Paul’s instincts as a PR man were already beginning to show. Some time in April 1960, he drafted a letter to a local journalist named Low who’d requested details about the band with a view to giving them some publicity. Whether the fair copy was sent, or produced the desired article, isn’t known. But the page and a half, in Paul’s neat hand, reveals that they’re still without a drummer or a name, and still pushing the ‘rhythm is in the guitars’ line:
Dear Mr Low
I am sorry about the time I have taken to write to you, but I hope I have not left it too late. Here are some details about the group.
It consists of four boys–Paul McCartney (guitar), John Lennon (guitar), Stuart Sutcliffe (bass) and George Harrison (another guitar) and is called the… This line-up may at first seem dull but it must be appreciated that as the boys have above-average playing instrumental ability they achieve surprisingly varied effects. Their basic beat is the off-beat, but this has recently tended to be accompanied by a faint on-beat; thus the overall sound is rather reminiscent of the 4 in the bar beat of Traditional jazz. This could possibly be put down to the influence on the group of Mr McCartney, who led one of the top local jazz bands (Jim Mac’s Jazz Band) in the 1920’s.
Modern music is, however, the group’s delight and, as if to prove the point, John and Paul have written over 50 tunes, ballads and faster numbers, in the last three years.
John–described as their leader, despite coming second in the initial personnel list–is said to be an ‘accomplished guitarist and banjo-player and an ‘experienced cartoonist’. Of his 18-year-old self, Paul says he’s reading English at Liverpool University and that, as well as the guitar, his specialities are piano and drums.
That fib about Liverpool University reveals his sensitivity about being the group’s last remaining schoolboy. Although a year his junior, George Harrison had by now left Liverpool Institute to become an apprentice electrician at Blacklers, a city centre department store. Like John and Stu, George could stay out as late and get as drunk as he liked, whereas Paul always had to be thinking about the next morning’s class and revising for his GCE A-Levels in July.
During the long hours when city centre pubs were closed, the still-nameless quartet hung out at a small coffee bar named the Jacaranda in Slater Street, where toast and jam cost only five old pennies, or 2p, per portion. At night, the basement became a club where prestigious bands like Cass and the Cassanovas and Derry and the Seniors would meet to unwind after their evenings’ gigs.
The Jacaranda belonged to 30-year-old Allan Williams, a chunky Welsh Scouser with curly hair, a piratical black beard and a Chinese wife named Beryl, who ran its kitchen. Williams at the time knew little about Liverpool’s music scene, and at first didn’t realise that the four ‘layabouts’ who monopolised seats in his coffee bar for hour after hour without ordering anything were a band.
What first caught Williams’s eye was Stu Sutcliffe’s talent as an artist. At the time, the Welshman was planning to stage a Liverpool Arts Ball, modelled on London’s Chelsea Arts Ball at the Royal Albert Hall, when Chelsea’s bohemian community gave Britain a rare glimpse of public drunkenness and nudity. For Williams’s far drunker and more abandoned version at St George’s Hall, he hired Stu to design and John, Paul and George to build and decorate the carnival floats that were ritually destroyed at the ball’s end. He also set them to work painting a mural in the Jacaranda’s ladies’ toilet.
Allan Williams’s emergence as a possible benefactor sharpened their need for a stage name that would stick. After more fruitless collective brainstorming, a decision was made privately by John and Stu and presented to Paul as a fait accompli one evening as they walked along Gambier Terrace towards the cathedral. In homage to Buddy Holly’s Crickets, they had decided on the Beetles, but spelt with an ‘a’ as in beat music and beatnik. In a pun within a pun, it would be spelt ‘Beatals’ to suggest beating all competition.
Neither Paul nor the unassertive George offered any objection, But among the bands who congregated at the Jacaranda, the name received a unanimous thumbs-down. Brian Casser, charismatic front man of Cass and the Cassanovas, said they were mad to depart from the usual formula of so-and-so and the such-and-suches. They should use their leader’s first name to create a Treasure Island effect and become Long John and the Silver Beatles.
