George had never expressed much interest in music. But Louise Harrison began to notice something when her son turned twelve in 1956. He would come home from school with his school workbooks covered obsessively with crude sketches of guitars. Unbeknown to Harold and Louise Harrison, their son George was undergoing a change.

Like most pre-teens of that period, George had a surface attraction to the popular music of the time, which was a folk-blues-rock hybrid called skiffle. He was also aware of such reigning pop singers as Frankie Laine and Johnny Ray and was finding a lot to like in American rock’n’rollers Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. To that point George had actually felt intimidated by the form and felt he was not grown up enough to be an active participant, limiting his rock’n’roll life to gathering with a small circle of friends to play the latest 45 or to listen intently to that week’s Top 40 radio playlist.

But all that changed when he discovered reigning skiffle superstar Lonnie Donegan. George was electrified by the simplicity of Donegan’s music and the emotions it brought out in him. There was something primitive and overtly sexual in the music that went hand in hand with George’s entering puberty. The music seemed to speak to the frustrations and desires George was experiencing. George might not even have had the questions – somehow, some way, Donegan’s music was supplying the answers.

Louise recalled when her son first made his feelings known.

‘One day he said to me, “This boy at school’s got a guitar he paid £5 for but he’ll let me have it for £3; will you buy it for me?” I said, “All right, son, if you really want it.”’

George fingered that guitar for the first time and struck a snarling rock-star pose as he stared at himself in the mirror. The look was admittedly childish. But he also had to admit that the guitar felt good in his hands.

That first guitar, a beat-up acoustic whose neck was being held precariously to the main body by a screw, held George’s interest for a few days until he accidentally pulled the screw out of the neck and could not get it back in. Frustrated, he put the pieces of the guitar in a cupboard and promptly forgot about it. Three months later George took the guitar out of the cupboard, got his older brother Pete to fix it for him and began to practise in earnest. And to fantasise about the possibilities that beat-up guitar represented.

‘When I was a kid growing up, the guitar was the main thing that saved me from boredom. It was the only job I could think of that I wanted to do, which was playing guitar and being in a rock band.’

The guitar became George’s salvation from a world that had increasingly offered him little stimulation. But his by now firmly entrenched aversion to formal instruction led him to attempt to teach himself to play. Unfortunately, after some weeks of practising, George was frustrated at the lack of progress he was making and began to express his frustration to his mother.

‘“I’ll never learn this,” he used to say,’ recalled Louise Harrison. ‘I said, “You will, son, you will. Just keep at it.”’

Louise’s encouragement, which would be with George through the often tumultuous years to follow, was extremely important. George was nothing if not flighty and probably would have dumped the instrument for something easier, albeit less rewarding, if his mother had not been there, urging him on to even the smallest accomplishments.

Encouraged by his mother, George did keep at it, practising at all hours of the day and night, often until his fingers literally bled. Eventually the youngster began to master the first primary chords and to pick out simple, skiffle passages. George would occasionally play along with his older brother, Peter, who had been inspired to get his old guitar out of storage by watching George and, most often, could be found attempting to play along to his favourite pop records of the day.

‘I’d study the way the words were written and sung, then I’d go over them myself,’ he said. ‘I bought a little book with all the chords. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it but I forced my fingers to put out the right chords.’

George threw himself into the rock-star dream as he sleepwalked through his years at Liverpool Institute. It was during this voyage of rock’n’roll discovery that George, during the long and dreary bus rides to and from school, made the acquaintance of a similarly inclined student named Paul McCartney. McCartney, a year ahead of George at Liverpool Institute, was also a budding guitar player who amazed the younger boy by doubling in trumpet. The boys spent many hours talking about music, bands and girls and grew to be good friends who would often go off on holidays together.

Their mutual interest in guitar cemented their already solid relationship and would often result in Paul stopping by George’s house where, at the encouragement of George’s parents, they would practise their meagre repertoire until all hours.

‘We used to play on our own, not in any group, just listening to each other and pinching anything from any other lad who could do better.’

In retrospect, however, the relationship between George and Paul hinged on much more than just their mutual interest in rock’n’roll. Paul saw a bravery and bravado in George’s feisty and often aggressively rude nature. This was much in evidence one day when Paul introduced George to another friend of his. George took one look at the boy and promptly head-butted him to the ground. Once Paul recovered from his shocked surprise at the act, he angrily asked George why he did it. George muttered some nonsense about how he was testing the other boy’s strength and that the fallen lad was not worthy of Paul’s friendship. Paul did not believe it for a minute but admired the younger boy’s brazenness, and let the incident pass.

