Everything about him demanded ‘Look at me!’ when on 16 September 1957, John Lennon made his way unenthusiastically along Hope Street to the entrance of Liverpool College of Art. It was a grey Victorian building, with echoing stone staircases and light classrooms, just behind Liverpool’s vast and still unfinished Anglican cathedral – the one they’d been building since 1904.
Obviously, he’d known there would be girls at college, but, until he got there, he probably hadn’t appreciated the difference they would make to his every day. Despite its wooded setting, all-boys Quarry Bank High School had been knee-deep in testosterone, but now, wherever John looked, there were pretty shampooed girls whose very presence seemed to soften the atmosphere. Confident, exotic looking creatures in self-made outfits were studying fashion, studious young ladies were bent, lips pursed, over their lettering, and serious, arty-beatnik types wearing black were there, too, and not taking any nonsense from loudmouths like him.
When lessons began it would be the first time he would be sitting next to a girl in class since he’d been eleven. Some boys from a similar background might have had initial difficulties with that, but not John. Those ‘five strong Stanley sisters’ who had helped bring him up had seen to that. He was comfortable with women of all ages. There would, he saw immediately, and despite Barbara back in Woolton, be quite a few girls to pursue at the art college.
Unlike school there was no compulsory uniform to wear, but on that first day of college, determined that eyes would be upon him, he chose to wear his old school blazer with the Quarry Bank crest unpicked from the breast pocket by Mimi, a ruler-thin tie, and a pair of tight-fitting drainpipe jeans. Already trying to grow sideboards, his hair was Fifties long, which meant not very long at all, and sported a casual quiff on top. Perhaps a dab of Brylcreem helped keep it in place. It was said later, by those who first encountered him, that he’d turned up looking like a Teddy boy, a species that would have been a rare sight then in a place of further learning.
If that was the case, it probably wasn’t what he’d intended. Real Teddy boys, who went to some expense to dress the way they did – and which involved money that John didn’t have – were at the bottom end of the educational spectrum, usually working in low-skilled jobs, and were not a group with whom he would have wished to identify. It seems more likely that he was trying to look like a moody young rocker, an English Elvis.
Whatever he looked like, with his admirers from Quarry Bank High School now scattered, and his best friend Pete talking disquietingly about joining the police force, he was, he knew, going to have to gather together a new gang. Notoriety was always a short cut to that, and could be quickly achieved by being loud, funny and outrageous. He was good at all of those.
His first few days were spent finding his way around and sorting out like-minded people. A tall, burly and eccentric mature student of twenty-five from Manchester called Jeff Mahomed, whose father was Indian and mother Italian, became one of his first friends. Sharing with him little interest in anything the art college wanted to teach, Jeff would be John’s first ‘grown-up’ friend. Not that mature behaviour, or indeed blinding talent, was much in evidence in either student, which meant that, instead of John being considered the next Pablo Picasso, his first year at college would be almost as onerous as his last at Quarry Bank.
The exception was the life class, when twenty-seven-year-old model June Furlong would, naked though she was, keep a sharply disapproving eye on teenage gigglers like John, who regularly appeared every first term. When he finally stopped mucking around, he and June would get on very well.
All teenagers love an excuse to get out of the classroom, and the afternoons when the staff thought it would do their students good to go out and appreciate what they had around them showed John a city he really didn’t know. It would stay lodged in his mind for the rest of his life.
He had come from a suburb, but Liverpool 8, which was the postal address of the art college, with its cobbled streets and terraces of once grand but now crumbling Georgian and Regency houses, was the most interesting and historic corner of Liverpool. The rich had once lived there when Liverpool was growing as a port and trading centre – including the slave trade. But with the lofty terraced houses now divided into flats and bedsitters and inhabited by artists, musicians, actors, eccentrics, the occasional prostitute and students from the nearby Liverpool University, the area had become the city’s bohemian quarter. And, with its West Indian and Chinese population in nearby Toxteth, it was also Liverpool’s melting pot. Less than half a dozen miles from village-like Woolton, it was as different an environment as could be envisaged – exactly the place to feed a capricious imagination. Studying there, John would love for the hurly burly of city life that would never leave him.
There was also something else that was of particular interest in Liverpool 8. It was the building that was immediately adjacent to the art college, just around the corner in Hope Place. It was the Liverpool Institute, where Paul McCartney, now the newest member of the Quarry Men, was at school. With only a brick wall and an open door between them, it meant they could see each other every day if they wanted to. They did want to.