John refused to identify himself in any way with the peg-legged villain of R.L. Stevenson’s seafaring classic. However, a flash of bullion seemed to modify the entomological element that everyone so disliked, so they settled on the Silver Beatles.
They still lacked a drummer–but that was no longer their only handicap. Stu Sutcliffe was supposed to have filled the void with his expensive Hofner President bass, but Stu turned out to have no aptitude whatsoever for the instrument and, despite lessons from John, still had trouble in laying down even the most basic rhythm. His lack of skill so embarrassed him that he’d stand with his back to the audience to hide his inept fingering. Often the others would secretly unplug his amp, leaving him mute. Paul was becoming increasingly annoyed by having to carry such a passenger, convinced it would keep the band in its gig-less limbo for ever. But John would not hear a word against his artistic and cultural mentor and seemed unbothered by even the worst of Stu’s fluffs.
Paul, in any case, had a weightier matter on his mind. Early in 1960, his steady girlfriend, the elfinly pretty Dot Rhone, had told him she was expecting a baby. She was 16, he was 17.
In those days, pregnancy outside marriage still carried the same stigma it had in Victorian times, nowhere more so than in Britain’s respectable working-class north. And generally for the young man responsible, the only option was a hasty marriage to save the unborn child from being labelled, as it surely would be, ‘a little bastard’.
Paul behaved well, never trying to claim the baby wasn’t his–which anyway, with a girl like Dot, would have been an impossibility–nor proposing any of the degrading, often dangerous means by which unwanted pregnancies used to be terminated. The ordeal, especially for super-shy and unconfident Dot, was facing their respective families. As they were both little more than children themselves, there had to be a meeting between Dot’s mother, Jessie, and Jim McCartney at Forthlin Road about what should be done. Mrs Rhone favoured giving up the baby for adoption, saying her daughter was ‘too young to push a pram’. But Jim, lovely man that he was, threw his arms around Dot and told her he’d be proud to see her pushing his grandchild in one.
It was settled that Paul and Dot would have a quiet wedding at a register office, before the baby’s birth that autumn, then live at Forthlin Road with Jim and Mike. Dot loved the prospect of joining the warm, party-loving McCartney clan, so different from her own violent father and troubled home. But the implications for Paul were clear: with a wife and baby to support, he’d have to leave school, forget all about further education and find a ‘proper’ job which could have nothing whatsoever to do with music.
It wasn’t to be, however: three months into her pregnancy, Dot suffered a miscarriage. Paul was loving and attentive, rushing to her bedside with flowers and trying to conceal his relief. The stairway to Paradise still stretched ahead.
America’s pioneer rock ‘n’ rollers whose careers had collapsed in their homeland continued to command a fanatical British following, and in March 1960 two of the most cherished, Gene (‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’) Vincent and Eddie (‘Twenty Flight Rock’) Cochran, toured the north together, stopping off for six consecutive nights at the Liverpool Empire.
The tour’s promoter was Larry Parnes, at that time Britain’s only notable pop music impresario. Parnes had discovered Tommy Steele, Britain’s first rock ‘n’ roll star, but–since such a career couldn’t possibly last–had swiftly turned Steele into an all-round entertainer and film actor. He now managed a string of pop vocalists in the new, blander style with stage-names designed to tickle the adolescent female psyche in every possible mood: Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Dickie Pride, Duffy Power, Johnny Gentle, Vince Eager. His habit of boarding them at his Kensington flat led them to be dubbed ‘the Larry Parnes stable’.
John and Paul were naturally at the Empire to see their two greatest musical heroes after Elvis and Buddy in the flesh. Paul would never forget the moment when the curtains opened to reveal Eddie Cochran with his back to the audience, running a comb through his hair. In fact, he was so drunk that the microphone-stand had to be threaded between him and his guitar to keep him upright.
