John moved out of Mendips and into a flat with Stuart in January 1960. ‘I feel like a baby living at home,’ he had told Mimi. Not surprisingly, she didn’t like the idea but he’d got around her by promising he would go home once a week – although it was double-edged in that it gave him the opportunity to take her his washing and get a decent cooked meal. She complained, but went along with it. One night a week was better than him not going home at all. When things were bad between them, there would be much shouting and arguing. But in better times it would be Mimi affecting despair at what she saw as his silliness and sloth – while being still amused by his joking. He could always make her laugh. When he was in the mood, he could make everyone laugh. He was an entertainer.
Stu’s new flat was the first floor of a house in Gambier Terrace, an imposing 1830s street of grand homes, the front room of which overlooked Liverpool Cathedral. No students could afford to live there today, but in 1960, although the front door was between two Doric columns, and the hall, stairs and rooms were vast, the entire building was in a crumbling state of disrepair. John didn’t notice that. Going home to sleepy Woolton after classes had made him feel more like a commuter than a student. Having his own place – well, a part of a room he shared with Stu – in the heart of Georgian Liverpool, unchained at last from Mimi’s strictures, was pure freedom. Paul and George liked it, too, sometimes staying over on a Saturday night and sleeping on the floor after an all-night party. As well as Stu, the flat was occupied by three other students, two of whom were girls. In 1960 to be living in a student flat with girls was almost ‘permissive’, a word that hadn’t yet found its place in the vocabulary of most people.
Apart from its convenience, Gambier Terrace also meant that John had somewhere to be alone with Cynthia – the obliging Stuart being regularly asked to make himself scarce for a while. And when Cynthia fibbed to her mother about staying the night with her pal Phyllis and ended up in bed with John instead, Stuart would be accommodating about that, too.
By this time the Quarry Men’s appearances at the Casbah had ended after a row over whether the extra guitarist (who owned the amp) should receive his share of the pay for a night when he’d been too unwell to play. Mona Best as the employer thought he should. John, Paul and George disagreed, insisting that his share of the fee should be split between the three of them. Mona made the rules in her club and wasn’t going to be dictated to by a mouthy John Lennon. If they didn’t like it they could go. They went.
It was a big mistake because for a while nobody else wanted them. The trouble was, they lacked a bass player and a drummer. Reflecting on the Beatles’ early years, John would often stress how important it was that three of them had been to grammar schools and one to art college. ‘That was what made the Beatles different,’ he would say. ‘We were pretty well educated . . . Paul could have gone to university. He could have become, I don’t know, Dr McCartney . . . I ruined his life!’ Which, apart from the joke at the end, was true. The education that the Beatles had, especially John and Paul who would become the main songwriters, did make them different from rival groups of that time – and very different from the working-class early American rockers. But in Liverpool in 1960, that education could also be something of a handicap.
In the years since the skiffle explosion, many Liverpool youths had evolved into good rock and roll bands. But, while skiffle had been acoustic, rock and roll was an electric form of music that relied upon amplifiers, electric guitars and bass and a decent set of drums.
Most boys in rival groups had left school at sixteen and taken jobs to fund their musical aspirations. A group that included a schoolboy and a penniless student couldn’t hope to compete with the expenditure on instruments and equipment that was now necessary. Over the months several of John’s college friends had been offered the chance of joining the band, if they would buy and learn to play an electric bass. But none had taken him up on the chance, either because they weren’t musical, or because they couldn’t afford to buy a bass.
Then one day, Stuart had a stroke of luck. In the autumn of 1959, he had entered a painting in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, only to discover that millionaire philanthropist John Moores himself, the owner of Littlewoods Pools and over fifty department stores, had bought it for £65. That would be about £1,400 in today’s money. It was a fortune, and John, aided by Paul and George, knew exactly how Stu should spend some of it – either on a set of drums or a bass. The choice was his.
Stu couldn’t play either instrument, or indeed any instrument, but the bass seemed the easier choice. So, accompanied by John and George, he was walked to Frank Hessy’s shop where he bought a large Hofner 333. When he confessed that he didn’t know if he could ever learn to play it, John was scornful. ‘Of course you can,’ he insisted. ‘Anyone can play the bass. It’s only got four fucking strings.’ Perhaps what John should have said was that anyone who was ‘naturally musical could learn to play the bass’. There’s a difference. But the deed was done. Stu was in the band whether he could play or not.
Quite what the group he had just joined were even called had been uncertain for some time, when John suggested a new name. He’d been musing over what a great name ‘The Crickets’ had been for Buddy Holly’s band, and had been going through friendly insects like ladybirds (obviously unsuitable), spiders and grasshoppers, when . . . ‘The idea of beetles came into my head. I decided to spell it BEAtles to make it look like beat music as a joke,’ he would remember. So, the Beatles was the name by which the ex-Quarry Men, ex-Rainbow Boys, ex-Johnny and the Moondogs, would become known.
