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Please God, give me a guitar.

He first heard about Elvis Presley from a Quarry Bank classmate named Don Beatty, one of the participants in the Great Dinner Tickets Swindle. Don had a copy of the New Musical Express—at that time rather a rarity in the northwest—and pointed out a reference to America’s newest rock-’n’-roll sensation and his just-released new record, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.

John reacted guardedly at first, remembering what a letdown Rock Around the Clock had been. ‘The music papers were saying Presley was fantastic, and at first I expected someone like Perry Como or Sinatra. “Heartbreak Hotel” sounded a corny title, and his name seemed strange in those days. But then when I heard it, it was the end for me…I remember rushing home with the record and saying “He sounds like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray and Tennessee Ernie Ford.” ’

When Presley erupted into popular music and mythology that spring of 1956, he was by no means the first entertainer to cause mass hysteria. During the 1920s, the silent screen idol Rudolf Valentino and the prototype crooner Rudy Vallee had each driven female audiences to frenzy—Vallee earning the nickname of ‘the guy with the cock in his voice’, Valentino attracting a screaming crowd of 10,000 even to his funeral. Two decades later, the young Frank Sinatra inspired a whole new species of female worshipper, the ‘bobbysoxer’, whose demented reactions at concerts ultimately competed in newsworthiness with the singer himself. Nor was such incontinence purely emotional: after Sinatra’s legendary opening at the New York Paramount Theater in 1947, it was found that many bobby-soxers, unable to contain themselves, had urinated where they sat.

All this was taken to uncharted new levels, however, by a 21-year-old former truck driver from Memphis, Tennessee, with dyed black hair and the face of a supercilious baby. For Presley did more than touch the trigger of feminine mass fantasy; he also gave release to the tension that had built up in young men with no more global conflict to burn off their testosterone. Here, rolled into one person, was a Valentino with a voice, a Sinatra with still greater power over young girls’ bladders, a James Dean in close-up more mesmeric than even Hollywood could contrive—in short, a rock-’n’-roll hero who looked every bit as gloriously disruptive as he sounded. The Phoney War of tarten jackets, soppy smiles and kiss curls was over: all-out bombardment had finally begun.

For the vast majority of Britons, Presley could not have been more incomprehensible if freshly beamed down from Mars. Bill Haley at least had a name that was recognisably human (one he happened to share with the current editor of The Times). But ‘Elvis Presley’ was the strangest configuration of syllables yet to have crossed the Atlantic—more so than Joe DiMaggio, Efrem Zimbalist Jr or even Liberace, which some newspapers felt obliged to render phonetically (‘Lee-ber-arch-ee’). Commentators were also intrigued by the fact that Presley performed his gyrations while simultaneously playing—or appearing to play—a guitar slung around his neck. Americans were familiar with the guitar as a normal accessory for singers of both country and blues; in Britain it was perhaps the most anonymous of all musical instruments, glimpsed fleetingly in the back rows of dance bands or as shadowy silhouettes behind Spanish flamenco dancers.

When John first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, the whole edifice of rumour and ridicule that the media had created around Presley instantly melted away. All he needed to know was in the song’s opening fanfare—that anguished, echoey cry of ‘Well, since my baby left me…’ answered by double stabs of high treble electric guitar. It was, in fact, not rock ‘n’ roll or even a ballad, but a blues shout in a traditional pattern that Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson would instantly have recognised. But while blues songs deal with adult themes, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ reached directly to the primary adolescent emotion, melodramatic self-pity. For the first time, any spotty youth dumped by his girlfriend, for whatever good reason, could now aspire to this metaphorical refuge for ‘broken-hearted lovers’, ‘down at the end of Lonely Street’.

Far from the mindless nonsense Presley’s critics accused him of peddling, the lyrics were neat and skilful enough to be dissected in a Quarry Bank literature test, the hotel metaphor sustained by a bellhop whose ‘tears keep flowing’ and a ‘desk clerk dressed in black’. The arrangement had the visceral simplicity of blues played live in the wee small hours, switching between foot-stomping bass, jangly whorehouse piano and jagged guitar half-chords suggesting the bottleneck style of Delta bluesmen. Those riffs are still potent today after 10,000 hearings; to an adolescent in 1956 who’d never heard a guitar played as an offensive weapon, they were stupefying. No sound ever had been, or ever would be, more perfectly tuned to hormones going berserk.