Paul had returned from his summer holiday at the end of August, after which the Quarry Men had soon got together to rehearse at drummer Colin Hanton’s parents’ house, and again in Julia’s bathroom. Soon, however, John and Paul were meeting separately from the rest of the group.
Paul had been brought up in a musical home, with his father Jim McCartney having played trumpet in a traditional jazz band when he was younger. His mother, Mary, had been a nursing sister in a hospital, and, ambitious for her family, had believed, just like Mimi, that success could only be achieved through education. But she had died suddenly while having surgery for breast cancer in 1956, leaving Paul and his younger brother, Michael, to be brought up by their father. The shock of her death hadn’t only devastated the family, it had, Paul would come to believe, driven him deeper into the music that he had already begun creating.
Now, thrown together by chance, John began visiting Paul’s house in the empty hours after classes and before Jim McCartney got home from his job as a cotton salesman. There, in the McCartneys’ little kitchen in Forthlin Road, Allerton, John would lean over his guitar and listen carefully to what Paul, also with a guitar, had to teach him. And gradually, over the weeks, the two found a way of working and then playing and singing together.
Often Michael McCartney, who was thirteen and also at the Liverpool Institute, would watch them, intrigued by his brother’s new friend. ‘There were never any compromises with John,’ he would remember. ‘He was very simple, yet complex, if you know what I mean. He was like a young, hungry animal.’ At college John would play the tearaway, forever being funny and making sick jokes. With Paul, he was more serious and keen to learn.
The first couple of gigs with the new member were at a Conservative Club in nearby Norris Green, and immediately a difference could be seen in the group. As well as his musicianship, Paul brought an element of professionalism that the Quarry Men had never had before. Both he and John now wore light-coloured jackets, stringy ties and black jeans, and stood together up front at the two microphones while Len, Eric, Pete and Colin, in white shirts but without jackets, were behind them. Financially, all five band members were sharing whatever ‘manager’ Nigel Walley managed to get for them, if they were paid at all. But it was clear that there were now two classes of Quarry Men – John and Paul, and the rest.
As it happened, the autumn of 1957 was like one long masterclass in rock and roll, as almost every week new classic records were arriving from America for them to listen to and study. There was Jerry Lee Lewis with ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’, Chuck Berry’s ‘School Day’ and the Everly Brothers, in close harmony, with ‘Bye Bye Love’ and ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, unknowingly demonstrating how John and Paul (and Simon and Garfunkel, too) might sound when they sang together. But most important of all was Buddy Holly in his horn-rimmed glasses, who, with the Crickets, sang ‘That’ll Be The Day’, and then, as a solo artist, ‘Peggy Sue’. Holly was more than special. He not only wrote the songs, but played lead guitar and sang them. Elvis almost never played lead guitar on a record, using his instrument just to strum the rhythm. And he certainly didn’t write hit songs.
Buddy Holly could do everything. And, with those glasses, he didn’t look, or even try to look, like a rock star. His success was entirely due to the music he made. After him it should have been acceptable for a lead singer to wear glasses, but it would be years before John had the nerve to wear his in public – and he would still take them off as soon as he’d finished reading anything.
Perhaps more important was the other message that Holly was sending, which both John and Paul picked up on. It was that people of talent anywhere could write songs and maybe one day make records, too. Holly didn’t come from New York or Los Angeles, or even Memphis or Nashville. He was from Lubbock, Texas, which was a long way off any beaten track John or Paul knew about. And he’d made it.
So, invigorated by the very idea of Buddy Holly, the two spent hours listening to the shape of ‘That’ll Be The Day’, learning how to master the opening riff. Could they one day write something like that, they wondered, a song for guitars, bass and drums built around an everyday catchphrase?
By 1958 the Quarry Men were improving, but being a member of the group was no longer the merry lark it had been – certainly not for Pete Shotton and his washboard. And when a young school friend of Paul’s, a fourteen-year-old called George Harrison, who didn’t say much but who could play the guitar better than any of them, began to tag along, Pete could feel his position slipping. A rock and roll band didn’t need a washboard.
‘Being John’s friend I didn’t want to say I was getting fed up and that I wanted to leave,’ Pete would write in his memoirs. ‘But my contribution was totally non-musical. I just went along to make wisecracks and help carry the gear. I never liked going on stage. It gave me the willies.’
