Polydor, the recording company, asked each of the group to write out a little biography. In his, John lists his ambition as ‘to be rich’ and signs himself ‘John W. Lennon (Leader)’; he mentions in passing that he has ‘written a couple of songs with Paul’. The biography Paul prepared is more detailed and effusive. Under a separate headline, ‘Songs Written’, he states ‘with John (Lennon)–around 70 songs’.

This record was to find its way to Liverpool and NEMS record shop, run by Brian Epstein, which led to Brian meeting them and going on to become their manager. In a five-year contract between Brian and the Beatles, signed on 1 October 1962, John and Ringo sign in their own names but Paul and George, still being under twenty-one, also had to obtain the signatures of their fathers.

The band agree that Brian, as their manager, will receive 25 per cent of ‘all moneys in consideration of their services as Artists’. The list of these services, covering how and where they might be performing or working, is interesting. It includes ‘vaudeville and review’ and also ‘balls, dances and private parties’. There is no mention of the possibility of any income as composers. Did Brian not expect them to make much money writing their own stuff, seeing them only as performers? Or was there no point in mentioning income from songs when they had yet to become recording artists?

Contract with Brian Epstein’s company, NEMS, 1962, in which they are desirous of performing at vaudeville, balls, dances, phonographic recordings.

One of their earliest engagements, before Brian took over, was at a strip club in Liverpool. When the stripper came on, she handed down her sheet music for them to play her backing tune. Unable to read it, they played something they did know, which was ‘Ramrod’. So, if they had been able to read music, would they have gone a different route, becoming session musicians, perhaps not bothering to write their own songs? Of course not. Their view was that being properly trained would only hold them back. Not knowing the rules allowed them to break the rules.

Paul never seems to have composed with George, or even thought about it, yet while they were both at the Liverpool Institute, he would often go back to George’s house, where his mother Louise was always welcoming, and they would practise chords, learn new tunes and techniques. But neither remembered writing together.

George was young for his age, which was very young anyway, as everyone remarked upon at the time, observing him walking like a lapdog ten yards behind John. He looked up to Paul as the clever one, and John as the leader, and tended to fade into the background rather than push himself forward. At sixteen, he had left school and started work as an apprentice electrician in a local department store. He probably felt intellectually inferior to Paul, the sixth former, and John, the art college student. When it came to composing songs, he left that to John and Paul, concentrating on playing the guitar properly.

Right from the beginning, Paul and John hit it off as joint composers. There was clearly some chemistry there. They were competing while co-operating, supporting while criticizing, rivals yet fans, loving each other while bitching. It was in the act of making music that they were at their closest.

Paul, George and John, recording in Abbey Road Studios, July 1963.

Partnerships were the norm when it came to composing popular songs, usually with one person responsible for the lyrics while the other did the music–for example Gilbert penned the words and Sullivan the music; Elton John’s songs had words written by Bernie Taupin; Mick Jagger did most of the words while Keith Richards composed the music. There have of course been notable exceptions, such as Noël Coward and Cole Porter, who did it all. (Cole Porter used to irritate Rodgers and Hammerstein by saying ‘How can it take two men to write one song?’)

Aside from the fact that they both wrote words and music, the other unusual aspect of Lennon and McCartney’s partnership was that they were performers as well as composers. Most composers, joint or otherwise, take a back seat, handing over their babies for others to bring into public life. Elvis never wrote his own songs, nor did Frank Sinatra. Dylan is an exception, writing words and music as well as performing, and his example inspired Paul and John.

There was one interesting and rather mysterious break in their joint song writing, which had been so productive from almost the first time they met, turning out, supposedly, 100 original new songs. During their early spells in Hamburg–covering roughly a year, 1960–61, they don’t appear to have written much, if anything. They were together all the time, not having to rely on finding an empty house in order to sit and work on a new song, as they had done in their early years at home in Liverpool, so in theory they should have produced more.

They were of course busy performing, almost nonstop, taking pills to keep awake, so didn’t have much spare time. But the more likely explanation is that when they first went to Hamburg, John was more involved with his art college friend Stu Sutcliffe, whom he had talked into joining the Beatles. Paul felt a bit a jealous, rather excluded, and for a while his relationship with John was not quite as intense. In July 1961, Stu, now engaged to Astrid Kirchherr, stayed on in Hamburg and left the group. He died tragically after a brain hemorrhage in April 1962.

By then, John and Paul had started writing songs together again, especially when there seemed to be a possibility, thanks to Brian Epstein’s hard work, that Decca or someone else might really offer them a recording contract.

There has always been a prejudice in the recording industry against performers getting above themselves, imagining they are creative artistes. Audiences can be unreceptive too; when an artist they know and love announces he or she is going to sing a song they have just written, the reaction from the fans is liable to be a moan of ‘Spare us’.

The other bias in Britain was that home-grown songs were, well, home-grown, and therefore inferior to the American variety, hence our native composers had to copy American music, producing pastiche country and western or phoney blues songs, and the singers had to adopt a mid-Atlantic accent. British pop music, such as it was in the fifties and early sixties, was also London-centred, with a prejudice against provincial towns and cities, especially Northern ones like Liverpool–the assumption being that nothing noteworthy had ever come from there.

The Beatles had to break all these barriers down–and it took time.

So it’s all the more surprising that, when at long last they did get a break–the chance of a recording contract, in London–they dared presume or at least hope to be allowed to perform one of their home-grown original numbers…

Brian Epstein’s instructions for some of their exciting engagements, June 1962,–for which suits and ties were essential.