He would always claim that ‘in our family the radio was hardly ever on, so I got to pop music later, not like Paul and George who were groomed in it coming over the radio all the time’. But when he did discover it and its potency, it wasn’t enough for him to simply listen to it, as most other boys did. He wanted to play it, to write it and to perform it – to be at the very centre of it. Mimi thought this was just another craze.
Every era has its own popular music, and the early Fifties had its hits. There’d been Guy Mitchell singing songs that sounded like sea shanties, such as ‘The Roving Kind’; and Frankie Laine had put blood and guts into pop with the ballad from the film High Noon, ‘Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling’. Then there was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s deep ‘Sixteen Tons’ and Johnnie Ray’s cover of the Drifters’ ‘Such A Night’ – which the BBC banned on the grounds that in between the gasps and sighs something carnal was being intimated.
So, mainly the hits of John’s early teens were elaborately orchestrated numbers sung by big American stars who would tour Britain every year, and sell out for a week at the Liverpool Empire. John would see their photographs in the Liverpool Echo and hear their records played on the BBC – although not very often. Wartime rationing of food and sweets might have ended in 1954, but old habits were dying hard at the BBC in regard to popular music. ‘The less of that stuff the better’ was the policy there. Only on Radio Luxembourg at 208 metres on the Medium Wave could British fans find the music they wanted to hear. The signal wasn’t very clear, especially in the summer, coming all the way from the little principality between France and Germany; but, intermittent though it was, the records Radio Luxembourg played brought a new kind of stardust to a still down-at-heel Britain and a 40-watt Liverpool.
At that stage in his life, John liked music, but that was all. He didn’t know very much about it, other than that all the singers and records he liked seemed to come from America. Naturally enough, Mimi disliked Americana in general and popular music in particular. But she couldn’t shield John from what the boys at school were talking about, and the records he would hear in their homes.
Changes were coming in the Fifties, and not only in music, with the new demographic of ‘the teenager’ causing much interest among academics and advertisers alike. For the first time, young people, as distinct from children and adults, were being targeted by manufacturers, analysed by social psychologists, and, inevitably, criticised by newspaper pundits. The angst of this new generation had even been made into the subject of a bestselling novel by J. D. Salinger – The Catcher In The Rye.
Nor did Hollywood want to miss out on the new market. The James Dean films East Of Eden and Rebel Without A Cause caught the fashion for misunderstood youth to perfection, while a more provocative film, Blackboard Jungle, captured grittily the modern problems of an inner-city New York high school. It was good, but little remembered now other than for a moment of inspiration when its producers laid a record by Bill Haley and the Comets called ‘Rock Around The Clock’ over the opening sequence.
‘Rock Around The Clock’ wasn’t a particularly interesting song. It had been a forgotten flip side of a minor hit until rescued by Hollywood – and it would never be one of the hundreds of songs that the Beatles would later perform during their careers. John never liked it. ‘When Bill Haley records came on the wireless my mother used to like them okay. But they did nothing for me,’ he said.
Rock and roll had been struggling to break out of the R&B market in the US, where it was classified as ‘race music’ and played mainly on black radio stations. But when sung by a chubby white man in a plaid jacket, it reached mainstream America, and Britain wouldn’t be very far behind. Something else, however, was also happening in the UK at that time.
Just a couple of months after ‘Rock Around The Clock’ had been recorded in New York, in April 1954, a guitar-playing Scot called Lonnie Donegan had gone into a London studio with a hepped-up Leadbelly blues song called ‘Rock Island Line’. Like ‘Rock Around the Clock’, it also took over a year to become a top ten hit. But when it did, it created a whole new movement – skiffle.
Requiring only a cheap acoustic guitar, a lusty voice, an old washboard, which every mother or grandmother then owned, and a bass made from a tea-chest, a broom handle and a length of string, just about anyone could put together a skiffle group. And just about anyone did. No musical experience was required to scrape a washboard, and there were no frets on a broom handle. As for the guitar, a knowledge of three chords was all it took.
At the beginning of 1956, fifteen-year-old John didn’t know even one chord, nor did he have a guitar. But boys at Quarry Bank, like schoolboys all over the UK, were suddenly talking about Lonnie Donegan and skiffle, and John was intrigued enough to buy ‘Rock Island Line’ to play on his mother’s record player. He liked what he heard and what he was seeing of Lonnie Donegan on television. Skiffle looked easy.
At first, he borrowed a guitar from a school friend, Eric Griffiths, but then Julia bought him one of his own from a mail order firm. ‘It had a label on the inside that said “guaranteed not to split”,’ he would remember. ‘I suppose it was a bit crummy, but I played it for a long time and got in a lot of practice on it.’
Julia, who could play the banjo, was ever encouraging and showed him how to play the few chords of Fats Domino’s ‘Ain’t That A Shame’. Her method ‘was by using only the top four strings and forgetting about the other two – because banjos only have four strings,’ Rod Davis recalls. It was a start. As John would say, ‘Most of our stuff then was just twelve bar blues boogies . . . nothing fancy.’
