If he ever worried about facing the second major academic milestone in his life, his GCE O-levels, John never let it show. But then, all the Quarry Men seemed to have a pretty insouciant attitude towards exams, as, during the spring and early summer of 1957, instead of sitting at home revising, they turned out increasingly for regular bookings. They’d been together for nearly a year, mainly making informal appearances at their local St Peter’s Youth Club and friends’ parties. But, if their musical progress had been slow, that didn’t get in the way of John’s ambition. So, when an appearance in a preliminary heat for the Carroll Levis television talent show was offered to Liverpool’s skiffle groups, they grabbed it. The audition was held on stage at Liverpool’s Empire Theatre which was where all the big American stars appeared, and, though the Quarry Men were immediately eliminated, their confidence wasn’t dented. How many other sixteen-year-old South Liverpool boys could say they’d appeared on stage at the Empire? Things weren’t going badly at all. They’d even made a guest appearance playing at the sixth form dance at Quarry Bank High School.
To John, all these moments were seen as little victories, but with his vagueness for details, he would later say that his earliest real memory of appearing in public was when the group played on the back of a coal lorry. That was in June 1957, in Roseberry Street, Toxteth, which was a pretty tough area of Liverpool. The occasion was the 750th anniversary of a charter given to the city by England’s King John – the famously ‘wicked’ monarch who was to be bullied into Magna Carta eight years later by the English barons. John would have been told about all that at school, but for him the appearance in Toxteth was memorable mainly because, for some reason, a gang of local Teddy boys in the audience took against him.
Quite why he should have annoyed anyone by simply singing a few songs, in front of his mother and his two half-sisters who were there that day, is puzzling, but throughout his life John would make a habit of rubbing people up the wrong way. Could it be that standing there unsmiling in front of the microphone, he looked arrogant? Certainly, there was always something slightly supercilious about that top lip. Or might it simply have had something to do with his extreme short-sightedness? Refusing to wear his glasses in public, he would stare myopically into the audience as he sang, with the result that anyone in what would have been his line of vision might have thought he was staring challengingly at them.
‘I was never really a street kid or tough guy . . .’ he would tell Rolling Stone years later. ‘I was just a suburban kid imitating the rockers . . . with the toughest-looking face you’ve ever seen. I’d get into trouble just because of the way I looked.’ That was probably true, because not everyone liked his attitude – even when he wasn’t aware that he was displaying any kind of attitude.
So, amid an undercurrent of threats, he and his schoolboy band cut short their Roseberry Street performance and sought sanctuary in an obliging woman’s house until, according to Quarry Men drummer Colin Hanton, ‘a bobby escorted us’ to the bus stop.
The Toxteth appearance might have been fraught, but the Quarry Men’s next gig, two weeks later on Saturday, 6 July, at the Woolton Parish Garden Fete, with its sideshows, balloons, ice-creams, pop, home-made jam tarts and the annual crowning of the local Rose Queen, promised to be more comfortable. John, like most of the members of the group, had been attending the fete behind St Peter’s Church since he was six, it being a day that Woolton children looked forward to. So, it was fortuitous that Pete Shotton’s mother had overheard neighbours discussing plans for that year’s fete while she’d been out shopping, and sharp of her to have quickly suggested that the Quarry Men should be added to the entertainment. Had Mimi, and not Pete’s mum, been the one to have overheard the plans for the fete, all kinds of things might never have happened.
But she wasn’t. And, as the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry led a noisy musical parade around the little lanes of Woolton, followed by floats bearing children in fancy dress costumes and that year’s Rose Queen, all waving to groups of neighbours who were lining the route, the Quarry Men, again on the back of a lorry, brought up the rear. They’d been asked to play and sing as the procession moved through the streets, but it wasn’t easy to make music on the back of a truck that kept stopping and starting. ‘I felt a real twat,’ said Pete.
The Quarry Men’s performance was on a raised platform in the field next to St Peter’s cemetery in the late afternoon, and John was wearing a check shirt given to him for his stage appearances by his mother. As usual, the majority of the group’s songs were skiffle standards, but there were some Elvis hits, too, including one of John’s all-time favourites, ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’. Then there was ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ and a song by the American doo-wop group the Del-Vikings, ‘Come Go With Me’.
As the microphone on stage was attached to the fete’s tannoy system, John’s voice could be heard all around the grounds, and soon a familiar face appeared among the crowd in front of the stage. It was Mimi, pushing her way through the teenagers and children, gaping at her nephew. Years later she would say: ‘I couldn’t take my eyes off him. There was this big grin all over his face. Then he saw me and his expression changed a bit.’
