JOHN AND PAUL START WRITING
Every time I approach a song, there’s no rules. Sometimes the music comes first, sometimes the words – and if you’re lucky, it all comes together.
– Paul McCartney
John and Paul started to spend time together away from The Quarrymen to find out more about each other’s musical interests. One of the first songs they learned to play together was Buddy Holly’s ‘That’ll Be The Day’ with Paul showing John guitar chords. Both also found out that, like Holly, they had each written songs of their own. When John was first teaching himself the guitar he created ‘Calypso Rock’ and later ‘Hello Little Girl’, while Paul had written the Sinatra-style ‘I Call It Suicide’ (inspired by his dad’s piano composition ‘Walking In The Park With Eloise’ and later recorded by Paul in 1974 with Wings and Chet Atkins, under the name of The Country Hams), a dance band number, ‘When I’m Sixty Four’ and, on guitar, ‘I Lost My Little Girl’.
The first songs they wrote together were called ‘Too Bad About Sorrows’ and ‘Because I Know You Love Me’, though neither were shown to The Quarrymen; they remained uncompleted and unrecorded. This was the case with other early songs, such as ‘I’ve Been Thinking You Love Me’, ‘If Tomorrow Ever Comes’ and ‘Years Roll Along’. At this time, though, they did write ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘I Call Your Name’, which would make their way into The Beatles’ repertoire later.
Buddy Holly, a huge influence on The Beatles. Alamy
As Paul’s dad didn’t approve of his new friendship with John, these songwriting sessions usually took place during the day when Jim was at work. Skipping school and art college, they would sit face to face, smoking, drinking tea, strumming their guitars, seeing what they could create. Quickly, they established a rule that if they couldn’t remember a song they had written the day before, it would be scrapped: if it wasn’t memorable to them, it wouldn’t be memorable to an audience. However, in their live sets, they stuck to covers for the moment.