It had begun as just another hobby, like acting out the characters in The Wind In The Willows when he’d been ten, or writing and drawing ‘The Daily Howl’ at fifteen. But now, what he enjoyed doing more than anything was singing and playing rock and roll. Rock music had taken over his life, and already he was becoming a semi-detached art student. When criticised by an irate tutor for his lack of effort he was angrily unembarrassed. ‘I don’t need all this,’ he shouted back. ‘I’m going to be a rock star.’ That had become his sole ambition, and he was determined that it would be his destiny. The only problem was in working out how he was going to achieve it.
Since his meeting with Paul McCartney, and his realisation of how little he and the other Quarry Men knew about music, one thing was becoming very clear. Friends though the original group were, they were not going to be with him on his journey, as Pete had already discovered. For John to get to where he wanted to be, he would need talented musicians around him, not half-hearted part-timers who sometimes didn’t even turn up for rehearsals.
For the time being, though, his job was to keep playing and learning; and to hold the group together while boy manager Nigel Walley arranged occasional appearances in church halls. It was at such a date that he first became seriously aware of George Harrison. John didn’t pay him much attention at first, not even when Paul told him how good a guitarist George was. In John’s eyes, the kid was just too young.
George, however, was also very determined. While both John and Paul lived their lives under constant adult warnings about the dangers of throwing their opportunities away, George received nothing but encouragement from his family, particularly from his mother, Louise. And, by sheer force of will and practice, and complete neglect of homework, he’d learned to do things with a guitar that not even Paul could do. He could, for instance, play ‘Raunchy’.
‘Raunchy’ was in 1958 a big American guitar instrumental hit that had followed Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash out of the Sun recording studios in Memphis and straight to the top of the US charts. Rock guitarists loved its twangy riff, and by mastering it, George was considered in his tiny circle to be something of a self-taught prodigy. ‘Raunchy’ was his passport to membership of the Quarry Men.
‘We asked George to join us because he knew more chords, a lot more, than we knew,’ John would often say. ‘So we got a lot from him. And every time we learned a new chord, Paul and I would write a song around it.’
Outside the Quarry Men, John wasn’t, however, prepared to socialise with George – as evidenced when, on one occasion, believing himself to be now in the gang, George arrived at Mendips and suggested that he and John go to the cinema together.
Immediately John made an excuse and sent him away. He didn’t want to be seen hanging out with a fourteen-year-old, no matter how good a guitarist the kid was. He would later sum up the problem to me with his usual exaggeration. ‘George looked even younger than Paul, and Paul looked about ten with his baby face. George used to follow me around like a bloody kid, hanging around all the time.’
Mimi probably applauded John’s behaviour on that occasion, if not for the kindest of motives. George’s winkle-pickers, drainpipe jeans, jazzy shirt and masses of grease-coiffured hair, allied to his thick Liverpudlian accent, had revealed him to be a very working-class boy. ‘He’s a real whacker, isn’t he! You always seem to like lower-class types, don’t you, John,’ she would snipe, with an undisguised implied dig at her nephew’s ne’er-do-well absentee father, Freddie.
She would tolerate Paul, though. Paul thought she even ‘quite liked him’, which she probably did, although she would patronise him whenever she answered the front door to him by calling up to John in his bedroom saying: ‘Your little friend’s here, John.’ She had a twinkle in her eye as she said that, Paul would remember, but she was making a point. He was slightly in awe of John’s smarter, more comfortable home, the prominent collection of books by Winston Churchill that Mimi had on show in a bookshelf in the sitting room, and Mimi’s long cigarette holder.
As far as Mimi was concerned, Paul was, just about, all right. His accent was less pronounced, and his manners and diplomatic skills more mature than those of George, whom she knew to have a Saturday job as a butcher’s boy. She didn’t see a butcher’s boy delivering sausages, liver and lamb chops on a bike as the right company for her college-educated nephew.
Not that Paul could get around her. When he turned up with his guitar, she always chased John and him from the house, making them practice out in the front porch. As it happened, they preferred to play and sing there. Like Julia’s bathroom, the porch had a better acoustic, and John’s bedroom was too small for them to practise in, their arms bumping into each other’s, sitting on the bed as they played together. Instead, when they were there, they would just put John’s 45s on the record player he now owned – two teenage boys sharing their obsession.
Sometimes for a change they would go to see Julia and play her records, too, as she lived quite near to Paul’s home. The relationship between John and Julia left a lasting impression on the younger boy. ‘I’d lost my mum, that’s one thing. But for your mum to be actually living somewhere else and for you to be a teenage boy and not living with her is very sad,’ Paul told his biographer friend Barry Miles. ‘Julia would be very nice but when we left there was always a tinge of sadness about him . . . Being John, he didn’t admit to it much unless it was a very quiet or drunken moment . . . He loved his Aunt Mimi, I know he did. But she was always the surrogate.’