Now they had a new name and a bass; what they didn’t have was an amplifier that could take more than one guitar. The college entertainment committee solved that when Stuart and Bill Harry convinced them that an amp was essential for dances. As the Beatles were the only band to play at such evenings, they very soon appropriated it for themselves . . . and, in the piratical environment of nascent rock and roll, never bothered to give it back.
The admission of Stuart into the band may have seemed a simple solution to an ongoing problem, but it also created a new tension. John didn’t have a monopoly on jealousy. Paul could be jealous, too. Once it had been John and Pete Shotton, inseparable friends and partners, and, as Pete had noticed, John always needed a partner. Then Paul had replaced Pete, and Lennon and McCartney had been born. Over months that friendship had grown into something more than the swapping of chords and lyrics, and the high harmony that Paul would sing over John’s lower voice.
In fact that Easter of 1960 John and Paul would even sing as a duo, when they hitch-hiked to Caversham in the south of England where a friend was running a pub. For a week, John and Paul, who had to sleep together in the same single bed, would entertain the regulars under the name the Nerk Twins. They were best friends and there was a mutual admiration between the two. While John would always recognise Paul’s greater gift for melody and musical craft – no matter what he might sometimes say years later – Paul admired John for his unalloyed bravery in speaking his mind, and his ability to summarise a thought in a single, often witty, line.
There was more. When John had been living at Mendips, Paul would sometimes go over on his bicycle to find him at a typewriter in his bedroom composing a nonsense piece. Or, perhaps, it might have been a poem that John was writing – something that played with words and images in the style of Dylan Thomas by way of radio star Stanley Unwin, whose corruption of everyday English turned sentences into clever-sounding nonsense. John liked to call that style gobbledegook, a wartime word he’d picked up from the radio, when presenters poked fun at seemingly unintelligible official documents. Always a great talker, John loved words and slogans and enjoyed bending and reshaping their meanings. And Paul, who was studying English Literature at school, and seeing himself as a culture vulture, was impressed. At one point the two even started to write a play together, before quickly deciding that they didn’t know what to write about and that song lyrics were more their metier.
So, with a friendship that was now based on more than music, it was inevitable that, with the introduction of Stuart to the group, Paul began to feel like an outsider. It was hardly Stu’s fault that John had dragged him into the band. But feeling increasingly cast aside, the perfectionist in Paul couldn’t help hearing the wrong notes the new bassist was playing. John would have heard those wrong notes too, but must have consoled himself with the thought that, given time, Stuart would improve. He would, but he would never be good enough. When the occasion demanded, however, John had an infinite capacity to deny the evidence of his own ears.
When Paul was older he would be embarrassed by his youthful jealousy. ‘It was something I didn’t deal with very well,’ he would admit. ‘George and I were always slightly jealous of John’s other friendships. He was the older fella . . . and . . . when Stuart came in . . . we had to take a bit of a back seat.’
It wouldn’t be the only time that Paul felt his partnership with
John was being put under pressure by a newcomer.
John grew up a lot during those months in Gambier Terrace. In his overcoat and jeans, he enjoyed being the eccentric art student, while the beatnik ethos of the time, with its romance of the hip artist, would stay with him for life.
Parts of central Liverpool, drab during the day, would come alive at night, and a coffee bar called the Jacaranda, which was down the hill towards the centre of Liverpool, had recently become a focal point for students. It was an exotic place, which had been recently opened by thirty-year-old, bearded Allan Williams, the son of a local dance promoter, and his eye-catching Chinese-Liverpudlian wife Beryl.
Initially, John had gone there at lunchtime with his college friends, where they had dreamed magnificent futures for themselves in which they turned their city into a cultural beacon. But now that he was living in town, he and Stuart, often joined by Paul and George, would hang out in the evenings in the Jacaranda’s cellar, which had been converted into a small nightclub.
He wasn’t there the night that ‘beat poet’ Royston Ellis turned up. Ellis had come to Liverpool to give a talk at the university. But, being disappointed with the students’ reaction, he’d made his way to the Jacaranda, where he fell into conversation with George Harrison. Intrigued by this almost-famous poet, George quickly invited Ellis back to Gambier Terrace.
Of all the group, John was the most impressed by Ellis. He had never met a real poet before, and the idea of fusing rock music with poems (which Ellis would do later with guitarist Jimmy Page in the musician’s pre-Led Zeppelin days) captured his imagination. But particularly interesting was Ellis’s advice on how to get high by chewing the Benzedrine cardboard strips which were then to be found inside Vicks nasal inhalers. Setting aside alcohol, this would be the first time John tried any kind of drug. It was, Ellis told the Beatles, the fashion in London.