That May, a second Presley single, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, joined ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in the UK Top 20; in August came a third, ‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You’, and in September a fourth, ‘Hound Dog’. Each drew John still further into this intoxicating new world where guitars rang like carillons of victory bells, pianos pounded like jackhammers and drums spat like machine guns. Each announced more joyously than the last that life need not be the grey, humdrum vista he and his fellow war babies had always known. As he himself put it: ‘Rock ‘n’ roll was real. Everything else was unreal.’

Film clips of Presley’s American TV appearances now also began to filter through, revealing him to be almost ludicrously goodlooking, albeit in a baleful, smouldering style more usually associated with female glamour icons. Here, indeed, was history’s one and only male pin-up for straight men. In common with his other British converts, John obsessively read and re-read every newspaper story about Presley, cut out and saved every magazine picture of him, pored over every detail of his hair, clothes and sublimely sullen face for what it might reveal of his private character and lifestyle. At Mendips he chattered so endlessly about his new hero that an exasperated Mimi finally brought down the guillotine. ‘It was nothing but Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley,’ she recalled. ‘In the end I said “Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner and tea.” ’

Like thousands of other boys who had never previously cared a button for their wardrobe or grooming, he began to model his hair, his dress, his whole being, on Presley’s. Like many Quarry Bank boys, he did what he could to Elvis-ise his school uniform, fastening only the bottom of his three blazer buttons to create a drape effect and stretching his gold-and-black school tie into the nearest possible semblance of a Slim Jim. The great problem was the trousers, which men and boys alike still wore in the baggy cut that had prevailed since the 1920s. Scarcely any men’s outfitters yet stocked ready-made ‘drainpipes’, so one’s only recourse was to take a conventional pair to an alterations tailor, sartorial equivalent of the back-street abortionist, and have their cuffs tapered from 24 to 16 or (in cases of ultimate daring) 14 inches.

No fiercer controversy raged in British families of the mid-1950s than this. No matter that the British Empire had been largely built by men in narrow trousers, nor that every palace, stately home and museum in the land thronged with portraits of narrow-trousered kings, dukes, prime ministers and generals. The style was now identified with lawless, low-class Teddy Boys and, by the more knowing, with gay men—although, paradoxically, it was deemed quite respectable in fawn cavalry twill, if worn by off-duty Guards officers together with riding jackets and tweed caps.

At Mendips, Mimi was predictably horrified and outraged by her nephew’s attempted metamorphosis into a ‘common’ Teddy Boy. She might be unable to stop John ruining the hang of his tailor-made blazer and leaving his top shirt button permanently agape above his mutilated school tie. She might not have prevented Signor Bioletti at Penny Lane from restyling his nice, wavy hair, as she put it, ‘like an overgrown lavatory brush’. But with trousers she dug her heels in: John was absolutely forbidden either to buy ‘drainies’ or have any of his existing pairs tapered. His response was to smuggle some to a compliant tailor and wear the finished product only outside Mimi’s field of vision. He would deposit them at Nigel Walley’s or Pete Shotton’s and change into them there, or leave Mendips wearing them underneath an ordinary pair of trousers, peeling off this outer layer once safely out of Mimi’s sight.

One grown-up, at least, could be relied on not to shudder at rock ‘n’ roll or pour scorn on its lip-curling godhead. John’s mother Julia adored Presley’s records, thought he was dishy to look at, and relished all the ways he was upsetting the generation whose values had always so oppressed her. It was Julia who, daring Mimi’s wrath, bought John his first real rock-’n’-roll clothes—a coloured (as opposed to plain grey or white) shirt, a pair of black drainpipe jeans, a ‘shortie’ raincoat with padded shoulders. When a kitten was given to John’s two small half-sisters, Julia and Jackie, their mother named it Elvis.

With every passing week of 1956, the heavenly noises from across the Atlantic multiplied and diversified. From New Orleans came Antoine ‘Fats’ Domino, a singer-pianist with the body of a whale and the face of a kindly Burmese cat, who had already been around and playing much this same stuff since 1949. From St Louis came Charles ‘Chuck’ Berry, a loose-limbed youth with a lounge-lizard mustache, who not only wrote and performed his witty anthems in the former Whites Only realm of expensive cars and high schools, but also simultaneously played cherry-red lead guitar, jack-knifing his skinny knees or loping across the stage in profile like a duck. From Macon, Georgia, came a former dishwasher named Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, a shock-haired imp endowed with the dual gift of being able to roar like an erupting volcano and ululate like an entire Bedouin tribe in mourning.