So did the lyrics to ‘Cumberland Gap’. ‘Here’s Mimi coming down the path’ John sang instead of ‘seventeen miles from the Cumberland Gap’. In truth, he can’t have been particularly surprised to see her, as she always went to the fete. And she might not have been quite as amazed to see him as she professed, since the Quarry Men’s appearance was advertised on the posters and the programme. But as she had taken absolutely no interest in the group, it must have been a shock for her to realise how competent and confident John was on stage.
Mimi wasn’t the only one to be surprised that afternoon. John didn’t know it, but someone else was watching from the crowd. It was a fifteen-year-old school friend of Ivan Vaughan’s – the boy whose parents had purposely sent their son to the Liverpool Institute when he was eleven in order to get him away from ‘that John Lennon’. The boy’s name was Paul McCartney and he’d cycled across the golf course from Allerton specifically at Ivan’s invitation. Ivan, who had continued to see John locally sometimes, knew that Paul was keen on pop music, too.
It wasn’t until the Quarry Men had finished their set and moved into the church hall for a break, leaving the ground free for the City of Liverpool Police Dogs to begin their annual display, that Ivan was able to introduce Paul to John. With nearly a two-year age gap between the two, which is a lot in mid-teens, the meeting was at first awkward. Paul, however, said all the right things. He would later remember that he’d been impressed that John had sung the Del-Vikings’ song. To him that showed seriously good taste. ‘Come Go With Me’ would never be a hit in Britain, and not many groups would have covered it. He had also been impressed by the way John improvised lyrics for those he didn’t know. That took guts, he felt.
As a musician what was puzzling Paul, however, was that John had been playing banjo chords. He didn’t understand that. And, asking permission, he picked up John’s guitar and played and sang the Eddie Cochran hit ‘Twenty Flight Rock’.
John was impressed. But he was also instantly jealous. Not only could the boy play and sing, he looked good, with his black hair slicked back, ‘a bit like Elvis’, he thought. There was more to come. Eventually putting the guitar aside, Paul went across to the piano and played and sang ‘Long Tall Sally’ – full-throated.
As Paul had noted John’s version of the Del-Vikings song, now John admired Paul’s take-off of Little Richard. He probably knew more than anyone else there how good an impersonation it was.
Eventually the kid ended his impromptu audition, although that hadn’t been what he’d thought he was doing, and went back to Ivan’s house to pick up his bike and cycle home across the golf course.
John had some serious thinking to do. Paul was obviously talented and knew more about playing the guitar than he or anyone in the Quarry Men. It was impossible to ignore him. Should he ask him to join the group? he asked himself. But what if he did and Paul wanted to be the lead singer and lead guitarist and then began to take over? That was a risk. Besides, did he really want to share the singing with Paul? Apart from the Everly Brothers, rock and roll bands only ever had one singer.
Of course, Paul might not want to join, but if he did, he would obviously be an asset. ‘It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line,’ John would later recall. ‘But he was worth having.’ It was a big decision, but in the end, music made the choice for him. Paul’s inclusion would inevitably ‘make the group stronger’. The Quarry Men would be different with two singers. It would prove to be the best decision he ever made.
A couple of weeks later, Pete ran into Paul when the younger boy had cycled over to Ivan’s house only to find that he wasn’t in. ‘I’ve been talking to John,’ Pete said, ‘and we thought maybe you’d like to join the Quarry Men.’
According to Pete, Paul was very cool about the offer. After thinking about it for a moment he simply said: ‘Yes, all right.’ Then, having explained that he couldn’t start playing with them for another few weeks as he was leaving for a Boy Scouts camp the very next day, which would be followed by a week at a Butlin’s holiday camp with his brother and father, he cycled off home.
As for John’s acceptance that Paul would benefit the group musically, this is what he would reflect to me in 1970, a few months after the Beatles broke up. ‘I learned a lot from Paul. He taught me quite a lot of guitar really. He knew more about how to play than I did and he showed me a lot of chords. I’d been playing the guitar like a banjo so I had to learn it again. I didn’t write much material early on, less than Paul, because he was quite competent on guitar. I started to write after Paul did a song he’d written.’
Nothing feeds ambition so much as competition, and from that very first day, as close as John and Paul became as friends and colleagues, continually helping each other musically, they never lost their mutual competitiveness. By virtue of complete serendipity the two boys, who would become the most successful songwriting partnership of the second half of the twentieth century, lived just a mile and a half from one another.
That afternoon has become one of the most celebrated days in rock history – the moment that Lennon met McCartney. But for one of the Quarry Men, it turned out to be a swansong. Rod Davis would never play with the group again. A skiffle purist, he’d never been keen on rock and roll, and, with John leaving school, while Rod was staying on to go eventually to Cambridge University, the two just drifted apart. ‘I was replaced with Paul McCartney,’ he says now, smiling. ‘I wasn’t kicked out. I just stopped playing with them. It was always very friendly.’
