Two Liverpool teenagers are introduced after a church fête

It’s not an overly bold statement to claim that some first encounters between Britons have been of rather more significance than others. There was the meeting in Manchester’s Midland Hotel in May 1904 of Charles Rolls and Frederick Royce. Dr Samuel Johnson marched into 6 Russell Street, Covent Garden to find one James Boswell within, apparently sipping a cup of tea. Henry Morton Stanley’s encounter with Dr Livingstone even fashioned its own catchphrase. However, there can have been few meetings that have had such an impact on modern British culture than that which occurred on Saturday 6 July 1957.

The historic event happened in Woolton, a middle-class suburb of Liverpool. John Lennon’s band, The Quarrymen – or ‘The Quarry Men Skiffle Group’ as the posters for the Woolton Parish Church Garden Fête dubbed them – were performing three times that day. First they played in the procession that opened the fête, although ‘played’ may be something of an exaggeration in this case. The lorry on the back of which they were standing was being driven very slowly through the streets of Woolton behind the float of the Rose Queen and her attendants, but the band members still found it difficult to keep from falling over, while at the same time doing something meaningful with their instruments.

John’s half-sister Julia Baird, in her book Imagine This, remembers running alongside the lorry with her younger sister trying to make their big brother laugh. ‘John gave up battling with balance,’ she recalls, ‘and sat with his legs hanging over the edge, playing his guitar and singing.’

The Quarrymen were awarded bottom billing on the poster for the fête, beneath such enticements as the Liverpool Police Dogs Display, Fancy Dress Parade, Sideshows, Refreshments, and the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry. The entrance fee to this extravaganza was a modest 6d for adults and 3d for children. Undaunted by the apparent slight, the Quarrymen gave their second performance of the day, on a stage in a field by St Peter’s, the parish church where John had once been a choir boy.

The line-up that day was John on vocals and guitar, Eric Griffiths on guitar, Rod Davis on banjo, with a rhythm section of Len Garry on tea-chest bass, Pete Shotton on washboard, and Colin Hanton on drums. In an interview with Record Collector, Paul McCartney recalls ‘coming into the fête and seeing all the sideshows. And also hearing all this great music wafting in from this little tannoy system. It was John and the band. I remember I was amazed and thought, “Oh great,” because I was obviously into the music.’

It’s often cited that the two met at the fête. However, to be strictly accurate, although Paul heard John perform there, he was only introduced to him later, as the band was setting up for a gig across the road at the church hall. The Quarrymen (billed last again on the poster, of course) were to share duties with the George Edwards’ Band at the Grand Dance that was scheduled to take place at 8P.M., after the garden fête – admission two shillings.

The unsung hero who brought John and Paul together was Ivan Vaughan. He knew both boys because he occasionally played the tea-chest bass with John’s band and was in the same class at the Liverpool Institute as Paul. The two boys’ interest in rock ’n’ roll and their obvious talent at performing it was Vaughan’s reason for making the introduction, though in another sense it was not a meeting of equals: Lennon would be 17 in October while Paul had only just turned 15.

The two talked a little – John may or may not have had a beer or two (Paul recalled smelling something beery on his breath) – before Paul famously showed John how to tune his guitar conventionally. Up until that time Lennon had been using a banjo tuning, in G (his banjo-playing mother Julia had taught him how to play guitar and had only ever shown him the banjo tuning). Paul had heard John play and sing earlier in the day but of course John had not heard what Paul could do. Cue an impromptu performance by the 15-year-old of a Little Richard medley, Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ and Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’. Swapping the guitar for a handy piano that was lurking backstage, he also gave John his version of Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’.

The Quarrymen performed their third gig of the day at the Grand Dance and the story goes that afterwards the band went to the pub, with McCartney and Vaughan in tow, though Quarrymen Len Garry and Pete Shotton have since claimed that that never happened (and, for that matter, that John had not been drinking earlier either). We do know what Paul and John were wearing when they met, though. Paul was rather dapper in a pair of black drainpipes and a white jacket with silvery streaks on it. Black-and-white photographs taken of the Quarrymen that day show John in an open-necked checked shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and dark trousers.

Lennon was impressed by McCartney’s singing and musicianship but he agonised over whether he should invite him to join the Quarrymen, fearing that Paul, despite his comparative youth, might prove a rival to his leadership of the band. After talking it over with washboard-player Pete Shotton, it was agreed to ask Paul to come on board. A fortnight or so later Pete bumped into Paul in Woolton and formally invited him to become a Quarryman. Paul recognised that John was talented but was somewhat less in awe of the other members of the band, so took his time deliberating before saying yes. Lennon and McCartney were in partnership. Paul’s friend George Harrison joined the band the following year. In 1960, after several line-up and name changes (‘Los Paranoias’ perhaps being the best, with ‘Japage 3’ a low point), they became The Beatles. Ringo Starr joined two years later.

The effect that The Beatles had on music and culture in the 1960s was immense, not just in Britain but around the world. Although they split up somewhat acrimoniously in 1970, their output has remained incredibly popular, resulting in album sales of well over two billion. Their sound and style of songwriting has influenced musicians from Elton John to Florence and the Machine.

The band was such a force of nature that it seems highly unlikely that either Lennon or McCartney would have had as much of an influence as individual musicians had they never met. Post-Beatles, McCartney has produced some material that is more than passable, such as the Band on the Run album he made with Wings, and the occasional decent single. However, he has also seen fit to inflict on the world ‘The Frog Chorus’ and the interminable festive-season dirge ‘Wonderful Christmastime’. Likewise, although there are plenty of fans of the solo work John produced before his life was tragically cut short in 1980, only a few tracks can make a serious claim to comparison with the best of The Beatles’ canon.

Yoko Ono attempted to put her finger on the collaboration when commenting on an interview that she and John had given to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in 1970:

Paul possessed elements that John would have wanted to have as well. In other words, Paul was extremely charming to the world and, because of his diplomacy and charm I think that the band flourished in a way. Whereas John’s rôle was to really bring that spiritually nourishing energy to the band, and that really helped the band to survive and to expand and to be successful… They were complementing each other.

There would not be another meeting that had an impact on British pop music that was in any way comparable for another 25 years, when an 18-year-old Johnny Marr turned up on the doorstep of Mrs Morrissey to see if her son was in.