WE ALL LIKED A CERTAIN KIND OF R & B. THESE DAYS R & B is sort of hip-hop, but back then it was proper rhythm and blues. And early on, we all loved Black music. We loved the spontaneity, or seeming spontaneity, of it.

The songs we listened to often seemed to refer to ‘a woman’. A song like ‘I Got a Woman’ by Ray Charles, or Little Richard’s hymns to ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’. A lot of what we were listening to was already there, but I think what we did was to take it in, send it through the tumble dryer, distil it and push it out the other end.

‘She’s a Woman’ extols the virtues of a girl of mine, and let’s be clear, she’s not a girl, she’s a woman. Because this was the interesting thing: when does a girl become a woman? To us, they’d been girls till we were around twenty-one. And they were still sort of girls, but now we could dare to think of ourselves as men, and could think of girls as women.

Often one of us would come up with something that put a spark in the recording, and I think the spark on the recording of ‘She’s a Woman’ was the combination of John’s backbeat guitar and my bass.

I’ve never composed on the bass. Never. Not to this day. So how did I end up playing the bass in this band? Well, after my cheap Rosetti Solid 7 guitar fell apart in Hamburg, I had to find a new instrument. We already had two guitars, a drummer and Stuart Sutcliffe, the bass player. There happened to be a piano on the stage where we played, so I took to that and just sort of worked all the songs out on piano. So, I became the pianist in the group. What was quite funny was that Stuart didn’t have any spare bass strings, so if one of his bass strings broke, he would raid my piano. He’d take a pair of pliers and cut out a string.

When we were in Hamburg, Stuart fell in love with a local girl called Astrid and decided he was leaving the group. So we were now without a bass player. We couldn’t have three guitars and no bass. Nobody wanted to be the bass player in those days because it was always the fat guy playing bass. There seemed to be some sort of stigma attached to it. Anyway, I bought a Höfner bass, a lovely violin-shaped thing that appealed to me because, being left-handed, I knew I was going to turn it upside down. Its symmetry was a big attraction for me. And it was light as a feather.

I have to smile at the fact that I turned out to be a bass player, because my dad always used to point out the bass in songs we heard. He was a musician with Jim Mac’s Jazz Band, playing piano and trumpet, and he educated me and my brother in music appreciation. We’d be listening to something on the radio, and he’d say, ‘Hear that? That’s the bass!’

Early 1960s