If black rock-’n’-rollers, teetered on the edge of comedy (like Presley himself), Richard’s exultant gibberish (‘Tutti-frutti O-rooty…Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom!’) was a deep-South descendant of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’. ‘The most exciting thing…was when he screamed just before the solo,’ John later recalled. ‘It used to make your hair stand on end. When I heard it, it was so great, I couldn’t speak. You know how it is when you are torn. Elvis was bigger than religion in my life…I didn’t want to leave Elvis. We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, even in my mind.’

As with almost every other new American idea, gauche and unconvincing British replicas quickly followed. In the wake of Presley’s onslaught, a young Londoner named Larry Parnes launched the United Kingdom’s first native rock-’n’-roller—a cockney merchant seaman named Tommy Hicks, now renamed Tommy Steele. Provided with the requisite exploding hair and Presley-style guitar, Steele drew crowds of screaming girls wherever he appeared and had several Top 10 hits. But his whole marketing exemplified the notion of rock ‘n’ roll as a passing fad or soon-to-be-unmasked confidence trick. One of Larry Parnes’ first acts was to move him into cabaret by booking him into London’s Café de Paris in the footsteps of Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward. In little more than a year, his career as a teenage idol would be metaphorically wound up by a film entitled The Tommy Steele Story.

Even Steele’s patent harmlessness could not mitigate adult hatred and terror of rock ‘n’ roll and the resolve to stamp it out, if not by frontal attack and ridicule, then by attrition. The BBC carried no news items about even its most famous performers and mentioned its very name only with lip-curled distaste. Apart from records, its main public outlets were jukeboxes in the newfangled espresso coffee bars, which explained why such places were always packed with teenagers and also why adults viewed them rather like speakeasies in Prohibition America. At travelling fairs, rock ‘n’ roll would blare out over carousels and bumper cars, so strengthening its perceived links with the grubby, the dishonest and the violent.

The steadiest source of supply was Radio Luxembourg, out in mysterious mainland Europe, which operated a daily English-language music service playing all the latest rock-’n’-roll hits with Americanstyle disc jockeys, advertisements and station IDs. But Luxembourg did not come on the air until 8.00 p.m., and reception on British wirelesses was always erratic. Like all teenagers up and down the land, John listened in late at night with a portable radio at low volume under the bedclothes so that Mimi would not hear it.

With rock fizzing in his veins around the clock, even things he had once regarded as treats now seemed irksomely unreal. During the school summer holidays of 1956, he paid his usual long visit to his Aunt Mater, Uncle Bert and cousin Stanley in Edinburgh, accompanied by Aunt Nanny, her nine-year-old son, Michael, and Harrie’s nine-year-old son, David. (Husbands seldom featured in these intersister excursions.) Part of the time was spent at Uncle Bert’s croft in Durness, Sutherland, near Cape Wrath, the furthermost northwesterly tip of Scotland. This was a working farm, set in vast, unspoiled tracts of sheep-dotted moorland and peat bogs. The family party roughed it in a primitive farmhouse, lit by oil lamps and candles, and noisy with the screeches of Mater’s pet parrot, Harry Parry.

As well as running the croft, Uncle Bert was carrying out extensive improvements, and John and young Michael and David found themselves allotted a punishing schedule of heavy manual work. ‘We were scything hay, building dry stone walls, carting wheelbarrowloads of sand,’ Michael Cadwallader remembers. ‘John soon got fed up with that, and wasn’t thrilled by the company of two nine-year-old boys. He obviously couldn’t wait to leave.’

Rock ‘n’ roll had no fiercer enemy in Britain than followers of traditional jazz, who either did not know or preferred to forget that the two were actually first cousins. Jazz had always overlapped with blues and country, the twin streams that produced Elvis Presley. The more enlightened traditional jazz bandleaders, like Humphrey Lyttelton, acknowledged this by incorporating both into their repertoire, even occasionally bringing over American bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy to make guest appearances at their concerts. However, in music, as everywhere else, the class system held firm. Rock-’n’-rollers were firmly bracketed at the most unsavoury end of the lower working class, while jazzers were middle-class student types who wore striped college scarves and drank half-pints of cider.