The same evening marked Allan Williams’s transition from coffee-bar owner to pop music entrepreneur. Untroubled by his total lack of experience, he struck a co-promotion deal with Larry Parnes to bring Cochran and Gene Vincent back to Liverpool on 3 May for a show at the city’s boxing stadium. His role was the recruitment of top local bands like Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Cass and the Cassanovas to support the American stars. But, despite their ‘in’ with Williams, the just-hatched Silver Beatles had no hope of being included without a drummer.
On 17 April, Cochran was fatally injured when his chauffeur-driven car hit a lamp-post en route from Bristol to London. Even so, it was decided the Liverpool boxing stadium concert should still go ahead with Gene Vincent–who’d suffered a broken collarbone in the crash–as sole headliner. To bulk out the programme, Allan Williams hastily booked further hometown attractions like the former Gerry Marsden Skiffle Group, now called Gerry and the Pacemakers. Even with the net thus widened, John, Paul, George and Stu resigned themselves in advance to being left out and watched the show miserably from the (standing) audience.
The event showed Larry Parnes that Liverpool possessed a wealth of good amateur musicians whom he could use to back his solo singers at attractively lower rates than London professionals. Less than a week later, he came back to Allan Williams with a request that galvanised every guitarist and dazzled every drummer on Merseyside: he needed a group to go on tour with the biggest name in his stable, Billy Fury. Williams was to organise a general audition at which Parnes and his star between them would choose the lucky sidemen.
Fury was Britain’s leading male pop star after Cliff Richard: a 20-year-old combining the smoulder of Elvis with the pathos of Oliver Twist. He was actually a Liverpudlian, born Ronald Wycherley, who’d worked as a Mersey tugboat-hand before Larry Parnes discovered him at a concert in Birkenhead and rebaptised him. Obedient to long-time show business convention, however, he spoke in a vaguely American accent and his publicity omitted all reference to his birthplace. Most interestingly to John and Paul, he was the first British pop idol to bypass the professional songsmiths of Tin Pan Alley. Others had penned the odd original track but on Fury’s debut album, The Sound of Fury, currently in the shops, every one was his own composition.
This time, the Silver Beatles wouldn’t miss out; for, thanks to Brian Casser, they had a drummer at long last. He was Thomas Moore, a forklift truck-driver at the bottle-making factory in Garston. At 29, he seemed middle-aged to the two students, the apprentice and the schoolboy; nonetheless, they gobbled him up like bulimic piranhas.
The auditions took place on 10 May, in an old social club in Seel Street which Allan Williams planned to convert into an upscale nightspot. The cream of Liverpool’s bands went through their paces as Parnes and Fury sat at a table taking notes like adjudicators at a music festival. To provide a photographic record, Williams had hired his Slater Street neighbour, Cheniston Roland, whose subjects were normally celebrities staying at the Adelphi Hotel, such as Marlene Dietrich and jazzman Dizzy Gillespie.
For this breathtaking opportunity, the Silver Beatles made a special sartorial effort: matching black shirts, black jeans with white-piped rear pockets and two-tone Italian shoes which Larry Parnes, in the twilight, mistook for ‘tennis shoes’. They were painfully in awe of the star whose backing band they aspired to be, calling him ‘Mr Fury’ and reacting like scandalised maiden aunts when the photographer Cheniston Roland addressed him as ‘Ronnie’; in earlier years, he’d been Roland’s newspaper delivery boy.
Their new drummer, Tommy Moore, didn’t arrive with them, having gone to fetch his kit from a club on the other side of town. When their turn came, Moore still hadn’t appeared, so they were forced to borrow the Cassanovas’ drummer Johnny Hutchinson, a noted tough guy who made no bones about disliking John and thinking the Silver Beatles ‘not worth a carrot’.