Indeed, Rod hadn’t been forced out. But, had he still been there, his presence with his skiffle banjo might have eased the group’s reception when, while waiting for Paul to join them, the Quarry Men played at a new jazz club in Liverpool’s city centre in early August. It was called the Cavern, and was housed in three barrel-ceilinged cellars under a fruit and vegetable warehouse in an alleyway called Mathew Street. To be playing in a grown-up venue close to the Pier Head was a real thrill for the group, even though John was swiftly handed a note by the management to ‘cut out the bloody rock and roll’. The traditional jazz purists there could just about tolerate skiffle because it was considered authentic American folk music. But rock and roll . . .? That was beyond the pale.
Characteristically John ignored the order, but he would never forget the put-down, professing ever after to hate the snobbery of jazz. ‘Jazz never gets anywhere, never does anything, it’s always the same . . .’ he would complain. ‘We’d never get auditions because of jazz bands.’
But he’d seen the way the wind was blowing. The absence of a banjo would make it easier for the group to begin the full transition from being a skiffle group to becoming a rock and roll band. The skiffle craze had been fun, but by the middle of 1957 it had pretty well run its course. A washboard and a tea-chest bass in a band screamed ‘Amateurs!’
Mimi had been fully aware that John hadn’t been putting any effort into his school work, but, as the regular difficult phone calls from the headmaster’s office at Quarry Bank had grown fewer in his final year (probably because the teachers had given up on him and didn’t care if he played truant), she may have been hoping for a miracle when the exam results arrived in August. She didn’t get one. John had failed every subject. All nine of them.
She just couldn’t believe it. Every single subject? John had spent half of his boyhood reading, surely he’d passed English? He hadn’t. But he must have passed art? He drew all the time. He hadn’t. When he’d been asked in the art exam to compose something about travel, he’d drawn a ‘hunchback with warts all over him’, he would later wryly remark.
For Mimi the results were the bitterest of disappointments and she was seriously worried. John cared, too, at least about English and art, but he wouldn’t have shown that in front of his aunt.
But, what was he going to do? He couldn’t stay on at Quarry Bank. They didn’t want him. Ever determined, Mimi set off to the school.
‘So, what are you going to do with him?’ mused the headmaster, Mr Pobjoy, when confronted.
Straight-talking Mimi wasn’t having that. ‘No,’ she would say that she replied. ‘What are you going to do with him? You’ve had him for five years.’
The headmaster might have retorted that it was hardly the school’s fault if John had refused to learn. But, as it turned out, a solution was already at hand. A young English teacher, Philip Burnett, had been both impressed and amused by an edition of John’s mock newspaper ‘The Daily Howl’ that had been making its way around the staff room. Showing it one night to a girlfriend who was teaching at Liverpool College of Art, he asked her if she, too, thought it was clever and funny. And, if so, was it possible that John Lennon, with his off-the-wall humour, might fit at an art college? She thought he might.
Further education at an art college was not, in the Fifties, considered the best destination for a bright pupil at a high-achieving grammar school. Although only 4 per cent of British schoolchildren would at that time go to universities, scholastic snobbery still marked art a good few ranks further down the academic ladder in that largely non-visual age.
Not that John was particularly interested in art college, anyway. ‘I thought it would be a crowd of old men,’ he would later say. So, instead, like his father, he tried to join the Merchant Navy, even filling in the forms. Then Mimi found out and put her foot down. After the experience Julia had had with her ‘worthless’ seafaring husband, Mimi was determined that John was definitely not going to sea.
To her, Liverpool College of Art was a godsend. ‘Any port in a storm,’ she announced, as she so often did. Lacking any other ideas, and absolutely not fancying the idea of getting a job, John decided, as he later put it in words that were probably Mimi’s, to ‘try to make something’ of himself.
He didn’t admit that there may have been another inducement. An older boy he knew, who had gone to the College of Art, told him how one afternoon a week there would be a life class, during which students would have to sketch a naked woman. That didn’t sound too bad.
So, as Mr Pobjoy, over at Quarry Bank, wrote a not completely damning reference for his most difficult pupil – ‘He has been a trouble spot for many years in discipline, but . . . I believe he is not beyond redemption and he could really turn out a fairly responsible adult who might go far . . .’ – at Mendips, John took Uncle George’s best suit from where Mimi had left it hanging in the wardrobe. Then, putting on a tie, he got on the bus to the centre of Liverpool. At least he would look relatively smart for his interview, Mimi must have thought, as she committed herself to paying for her nephew’s upkeep for a further two years.