This incident was typical of George into his middle teen years. The proverbial chip was always on his shoulder. So was the element of distrust. For George, every waking hour had become a battle of wills that he was determined to win at any cost.

George’s rapidly expanding skills coincided with the increasing limitations of his £3 wonder. He would regularly explain to his mother that he was having a hard time getting certain notes out of his now ragged instrument and hinted, not too subtly, that it would be nice if he had another, newer instrument. Louise Harrison’s response was, ‘Sure. I’ll help you buy a new one.’

Louise managed to scrape together £30 and soon presented her son with a state-of-the-art acoustic guitar. George was grateful but also insistent that he would not accept charity . . . even from his mother. And so, for the period of time it took to pay his mother back, George took a part-time job delivering raw meat for a local butcher shop.

George’s emerging talents as a guitarist fuelled his desire to play in a band and in front of a live audience. Skiffle was the music of the moment in London in the late 1950s and any bar, club or legion hall worth its salt would always have a night or two set aside for a number of local bands to bring in a young, free-spending audience. George was convinced that, despite never having played in a band before and not knowing any other musicians other than Paul and his brother Peter, he was ready for his professional debut.

And so one day George wandered down to the nearby British Legion Club in Speke and convinced the owner that he had the hottest band in town and that they were worthy of an audition. George came home that evening with the good news. Needless to say Louise was thrilled at her young son’s daring, but shocked at the corner he had painted himself into.

‘I told him he must be daft,’ she remembered years later. ‘He hadn’t even got a group. He said, don’t worry, he’d get one.’

George immediately recruited his brother Peter and his friend Arthur Kelly to join him in his projected three-guitar line-up. Two other friends, whose names long ago slipped from George’s memory, were added on tea-chest bass and mouth organ. This impromptu group, christened the Rebels, put together what they felt was a comfortable but extremely brief set of two songs. George, his confidence overflowing, thought the Rebels were great. The rest of the band were not quite so sure.

On the night of the audition, perhaps feeling a last-minute attack of nerves, the band decided to sneak out of George’s house, one by one, through George’s backyard in an attempt to keep what they were doing from the neighbours. The Rebels arrived at the British Legion Club and ran through their entire ragtag set for the club owner, who was impressed. Then he dropped a bombshell on the unsuspecting band.

The headlining band for that night’s show had unexpectedly not shown up and so the gig was theirs . . . if they were willing to play all night. George and the others looked at each other. They were ready. Fortunately, the club owner was not too picky about what they played and probably did not notice that they were playing their same two-song set over and over.

From all accounts, George Harrison’s first-ever live performance was a success, short on any overwhelming talent but long on enthusiasm. George would later relate that his first brush with the stage was a mixture of fright and excitement and that it was something he would never forget. Even more exciting was that the club owner happily paid them the headliner’s fee, ten bob per person, at the end of the night.

‘We thought we made a pretty good sound,’ said George, looking back on the Rebel’s performance. ‘But so did about four million other groups.’

The Rebels would never perform again but George became a regular on the Liverpool skiffle circuit and would regularly sit in with a number of local bands. Despite his growing reputation as a guitarist who played with passion and no amount of soul, the musically confident George, as a thirteen-year-old with no small amount of normal teen insecurities, felt he was not up to snuff. He would regularly lament to his mother, and occasionally Paul, that he was not that good a player and that just about everybody he played with was so much better than he was. But his shaky confidence did not dissuade him from continuing to play and grow as a musician.

In the meantime Paul, who had grown into quite the accomplished rock’n’roller in his own right, had hooked up with a local skiffle band in July 1957, the Quarrymen Skiffle Group, a revolving group of musicians headed up by a college student named John Lennon. With Paul in the band, as well as with Lennon’s determination that the band should evolve from skiffle to rock, the Quarrymen Skiffle Group would rise to the top of the semi-pro skiffle circuit in and around Liverpool.

Paul would regularly entertain George with tales of playing in the Quarrymen and suggested that he come around to their gigs. Finally, early in February 1958, fourteen-year-old George screwed up the courage to go to the Wilson Hall at Garston and watch the band play. George was immediately impressed with the much older Lennon’s tough-guy attitude and trendy dress. And Paul in a live setting was something to behold.

After the show, Paul introduced George to John. There ensued the tentative dance in which the pair talked guitars and music. John was immediately attracted to the fact that George’s influences favoured rock, a direction John was trying hard to take the band in the face of what he considered the looming end of skiffle as a popular form.