Cheniston Roland’s famous shot of them in mid-performance shows John and Paul frantically bouncing around in their little two-tone shoes as if trying to compensate for their bandmates’ woodenness–serious-faced George; Stu Sutcliffe with his heavy bass, as usual turning away in embarrassment to hide his ineptitude; ‘Johnny Hutch’ on drums, in ordinary street-clothes and clearly bored to death.
Among the onlookers was the Cassanovas’ new bass-player, John Gustafson. ‘They had tinny little amps that hardly made a squeak,’ Gustafson recalls. ‘John and Paul didn’t do any of their own songs that day, just straight rock ‘n’ roll, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Larry Williams. But what sticks in my mind was Paul’s voice. This pretty boy, who all the girls loved, would open his mouth and the most amazing Little Richard-type scream came out.’
They didn’t get the coveted Billy Fury job, but Larry Parnes saw something in those leaping lads in ‘tennis shoes’. Eight days later, through Allan Williams, Parnes offered them a week-long Scottish tour as backing group to another singer from his stable, Johnny Gentle. They’d have to decide quickly since the tour was scheduled to begin in 48 hours.
For the two art students, the electrical apprentice and the forklift truck-driver, there was no problem about seizing the opportunity. But for Paul, it came at the start of the Inny’s summer term, with his A-Level exams just a few weeks ahead. Few fathers would have been likely to sanction such a jaunt, least of all one with a respect for education like Jim McCartney’s.
Nonetheless, when the Silver Beatles caught a train for Scotland two days later, Paul went with them. He’d managed to convince Jim that he had an unexpected week off from school and the tour would be ‘good for his brain’.
In the spirit of Larry Parnes protégés, three of them took stage-names of their own invention. Paul became Paul Ramon, thinking it had an exotic 1920s silent movie sound; George became Carl Harrison in tribute to Carl Perkins; and Stu Sutcliffe became Stuart de Stael after the abstract painter Nicolas de Stael. John and new drummer Tommy Moore didn’t bother, although during the tour–according to Paul–John did once or twice hark back to the Treasure Island theme Brian Casser had proposed for the band and let himself be known as ‘Long John’.
They travelled to Alloa, Clackmannanshire, in the Scottish Central Lowlands, where they met their temporary front man, Johnny Gentle, for the first time. There was then just half an hour to rehearse before they went onstage together at the Town Hall in nearby March Hill.
Twenty-three-year-old Gentle was yet another ‘secret’ Liverpudlian, born John Askew and a carpenter and merchant seaman before moving to London, where Larry Parnes had found and rebranded him. Although only a minor member of Parnes’s stable, he was hugely impressive to the Silver Beatles for having appeared with Eddie Cochran at the Bristol Hippodrome just hours before Cochran’s death on the road back to London.
Gentle was less thrilled to find that of his promised five sidemen, only three were fully functioning musicians. Stu Sutcliffe still palpably struggled on bass guitar and while Tommy Moore was a serviceable enough drummer, his kit was so insecurely put together that a too-enthusiastic bang on the bass drum could detach it from its mounting and send it rolling away across the stage.
In the opening show, their performance was so bad that Parnes’s Scottish co-promoter, a sometime poultry farmer named Duncan McKinnon, popularly known as ‘Drunken Duncan’, wanted to put them on the first train back to Liverpool. But Johnny Gentle insisted that he could work with them, hoping they might improve along the way.
The tour, which had sounded so glamorous, turned out to be a week of purgatory, travelling in a van up Scotland’s bleak north-east coast and into the Highlands, performing in half-empty ballrooms and municipal halls and staying in cheerless small hotels or bed-and-breakfasts. Nor were their paltry audiences even aware of watching the Silver Beatles, still less of their fancy individual stage-names; at each venue, the posters simply advertised ‘Johnny Gentle and his Group’. For their collective fee of £18, they had to work punishingly hard, opening the show with an hour on their own, backing Gentle for 20 minutes of Elvis and Ricky Nelson songs, then doing about another hour on their own, usually beset by disappointed cries for more ‘Johnny!’ The stamina John, Paul and George were forced to develop would serve them well in the months–and years–ahead.