The most archivally minded trad bandleader of pre-rock-’n’-roll times was the trombonist Chris Barber. Since well before Presley hit Britain, Barber’s shows had featured his foxy-faced banjo player, Tony, aka ‘Lonnie’, Donegan, on guitar with a small rhythm section, performing in an otherwise forgotten American folk style known as skiffle. The word (like jazz itself) was onomatopoeic, harking back to the bleak Depression era of the thirties, when poor whites, unable to afford conventional instruments, would beat out a shuffly rhythm on makeshift ones like kitchen washboards, empty boxes and dustbin lids.

In January 1956, Donegan and a three-strong skiffle group scored a surprise hit with ‘Rock Island Line’, a train song associated with the thirties’ blues giant Huddie (‘Leadbelly’) Ledbetter. Undoubtedly helped by the word rock in its title (though the reference was purely geological) it reached number eight in Britain, was accepted for US release on the London label, and by April stood at tenth place in the American charts. For any British-made record to catch on in America was rare enough; for one to do so by reinterpreting such a uniquely American idiom was unprecedented.

British skiffle was essentially boys’ music, a gift out of the blue to boys like John who had been just too young for rock ‘n’ roll’s first uprising and felt excluded from the tough Teddy Boy culture that now monopolised it. Skiffle was rock ‘n’ roll in a milder, more socially acceptable form, also intoxicatingly American but without the taint of sexuality or violence. In its Anglicised version, it drew on every ethnic source—blues, country, folk and jazz—though its young British performers seldom knew one genre from another, let alone understood what social conditions had inspired the songs or what pain or anger or sense of social injustice had gone into their creation. All that mattered was the frantic, pattering beat and those magic references to railroads, penitentiaries and chain gangs.

Elvis Presley had made the guitar an unreachable symbol of glamour and sexual allure to young British males; now Lonnie Donegan made it a reachable one. For skiffle followed the traditional 12-bar blues pattern of four chords, in their simplest versions requiring only one or two fingers. Anyone could play them, pretty much instantaneously.

Skiffle became the British pop sensation of 1956-57, relegating even Presley and rock ‘n’ roll to the sidelines. Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle group began a run of Top 10 hits that would not be surpassed until the next decade, with genuine or ersatz folk titles such as ‘Lost John’, ‘Bring a Little Water, Sylvie’, ‘Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O’ and ‘Cumberland Gap’. Record companies began a frantic hunt for alternative skiffle stars, concentrating their efforts on London’s Soho district, specifically the 2 I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street, where Tommy Steele had made some early live appearances. A fledgling record producer, the Parlophone label’s George Martin, advanced his career just a little by finding his way to the 2 I’s and signing up a skiffle quintet named the Vipers.

Most important, skiffle electrified ordinary youths, far away from London, who had never considered themselves musical and once would rather have committed hara-kiri than get up and sing in public. All over the country, youthful skiffle groups were formed with names hopefully evoking the great American open road—the Ramblers, the Nomads, the Streamliners, the Cottonpickers. Kitchens were stripped of washboards and brooms; guitars that had gathered dust for years in music-shop windows disappeared overnight. In an echo of not-so-distant Austerity years, the newspapers were soon reporting a national guitar shortage.

A few would-be boy skifflers did not start as absolute beginners, thanks to fathers, older brothers or uncles who were pro or semipro musicians. But only a very few can have owed their head start to their mothers, as John did. For Julia could play the banjo, an instrument even more unexpectedly catapulted into fashion than the guitar. Well before skiffle arrived, she had begun teaching John to pick out single-string versions of ‘Little White Lies’ or ‘Girl of My Dreams’ on the sound principle that if he could play an instrument, he’d always be popular. But now the banjo was forgotten. ‘I used to read the ads for guitars,’ he would recall, ‘and just ache for one. Like everyone else, I used God for this one thing I wanted: “Please God, give me a guitar.”’

His Aunt Mimi has gone down in history as the person who bought John his first guitar, launching him on his roundabout path to immortality. Many times would she later recount how, weary of his endless pleas and nagging, she took him by bus down into central Liverpool and paid out £17 she could ill afford at Hessy’s music store in Whitechapel. Mimi certainly did buy John a guitar, and at some financial sacrifice, but that was a step or two further along the path. The first one he owned, and used until long after his skills had outgrown it, was given to him by Julia.

