Читать книгу John Lennon: The Life - Philip Norman - Страница 14

I was in a blind rage for two years.

I was either drunk or fighting.

Late-fifties Britain had none of the aids to coping with personal tragedy that we so depend on today. There were no family bereavement counsellors to help John come to terms with his loss; no therapists, support groups, helplines, agony aunts, confessional television shows or radio call-ins yet existed to tell him that the most private emotions are better made public and that broken hearts heal quicker if worn on one’s sleeve.

In 1958, Britons throughout the whole social scale still observed the Victorian Empire-builders’ convention of the stiff upper lip. Tears were the prerogative of females only and, for the most part, shed in decent seclusion; males were expected to show no emotion whatever. The closest members of a stricken family rarely expressed their feelings to one another, let alone to strangers. Such reticence had always been strongest in the north, strongest of all in those northern parts where privet hedge grew and hallways were half-timbered. Thus the shock and pain and outrage of Julia’s death would stay bottled up in John until their release like a howling genie more than a decade into the future.

Among Julia’s four sisters, there certainly was no weeping or wailing, only the most modest, muted signs of heartbreak. On the day after the tragedy, she had been due to go and see her sister Nanny at Rock Ferry. In anticipation of the visit, Nanny already had deck chairs set out in the back garden. She took a photograph of the unused chairs, and kept it always beside her until her own death in 1997.

Mimi herself was never seen to cry, although Nanny’s son, Michael Cadwallader, often saw silent tears well in her eyes. John would put his arms around her and say ‘Don’t worry, Mimi…I love you.’ But such moments were never shared with outsiders. Three days after Julia’s death, Michael Fishwick had had to report back to his RAF station, missing the funeral and not returning until the end of the year. Close though he was to Mimi, she never mentioned the events of 15 July to him, nor did she and John ever discuss them in his presence. In her traumatised state, the secret affair could hardly continue and, by unspoken agreement, she and Fishwick returned to being just friends. His visits became more infrequent until finally he met a young woman his own age and married her in 1960, ensuring that henceforward there would be only one man in Mimi’s life.

The boys who had known John since toddlerhood were all equally at a loss about what to say to him. Pete Shotton, to whose house a distraught Nigel Walley had run immediately after the accident, could manage only a muttered ‘Sorry about your mum, John’ when they met in Woolton the next day. As the last person to speak to Julia, Nigel himself would always harbour a lingering sense of guilt. He felt John blamed him for not saying the extra couple of words that might have stopped her crossing the road when she did.

It was, in fact, a new and still largely untried friend who most empathised with John’s situation. For barely a year had passed since Paul McCartney had lost his own mother to breast cancer. ‘We had these personal tragedies in common, which did create a bond of friendship and understanding between us,’ he says. ‘We were able to talk about it to some degree [and] share thoughts that until then had remained private…These shared confidences formed a strong basis for our continuing friendship and insight into each other’s characters…’ They could even summon up a weak smile at their common predicament after bumping into an acquaintance of Paul’s mother Mary who also knew Julia, but had no idea that either had died. Having first blunderingly enquired of Paul how his mother was, the acquaintance turned to John and asked him the same question.

Most of his fellow art students did not learn what had happened until the college reconvened for its autumn term, two months after Julia’s death. ‘Hey, John,’ a tactless girl shouted to him on registration day, ‘I hear your mother got killed by a car.’ Onlookers thought it must be some kind of sick joke until he nodded and muttered, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ The only person not mortified by the faux pas seemed to be John himself. ‘He didn’t choke on it,’ a witness of the incident remembers. ‘He didn’t register anything. It was like someone had said “You had your hair cut yesterday.”’

The only person let under his guard was Arthur Ballard, the prizefighter-turned-professor in whom he seemed to find some of the reassuringness of his beloved Uncle George. Ballard was always to remember climbing the main college staircase and finding a red-eyed John sprawled miserably on the big window ledge halfway up. ‘I think he cried on Arthur’s shoulder,’ June Furlong, the life model, says.

Unable to express, let alone share, his feelings, he turned to Liverpool’s well-tried method of anaesthetising them. Most afternoons, he would stagger back to college from Ye Cracke with Jeff Mohammed, helplessly drunk and bent on ever more mindless disruption and devilment. One day, Arthur Ballard found him trying to urinate into the lift shaft. The verbal cruelty he had always used on even his best friends seemed to grow still sharper and more unpredictable as he sensed their pity and confusion. ‘He tried it on with me,’ Bill Harry says. ‘But I came from a tough background; I told him to fuck off, and never had any trouble with him again. Stu Sutcliffe was different, though. John admired his work, but he could be terrible to him on a personal level. He’d make fun of Stu for being small…go on and on about it. And Stu never seemed to answer back.’

