practice sessions at Paul’s generally took place on weekday afternoons when both participants would ‘sag off’ from their respective studies at college and school. At first the sessions were simply to practise the songs they had learned, or were still struggling to learn, from records or the wireless. John in those days had a liking for purely instrumental numbers and, so Paul remembers, did ‘a mean version’ of the Harry Lime Theme, making his Gallotone Champion sound as much like a Viennese zither as it ever possibly could.
Bouts of playing would be punctuated by listening to the radio or to records, pun-making, sex talk and horseplay. The McCartneys had just acquired a telephone—no small thing for a council house in 1957—which Paul and John would use to make anonymous nuisance calls in funny voices to selected victims like John’s former headmaster, Mr Pobjoy. Once they tried writing a play together about ‘a Christ figure named Pilchard’ who was to remain enigmatically offstage throughout in the manner of Samuel Beckett’s Godot. ‘We couldn’t figure out how playwrights did it,’ Paul remembered. ‘Did they work it all out and work through the chapters, or did they just write a stream of consciousness like we were doing?’ Unable to resolve this dilemma, they gave up after page two.
The idea of writing original songs to perform, rather than merely recycling other people’s, was firmly rooted in Paul’s mind well before he met John. He had begun trying it virtually from the moment he acquired a guitar, combining melodic gifts inherited from his father with a talent for mimicking and pastiching the American-accented hits of the moment. His first completed song, ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, had been written in late 1956, partly as a diversion from the trauma of his mother’s death, partly as an expression of it. Around the time he joined the Quarrymen, he had something like a dozen other compositions under his belt, mostly picked out on the family upright piano, including a first draft of what would eventually become ‘When I’m Sixty-four’ (which he thought ‘might come in handy for a musical comedy or something’).
For a 15-year-old Liverpool schoolboy—indeed, for any ordinary mortal—this was breathtaking presumptuousness. In Britain’s first rock-’n’-roll era, as for a century before it, songwriting was considered an art verging on the magical. It could be practised only in London (naturally) by a tiny coterie of music-business insiders, middle-aged men with names like Paddy or Bunny, who alone understood the sacred alchemy of rhyming arms with charms and moon with June.
The writing first appeared on the wall for Paddy and Bunny in November 1957, when ‘That’ll Be the Day’ by the Crickets topped the UK singles chart. It was the most uproariously guitar-driven rock-’n’-roll song yet, with its jangly, wind-chime treble intro and solo and its underlay of thudding bass. The Crickets’ leader, 21-year-old Buddy Holly, was a multi-faceted innovator: the first white rock-’n’-roller to write his own songs, the first to sing and play lead guitar, the first to subsume himself into a four-person group whose name was a whimsical collective noun. Holly’s vocal style was as unique as Presley’s and, if possible, even more acrobatic, veering between manic yells, lovelorn sighs and a hiccuping stutter that could fracture even a word like well into as many as eight syllables.
For British boys struggling to make the leap from skiffle to rock, Holly was less a god than a godsend. Most of the previous American rock-’n’-roll hits, including almost all of Elvis’s, had been far beyond their power to reproduce with their piping little voices and tinny instruments. But the songs that Holly wrote and recorded were built on instantly recognisable chords, Es and Ds and B7s, their familiar changes and sequences rearranged to create a drama and stylishness they’d never seemed remotely capable of before. Equally imitable were the vocal backings, the blurry Ooos, Aahs, and Ba-ba-bas that were presumed (mistakenly) to come from Holly’s three fellow Crickets. With these elementary tools, every fading-from-fashion skiffle group could instantly refashion itself as a top-of-the-range rock combo.
Holly’s most radical departure from established rock-’n’-roll style was an outsized pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. Coincidentally, this was a time when the new beatnik culture, simultaneously emanating from New York and Paris, and the first screen appearances by Anthony Perkins, had led many young men to cultivate just such an earnest, intellectual air. Holly’s glasses, allied to his neat appearance and polymathic talent, made him appear like some star student, sitting exams in each sphere of rock and passing every one with honours.
With Buddy on the charts, John no longer needed to feel his poor sight automatically cast him down among the nerds, drips, weeds and swots. After years of fruitlessly begging him to wear his glasses, Mimi now found herself being pestered to buy him a new pair, with frames far more conspicuous than the ones he had. Mimi, of course, had no idea who Buddy Holly was or why he should have superseded Elvis as John’s mental menu for breakfast, dinner and tea. She bought him the black horn-rims because she could refuse him nothing, in the hope that he’d now spend less of his time walking around half-blind.
She might as well have saved her money. Even Buddy Holly-style frames could not overcome John’s phobia about being seen in glasses. He put them on only when absolutely necessary, for close work at college or his practice sessions with Paul at Forthlin Road. To be allowed to see him wearing them was a mark of intimacy, granted to almost no females and only a select circle of males. Among the latter was Paul’s brother Michael, a keen amateur photographer whose lens sometimes caught the horn-rimmed John studying his guitar fretboard with a librarian’s earnestness. But by the time Mike clicked his shutter again, the horn-rims would have vanished.
That winter of 1957-58 brought a stream of further Buddy Holly songs—‘Oh Boy’, ‘Think It Over’, ‘Maybe Baby’—each intriguingly different from the last yet still as easy to take apart and reassemble as children’s building blocks. For John and Paul in their facing armchairs, it was the most natural step from playing songs Buddy had written to making up ones he might easily have done. Paul would later describe how they’d sit there, strumming Buddyish chordsequences, exchanging Buddyish hiccups—‘Uh-ho! Ah-hey! Ah-hey-hey!’—until inspiration came.
It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
By his second term at Liverpool College of Art, John was known as the most problematic student in any age group or any course: a troublemaker and subversive who resisted doing serious work himself and tried his utmost to distract his fellow students from theirs. Most of his instructors quickly decided he was unteachable, demanded little or no work from him, and avoided any confrontation over his behaviour. His sculpture tutor, Philip Hartas, for one, was frankly intimidated by ‘a fellow who seemed to have been born without brakes.’
The sullen sartorial outsider of registration day had metamorphosed into something vaguely resembling an art student, though he would never completely discard his would-be tough Teddy Boy persona. ‘I became a bit artier…but I still dressed like a Ted, with tight drainies,’ he recalled. ‘One week I’d go in with my college scarf…the next week I’d go for the leather jacket and jeans.’
The young people with whom he now spent his days were a great deal less shockable than his old classmates at Quarry Bank. The word fuck and its derivatives—still absolutely taboo in polite society and all printed matter—were used throughout college with a casualness that even the doggedly foul-mouthed Woolton Outlaw at first found surprising. Many students had flats of their own, and so could have sex whenever they pleased, in privacy and comfort rather than hastily and furtively in the cold outdoors. Almost everyone, male and female, drank heavily and chain-smoked; some even took illegal drugs, mostly acquired through the neighbouring West Indian community—though John, at this stage, did not even dream such things existed.
On the outside, he might have been all swagger and defiance, but inside he was consumed with self-doubt, believing that he had got into college