robbins (anglicised into ‘A White Sports Coat’ by Britain’s King Brothers). Paul had searched high and low for such a garment and finally found one in silver-flecked oatmeal, cut in daring Teddy boy ‘drape’ style with a flap on its breast pocket. Ian had a similar Elvis quiff and DA and a similar jacket in pale blue.
He also had access to a guitar just at this moment when the eyes of British boys were becoming riveted to the instrument. His grandfather had been bandmaster to the local Salvation Army in the Dingle and he’d grown up with a Spanish guitar around the house–then considered nothing but a background rhythm-maker. When the skiffle craze arrived, and Paul finally got a guitar of his own, Ian looked like his natural musical partner.
Skiffle derived from American folk music during the Great Depression when poor whites who couldn’t afford conventional instruments would improvise them from kitchen washboards, jugs, and kazoos. In its British reincarnation, it became a mash-up of blues, country, folk, jazz and spirituals–all genres about which most young Britons had little or no previous knowledge.
Its biggest, in fact only, star was Lonnie Donegan–like Paul, of mixed Irish and Scots origins–who had previously played banjo with Chris Barber’s jazz band. In 1956, Donegan and a rhythm section from the Barber band recorded a skiffle version of ‘Rock Island Line’ by the blues giant (and convicted killer) Huddie ‘Lead Belly’ Ledbetter. Its subject matter, railroad-tolls on Rock Island, Illinois, could hardly have been more mundane, but that word ‘rock’, in any context, now set schoolboy hormones aflame. ‘Rock Island Line’ went to number eight in Britain and also became a hit across the Atlantic, an unprecedented example of British musicians selling Americana back to the Americans.
Skiffle offered the romance of America–chiefly represented by freight trains, penitentiaries and chain-gangs–but without the taint of sex and Teddy boy violence attached to rock ‘n’ roll. The BBC relented so far as to put on a radio programme called Saturday Skiffle Club and an early-evening TV show especially for teenagers titled like a train, the Six-Five Special, with skiffle theme music. Whereas rock ‘n’ roll was an unknowable alchemy created by incomprehensible beings, skiffle could be played by anyone with a cheap acoustic guitar and mastery of the three simple chords of 12-bar blues. Its other essential instruments were literally home-made: ‘basses’ improvised from resonant empty boxes, broom-handles and bits of string, and serrated kitchen washboards, scrubbed with fingers capped by steel thimbles to create a scratchy, frenetic percussion.
The effect was galvanising on bashful British boys with no previous musical leanings who, hitherto, would rather have committed hara-kiri than get up in public and sing. All over the country, juvenile skiffle groups sprang–or, rather, strummed–into life under exotically homespun names, like the Vipers, the Nomads, the Hobos, the Streamliners and the Sapphires. The guitar rocketed even further in popularity, so much so that at one point a national shortage was declared.
In November 1956, when Lonnie Donegan appeared at Liverpool’s Empire Theatre, Paul was in the audience. Before the show, he hung around the Empire stage-door, hoping for a glimpse of Donegan arriving for rehearsal. Some local factory hands had sneaked out of work with the same idea; Donegan paused to talk to them and on learning they’d gone AWOL he wrote a note to their foreman, asking that they shouldn’t be penalised because of him. Paul had expected metaphorical stars to be as cold and distant as the real thing, and Donegan’s friendliness and graciousness to those fans made a profound impression on him.
By now, the ‘King of Skiffle’ had dropped all 1930s-hobo visuals from his act, performing the ragged-arsed repertoire of Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie in black tie, with a tuxedoed trio that included a virtuoso electric guitarist, Denny Wright. That touch of sophistication was Paul’s Damascene moment; from then on, he burned to play a guitar and sing–an impossibility with a trumpet. So after the Donegan show, he asked his dad if he could swap his birthday present for a guitar. To Jim McCartney, as to all musicians of his generation, rock ‘n’ roll and skiffle were undifferentiated cacophony. But, remembering how his own dad, the brass band E-flat tuba man, had once ridiculed his love of jazz and swing, he resolved to be tolerant. So Paul returned the trumpet to Rushworth and Draper’s music store and in its place selected a Zenith acoustic guitar with f-holes and a red sunburst finish, price £15.
For instruction he turned to Ian James, who now owned a superior Rex model with a cutaway body, for reaching the tinkliest treble notes at the bottom of the fretboard. Ian showed him the first basic one-finger chords, G and G7, and how to tune the Zenith–which, with his natural musical ear, presented no problem. To begin with he played as Ian did, with his guitar-neck pointing leftwards, but found it extremely awkward and laborious. Then he happened to see a picture of the American country star Slim Whitman, a ‘leftie’ like himself, and realised he should be holding his guitar the other way around, fingering the fretboard with his right hand and strumming with his left. That, of course, put the bottom string where the top one ought to be, so he had to remove all six and put them into reverse order. The white scratch plate–over which the strummer’s hand slides after each stroke–proved too firmly screwed in place to be switched over, so it had to be left upside-down.