Living at democratically close quarters with his group, Johnny Gentle soon became aware of the tensions within it. The disappointments and discomforts of the journey gave a special edge to John’s acid tongue and malevolent humour, usually at the expense of his two most vulnerable bandmates. He teased Tommy Moore continually about his age, calling him ‘dad’ or ‘grandad’ and playing elaborate practical jokes on him. And Stu’s distance from art college magnified his poor musicianship in John’s eyes and disqualified him from respect, even consideration. In the back of the tour van, there weren’t enough seats for everyone, so John always made Stu perch precariously on one of the metal wheel-arches.
The tour revealed Paul’s ability–one he would keep all his life–to get the most out of even the poorest situation. However remote the venue and minuscule the audience, he always played the role of ‘Paul Ramon’ to the hilt, greeting the Highland girls with an unfailing smile and ever-ready joke Scottish accent, signing his first-ever autographs with euphoric loops of his schoolteachery signature and immediately sending a postcard to his dad about it.
He also took every opportunity to pump the good-natured Gentle about what a pop idol’s life was like. ‘He was inquisitive about everything… how I’d got my start… how you made records… where I thought he and the others in the band should go from here.
‘I told him, “The best thing you can do is get down to London as soon as possible.” In retrospect, of course, that was the very worst advice I could have given. But Paul said, oh no, they were determined to make it in Liverpool first.
‘He was never in any doubt that the band would make it someday. He had this total focus and dedication, but he was realistic as well. He’d looked at the careers of the big rock ‘n’ roll names and knew how short they always were. “When we get to the top,” he told me, “we’ll have a couple of good years if we’re lucky.”’
At one point on the journey, he might easily have gone the way of Eddie Cochran. En route from Inverness to Fraserburgh, the van-driver, Gerry Scott, was incapacitated by a severe hangover so Johnny Gentle took over at the wheel. At a confusing road-fork, he took the wrong turn and hit an approaching car head-on. No one was wearing seat-belts but, miraculously, the only casualty was Tommy Moore, who had two teeth loosened by a flying-guitar case and had to be taken to the local hospital suffering from concussion.
It wasn’t enough to excuse Tommy from his so-necessary duties at that night’s show. While he was still being treated in the casualty department, John barged in, almost frog-marched him to the venue and pushed him onstage, still groggy from painkillers and with a bandage around his head.
Things went rapidly downhill from there. The group had by now spent all of their small subsistence allowance from Larry Parnes but had seen no sign of a promised second instalment that was to have come via Allan Williams. For the last couple of days, they became semi-vagrants, skipping out of hotels and cafés without paying (something which didn’t bother John but mortified Paul) and sleeping in the van. George later recalled that they were ‘like orphans… shoes full of holes, clothes a mess’. When Parnes finally did send some money, it wasn’t enough to pay all their train-fares home, so Stu’s mother had to be asked to make up the difference.
For Paul, it was the unhappiest introduction to a land that would one day give him boundless happiness.
The Scottish tour had promised to lift the Silver Beatles out of obscurity but it left them even worse off than before. Johnny Gentle had seen some sparks of talent in their playing and sent an enthusiastic report to Larry Parnes in London. However, Parnes had decided they were trouble and offered them no further work. Worst of all, the battered Tommy Moore resigned as their drummer to return to his better-paid job driving a forklift truck at Garston Bottle Works. They did their best to win him back, shouting apologies up at the windows of his flat until his girlfriend appeared and told them to fuck off, then pursuing his forklift around the bottle works yard, but on that question Tommy was immovable.
