WE ALWAYS HAD TROUBLE WITH DRUMMERS. IN THE VERY early days, when we were just innocent boys starting to form our group, John and George were quite set that we three were going to be in it, but we were never quite sure who’d be drumming for us. For a while we even started telling people the rhythm came from the guitars.

We were often throwing pebbles at a drummer’s window saying, ‘We’ve got a gig on Tuesday.’ He’d be trying to sleep, or his wife or girlfriend would shout at us. It was also difficult in those years to find someone who had actually bought and owned a drum kit. We could get away with a guitar; that was easier to acquire. But there was a guy called Colin Hanton who was a little older than us and had come over from John’s group, The Quarry Men; he was with us for a while. So this was the beginning of The Beatles: me, John, George, Colin Hanton on drums, and a school friend of mine, John ‘Duff’ Lowe, who could play piano.

There’s an arpeggio, as I later learnt it’s called, at the beginning of ‘Mean Woman Blues’ by Jerry Lee Lewis. It’s a spread arpeggio – which basically means you play the notes of a chord individually rather than at the same time, and really quickly across several octaves – and none of us could do that, but Duff could, so we were quite impressed with that, and for that reason alone we got him in the group.

The name ‘The Quarry Men’ came from John’s grammar school, Quarry Bank High School. George and I went to what I liked to think was a better grammar school, the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, which is now the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts. But while he was at Quarry Bank, John had formed a group and called them The Quarry Men, so we kind of inherited that title, which we didn’t mind. It was just a name.

At some point in 1958 we wanted to make a record to say, ‘Look, this is us,’ just to show our wares. We found an advert for a little studio, Percy Phillips in Kensington – Liverpool’s Kensington, not quite as posh as London’s Kensington. It was about half an hour away by bus. It cost you five pounds to make a demo record on shellac; that’s the old-fashioned way of doing it. Each of us had managed to scrape a pound together, which wasn’t too hard once we set our minds to it. If it had been five each, that might have been a bit more challenging.

So we showed up at Percy Phillips’s recording studio, which was basically a small room with one mic. We were young kids with our own equipment, and you’d have to wait your turn, like at a doctor’s office. When it was us, he just said, ‘Okay, you go in there and we’ll run through the song, and then you can record it. Let me know what you want to record as the A-side, the B-side and all that.’ And we said okay.

‘In Spite of All the Danger’ original 1958 acetate

There was the Buddy Holly song, now a real classic, called ‘That’ll Be the Day’, which we liked a lot, and we decided we wanted to record it. And then for the B-side we had a self-penned epic, which was called ‘In Spite of All the Danger’. John and I had already started our writing careers, and we had a few songs at that time. He had a couple and I had a couple, and when we got together we fixed each other’s songs up, and they still, in fact, remain unrecorded, which is probably a good thing because they weren’t very good songs. But we did have these two that we took in – ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and ‘In Spite of All the Danger’ – and we recorded them in this little, dark recording studio, and we paid the five pounds.

The only problem was that there was only one copy of the record, so we happily shared it, the deal being that we would each keep it for a week. We’d play it for all our relatives and say, ‘Look at this. This is what we did.’ We were quite thrilled just to hear ourselves on a record because we’d never really done that before. As it turned out, John had it for a week, then gave it to me. I had it for a week, George had it for a week, Colin had it for a week, and then Duff Lowe had it for twenty-three years.

We more or less forgot about it, once each of us had heard it for a week. There wasn’t an awful lot more to do with it. We didn’t have any promoters or managers to play it to. It was really just for ourselves and our families. I got it back in 1981 and made a few copies for friends and family. You can’t play the original acetate really, because the shellac would wear out. It’s said to be one of the most valuable records in the world, but really, for me it’s about the memories in those grooves.

‘In Spite of All the Danger’ has often been thought by some to be a cry for help, that it somehow reflects John’s angst about everything, which really got bad when his mum Julia died very shortly after we recorded the song; it might even have been only days afterwards. But in this case, John was not involved in the start of the song. I realise that many of our songs, especially the very old ones, are thought to come from me, as in ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, which did start with me, with John helping me fix a couple of lines.

It’s true that while some of these songs did start from me, and others began with John or us collaborating, the most important thing to know about ‘In Spite of All the Danger’ is that this is the only McCartney-Harrison writing credit on record. This was really before we understood writing credits. George made up the solo but some of it did come from John. It was the first song we ever recorded, the first thing on which our names appeared, the first official recording of what later became The Beatles.