It would be a recurrent feature of his life. Whenever things got difficult, John would go to earth and cut himself off, or perhaps just go to bed and stay there for as long as he could. After getting home from Hamburg he needed time to think things through. So, for ten days he hung around Mendips and played his records, and then bought some more and listened to them, while making no attempt to contact the other Beatles, nor even to find out if they had got home safely. The Great Hamburg Adventure had ended miserably. He had turned twenty in October; it was time to reassess. ‘I was thinking, “Is this what I want to do? Nightclubs? Seedy scenes? Being deported? Weird people in clubs?” I thought hard about it. Should I continue doing it? It had been a shattering experience,’ he would tell a friend, Elliot Mintz, in 1976.
The only person he did want to see was Cynthia, and he went into Liverpool to meet her after her classes at college. He was wearing the leather jacket he’d bought in Hamburg and decided that she should have a leather coat, too. So they went into C&A’s department store and picked out, as Cynthia would write, ‘a gorgeous, three-quarter length chocolate brown one for seventeen pounds. It was my first present from him and I couldn’t wait to show it off.’
They also bought a takeaway cooked chicken and set off back to Woolton as a treat for Mimi. The encounter didn’t go well. According to Cynthia, when Mimi saw the coat and heard that John had paid for it, ‘she hit the roof’, screaming that he’d ‘spent his money on a gangster’s moll’, and hurled the chicken at him. ‘Do you think you can butter me up with chicken when you’ve spent all your money on this? Get out,’ she said.
Embarrassed by his aunt’s behaviour in front of his girlfriend, John took Cynthia to the station. ‘All she cares about is fucking money and cats,’ he apologised. That wasn’t true. All Mimi really cared about was John.
It was almost Christmas when he finally made contact with the other Beatles, by which time Paul, under duress from his father, was working delivering the Christmas post. He, too, had been wondering whether he should pursue another career. But a session at Mona Best’s Casbah, where a pal of Pete’s filled in on bass, quickly banished those thoughts when the Beatles saw the response they provoked. They had improved so much. Something else happened that night. Neil Aspinall, an acquaintance of Paul’s from school, who was also a friend of Pete’s and lodging with Mona while he studied for accountancy exams, was so thrilled by the Beatles that, as Mona tried to get the group bookings in other venues, he began to make and stick up posters for them.
But it was in working-class North Liverpool at Litherland Town Hall on 27 December that the great breakthrough in their home city really happened. With each of the group being paid £6 for their appearance, from the moment they came on stage and Paul went into his Little Richard impersonation with ‘Long Tall Sally’, the large ballroom came alive. The timing was perfect. With Elvis turning to Hollywood, Buddy Holly dead, Jerry Lee Lewis in disgrace over his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin and Chuck Berry in jail, the fashion for groups had recently diluted into the soft rock of Ricky Nelson in the US and Cliff Richard and the Shadows in the UK. Musically, the Shadows were terrific, but with their shiny suits and fancy little choreographed steps they looked like four bank clerks when they appeared on TV.
No bank in the world would have employed the Beatles. Just the volume of sound that they made – and they would always play very LOUD – shocked and thrilled. Wearing their German leather jackets and black T-shirts as they stamped away in their boots, they were punk-like in their arrogance. John’s art college friend Bill Harry was astonished at the progress they’d made since he’d last seen them in the summer.
Neil Aspinall’s posters outside the hall had billed them as ‘The Beatles, Direct from Hamburg’, but apart from their Casbah fans who had followed them to Litherland, and who obviously included Cynthia and Paul’s pretty seventeen-year-old girlfriend Dot Rhone, who worked in a chemist’s shop, no one knew who they were.
‘Suddenly, we were a wow!’ John would say. ‘Mind you, seventy per cent of the audience thought we were a German wow. They didn’t know we were from Liverpool. They said, “Christ, they speak good English, don’t they.” That was when we began to think we were good. Up until Hamburg we thought we were okay, but not good enough. It was only when we were back in Liverpool that we realised the difference and that everybody else was doing Cliff Richard shit.’