At the time George and Paul, still at Liverpool Institute, were part of an informal group of student musicians who would get together in a room during their lunch break to jam on the latest rock’n’roll hits. John, at the nearby Arts College, began to come by and join the informal jam. He was also impressed that George, his own insecurities aside, knew a lot more chords and rock progressions than the current line-up of guitarists drifting in and out of John’s band. So while musically George was just what John was looking for, his extreme youth and the sensed attitude of hero worship directed at him by George had John worried.

‘I couldn’t be bothered with George when he first came around,’ recalled John of his earliest encounter with George. ‘George’s relationship with me was one of a young follower and an older guy. He was like a disciple of mine when we started. He used to follow me and my first girlfriend [and later his first wife] Cynthia around wherever we went. We’d come out of school and he’d be hovering around.’

Eventually George’s ability on guitar, and in particular his ability to play some sterling guitar lines on the then popular rock tune ‘Raunchy’ during an impromptu audition in the back of a bus, and the pure insistence that saw him showing up at every Quarrymen rehearsal and gig, eventually wore John down and, by early March of 1958, he invited George to join the group. With the nucleus of John, Paul and George and a revolving door of drummers, the Quarrymen broke away from the skiffle crowd and became a full-on rock’n’roll band.

It was also during 1958 that fifteen-year-old George Harrison fell in love for the first time, with a bright and wildly attractive girl named Ruth Morrison. To that point, George had talked a good game when discussing girls with his male friends and had been mildly flirtatious with the schoolgirls that had crossed his path. But music had been his overriding love to the exclusion of a romantic relationship. Until Ruth came along. Theirs was the classic teen romance: totally chaste with a lot of hand-holding and kissing but nothing else. At age fifteen, George was still a virgin and inclined to remain that way.

True to John’s prediction, by 1959, the skiffle phenomenon had flamed out, to be replaced by a growing rock movement, typified by the so-called Beat circuit of 50s rock and blues bands plying their trade in a number of primarily low-paying jobs at a variety of clubs. George was still living at home and barely giving school a second thought. By the end of the year, he was out of school and struggling through his job at Blackler’s out of a sense of guilt at disappointing his parents with his academic failure. The band rehearsed in an informal circuit that took in the homes of John, Paul and George.

Through constant gigs in clubs and ballrooms, George was finding himself coming into his own as a guitarist. His leads became sharper and more passionate. His rhythm changes were constant and innovative. And, on the rare occasion when John and Paul relinquished the microphone, it became evident that George had a better-than-average singing voice. Another distinct advantage in having George in the band was that his boyish good looks (in conjunction with Paul’s, of course) were drawing an ever-increasing number of single ladies to their appearances.

The Beat club circuit was a real grind. Most nights George and his mates could count on little more than £1 each for a full night’s work. The club owners were notorious for not paying if a band went on late or came off too early or violated any number of myriad and arbitrary rules. Some nights the best they could hope for was a soda and a plate of beans for their efforts. But George would readily admit that he was enjoying the life of a semi-professional musician, despite the fact that he was dog-tired most of the time.

‘We loved it like mad when we were first starting out,’ reflected George. ‘Because all we ever wanted was to go around Liverpool and be cute and popular, play our guitars and not have to work.’

Although John was the de facto leader of the Quarrymen, and all the early attempts at songwriting were Lennon–McCartney compositions, George had quickly emerged as the best guitar player in the group and both John and Paul would concede in later years that they were constantly practising just to keep up. It went without saying that George was the element that the Quarrymen needed to break in to the big time.

One such opportunity came in 1959 when Carroll Levis, better known in London at the time as ‘Mr Star-Maker’, would be coming to Manchester to audition local talent for his Carroll Levis Discoveries television show. They were excited at the opportunity of making it to television and stardom but also a little concerned that losing under the name of the Quarrymen would be a blight against their local reputation. And so they decided to go under the moniker of ‘Johnny and the Moondogs’ for the audition.

On the day of the audition, George was visibly nervous, sitting quietly and strumming the guitar while making mindless small talk with John and Paul as they waited to go on. According to the group members’ collective memories, their set, with John on lead vocals and George and Paul laying down a deft guitar backing, went down fairly well and they received quite a bit of applause. At the end of the auditions, each band was required to return to the stage, play a few bars of their song again, and receive a final round of applause whose intensity would determine the winner.

Unfortunately, the show was running late and they were about to miss the last train back to Liverpool. Sadly, they made the decision to get on the train and not return to the stage.