The truth was that Stu possessed a maturity and wisdom beyond his 18 years. He recognized that the price of John’s friendship were these occasional venomous outbursts, and decided that it was a price worth paying. ‘John came to rely on that,’ says Stu’s sister Pauline. ‘He knew Stuart could be pushed, but that he’d never be pushed away.’

Almost everyone Stu met ended up being drawn or painted by him, and John was a subject he seemed to find more fascinating than most. A pencil sketch, made not long after they first met, shows John hunkered down with what looked like a skiffler’s washboard—faceless yet still unmistakable. In a Sutcliffe oil painting of the student crowd at Ye Cracke, he dominates the foreground, seated on a barstool in a tan sweater and blue (suede?) shoes, clutching his pint glass and staring off into the distance, lost in his own acrid thoughts.

The experience of knowing John also inspired Stu temporarily to forsake paint and charcoal for prose. In late 1958, he began writing a novel whose central character was named John and was very obviously drawn from life: ‘capricious, incalculable and self-centred, yet at the same time…a loyal friend.’ The novel seems never to have had a title, and it petered out after a few hundred words in Stu’s meticulous italic handwriting. The surviving fragments read less like fiction than a case study of its hero and the ‘terrible change’ that comes over him nine months after the narrator meets him. (It was about nine months after Stu first encountered the real-life John that Julia was killed.)

Even Aunt Mimi, never one given to idle praise, would later call Stu the best and truest friend John ever had.

The first steady girlfriend he had found at college was Thelma Pickles, a stunningly attractive Intermediate student whom he met through Helen Anderson. Thelma was as much of an individualist as he, and their relationship, while it lasted, was often stormy. ‘He could be very unbearable at times,’ she would remember. ‘He was never violent…but he would say things to hurt you. I think it was a defence thing, because he could be vulnerable at times [like] when you talked about his mother. He would become almost dreamy and very quiet. It was his weak spot…’ She also had a tongue every bit as sharp as John’s, and did not hesitate to use it if ever he tried to vent his anger and anguish on her. ‘Don’t blame me,’ she once lashed back at him, ‘just because your mother’s dead!’

Of all possible successors to Thelma, Cynthia Powell seemed the least likely. A year older than John, she was a mildly pretty, bespectacled girl of the hard working and conformist type he termed ’spaniels’. At college she had impinged on his notice only as an object of ridicule, thanks to her school head-prefecty Christian name and the fact that she came from Hoylake, on the Cheshire Wirral, a supposed bastion of suburban gentility and decorum. ‘No dirty jokes please, it’s Cynthia,’ he would admonish his cronies sarcastically when she approached, seldom failing to make her blush to the roots of her mousy, permed hair.

She was not in John’s workgroup but in Jeff Mohammed’s and thus shared a classroom with him only in a few general activities such as Lettering. For this detested but unavoidable weekly penance, he would slouch in late, his guitar slung troubadour-style on his back and, somehow, always take the seat immediately behind her. He never had any of the proper equipment, so would have to borrow her meticulously kept pencils and brushes, usually going off with them afterwards and not bothering to return them.

Cynthia’s future at this point seemed as neatly laid out as the materials on her desk. She had a steady boyfriend named Barry, whom she planned to marry before pursuing her chosen career of art teacher. She was not in the market for any new beau, least of all one whose ways were so turbulently and distastefully unlike the ways of Hoylake. Yet John had a powerful, half-fearful fascination for her. On a couple of occasions, she watched him perch on a desk and play his guitar, and was stirred by the very different look this brought to the usually hard, mocking face. ‘It softened…All the aggression lifted,’ she would recall. ‘At last there was something I had seen in John that I could understand.’

Her feelings clicked into focus one day in the college lecture theatre when she was seated a few places away from John, and saw the attractive Helen Anderson suddenly start to stroke his hair. There was nothing between Helen and him; she was simply bewailing his greasy Teddy Boy locks and urging him to have them shampooed and cut shorter. Nonetheless, Cynthia felt a sudden, irrational surge of jealousy.

From that moment, rather than avoiding John’s eye, she set out to catch it. She grew her hair down to her shoulders in the fashionable bohemian manner and exchanged her mumsy woollens and tweed skirt for the white duffle jacket and black velvet slacks favoured by college sirens like Thelma Pickles. She also gave up wearing the glasses, which, as she thought, most condemned her as a swot and spaniel to John. Since she was extremely shortsighted and could not afford contact lenses, then still an expensive novelty, this aspect of her makeover brought its problems. In the morning, her bus regularly carried her far beyond the art college stop when she failed to recognise it in time.