Whether that was the first guitar he played is another matter. John himself was to recall initially borrowing one from another boy and experimenting rather inconclusively with it before he got his own. This may well have been in the interval between being promised his heart’s desire by his mother and actually holding the wondrous object in his hands. After several weeks’ unsuccessful search around Liverpool, Julia finally obtained one by mail order on the instalment plan. No record of the vendor has survived; the likeliest one seems to have been a mail-order firm named Headquarters and General Supplies of Coldharbour Lane, London SE5. At around the moment John got lucky, H & G announced their acquisition of ‘1,000 only’ Gallotone Champion guitars, a mass-produced make imported from South Africa. The cost was £10 19s 6d (£10.95) each, or 10 shillings (50p) deposit and 18 fortnightly payments of 18s 11d (90p). The guitar was an acoustic Spanish flamenco-style model but with steel rather than gut strings, strummed not with the fingers but with a tortoiseshell plectrum. Inside the sound hole was a label saying GUARANTEED NOT TO SPLIT.

He was not the only Quarry Bank pupil able to flaunt such a status symbol in that autumn term of 1956. A fellow member of Woolton house, a studious, scientifically minded boy named Eric Griffiths, had also got hold of a Spanish-style guitar similar to John’s in size, shape and cheapness. Although the two boys had never been especially friendly, they agreed to go for guitar lessons together with a tutor in Hunts Cross. However, the tutor wanted them to learn to read music, which neither could be bothered to do. The easy shortcut suggested by Julia was that she should tune their six-string guitars like a four-string banjo—that is, using only the guitar’s four thinnest treble strings and ignoring the two thick bass ones. Then she herself could teach them all the chords they needed for the music they wanted to play.

From here on, there was no stopping John. Whenever Pete Shotton or Nigel Walley visited Mendips, they would find him seated on the end of his bed, struggling to stretch his left hand into a C or G chord shape, pressing down hard and rippling the pick again and again until the sound rang clear and true, oblivious of the painful grooves that the steel strings cut into his fingertips. ‘He’d sit there strumming,’ Nigel remembers, ‘singing any words that came into his head. In a couple of minutes, he’d have a tune going.’

Mimi tried to protest about the neglect of his school work, especially with exams now only a few months away, but to no avail; as Liverpudlians say, never more aptly than here, he was ‘lost’. From the kitchen or living room, Mimi would shout an admonition destined to be given back to her one day, chidingly, engraved on a mockceremonial plaque: ‘The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living at it.’

According to Eric Griffiths, neither John nor he had thought of starting their own skiffle group until another Quarry Bank boy, George Lee, suggested it one day during break. Alas for the donor of this stupendously bright idea, he himself was not to join or have anything whatsoever to do with the group that resulted. More than a year was to pass before its personnel included anyone named George.

John, as usual, refused to consider any enterprise that did not include his fellow Outlaw Pete Shotton. This being skiffle, Pete’s lack of even the smallest particle of musical talent was not an issue. He took on the role of washboard player, for which the sole qualification was possession of a washboard—not as straightforward as it might appear, since skifflemania had also created a national washboard shortage. The group was initially called the Blackjacks, but within about a week Pete Shotton suggested something more in tune with the skiffling ethos of hoboes and chain gangs. Quarry Bank’s school song had a line in which the pupils apostrophised themselves as ‘Quarry men, old before our birth…’ Quarries were where chain gangs worked, and John and Pete indubitably regarded themselves as convicts at hard labour. So their skiffle group became the Quarrymen.

Two more recruits quickly emerged from their immediate circle of friends in Woolton house. (George Lee belonged to a rival house, Aigburth, which may perhaps have accounted for his exclusion.) One was the studious Rod Davis, playing the banjo his parents had recently bought him on a trip to Wales. The other was a boy known to John—and featured in his cartoon gallery—as Bill ‘Smell Type’ Smith, plunking the one-string skiffle ‘bass’ composed of a broomstick and an empty tea chest. To make the tea chest less starkly utilitarian, Rod’s mother covered it in brown wallpaper, on which musical notes and a large treble clef were then outlined in white.