Pete had already left, but George’s admission into the Quarry Men presented John with a problem. Four guitars in a six-man group made it, to say the least, unbalanced. So, he suggested to Eric Griffiths that he put aside his acoustic guitar and buy one of the new electric bass guitars and amplifiers that were then just becoming available in Liverpool.
Not seeing the danger looming, or that making an expensive investment in a bass guitar might be his way of staying in the group, Eric turned the idea down.
At this point it would have been politic, or even kind, to have explained to Eric that he was being replaced by George. But John didn’t do that. Instead the group held a rehearsal at Paul’s home without Eric, and, in the end, Nigel Walley was sent to deliver the sacking. Eric was upset. John was his friend and Eric had been a founder member of the band.
It wouldn’t be the last time that John would leave it to someone else to impart bad news.
Most groups were content to copy the records that were arriving from America, and almost everything the Quarry Men played in public was a cover of an Elvis, Buddy Holly or Carl Perkins record. But what made Lennon and McCartney different was that, from the beginning, years before they knew that the big money in popular music was to be made in its writing and publishing, they decided, like Buddy Holly, to write their own songs.
Paul had already written his first song, ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, when he met John. So, spurred on, as he always would be, by rivalry, John then wrote one. That was the way the working partnership evolved – as friends, rivals and perhaps most importantly, as contributors to and editors of each other’s ideas. Most of the songs they wrote in that period were lost because, as neither boy could write music or had a tape recorder to save what they’d written, there was no way of remembering what tune they’d come up with. This didn’t worry them. Although Paul would diligently copy the name and lyrics of every song into an exercise book, as ‘Another original by John Lennon and Paul McCartney’, if they couldn’t remember the tune, that must have meant it wasn’t any good. So they forgot about it. A few though, like one of John’s first songs, ‘One After 909’, hung around for years – before eventually appearing on the Let It Be album in 1970.
Now and then Nigel Walley would hear of somewhere new for the Quarry Men to play, and off they would go to brave the local gangs who would watch with suspicion if they thought their girlfriends might fancy them too much. A couple of times, carrying their guitars, they had to run for the bus to escape the wrath of the locals – which was another good reason not to be the drummer in a band. You couldn’t run very quickly when hauling a drum kit on and off a bus. Mainly, though, their performances were met with friendly indifference and small audiences, the main benefactors being the Quarry Men themselves who regarded gigs as practice time.
John might no longer have been a schoolboy, but he was still dependent on Mimi, who, brought up among girls, and with her husband George now dead, had little idea of how to handle a truculent teenage boy. So when she found a packet of condoms in her nephew’s pocket she sought the advice of one of her former lodgers, Michael Fishwick, who had now returned to stay at Mendips while writing his PhD at Liverpool University. His advice to Mimi was that it would be better if she didn’t mention the condoms to John. This was wise counsel. But there was something ironical about the whole situation. Mimi and Michael Fishwick, who was half her age, had, over the past few months, become lovers. As John was now spending more and more time at Julia’s home, it’s quite possible that he was never even aware of it. Certainly he never talked about it.
Of course, there was no reason why a widowed landlady of fifty shouldn’t have been having a relationship with her unmarried young lodger. But since the day John had moved into Mendips, Mimi had always presented herself as being the living spirit of dignified behaviour. What would have been his reaction had he known that she was now having sex with her student lodger in the bedroom next to his? He would have been astonished, for sure. But would he have been shocked, appalled, hysterically amused or . . .? Mimi couldn’t tell.
As it happened, at around the same time, John found himself having to reassess his mother’s love life when, arriving at Julia’s house one afternoon, he wandered into her bedroom only to interrupt her giving her partner, Bobby Dykins, oral sex.
Being John, he couldn’t keep it a secret, and told his best friend Pete. He couldn’t keep it a secret either.
Meanwhile at Liverpool College of Art, academic history was repeating itself. Just as he had failed at school, John was continuing to disappoint at college. This time, though, the problem wasn’t just that he was lazy and not interested, although he was certainly both. It was that he simply didn’t have the appropriate talents and temperament for the course on which he found himself.
Arthur Ballard, one of his tutors, a tough, no-nonsense former army boxing champion, had, unlike most of the staff, a soft spot for him, and was happy to let him invite Paul and George into his classroom at lunchtime to practise together. But Ballard was blunt about John’s abilities as an artist. ‘I think he felt frustrated, though he would never admit it,’ he said. ‘There he was, surrounded by people who had some talent with art, and I think he felt a bit in over his head. He would act in a daft manner to distract people . . .’ probably to hide the fact that ‘he wasn’t as good an artist as they were’.