All hope now rested with Allan Williams who, thanks to his connection with Parnes, had become a figure of consequence in Liverpool entertainment circles. Through the summer of 1960, Williams set about trying to get them gigs, handicapped as they were by rhythm still only ‘in the guitars’ and a name that nobody liked or understood. The business cards he had printed called them the Beatles, though they were variously advertised as the Silver Beatles, the Silver Beetles and the Silver Beats.
Few of the venues Williams came up with seemed like any place for a Liverpool Institute boy like Paul. These were mainly ballrooms and municipal halls in Liverpool’s toughest areas, where unreconstructed Teddy boys wanted to hear nothing but original hardcore rock ‘n’ roll, and faithfully kept alive its original spirit of violence and destruction.
What would be innocently billed as a ‘dance’, a ‘hop’ or a ‘jive-session’ almost always turned into a set-piece confrontation between Teds from the district and invaders from a neighbouring suburb. Often, a number from the band would unwittingly cause the ‘bother’; their version of the Olympics’ ‘Hully-Gully’, for example, always started beer-bottles, even whole beer-crates, flying.
One night at the misleadingly posh-sounding Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey, a huge Ted leapt onto the stage and grabbed Paul’s puny little Elpico amplifier to use as a missile. His polite protest was answered by a snarl of ‘One move and you’re dead.’
Williams at the time had a business partner, a member of Liverpool’s substantial West Indian community whose vast consumption of the cheapest brand of cigarette had earned him the nickname ‘Lord Woodbine’. In Upper Parliament Street the pair operated a strip club, still illegal in Liverpool and so innocuously named the New Cabaret Artists Club. One evening when the strippers’ regular accompanists failed to show, Williams put the Silver Beatles/Beetles/Beats on instead.
Paul would always remember the rather forbidding stripper named Janice who briefed them on her musical requirements. ‘[She] brought sheet music for us to play all her arrangements. She gave us a bit of Beethoven and the Spanish Fire Dance. We said, “We can’t read music, sorry, but… we can play the Harry Lime Cha Cha, which we’ve arranged ourselves… and you can have Moonglow and September Song… and instead of the Sabre Dance, we’ll give you Ramrod.”
‘Well, we played behind her… the audience looked at her, everybody looked at her just sort of normal. At the end of her act, she would turn round and… well, we were all just young lads, we’d never seen anything like it and we all blushed. Four blushing, red-faced lads.’
The best exposure Williams provided was in the basement club of his coffee bar, the Jacaranda, where, led by Stu Sutcliffe, they’d already painted surrealistic murals and redecorated the ladies’ toilet. They appeared on Mondays, when the club’s usual Jamaican steel band had the evening off, but without any advertisements or even billing outside. The tiny stage did not have stand-microphones, so Paul and John’s girlfriends, Dot and Cynthia, would sit in front of them, each holding up a broom-pole with a hand-mic tied to its end. Bill Harry and his own girlfriend, Virginia, often witnessed this display of selflessness. ‘Then later as we left, we’d see Paul necking with Dot in one doorway and John with Cynthia in another.’
At the Inny, Paul had sat his A-Level exams in two subjects, failing art but passing English literature. Though it was enough to get him to teacher-training college, a mood of unaccustomed sloth had come over him and he was considering marking time for an extra year in the sixth form. The idea had been prompted by one of John’s college acquaintances, still studying art at the advanced age of 24.
‘I thought if he could keep going without getting a job, then so could I.’
This plan was overturned by a sudden opportunity which would see Liverpool’s worst band leap out of the Jacaranda’s basement to West Germany, then back again, almost magically transformed into its very best.
The opportunity came from Hamburg, a port very like Liverpool in its raffish, cosmopolitan nature but with the addition of a sex district named St Pauli that was legendary throughout Europe. There, a club owner named Bruno Koschmider had recently asked Allan Williams to supply a band for one of his establishments, the Kaiserkeller. Williams had sent over Derry and the Seniors, who at that time were Merseyside’s top dance-hall attraction. Such was the German appetite for British rock ‘n’ roll that now Herr Koschmider wanted a second outfit, for a six-week engagement beginning on 17 August.