Most skiffle groups featured no percussion other than strummed guitars and the rattle of the washboard player’s thimble-capped fingers. If drummers did feature in the lineup, they tended to play only a single snare drum on a stand. The Quarrymen, however, started out with the luxury of a drummer in possession of his own complete kit (something that would seldom come along quite so easily again). He was not a Quarry Bank pupil but an acquaintance of Rod and Eric named Colin Hanton, who had already left school to become an apprentice upholsterer at the Guy Rogers furniture factory in Speke. At 18, he was two years older than the others, though his diminutive build and innocent face made him look younger—so much so that he had to carry his birth certificate around with him to prove to pub landlords that he was of the legal drinking age.

Strictly speaking, he was not quite in the other Quarrymens’ social bracket; nor had he any performing experience beyond playing along with jazz records at home; nor was he nearly as much interested in percussion as he was in downing pints of black velvet (Guinness mixed with cider) at every possible opportunity. Such considerations were easily waived in view of the almost brand-new drums that came with him. And, working man or not, he seemed happy enough to throw in his lot with a gaggle of schoolboys, even getting a printer friend to stencil QUARRY MEN (splitting the name for space reasons) on the side of his bass drum.

From the beginning, as Hanton remembers, John naturally took on the role of leader. ‘He was the only singer in the group, so he was the one who said what we played and in what order. And, if we wanted to sound any good, we had to learn to play the songs he knew.’

Prophetically, there was soon upheaval in the Quarrymen’s lineup. Although Bill Smith had seemed keen enough to play tea-chest bass, he proved so bad about turning up for rehearsals that the others unanimously voted him out. A resentful Smell-Type retaliated by holding the tea chest hostage at his house: when all requests for its return were ignored, John led a night expedition to retrieve it from the Smiths’ garage. After this, the role of bass player was divided between Nigel Walley, Ivan Vaughan and Ivan’s Liverpool Institute friend, Len Garry.

The Quarrymen’s repertoire at first consisted mainly of Lonnie Donegan songs: ‘Cumberland Gap’, ‘Lost John’, ‘Gamblin’ Man’, ‘Wabash Cannonball’. As well as ‘Rock Island Line’, Leadbelly’s blues oeuvre supplied another couple of easily accessible four-chorders, the upbeat ‘Cotton Fields’ and the doleful ‘Midnight Special’. Rod Davis, a passionate folk-music fan, introduced Burl Ives numbers like ‘Worried Man Blues’, while John would do the occasional country number, like Hank Williams’s ‘Honky Tonk Blues’. He had, in fact, been a fan of Williams—the prototype singer-songwriter—well before Presley came along, and been conscious of the strong country-music following among Merseyside’s Irish population since he was a small boy. The first guitar he ever remembered seeing had been played ‘by a guy in a cowboy suit…with 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 vacated tub.

Only skiffle groups composed of affluent working men could afford their own private transport. Rod Davis’ father had an Austin Hereford car in which he’d occasionally chauffeur the Quarrymen to their gigs. Most of the time they had to travel on Liverpool Corporation’s ever-plentiful and reliable green double-decker buses, somehow packing the tea chest and Colin Hanton’s drums into the luggage compartment under the stairs. On these journeys a weather eye always had to be kept open for two local heavies named Rod and Willo, who, for unexplained reasons, had vowed to get them, and of whom even John made no secret of being terrified. One night when the Quarrymen got off their bus in Woolton village, Rod and Willo were waiting in ambush. The skifflers all managed to escape, but at the cost of abandoning their tea-chest bass, which stayed in the road where they dropped it for several days afterwards, being sideswiped this way and that by passing traffic.

After John, the group’s most extrovert member—and the only other one with any noticeable singing ability—was Len Garry. By far the best of their three original alternating bass players, Len soon took over the role from Ivan Vaughan and Nigel Walley. Bookish Ivan returned to his school studies with some relief, while ‘Walloggs’ became the group’s manager. He approached the role with great seriousness, writing earnest letters in longhand to local dance promoters and persuading even the Woolton newsagents who had suffered most from John’s shoplifting to display advertisements for the Quarrymen free of charge in their front windows. He also gave out business cards, expressed with old-fashioned formality and claiming an impressive command of musical styles:

Country—Western—Rock ‘n’ roll—Skiffle

THE QUARRY MEN [sic] Open for engagements

Their fee varied between £3 and £5, according to length of performance, divided among six of them, since their manager also took an equal share.