John must have realised this, but he wasn’t going to push his best friend out of the group. Instead he waited for Pete to make the decision himself. It came after the Quarry Men had played at a wedding reception when they had both had too much to drink, and Pete plucked up the courage to say he was leaving.
He thought John would be upset. But John had obviously been struggling to tell Pete that he didn’t want him in the group any more. ‘Anyway,’ Pete remembered, ‘he suddenly picked up my washboard and hit me over the head with it.’ It broke and ended up around his neck.
‘Well, that takes care of that problem, doesn’t it?’ John said.
‘So that was it,’ Pete remembers. ‘We then just laughed until the beer rolled from our eyes . . .’
It was an inevitable turning point that they had both recognised. But John hadn’t dropped Pete until he had a new partner in Paul. For years, as the two had roamed Woolton together, it had been Lennon and Shotton. Now it would be Lennon and McCartney – a very different kind of relationship.
Years later, reflecting on his friendship with Pete, John would say: ‘I ruined Pete’s education, just as I ruined my own.’ But Pete never complained, not then, nor later.
Jim McCartney was not happy about his son Paul’s new friend. Jim, then fifty-five, was the nicest of old-fashioned men and held great hopes for his sons. He had been thrilled when Paul had shown early promise at music, but then disappointed when the boy had quickly given up on piano lessons. So, he’d bought him a trumpet, the instrument that he used to play himself in the Jimmy Mac Jazz Band. But Paul couldn’t play the trumpet and sing at the same time, and Paul always liked to sing. The trumpet had, therefore, gone back to the shop to be replaced with a guitar. Jim didn’t mind skiffle – it was, after all, tolerated by jazzmen like Chris Barber – but he wasn’t sure about rock and roll. And, following a path already trodden by the parents of children at Dovedale Primary School and teachers at Quarry Bank High School, he was especially not sure about John Lennon.
To Jim, the ideal path for Paul would have taken him from school to university and on to a good professional career. He was a clever boy and, having been accelerated at school, had taken his Latin and French O-levels a year early. Unfortunately, distracted by his guitar playing – although the loss of his mother might have contributed to a lack of focus – Paul had failed both. For Jim, music was fine as a hobby, but education was what mattered, and now he was afraid that Paul was being led astray by this wise guy Lennon. ‘He’ll lead you into trouble, son,’ Jim would warn.
Paul disagreed. He could see qualities in John that eluded most parents. John was bright and funny. Musically, he and John were absolutely on the same wavelength, and playing music was what he wanted to do far more than pass exams. The afternoons when they went back to Forthlin Road to play together, or to try writing a song, or maybe just to listen to records, were the best part of the week for both of them. When he hinted to John that his father wasn’t happy, John’s automatic response was to encourage him to rebel. ‘Tell him to fuck off,’ he advised, although that was something he would never have dared say to Mimi.
Paul didn’t say it to his father, either.
Some other people who didn’t like John Lennon – and by the time he was seventeen there was quite a queue – were the parents of his on-off girlfriend, Barbara. All the time they’d been going out, John’s world had really been a boys’ only gang, in which girlfriends were expected to be pretty, admiring, as sexy as any girl dared to be in those pre-Pill days, and content to play a minor role. Even before he’d gone to art college, he had never been a very loyal boyfriend, and there had been other local liaisons – one of the not inconsiderable benefits of being a lead singer in a group. According to him, he’d lost his virginity before any of his friends while still at school, but, knowing his talent for over-dramatising situations, the details of a comical tryst he’d enjoyed with a girl on top of an ancient, flat gravestone in a cemetery one night might not have been entirely reliable.
As for Barbara, the final parting of the ways came after some months at art college – no doubt to her parents’ delight. He hadn’t treated her well and had often been off pursuing other girls with lusty intent, although he’d be beside himself with jealousy if Barbara went out with another boy. In the end their relationship, like many when one partner goes off to college, had simply petered out. And, although, many years later, Barbara was invited to talk about their days together, she almost never did.
John would never forget Barbara or that period of his life when the world and new possibilities were beginning to open up for him. Twenty years later he reminisced about her in an American radio interview, wading, at first spikily, back into the few years of normality he had enjoyed before fame had engulfed him. ‘Barbara, where are you? Fat and ugly? Fifteen kids? Years of hell with me should have made you ready for anything.’
But regrets and nostalgia quickly followed the more he thought about her. ‘What’s so sad about the past is that it’s passed,’ he ruminated, before ending the reverie with a jokey reference to a song lyric from his childhood. ‘I wonder who’s kissing her now.’