But when Ellis then read them a poem about a homosexual act (then still a crime in Britain) and told them that one in four men was probably homosexual without knowing it, they were nonplussed. Paul probably summed up all the Beatles’ reactions best in an interview in 1997 when he remembered: ‘We looked at the group. “One in every four.” It literally meant one of us was gay. Oh, fucking hell, it’s not me, is it!!!’
The Beatles didn’t know very much about homosexuality. In those days it wasn’t much talked about in their circle. It was sex with girls that was never far from John’s thoughts, but, in those pre-Pill times when pregnancy always loomed, that, too, was a subject that usually came wrapped in code and euphemism. So, John would talk about ‘edge of the bed virgins’ to describe girls who would say ‘no’ at the crucial moment; while the uniquely Liverpudlian phrase ‘getting off at Edge Hill’ described coitus interruptus, Edge Hill being the small station where long-distance trains would stop to let suburban travellers alight, immediately before terminating in Liverpool Lime Street. Finally there was the ultimate act – ‘going for a five-mile run’, John would say, which was what a boy and a girl did when she didn’t say ‘no’. As a figure of speech it may have been a little bit of Lennonesque, John’s explanation being that it came from something he’d read, probably in the Reader’s Digest. For years ‘a doctor’ would regularly write there about the dreaded perils and occasional medical benefits of sex – one of the few pluses being that the physical effort expended during intercourse was the equivalent of going on a five-mile run, and therefore good for the heart. John had never been one for long-distance running (in fact he’d got into trouble at Quarry Bank for skiving off during a school cross country) but he would always be an enthusiastic partaker in a metaphorical five-miler.
History would show that the Jacaranda was a fortunate choice of meeting place for the Beatles, because not only was its owner Allan Williams keen on rock and roll, he was also a fledgling promoter with growing connections. And in 1960 he made one very big connection with Larry Parnes, then the most famous pop manager in London.
Hearing that Williams had been asked by Parnes to find a backing group to tour with Liverpool star Billy Fury, every local band put their names forward. Included among them were the Beatles, although, since Williams knew them as the Silver Beetles, that was the name they would be booked under.
To no one’s surprise the Silver Beetles failed the Fury audition, as did all the other local groups. There was, however, a consolation prize on offer. If they could find a drummer, they could go on a nine-day tour of Scotland backing a second-division Parnes singer called Johnny Gentle. They found one. He was, by day, a forklift truck driver called Thomas Moore – Tommy to his mates.
The tour was a surprise, and a big moment in all their careers, but it had come at an awkward time. Paul should have been preparing for his imminent A-levels, but managed to convince his father that the break would do him good; George took time off from his apprenticeship, and John and Stuart simply skipped college and final exams. And while Cynthia finished off John’s course work for him, Mimi was never even told.
A tour of ballrooms and church halls in remote towns in Scotland wasn’t much, but at £18 each it was the first tour the group had ever done. At last they were being employed as professionals and travelling around Scotland in a Dormobile was, for the first couple of days, a lark. After that, however, the claustrophobia of being locked in together began to fray the nerves, with John unable to resist teasing the stand-in drummer.
Why would John pick on the outsider, especially as the drummer had taken time off from his job at a bottle works to accompany them? It’s difficult to understand. Had it begun as a defence mechanism in his broken childhood? Or had he simply been born with an impatient and mean streak that meant he didn’t suffer fools gladly, nor anyone else who didn’t have the wit or the devil in him to fight back?
Nor was it only Tommy whom he picked on. Stuart may have been his room-mate, but on the road, the newcomer to the group came in for it too – and not only from John. Paul and George, encouraged by their leader, joined in the sniping as well. ‘We were terrible,’ John would remember. ‘We’d tell Stu he couldn’t sit with us. We’d tell him to go away, and he did . . . It was all stupid but that is what we were like.’
The journey from Liverpool to Inverness is 375 miles, after which there was much to-ing and fro-ing between little Highland towns. So, the Silver Beetles were hardly hitting the high spots. But this was something new for them. John got on well with Johnny Gentle, whose real name was John Askew, an apprentice carpenter also from Liverpool, and to whom he gave a few lines for a song that Gentle later recorded; while Paul and George found themselves being asked for their autographs for the very first time. Even Stuart seemed to enjoy the tour. Only Tommy Moore absolutely regretted it, particularly after the Dormobile collided with a car and he was thrown against the band’s equipment, losing two teeth, being concussed and taken to hospital.
If things weren’t bad enough for him, that night John turned up at the hospital with the tour organiser, and, despite Tommy’s concussion, insisted the drummer get out of bed and go and play with them. According to Tommy, he had to play with a bandage around his head, with John constantly glancing back at him in amusement.
‘That John Lennon has a fucking perverse sense of humour’ was something John would grow used to hearing about himself.