Although John always gets the credit, it hadn’t originally been his idea to form a group. It was first suggested by another boy whose name has been forgotten, but who, in the end, wasn’t invited to join.
From the start, John’s enthusiasm, bossiness and sheer nerve determined that he would be the singer, front and centre. No one disagreed with him. That was the way he was. Pete Shotton, who was unmusical, would have to be in the group, of course, as John’s best friend. He could play the washboard. That didn’t require any talent. Rod Davis was invited to join, too. He had a banjo.
John might not have done much homework, but over the next few months he thrashed his new guitar until his fingers bled, as gradually the little band of schoolboy skifflers began to expand – although not exclusively with other Quarry Bank boys. A boy called Len Garry, who was with Ivan Vaughan at the Liverpool Institute, was added on tea-chest bass, with Ivan sometimes helping out if Len didn’t turn up. Meanwhile Nigel Walley, another of John’s Woolton gang, decided that he should be the manager – although there wasn’t anything yet to manage. According to Pete Shotton, it was his idea to name the group the Quarry Men – partly after his and John’s school, but also because there were several overgrown quarries around Woolton hill.
By the spring of 1956, the Quarry Men were becoming relatively adept at copying other Lonnie Donegan recordings, like ‘Maggie May’ and ‘Stewball’, especially after a drummer called Colin Hanton joined the band. Colin wasn’t at Quarry Bank High School either. He was, in fact, already working as an apprentice upholsterer, which meant he had money in his pocket – not much, but enough to have bought himself a set of drums. Lots of boys had guitars, but a boy with a set of drums was someone to be sought after. Primitive though their sound might have been, the Quarry Men were now complete. And it was just in time, because John was already seeing wider horizons.
Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ had been released in Britain in March 1956, and immediately put on the ‘restricted play’ list by the BBC. They didn’t like the sound of it. John did. ‘This boy I knew at school, Don Beattie . . . his mum bought him records,’ he later told me. ‘He showed me the name “Elvis Presley” in the charts in the New Musical Express, and he said it was great. I thought it sounded a bit phoney . . . “Heartbreak Hotel”. But then I heard it on, I think, Radio Luxembourg, and it was the end for me.’
Actually, it was the beginning. ‘Before Elvis there was nothing,’ he would very famously say later, which was a little bit of Lennon hyperbole. But, for John, the arrival of Elvis and rock and roll was an epiphany. He was fifteen. ‘It was the only thing to get through to me . . . Rock and roll was real. Everything else was unreal.’ He now began to realise what he wanted to do, who he wanted to be. Lonnie Donegan had provided the initial spark, but it was Elvis – who, incidentally, had started out, like Donegan, singing a rocked-up version of a blues song – who mostly fired John’s ambition.
Since he’d been a little boy, he’d dreamed about writing Alice In Wonderland, or, rather, a book like it. But, looking back on that period in his life, he would tell me: ‘I wanted to write Alice In Wonderland and be Elvis Presley.’ He saw no problem in putting the two together, not allowing that some may see Lewis Carroll as high culture and Elvis as something else. To him there was no conflict. They fitted together. It was a belief he would always hold.
That year he began to buy records in earnest to play at Julia’s home, with 78 rpm versions of Elvis Presley’s ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ and ‘My Baby Left Me’ following ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Then there was Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’. He bought a comedy record, too. It was the nonsensical ‘Ying Tong Song’ by the stars of his favourite radio programme, The Goon Show. It was an exciting time. ‘The Daily Howl’ and John’s wacky insolence had made him famous – well, notorious – at school, he was starting his own skiffle group, and now Elvis was in his life. Then along came Little Richard singing ‘Long Tall Sally’. This was almost too good to be true.
‘When I heard it, it was so great I couldn’t speak,’ he told me and other journalists. ‘You know how you are torn. I didn’t want to leave Elvis . . . I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, not even in my mind. How could this be happening in my lifetime. Both of them.’
Then someone told him that Little Richard was black. It hadn’t occurred to him until then. ‘So . . . Elvis was white and Little Richard was black. There was a difference between them.’ That meant he could love them both without being disloyal to Elvis. ‘I thought about it for days at school, about the labels on the records. One was yellow [the American Specialty label of Little Richard’s record], the other was [His Master’s Voice in the UK] blue. I thought about that . . . yellow and blue.’ These were the memories of a nerdy teenage boy he would tell and retell all his life, luxuriating in the passions recalled.
Naturally when a film with Little Richard, The Girl Can’t Help It, which also starred the pneumatic Jayne Mansfield, was shown in Liverpool, John went to see it, as he had also been to see the rock exploitation movie Rock Around The Clock. The experience of both was not quite as he had been led to expect.
When any rock and roll film was shown in the UK in the mid-Fifties, there were newspaper stories of riots, fighting and dancing in cinema aisles, which then sparked copycat incidents around the country, and which, in turn, triggered further newspaper headlines. The culprits were said to be Teddy boys (and their girlfriends), gangs of working-class youths whose fashion was to wear Edwardian-style outfits of narrow trousers and long jackets, and to grow long sideboards under quiffs of greasy duck-tailed hair. Like hormonal youths the world over, some Teddy boy gangs liked to fight with other gangs, the result being that in Britain they were considered, at least by the tabloid newspapers, a menace.
