stars and a cowboy hat and a big Dobro [selfamplifying metal guitar]…There had been cowboys before there was rock ‘n’ roll.’
The folk input even included a few traditional British ballads, most notably ‘Maggie May’, the requiem for an archetypal Liverpool ’tottie’, or tart, from the well-worn hookers’ beat between Lime Street and Canning Place. John had always vaguely known the words, and was given a refresher course by his mother, playing his guitar in the living room at Mendips, watched also by Mimi and her regular boarder, Michael Fishwick. Julia knew the whole bawdy lyric that most skifflers dared not sing, and she articulated every word (‘No more she’ll rob the sailor, or be fucked by many a whaler…’) with Vera Lynn clarity and sweetness. Fortunately, most of it went completely over her straitlaced sister’s head.
Otherwise, in these days when tape recorders were rare and fabulously expensive, learning the words of a song could be a laborious business. Every pop record that was released was still also published as sheet music with a one-colour cover picture of the vocalist, the words spelled out in the style of operatic libretti (‘You ai-n’t nu-thin’ but a ho-und dog…’) and anachronistic directions such as ‘Allegro’ or ‘bright, lively rhythm’. But for a schoolboy like John, buying the record itself at six shillings per copy was costly enough. The only way to learn it was to play it over and over again, each time scribbling down another phrase, or part of one, and gaining another clue as to which chord changed into which. Since Mimi refused to have a record player at Mendips, John had to take his records to Julia’s and learn them from hers.
As always if he really wanted to do something, he never gave up. When he finally sold his copy of ‘Rock Island Line’ to Rod Davis, he’d thrown it back onto the gramophone so many times and so roughly that the hole in its centre had been worn out of shape by the turntable stem. The first time Rod tried to play it, it wobbled so crazily that the song was barely recognisable.
The Quarrymen’s first gig was at St Barnabas Church Hall—popularly known as ‘Barney’s’—close to the Penny Lane roundabout where John used to get off the bus for Dovedale Primary. No advertisements appeared in the local press, so we can only roughly date his debut in front of a live audience as September or October of 1956. Nothing else is known of the event except that his mother turned up loyally to cheer him on, accompanied by his steady girlfriend, Barbara Baker.
The next significant booking was an anomalously upmarket one at the Lee Park Golf Club in Gateacre. Lee Park was that common fifties institution, a ‘Jewish-only’ club, catering to those whose religion excluded them from playing on other courses in the area. Nigel Walley had recently begun working there as an apprentice golf pro, and he talked the secretary into booking the Quarrymen as an extra attraction at a Saturday-night club dance. They played in the round, while a formally dressed and largely adult crowd sat and watched. There was no fee, but a cold supper was provided and a collection taken for them afterwards.
From the very first, John dominated the stage as if born to it, pounding his cheap little mail-order guitar, singing in the high, slightly acid voice that, unusually, he made no attempt to Americanise. To be heard above five frantically skiffling companions, usually without a microphone, the only option was all-out attack. On such public show, it was more unthinkable than ever for him to wear his hated glasses, even though without them he could barely see the edge of the stage. As a result, he adopted a slightly hunched, splaylegged stance, his face thrust forward and eyes narrowed to slits in a way that onlookers took to be aggressive and challenging but often was no more than an effort to get his surroundings in focus. Though he never indulged in overt displays of egotism, his companions were left in no doubt as who was boss. ‘John used to go at his guitar so hard that he’d often break a string,’ Rod Davis remembers. ‘When that happened, he’d hand his guitar to me, take my banjo and carry on playing while I changed the guitar-string for him.’
Perform it though he did with his whole heart and soul, skiffle was never enough for John. What he really wanted to be playing was rock ‘n’ roll, not the historically meaningful tracts and protests of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie but the magic, molten gibberish of Elvis Presley and Little Richard. And time was pressing. Every day brought a fresh hail of adult calumnies against rock ‘n’ rollers and seemingly authoritative predictions that they would all soon have passed into richly deserved extinction. As evidence, the finger was pointed at Presley himself and how he already seemed to be hedging his bets by recording fewer rock-’n’-roll rabble-rousers and more ballads. December 1956 found ‘the King’ starring in his first Hollywood movie, Love Me Tender, and topping the charts with a theme song that was less ballad than hymn.
So John, at the very earliest stage, began mixing rock ‘n’ roll into the Quarrymen’s skiffle repertoire in small, surreptitious doses, like nips of vodka added to orange juice. He was, anyway, in the habit of making up his own words to current hit songs when he hadn’t been able to decipher their real ones. So he’d play rock-’n’-roll songs as skiffle, slipping in a folksy reference here and there to mollify the purists. The example always cited by his former companions was ‘Come Go with Me’, a 1957 million seller for the Del-Vikings in the doo-wop, or part-singing style created by a cappella vocal groups on urban street corners. John’s Quarrymen version—perhaps the seeds of a future song lyric’s invitation to ‘let me take you down’—ran:
Come come come come
and go with me down down down down to the Penitentiary
One immediate effect of his new passion was a slight improvement of his profile at Quarry Bank High School. In October 1956, the remote and humourless Ernie Taylor had retired from the headmastership and been replaced by William Ernest Pobjoy, at only 35 one of the youngest head teachers in the northwest. Mr Pobjoy had been warned in advance about the malign influence of Shennon and Lotton, by now sometimes too extreme even to feature in the official punishment log. ‘I was told there was a certain member of staff that Lennon had actually thumped,’ the former head remembers now. ‘The poor man was so humiliated that he’d begged for the matter not to be reported.’
Despite his youth and far lighter touch, ‘Popeye’ Pobjoy was no pushover. Soon after his arrival, he found it necessary to give John three strokes with the cane—an experience that helped convince him to phase out corporal punishment from the school altogether. Early in 1957, while Popeye was temporarily absent, Shennon and Lotton were each suspended for a week by the deputy head, Ian Gallaway.
But in general John’s guitar made him more a member of the school community than he’d ever wished or expected to be. Now when he went to the headmaster’s study, it might not necessarily be for the cane but to ask in all politeness if the Quarrymen could play at the next sixth-form dance. In a turret of the old Gothic schoolhouse was a little-used classroom where—with Popeye’s tacit permission—John, Pete and Eric Griffiths would hold practice sessions during break or after school.
Rehearsal space for the whole eight-man group (if you count all three alternating bass players) was less easy to find. At Mendips, John’s bedroom was too small, and Mimi’s house-proud eye too vigilant, for them ever to feel quite comfortable there. They might convene at Eric’s or Colin’s house or, if the weather were fine, in the back garden of Rod Davis’. Next door lived the grandparents of the future Olympic runner Paula Radcliffe; as John tried out the latest Donegan or Presley number, the Radcliffes would jokily throw pennies to him over the garden fence.
But most times the Quarrymen would pick up a packet of Wild Woodbines and a newspaper parcel of fish and chips, and go over to their unofficial den mother’s house in Bloomfield Road. However many they were, they could depend on the same warm welcome from Julia; she would make them endless cups of tea, share their ciggies, be a sounding board for their latest numbers and a sympathetic listener to their latest adventures and misadventures. The practice session itself would usually be held in the bathroom, whose uncarpeted floor and tiled surfaces maximized the volume and echo of acoustic skiffle instruments; to get the very best effect, John, Eric and Rod would stand together in the bath. No matter if Julia happened to be bathing John’s two half-sisters when the musicians arrived: the little girls would be evicted, the water would be drained, and the two guitarists and banjo player would take off their shoes and clamber into the