Williams’s first thought was not of his recent mural-painters and toilet-decorators. He offered the gig to Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, who had to turn it down because of a prior commitment at a Butlin’s holiday camp. Next on his list were Gerry and the Pacemakers, but their leader, Gerry Marsden, refused to quit his steady job with British Railways. So, scraping the bottom of the barrel, Williams turned to John, Paul, George and Stu.
Accepting the offer meant turning professional–an easy enough transition for three out of the four. John had no idea what he might do after graduating (or failing to) from art college and rejoiced in confounding his Aunt Mimi’s prophecy by earning a living from his guitar. Stu would not have to turn his back on art, for the college assured its most promising student he could return and complete his diploma anytime he wished. For George, anything was preferable to an electrical apprenticeship at Blacklers.
Paul, on the other hand, seemed to have everything to lose. Becoming a full-time musician–with no prospects after the first six weeks–seemed no kind of substitute for teacher training. He would disappoint his father and, even worse, betray the memory of the mother who’d always so much wanted him to rise socially. On the other hand, he’d be getting £15 per week, a hefty wage for anyone in 1960; more than his dad earned, and most of his teachers too.
Jim McCartney was predictably horrified by the thought of Paul giving up school and, even more, of his taking employment in the country which had bombed Liverpool to ruins only 20 years earlier. And having only just turned 18, he couldn’t go without written parental consent. However, his brother Michael pleaded eloquently on his behalf and Allan Williams visited 20 Forthlin Road with assurances that ‘the lads’ would be well looked after. So Jim put aside his misgivings and signed the necessary paper.
There remained one major obstacle for the band who, for the sake of simplicity in a non-English-speaking environment, now called themselves simply the Beatles. Somehow or other, they would have to find themselves a drummer. They thought they’d struck lucky with a mysterious youth named Norman Chapman, whom they chanced to hear practising alone–and brilliantly–in an office building near the Jacaranda. Chapman sat in with them a couple of times, but then had to go into the army in Britain’s final batch of National Service conscripts.
With their departure date looming, Paul was ready to take on the drummer’s role, using odds and ends of kit left behind by previous incumbents. However, that would still leave them one body short: Herr Koschmider wanted a band exactly like the one Williams had previously sent him, and Derry and the Seniors were a quintet.
Then late one night, John, Paul and George happened to drop by the Casbah coffee club in Hayman’s Green, their first visit since playing there as the Quarrymen the previous year and walking out in a Paul-led huff. They found Mona Best’s basement venue still buzzy, now with a resident band named the Blackjacks, featuring her handsome, taciturn son Pete, on his pearly blue drum-kit. Afterwards, Paul contacted Pete Best–who, coincidentally, was also bound for teacher-training college–told him about the Hamburg gig and invited him to audition for the Beatles. This duly took place, at the same run-down club where they themselves had auditioned for Larry Parnes, but was the merest formality: Pete was in as suddenly as, two years later, he would be out. Blackjacked twice over.
At the Inny, the news that Paul was blowing out sixth form to become a rock musician caused a sensation among pupils and staff alike. Head of English ‘Dusty’ Durband was deeply disappointed by this apparently reckless sacrifice of the most worthwhile of careers. ‘Just who do you want to be, Paul?’ Durban inquired, quoting the least impressive pop name he could think of: ‘Tommy Steele?’
Strictly speaking, it was Jim McCartney’s job to give written notice to the headmaster, Mr Edwards, but Paul himself did so. He was, as always, polite and respectful to ‘the Baz’, but couldn’t resist mentioning the affluence awaiting him in Hamburg: ‘I am sure you will understand why I will not be coming back in September… and the pay is £15 per week.’
On the last day of term, his farewell was to climb onto his wooden desk–the one at which the famous funny man Arthur Askey used to sit–and perform ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ in his lustiest Little Richard shriek.