John’s insistence on putting rock ‘n’ roll first onstage, if not in print, was to cause Nigel many headaches with promoters of skiffleonly venues, as well as some little embarrassment in his day job as an apprentice golf pro. In the Lee Park clubhouse, he had become friendly with a doctor named Sytner, whose son, Alan, was about to open a jazz club in central Liverpool. Its premises were the cellar of an old warehouse in Mathew Street, and—in a conscious echo of jazz joints on the Parisian Left Bank—it was to be named the Cavern. Alan Sytner agreed to book the Quarrymen (advertising them as ‘Quarry Men’) for a skiffle session in company with other local groups, including the Deltones, the Dark Town Skiffle Group, and the Demon Five.

But the Cavern in this first incarnation proved hostile territory, peopled by traditional jazz fans of the most earnest and intolerant kind. Skiffle they could tolerate, for its blues and folk ancestry, but rock ‘n’ roll had much the same effect on them as a string of garlic on a vampire. John nonetheless launched into his Presley and Fats Domino numbers, oblivious of the nauseated silence that greeted each one. ‘I tried to argue with him,’ Rod Davis remembers, ‘not because I was a purist myself, but because it was so obviously a suicidal thing to do with that particular audience.’ John carried on regardless, so ‘lost’ that when a note was passed up to him, he took it to be a song request. But it was from the Cavern’s management, and contained a single terse instruction: ‘Cut out the bloody rock.’

Just as it had for his father, Alf, two decades earlier, the Empire Theatre in Lime Street represented John’s ultimate ambition as a performer. True to its time-honoured place on the music-hall Number One Circuit, the Empire now presented all the country’s top skiffle and rock-’n’-roll stars, usually at the head of a traditional variety bill whose jugglers and comedians had to struggle to make themselves heard over anticipatory teenage screams.

Alf Lennon had never gotten further than backstage at the Empire. But his son received an early chance to tread its hallowed boards when a Carroll Levis Discoveries show came through town in June 1957. Levis was an oleaginous Canadian, known in glamour-hungry and credulous postwar Britain as ‘Mister Star-maker’. During the fifties, he used to tour provincial theatres, holding talent contests for every kind of would-be entertainer, from singers and comedians to parakeet trainers and players of musical saws.

When the Quarrymen turned up at the Empire for the contest’s Sunday heats (minus Rod Davis, whose religious parents would not let him take part), they found several other skiffle groups also hungry to be discovered by Mister Star-maker. Their main competition, they decided, was a group from Speke, the Sunnysiders, who included a midget named Nicky Cuff on tea-chest bass. The Sunnysiders’ act was partly comic, with Cuff (in everyday life, a workmate of Colin Hanton’s) running onstage dressed in a top hat and tails and explaining that he’d lost his way to the Adelphi Hotel. His other gimmick was being able to stand on his tea chest while belabouring its single string.

The Quarrymen did better, however, getting through to the Wednesday-night finals while the Sunnysiders’ comic dimension actually lost them points. But on the Wednesday, when winners were judged on audience applause, John’s outfit found themselves up against a group from Wales who had arrived with a busload of supporters to cheer them on. Rod Davis remembers how these Welsh skifflers used extrovert showmanship, flinging themselves around, even lying flat on the stage, ‘while we just stood still, like purists’. Nonetheless, the applause-measuring ‘Clapometer’ initially showed a dead heat between the two groups. But on a retry, the Welsh group were announced to be just ahead. So Mister Star-maker—not for the only time, it would turn out—missed the greatest discovery of his life.

Rock ‘n’ roll continued to defy every forecast of its imminent selfdestruction, boosted by an unexpected endorsement from Hollywood. Late 1956 had seen the release of a film comedy called The Girl Can’t Help It, originally intended as a vehicle for the huge-bosomed screen goddess Jayne Mansfield, with jibes at teenagers and their music by way of a subplot. Instead, the satire on rock somehow turned into a celebration of it—to this day, still the most potent ever captured on celluloid.