As a suburban schoolboy in a blazer and tie, John steered well clear of them. ‘I was never in any street fights or gangs,’ he would remember. But he was intrigued by the reports of riots in the cinemas.
‘I was most surprised,’ he would often say, comically deadpan about going to see Rock Around The Clock. ‘Nobody was fighting and dancing in the aisles like I’d read . . . It must have all been done before I got there. I was all set up to tear up the seats, but nobody joined in.’
The notion that rock and roll drove young people crazy because of its ‘jungle beat’ (rock’s early detractors really used to say that) might have been a myth built around the behaviour of a few over-energised and aggressive show-offs. But, because of the newspaper coverage, by the late Fifties rock and roll had become firmly associated in the public’s mind with the uneducated and unsophisticated. It would take the Beatles, eight years later, to eventually change that.
John was sixteen in October 1956. It was the beginning of his last year at school and by now it wasn’t only rock and roll and the Quarry Men that was obsessing him. There was sex, too. And when at weekends he and his gang would ride their bikes as a squad to nearby Calderstones Park for a secret smoke and a chat, there would often be girls hanging about, trying to attract his attention. He wasn’t the best-looking boy in his group, but girls always liked him, and one day, out cycling in the park with Len Garry, they met a couple of new faces. John fancied the pretty fair one with the pony tail, but, at first, she preferred Len. Her name was Barbara Baker and she was fifteen. A little later, in the way these teenage things go, she transferred her affections to John. Len didn’t mind. And, off and on, for the next eighteen months, Barbara and John would become a couple, going off on cycle rides, or to the pictures, or to the homes of friends when their parents were out. He even wrote her love poems, enjoying the security of having a steady girlfriend, although he was rarely steady himself – expecting her to be available when he wanted her, but happy to be with the Quarry Men when he didn’t.
‘I was a very insecure male,’ he would one day tell Playboy, ‘a guy who wanted to put his woman into a little box, lock her up and then bring her out when he feels like playing with her. She’s not allowed to communicate with the outside world, outside of me, because it made me feel insecure.’
Not surprisingly, Mimi was cool towards this new development in her nephew’s adolescence, but Julia liked Barbara and would welcome the pair into her home.
For the best part of his last year at school, Julia, Elvis, the Quarry Men and Barbara defined the boundaries of John’s life. No one, other than he, saw the Quarry Men as anything more than a craze, but the rehearsals, which were usually in the homes of the other members of the group (Mimi didn’t want them disturbing her lodgers’ studies, and would make John practise his guitar outside in the side porch), were fun, if haphazard. But when Julia allowed them to use her bathroom for practice, because the tiled walls gave the best approximation of the echo effect heard on Elvis’s records, she endeared herself to everyone.
None of the group was, of course, even close to being a musician, so the playlist for the Quarry Men’s earliest unpaid appearances at the St Peter’s Youth Club in Woolton depended on the few songs they knew. And playing some of them didn’t come easily, as Rod Davis remembers. ‘When another skiffle song, “Freight Train” by Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey, entered the charts a few months later, we were all wondering what to do because you needed to know four chords to play that.’ Another limitation was that the lyrics to the songs were often indistinct on the records. John tried to get a vague idea of the words, but, when he couldn’t, he just made up new ones as he went along. It didn’t matter. No one else knew them either.
The Quarry Men’s first proper public appearance, probably in late 1956 (no one can remember exactly), was at a golf club in Childwall, a Liverpool suburb. It had been arranged by Nigel Walley, who had now left school and was an apprentice golf pro at the club. And although the group weren’t actually paid, someone passed around a hat at the end of the evening, so the boys shared a few shillings between them.
Julia was there, too, encouraging. Mimi, however, with her mantra, ‘The guitar’s all right, John, but you’ll never make a living with it’, wasn’t. In her view, her nephew was in danger of throwing his life away, just as his mother had.
But was she also jealous of the increasing amount of time that John was now spending with Julia? She had lost her husband, and although she and John rowed frequently, he was the centre of her life. In her pretend-stern way she doted on him. She would have been too proud ever to admit it, but it must have hurt when John preferred to be with his real mother. If so, that would explain why one day during that first year of the Quarry Men her emotions may have got the better of her.
After yet another row, John had banged out of Mendips and gone to stay at Julia’s place, telling Mimi that this time he wasn’t coming back. Of course, he did go back. He always went back. But when, after a few days, he returned something was missing. His terrier dog, Sally, that his Uncle George had given him when he’d been still in short trousers, was no longer there. Mimi explained that if he wasn’t going to be around to look after the dog, she had decided to give her away.
It was, Pete Shotton would recall, the only time he ever saw John with tears in his eyes. It seems unlikely that Mimi had the dog destroyed, as Pete believed. John’s cousin Stanley Parkes was under the impression that Mimi simply found another home for Sally. She always preferred cats, anyway. But, knowing how fond John was of his dog, it does suggest an act of spiteful jealousy on Mimi’s behalf.