Not that the Beatles were doing anything original yet. The Lennon and McCartney writing partnership may have already produced several songs, but the Beatles didn’t sing anything new that night. It was their full-blooded covers of American rock and roll records that the Litherland audience loved.
It might be imagined that, seeing the audience’s response in Litherland and at other Liverpool venues over the next few months, some enterprising promoter would have pressed a management contract into the group’s hands. But it didn’t happen. Just as the city’s evening newspaper, the Liverpool Echo, which in those days was seen by over a million readers in the Merseyside area, remained totally uninterested in any of the local groups, no young manager saw himself as the next ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker. The lack of managerial interest puzzled John, but this was Liverpool in 1961, where there was no culture of pop management and where the pay was rarely more than eight pounds a night per Beatle. Even though they would sometimes play at two different halls in a single night, after Neil Aspinall bought an old van and put aside his accountancy homework to ferry them across Liverpool, it all seemed very precarious. Small wonder that, with the Christmas post finished, Paul took a day job as an apprentice electrician for three months. None of them could yet be certain that there really might be a future in music.
Stuart returned home from Hamburg in mid-January 1961 to apply for a teacher’s training course at Liverpool College of Art. John had missed him, the two having written long letters to each other over the past six weeks, and he went immediately to see him the night he got back. Both now accepted that music wasn’t going to be Stuart’s career. But in the meantime, while he waited for Astrid to join him in Liverpool, Stuart retook his place on bass with the group. And it was after a gig at Lathom Hall, another North Liverpool venue, at the end of January that he became the victim of an attack in the toilets by a group of Teddy boys.
No one knew why Stuart should be the victim, because he was the most inoffensive of all the group. But, whatever the trigger, while the others were loading their equipment into Neil Aspinall’s van, Stu was knocked to the ground and kicked in the head. When John and Pete realised what was happening, a melee erupted in which John broke a finger.
Stuart was living at his parents’ new home near Sefton Park by then. According to his sister, Pauline, he arrived home still bleeding from the attack, but refused to go to hospital. And when, the following day, the family GP visited him and pronounced that no permanent damage had been done, he resumed his position on bass that night at another venue. John played with a splint around his broken finger.
It was still there when, on 9 February 1961, he and the other Beatles made their debut at the Cavern. John had been there before, of course, in 1957, with the Quarry Men, when he’d been told to ‘cut out the rock and roll’. The world had now moved on . . . more or less.
‘That’s the youngest tramp I’ve ever seen,’ the bouncer on the Cavern door observed as George arrived at 10 Mathew Street in jeans and a leather jacket. He wasn’t joking – not much, anyway. It might have been lunchtime but the Cavern still had standards, and right at the top of its prohibited list were ‘jeans’. It must have made a kind of sense. Mathew Street was in the city centre. Any fans around there in the middle of the day would be kids who were already working for a living. If they were boys, they were either clerks or messengers in the nearby insurance and shipping offices, and therefore had to look smart when they went to work, which meant a collar and a tie and jacket. To let boys into the Cavern who were wearing jeans would have been to encourage the ‘rougher types’, the Cavern’s owner, Ray McFall, had decided. And he didn’t want those fellas in his club. The girls who might attend, and who would mainly be typists or shop-workers or hairdressers’ assistants, would be appropriately dressed, too, in their sensible, if drab, skirts for work and back-combed beehive hair. The decade of the Sixties may already have been more than a year old, but the Sixties of fable, that time of colourful teenage fashion, youthful optimism, permissiveness, drugs and rock and roll, wasn’t even in sight.
Or was it?
George’s appearance at the Cavern door, shortly to be followed by John, George, Pete and Stuart, all similarly dressed, might have given the clue. The barbarians were at the gate and the doorman had to let them in because, jeans or not, they were the entertainment. And, as everyone knows, entertainers live by different rules.
