By his own admission John’s behaviour deteriorated after the death of his mother. For the next two years he was, he would say, angry with the world. As his tongue and temper grew increasingly vicious he began to drink a lot, spending longer in Ye Cracke at lunchtime – and not now for the conversation. Throughout his life he would never be good with alcohol, often becoming cruel and unpleasant when he drank.
‘It was mainly one long drinking session,’ he would later tell Rolling Stone. ‘But when you’re eighteen or nineteen you can put away a lot of drink and not hurt your body so much . . . I was pretty self-destructive . . . smashed phone boxes . . . a little violent . . . It made me very bitter. The underlying chip on my shoulder that I already had, got really big then.’
One of his college girlfriends at that time, a pretty, dark-haired Liverpudlian called Thelma Pickles, identified his problem with one deadly accurate line when after being berated by him she eventually snapped back: ‘Don’t take it out on me because your mum’s dead.’
His friendship with Paul helped. He didn’t want to talk about Julia’s death, as Paul didn’t discuss losing his mother. But, though unspoken, it was something they shared as they continued to play and write together. Paul believes it may have drawn them closer together.
‘We had a bond there that we never talked about,’ he told Keith Howlett. ‘I know he was shattered, but at that age you’re not allowed to be devastated . . . We had private tears . . . but we knew we just had to get on with our lives. I’m sure I formed shells and barriers in that period that I’ve got to this day.’
It was a quiet time for the Quarry Men, with Len Garry having been taken ill with viral meningitis during the summer. And although John and Paul visited him in hospital, his tea-chest bass had already become an anachronism. By the time Len came home from hospital, nine months later, the group had moved on. He wasn’t needed any more.
Because drummers were still hard to find, Colin Hanton hung on in the original Quarry Men line-up for the longest, but even his grip was slipping. Having had less education than John or Paul, who were both not beyond flaunting their grammar school erudition, he was never close to either, and would become irritated when Paul would criticise him for playing his drums too loudly. Furthermore, rehearsals had been regularly held at Paul’s home on Sundays, but, after complaints from the neighbours, Jim McCartney banned drums from his home, which meant Colin’s weekly get-together with the others ended.
The end came for Colin in a drunken row on the top deck of the bus after an appearance in a club in the Norris Green suburb of Liverpool, when, as he told Hunter Davies, John began imitating the way deaf mute people spoke. It was part of John’s sick, show-off routine, and on this occasion the adolescent Paul also joined in.
‘It annoyed me because I had a couple of deaf and dumb friends,’ Colin, who by then was almost twenty, remembered. ‘It wasn’t quite a fist fight. Just a lot of shouting and arguing . . . I got so pissed off by how they were behaving that I stood up, even though it wasn’t my stop, collected my drums, left the bus, and left them. I never contacted them again. They never contacted me.’
All of which meant the Quarry Men didn’t have a drummer.
As it happened, John soon didn’t have a guitar, either. After two years of being hammered by him, the acoustic Gallotone instrument his mother had bought him had become unplayable. That meant that when John, Paul and George did get the occasional booking, they would sing with just two guitars as accompaniment. Nor were they still appearing under the name of the Quarry Men. On some nights the three of them would call themselves the Rainbow Boys because of their colourful shirts, while later on they would become Johnny and the Moondogs.
John always liked that name and it was the one they were using when, in late November, they made the thirty-mile train journey to Manchester to audition once again for the Carroll Levis amateur talent TV show. This time, despite their lack of instruments, but now with Paul, they were much more confident and professional. And, judging by the Manchester Hippodrome’s audience reaction when John sang Buddy Holly’s ‘Think It Over’, with the other two Moondogs on either side of him with their guitars, they did well.
Whether they would be wanted back to appear in a further heat, they didn’t know, as they were to be informed by post. But as they were leaving John did something that could have ruined it for all of them. Without a guitar of his own, and spotting one leaning against a wall, he stole it and took it back to Liverpool. To him it was probably just a bit of teenage devilry – made more exciting by the presence of Paul and George as an audience, as he had once enjoyed petty shoplifting with Pete. But it was a dangerous and mean-spirited thing to do. Had he been caught, Johnny and the Moondogs would, at the very least, have been kicked out of the competition. The police might even have been called and John charged with stealing. Luckily for him, none of that occurred. But in the fun of the moment, didn’t he wonder about the boy who owned the guitar, who might have been still paying for it on hire purchase, and who might not have been able to perform when his turn came in the competition?
This was a side of John Lennon that Colin Hanton, and others, disliked and that Jim McCartney feared. In many ways he was generous and welcoming. But there was a selfish streak there, too. As John would say of himself, he could be a real bastard.