All this was less than a month after Mary’s death. And for Paul, in his buttoned-up grief, the Zenith came as salvation with six strings. He played it at every possible moment, even when sitting on the toilet, both the inside and outside ones. ‘It became an obsession… took over his whole life,’ remembers Mike McCartney. ‘It came along at just the right moment and became his escape.’
He also began to sing as he played, not mimicking Elvis or Little Richard now, but in his real voice. This was high and pure, like no one currently in the charts or anywhere in popular music except perhaps the jazz singer Mel Tormé, though he found he could give it a sandpapery rock ‘n’ roll edge.
And he’d already written–or, as his dad would say, made up–a song. Called ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, it seemed to be in the usual idiom of teenage heartbreak, but actually was a way of channelling his grief over his mother’s death. It revolved around chords Ian James had taught him, G, G7 and C, and Ian was one of the first people he played it to, in his bedroom at Forthlin Road. ‘I was really impressed,’ James remembers. ‘I’d always thought all songwriters were old blokes on Tin Pan Alley. That was something no one else I knew would have thought of doing.’
Despite his obsession with his guitar, he kept up his interest in the piano, now suddenly the least cool of instruments. He had often asked his father to teach him, but Jim, modest and self-deprecating as ever, insisted he could only learn ‘properly’ by finding a teacher and going through all the groundwork he had shirked as a small boy. Remembering the camphor-scented old lady teachers he’d so disliked then, Paul made sure he had lessons from a man this time, and started on a back-to-basics course, determined to be able to read music at the end of it. But he felt no more interested now than he had at the age of eight–and, meantime, songs kept coming into his mind for which he could always find the piano-chords by instinct. ‘Something was making me make it up,’ he would recall, ‘whether I knew how to do it or not.’
Rock ‘n’ roll films, too, were now coming from America and finding their way to Merseyside cinemas. They were a genre known as ‘exploitation movies’, hastily put out to catch the craze before its universally-predicted demise. Most were cheap black and white affairs, with feeble plots and cliché characters, serving only as a showcase for the music acts involved. But The Girl Can’t Help It, filmed in colour and CinemaScope and on general release all over Britain in the summer of 1957, was like no exploitation movie before.
Intended primarily as a vehicle for the monumentally-endowed Jayne Mansfield, it was a satire on rock ‘n’ roll, with in-performance appearances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters and Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys. It had all the sexiness for which the music was condemned, but wrapped in witty double entendre, verbal and visual, that went completely over the censors’ heads. In its most famous scene, Little Richard shrieked the title song in voice-over as Mansfield sashayed down a street, making men’s spectacles shatter in their frames and milk spurt orgasmically from bottles.
The film’s performance sequences included two instant rock ‘n’ roll classics. One was ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, the first rock band whose sidemen were as young and hip, in their blue ‘cheesecutter’ caps, as the lead singer. The other was ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ by Eddie Cochran, an Elvis lookalike with a white sports coat, a red guitar–and a novel line in humour and self-mockery. His girlfriend lived on the top floor, the elevator was broken, so he had to walk up 20 flights and his feet were killing him.
Paul and Ian James were among the first in line to see The Girl Can’t Help It. Afterwards, Ian bought the single of ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ from Currys in Elliott Street, playing it over and over again until he’d worked out its guitar chords and Paul had managed to decipher and write down all its words. ‘After a couple of run-throughs, he got it,’ James remembers. ‘He was Eddie Cochran.’
At the beginning of July 1957, Lonnie Donegan was in the charts yet again with a double-sided hit, ‘Gamblin’ Man’ and ‘Puttin’ On the Style’. Skiffle groups had started up all over Liverpool, but none so far had attempted to recruit Paul, and he seemed in no hurry to join one.
Two boys he knew at the Inny, Ivan Vaughan and Len Garry, were sharing the role of tea chest bassist in a group called the Quarrymen. ‘Ivy’, a formidably bright ‘A’ streamer, was his special friend: they shared the same sense of humour and the same birthday, 18 June. And it so happened that Ivan’s home in Vale Road, Woolton, backed on to that of the Quarrymen’s leader, John Lennon, with whom he was equally good friends.
On 6 July, the Quarrymen were to play at a garden fete organised by Woolton’s parish church, St Peter’s. Ivan suggested Paul should come along and he’d introduce him to John with a view to his possibly joining the line-up. Paul agreed, but asked Ian James to meet him there, thinking there might be places for both of them in the group–and also for a bit of protection.