John had an excuse for that. ‘I should have been an illustrator or in the painting school because it seemed groovy. But I found myself in lettering. I didn’t turn up for something so they put me in that. They were neat fuckers in lettering. I was never neat. They might as well have put me in sky-diving for the use I was at lettering. I failed all the exams.’
Again, what he seems to have been unprepared to admit, not even to himself, was that he wasn’t good enough to be in the painting school. That was why he hadn’t been chosen. It was the same complaint he’d had at Quarry Bank – that the school hadn’t recognised his genius. His high opinion of himself could blinker him sometimes.
Only when Arthur Ballard accidentally came across a notebook of John’s caricatures did he revise his opinion of the boy. They were, he thought, ‘the wittiest thing I’d seen in my life’. That, he told John, was what he should be doing.
‘He would act the fool,’ Ballard told me years later, ‘but underneath all that I could see that he was a thinker.’
Other people at college were discovering the same thing. While some fellow students were appalled when John would revel in saying the unsayable, such as his loud comment when passing a one-legged man in the street, ‘Some blokes will do anything to get out of the army’ – and with two world wars having occurred in the last forty years, they were not an uncommon sight – others were discovering a more thoughtful side to him.
One of them was a dark-haired boy called Bill Harry who’d had a tough Liverpool upbringing, and who saw art college as his big opportunity in life. Sitting with John at lunchtime in Ye Cracke, a faux ancient pub a couple of streets away from the college where the two would drink beer and eat chips, Harry discovered that, when he could get the class joker away from his little mob of admirers, he was articulate and well read. Eventually Bill brought a slight, pale, good-looking boy called Stuart Sutcliffe into their company.
Reckoned to be the most promising student of his generation at the college, Stu Sutcliffe was, at seventeen, the same age as John, but a year ahead in his course. Clever, quietly spoken, talented and hard-working, he had grown up in Prescot, a small town about nine miles east of Liverpool. His parents were Scottish and his mother had spent some years as a novitiate in a convent intending to be a nun before realising that she didn’t have a vocation. This was the sort of detail that fascinated John, as did much of Stu’s conversation. While the teaching staff failed to hold his attention with their art history lectures, Stu fascinated him by talking about existentialism – which he may only just have got to know about himself. Most probably Stu – whose image of himself led him to frequently wear sunglasses, even in cloudy Liverpool – was the sort of talented student John would like to have been. For his part, John’s whimsical conversations and the generally restless anarchy of his daily life found a ready admirer in his new friend.
Opposites attract. John might not have been able to paint very well, and lettering bored him, but what he could do was talk, and a part of him began turning into a student intellectual. Conversation with Stu made him feel clever. And, to cap it all, Stu loved rock and roll, just as much as he did Kandinsky and Dali, Duchamp and Dadaism. Arthur Ballard summed up Stu’s influence on John in a single line. ‘Without Stu Sutcliffe, John wouldn’t have known Dada from a donkey.’
But something more than that was involved. John’s friendship with Stu would initiate the way he would begin to think of rock music as an art form. A synthesis of rock and art would, in a few years’ time, be occurring at other colleges all around Britain, but for John it started one lunchtime in a pub in Liverpool.
All the Quarry Men had read how Elvis had begun his career by simply going into Sun Records in Memphis in 1954 and paying four dollars to make a record of himself singing. So when one of them heard that there was a studio in Kensington in Liverpool where they could do the same thing, they booked a session.
By this time the group was down to John, Paul, George and drummer Colin Hanton, but a school friend of Paul’s called Duff Lowe sometimes played piano with the band and was invited along to the session. It took place, according to John, ‘in the front room of some guy’s house that he called a recording studio’. It was apparently all over in about half an hour, after which they were handed a single copy of the specially cut 78 rpm shellac record to take home. What they considered to be the A-side was a cover of ‘That’ll Be The Day’, while the B-side was an early composition by Paul and George (who wrote the guitar break) called ‘In Spite Of All The Danger’, the melodic shape of which leant somewhat on Elvis’s ‘Trying To Get To You’.
‘I sang both sides,’ John would remember to a US radio interviewer in the mid-Seventies. ‘I was such a bully in those days. I didn’t even let Paul sing his own song.’ Paul’s contribution, as well as on guitar, was to add a strong harmony in the style of Phil in the Everly Brothers – shades of things to come.
Making a record meant that for the first time the Quarry Men had been able to hear what they sounded like, and it was, therefore, a big moment for the band. So after the session, they all chipped in to pay the seventeen shillings and sixpence cost (about £20 in today’s money) and agreed to share the disc, passing it, one to the other, for a week each. Duff Lowe, being outside the group, got the record last . . . and would accidentally keep it for the next twenty-five years.