Although the Quarrymen continued to be a top draw throughout 1959, there were those inevitable periods where they were not working on a regular basis. George could not handle the downtime and took to moonlighting in another band, the Les Stewart Quartet. Through his association with that group, George became aware of a new club, called the Casbah, that was about to open its doors to live music. The Les Stewart Quartet was originally slated to open the club. But when an internal blow-up within the band derailed the Les Stewart Quartet, George volunteered the Quarrymen for the gig. The band’s growing reputation preceded them and when word got around that the Quarrymen would be playing, more than 300 people showed up for the 29 August 1959 opening. The band would be the closest thing to a house band at the Casbah for two months and would return for sporadic appearances during the early 1960s.

With George’s musicianship as a driving force, the Quarrymen had turned totally to rock’n’roll. To fill out the sound, an art-school chum of John’s, Stu Sutcliffe, was recruited and quickly taught how to play bass.

For George these were heady times. He was an adrenaline junkie, living on little sleep, questionable food and an all-encompassing drive to play music. Being in it for the adventure, George was going through the expected emotional ups and downs of youth, complicated by the pressures of rising stardom. During this period he would occasionally confide to his parents that it was all getting to be too much and that they should all just run away and hide somewhere. To their credit, Harold and Louise Harrison, now fully behind their son’s musical ambitions, would constantly encourage their son to stick with it.

And George would admit, when things were beginning to take off, that rock’n’roll was really a good job. ‘Money, travel, chicks, nice threads. There’s a great deal to be said for playing rock’n’roll.’

The evolution of the band continued. The band began putting their meagre earnings towards amps and electric guitars. Their feeling that the name the Quarrymen was not too dated and quaint was followed by a suggestion of short-lived names that includes the Rainbows and Johnny and the Rainbows. Eventually John came to rehearsals one day with the suggestion of the Beatles, taking his cue from the Crickets, Buddy Holly’s backing band. But when the response was less than enthusiastic, the group agreed on the moniker the Silver Beatles.

On 10 May 1960, the newly named Silver Beatles landed their first real tour when they auditioned for rock’n’roll impresario Larry Parnes to be the backing band for carpenter-turned-pop star Johnny Gentile on a two-week tour of Scotland. The band, with yet another fill-in drummer, won the audition and literally had a week to prepare to go on tour for the sum of £18 per person plus expenses.

For George, dropping the tedium of Blackler’s for two weeks on the road in an admittedly third-rate tour went without question. George saw this low-level tour of dingy clubs and run-down teenage dance halls as the band’s first glimmer of the possibility of making the big time. And it was with this attitude that George would revel in a tour that encompassed long drives, an accident that temporarily incapacitated their drummer, the way the rockers seduced impressionable young women and the fine art of skipping out on a hotel bill.

Besides backing Gentile on his seven-song set, the Silver Beatles also performed an hour-long set of their own, made up primarily of rock’n’roll covers that included ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Rock’n’Roll Music’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’, and while all the band members had obviously grown into their rock’n’roll personas, it was George, whose stage presence had quickly caught up with his musical abilities, who shined.

The band’s egos knew no bounds during the tour. Seeing their names and pictures on posters and receiving thunderous applause in hole-in-the-wall venues in towns like Inverness and Nairn was big-time for the headstrong young musicians.

Unfortunately, upon returning to Liverpool, the Silver Beatles ran headlong into a particularly dire dry spell. Despite glowing reports on the band’s professionalism, Larry Parnes was unable to find another slot for the Silver Beatles. For a month after their return, they did little but sit around their respective homes and return to their dead-end jobs and unrewarding school lives. The mundane life at Blackler’s and the sudden downturn in the band’s fortunes hit George Harrison particularly hard.

‘I was just about convinced that it was never going to happen,’ he confessed, looking back on those dark days. ‘It gave me great reason for concern. After all, the only other reasonable alternative was to just go out and find a real job.’

After a time, jobs did start trickling in again but they were not the quality gigs the musicians were used to. One such date was as the backing band for a stripper named Janice as she took it all off to the accompaniment of the songs ‘Moonglow’ and ‘Ramrod’. The Cavern Club, then one of the more popular local outlets for live jazz, offered the band a couple of dates on the condition that they only play jazz. For better or worse the band ignored those requests, often passed up to the stage by way of a note during their set, and eventually were not invited back. They were also managing a couple of dates a week at low-level bars and clubs where customers were more interested in drinking and fighting than anything the band had to say musically.

The future looked grim for George and the Silver Beatles in the summer of 1960. And George was dreading it.