When The Girl Can’t Help It finally reached Liverpool early in the summer of 1957, it showed John America’s new rock-’n’-roll stars as living beings for the very first time—minus Elvis, admittedly, but featuring cameo performances by others he worshipped almost as much, plus a few he’d barely heard of, all in voluptuous Eastmancolor and megascreen CinemaScope. Here was Little Richard shrieking the title song in voice-over as Jayne Mansfield’s mighty cleavage sashayed along a street, making men’s glasses shatter in their frames and milk spurt out of bottles as though in premature ejaculation. Here was Eddie Cochran, a hunky young Elvis clone, singing ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ while aiming his gorgeous vermilion guitar to left and right like a tommy gun. Here was another white newcomer, Gene Vincent, a bony ex-sailor with an eerily high and sibilant voice, keening a second classic piece of rock-’n’-roll Jabberwocky, entitled ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’. Here, even more fascinatingly to John, were Vincent’s backing group, the Bluecaps: not merely tacked-on session men but fellow spirits who shared their leader’s aura of dissipation and menace, and counterpointed his vocal with almost animalistic whoops and yaps and cackles.

The messages from jukeboxes and Radio Lux were not all uproar and anarchy. Early June brought the first chart appearance of the Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, two former child country stars whose almost feminine close harmony created some initial confusion with Britain’s own Beverley Sisters. The Everlys’ number-six hit, ‘Bye Bye Love’, so appealed to John’s softer, melodic side—never mind the notion of having someone so close as a brother to sing with—that he began looking around for a partner to form an Everly-style duet. Since his usual blood brother, Pete Shotton, couldn’t sing a note, he had a few tentative vocalising sessions with Len Garry. But the closer-than-Everly brotherhood he was destined to form only a few weeks from now would not be called Lennon and Garry.

On 22 June, Liverpool celebrated the 750th anniversary of the charter it had been granted by King John. The occasion was marked by street parties throughout the city, each street competing with its neighbours in lavishness of decoration, food and outdoor entertainment. Like several others, Rosebery Street catered to the younger element by having a skiffle group, in this case John and the Quarrymen. Rosebery Street was deep in the heart of Liverpool 8, a quarter where grammar-school boys from Woolton normally would not care to stray. But it was also the home of Charles Roberts, Colin Hanton’s printer friend, who had stencilled QUARRY MEN on his bass drum, so a quid pro quo was felt to be in order.

The Quarrymen played on the back of a coal lorry, giving one performance in the afternoon and another in the early evening. At the second, their audience included a hugely proud Julia, who made the long bus journey from Bloomfield Road, bringing John’s halfsisters, Julia and Jackie. The two little girls sat on the lorry’s tailboard while Julia watched from the Roberts family’s living room.

Many cameras were in use that day, and one of them chanced to take the first-ever picture of John in performance. There he is on the coal-dusty stage, wearing the checked shirt Julia had bought him at Garston’s open-air market, singing raptly into a stand microphone whose cord extends perilously and through the open ground-floor window of the house behind, to the nearest accessible electrical outlet. His fellow Quarrymen are grouped slightly behind him, all but for little Colin Hanton, in a garish two-tone jumper, who sits some way to the left—‘half-cut’, as he now admits, on pints of black velvet. The backdrop of grimy Victorian brickwork and celebration flags makes it more like a scene from the late-19th century than the mid-20th.

During their second show, as dusk was falling and fairy lights twinkled on overhead, Colin’s rather isolated position on the lorry turned out to be providential. Just behind it stood a group of tough boys from neighbouring Hatherley Street whom he overheard plotting to ‘get Lennon’ after the show. When their last number ended, the Quarrymen did not wait for applause but bundled their instruments offstage and sought sanctuary in Charlie Roberts’ house, where his mother regaled them with a high tea. The Hatherley Street roughs were not easily deterred, banging on the windows and calling on John to come out. The problem was solved by the arrival of a single policeman, in those days a magisterial presence, who warned off the troublemakers, then gave the Quarrymen safe escort to their bus stop.

Summer’s ritual festivities promised more busy times ahead. On 6 July, the Quarrymen were booked to appear at the annual garden fête of their own parish church, St Peter’s, Woolton. John had lately astonished Pricey, the rector, by submitting himself for formal confirmation into the Church of England—not through any deep religious awakening, as he would later admit, but for the sake of the cash gifts that confirmation candidates traditionally receive from their families. Whether or not Pricey realised this, John was once again persona grata at St Peter’s, and his group was not only to perform at the fête itself, but also aboard one of the motorised carnival floats that paraded through Woolton village beforehand. Shades of his grandfather Jack, in days when Andrew Roberton’s Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels always came to town in triumph, plinking and plunking on the back of a decorated wagon!