From the outside, in 1961 the Cavern suggested the most unexciting of places – just a doorway in a warehouse in a cobbled alleyway. Not far from the Pier Head, the club’s entrance was surrounded for much of the day by trucks and vans disgorging, or picking up, boxes of fresh produce, the essence of which would lace the surrounding atmosphere with the cloying aroma of ripening fruit. Inside, seventeen steps led to three airless cellars, with a couple of smaller ones to the sides where, in the days before anyone worried too much about ventilators or air conditioning, the walls would quickly become damp with teenage perspiration.
It was a former railway clerk called Bob Wooler who in his new talent-spotting role for the Cavern took the Beatles there. Owner McFall would tell him that if he’d seen the Beatles first he wouldn’t have let Wooler book them. But then he heard them, after which he would stand at the back of the club watching in total admiration as on stage they would play and sing, and then joke and tease and eat and goon about between songs, all the time keeping a conversation going with the fans who would shout out requests. Somehow, the Beatles had developed the gift of turning the audience into friends. When something went wrong with an amp or a microphone, as it often did, they didn’t panic and wonder what to say next. Instead they would simply amuse the fans and maybe have a communal singsong until the problem was mended. Those long hours playing in Hamburg had made them completely at home on stage and with themselves.
Not that any of this would have worked if Hamburg hadn’t also turned them into a terrific band, in which John now sang the Shirelles’ ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, blithely overlooking that it’s a girl’s song as she contemplates losing her virginity. Paul, for his part, went from ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ to ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’, George did his Carl Perkins numbers, Stuart sang ‘Love Me Tender’, and they let Pete leave his drums to do ‘Wild In The Country’. They had an eclectic repertoire.
For this they earned a total of £5 for a two-hour session – a pound each. Their fans paid a shilling (5p) to get in, where they could swap their Luncheon Vouchers, often given to them by their employers, for a Cavern cob (a roll) and a bowl of soup. There was no alcohol, obviously, but a cup of tea cost fivepence (about 2p).
That it would be from this modest, cheap chrysalis of a former wine cellar that the Beatles would emerge, fully formed, less than two years later, seems ever more unlikely the further away in time we get from it.
By March 1961 steps were being made by the Top Ten Club in Hamburg to get the Beatles back to Germany. The group was keen to go. The money, they were now promised, would be much better than at the Kaiserkeller, and there would be accommodation over the club. So, while the Top Ten lobbied the relevant Hamburg authorities, Allan Williams wrote to the German consul in Liverpool explaining that the Beatles were hardly the juvenile delinquents Koschmider had painted them. And, as George was now eighteen, he was therefore legal to work on the Reeperbahn.
While they waited to hear, John would often hang out at the Jacaranda when he was in town, keeping in touch with his college friend Bill Harry. Bill’s news was that with a fifty-pound loan he was setting up a bi-weekly music newspaper for the Merseyside area. It would be called Mersey Beat, and he now wondered if John would like to write for it.
When John didn’t want to do something he was a sloth. When he did, few were quicker. Going home to Mendips he immediately set to work, telling, in a Goon-like allegory, the story of the Beatles’ creation. It was very funny, and told in a fairy-tale style how three little boys ‘grew guitars and formed a noise’, and how the name ‘Beatles’ had been brought to them ‘in a vision’ by a man ‘on a flaming pie . . .’
The account would appear in the first edition of Mersey Beat that coming July with an inspired headline written by Bill Harry himself that read ‘Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of Beatles, translated from the John Lennon’. Harry could forever be justly proud of himself for being the first editor to publish a piece by John Lennon.
But John was proud of himself, too: more than proud. He might not have written Alice In Wonderland but he was going to be published, writing in his own style, the one he’d experimented with in ‘The Daily Howl’ when he’d been at school. He hadn’t had to compromise.
He was a writer now, as he’d always wanted to be.