As it happened, Johnny and the Moondogs did get through to the second round. And they returned to Manchester a few weeks later – without the purloined guitar, in case anyone should recognise it. Introduced on stage by Jackie Collins, before she became a famous author – and of whom John was overheard to comment admiringly, ‘Look at the tits on that’ – they sang another Buddy Holly song. Unfortunately, they had to leave before the end of the show to catch the last train back to Liverpool, so they never found out how well they’d done. But, no one ran after them with a contract to sign . . .
At college John was distracted and further drifting. Spending his lunch breaks talking to Stu Sutcliffe, he would then go round to Stu’s nearby flat after classes, to put off the time when he had to return home to Mimi in Woolton. ‘I never saw two teenage boys as close as those two,’ tutor Arthur Ballard would remember. Other students would puzzle at the friendship the two shared, but Stu was helping fill a new vacuum that had appeared in John’s life. Julia’s home had been a friendly, lively place for John to go. He missed it.
Sometimes he would take Stu home to Mendips to meet Mimi. As might have been expected, she liked the other boy’s polite, middle-class manners, and his accent, which was northern, like hers, but not the ‘common’ Liverpudlian Scouse of some of John’s other friends. Stuart was, she would tell journalist Ray Coleman, ‘the nicest of all John’s friends’.
John was halfway through his second year at college when Buddy Holly was killed. The news reached Britain on the evening of 4 February 1959. Holly, along with the Big Bopper, the disc jockey who had made a hit out of the song ‘Chantilly Lace’, and seventeen-year-old Ritchie Valens who’d had a million seller with ‘La Bamba’, had decided to take a private flight after appearing at Clear Lake, Iowa, while on a winter tour of the US Midwest. The small plane in which they were travelling had crashed shortly after taking off from Mason City airport, killing all three as well as the pilot.
The newspapers, radio and TV duly covered the story, with a photograph of the little Beechcraft Bonanza plane lying wrecked in a snow-covered field after the bodies had been taken away. But Buddy Holly had belonged to a new culture that wasn’t readily understood by middle-aged editors, and there was little appreciation of how innovative and influential he’d been. There would, therefore, be no long, earnest obituaries published, because there were no dedicated rock writers to file them. Some of the popular papers gave Holly a few showbiz columns, listing his hits and the fact that he had recently married a Puerto Rican girl. But there were bigger stories fighting for space that day, such as the American Airlines flight from Chicago that had crashed into New York’s East River killing sixty-five passengers, and the results of a referendum in Switzerland that had overwhelmingly banned women from voting. The death of a pop singer, along with two others who were not as well known, was tragic, but it didn’t dominate the news for very long.
To young rock and roll fans, however, Holly’s death was more than shocking. It seemed inexplicable. Young rock stars didn’t die in those days. Rock was new. Nothing like this had ever happened before. There was no internal memory by which fans could deal with it.
For John and Paul, as surely as for thousands of boys who were starting out with their own groups, the news was numbing. Holly had been only twenty-two, but, as a songwriter and guitarist, he’d been showing the way. When John next saw Paul and George, they could talk of little else, reminding each other of information they all knew, and how when Holly had appeared for one night only at the Liverpool Philharmonic just eleven months earlier, they, for some now regretted reason, hadn’t gone to see him. What they had done was study his performance when he’d appeared earlier on ITV’s Sunday Night At The London Palladium.
‘That was the big occasion, to watch his fingers,’ Paul would later tell a BBC interviewer. ‘To see what guitar he had, to see if he played the chords right . . . to see if he used a capo . . . all the various technical things.’
For John, it had been the first time he’d seen a Fender guitar played while the singer sang. What Buddy Holly did with three chords made a songwriter out of him, he would write in a letter to a Holly fan in 1974.
And now the teacher was gone. The Quarry Men had been incorporating many Holly songs into their act for two years, but the songwriting lessons he’d unknowingly given John and Paul would serve them for life.
For a boy who spent so much of his time in all-male gangs, it was important to John to always have a steady girlfriend. There had been various liaisons at college but the longest-lasting would be with Thelma Pickles. Thelma was brave and clever, and streetwise enough not to take any verbal clatterings from him – and there were several – without sticking up for herself. Good friends rather than star-struck lovers, they just got on. He made her laugh. It wasn’t a serious relationship, and when it reached its natural breaking point, they remained friends. They were never in love, simply, for a few months, a pair of like minds in a gang of young Liverpool students who were starting out in life.
Thelma’s successor would be altogether different.