One day she and John were in a group of students who began a game of testing one another’s vision. To her amazement, Cynthia discovered that he was as myopic as she was, and equally self-conscious about wearing glasses. He in turn discovered that, only a year earlier, Cynthia’s father had died of lung cancer, leaving her as devastated as he now was himself. Better than all the clear-sighted people around, this shy, prim Hoylake girl knew just what he was feeling.

The end of the 1958 winter term was celebrated by a midday gettogether in one of the lecture rooms. A gramophone was playing, and, egged on by Jeff Mohammed, John asked Cynthia to dance. Thrown into confusion by this unexpected move, she blurted out that she was engaged to a fellow in Hoylake. ‘I didn’t ask you to fuckin’ marry me, did I?’ John snapped back. After the party came a drinking session at Ye Cracke, which John persuaded the usually abstemious Cynthia to join. They ended up spending the rest of the afternoon alone together at Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray’s flat in Percy Street.

Among their fellow students—the female ones at least—there was no doubt as to who had the better bargain. ‘Cynthia was a catch for John,’ Ann Mason says. ‘She could have had anyone she wanted. She had lovely eyes and the most beautiful pale skin. And she was the sweetest, nicest person you could ever meet.’

She was different indeed from the strong-willed, caustic females who had hitherto dominated John’s life. She was soft, gentle and tranquil (although secretly prone to bouts of paralysing nerves). She also possessed the notions of male superiority shared by many young women in the late fifties, which could have won them unconditional employment in a geisha house. She deferred to John in everything, never questioning or arguing, always complying with what she later called his ‘rampant’ demand for sex. Normally he might quickly have tired of such a companion, but in the desolation of Julia’s death, Cynthia answered his deepest unspoken needs. ‘I think [she] offered him a kind of mother thing,’ the former Thelma Pickles says. ‘She was so warm and gentle. She was the kind of person anyone would have been proud to have as a mother.’

The two began dating in a manner reflecting their suburban backgrounds as much as their bohemian student life. Since both of them still lived at home, they had nowhere to be together in private, unless Stu and Rod Murray both tactfully absented themselves from the Percy Street flat. Their trysts therefore consisted mainly of cinema-going or sitting for hour after hour in a coffee bar, holding hands over their foam-flecked glass cups. At John’s insistence, Cynthia stayed in town until the latest possible moment each night, catching the last train from Lime Street to Hoylake amid home-going drunks and hooligans ‘[for] the longest 20 minutes of my life,’ then walking unaccompanied through the dark streets to her home.

Everything he asked, she gave unstintingly. Her eight-shilling (40p) daily subsistence allowance kept him in coffees, fish-and-chips, Capstan Full-Strength cigarettes and replacement guitar strings. She did his college work for him when he could not be bothered to finish—or begin—it and neglected her own whenever he demanded attention. To please him, she changed her whole appearance into one hopefully resembling his ultimate fantasy woman, Brigitte Bardot, dyeing her hair blonde and wearing tight skirts and fishnet stockings with garter belts. Waiting for John in such attire at their usual rendezvous, outside Lewis’s department store, she would dread being mistaken for a tart.

On bus journeys he would choose a seat behind some balding elderly passenger and softly tickle the fluff on the man’s cranium, withdrawing his hand and assuming an expression of blank innocence each time his victim turned around. Then the laughter would fade in Cynthia’s throat as he sighted some human infirmity more pitiable than baldness—a blind beggar or mentally handicapped child—and instantly went into his own pitiless-seeming over-parody, crooking his back, freezing his face into an idiot stare, inverting his hands into claws. ‘John had a great need to shock and disgust people, and certainly shocked me on these occasions,’ she would remember. ‘Of course when his mates were around, he was the star turn.’

The real terror of illness and suffering that underlay this apparent callousness showed itself one afternoon when the two were alone together in Stu Sutcliffe’s bedroom-studio at Percy Street and Cynthia suddenly collapsed with excruciating stomach pains. John’s idea of tender loving care was to rush her to Lime Street and put her on a train to travel back to Hoylake on her own. When a grumbling appendix was diagnosed, he could not bring himself to visit her in hospital without bringing George Harrison along for support. Having pined for days to spend time alone with him, Cynthia produced a rare show of temperament by bursting into tears. Love was still new enough for John to bundle the bewildered George out of the ward and spend the rest of his visit assiduously making amends to her.

As ‘going out with’ moved into its next phrase, ‘going steady’, the time came for John to introduce Cynthia to Mimi. Woolton and Hoylake being spiritually so close, and Cyn being of so obviously superior a class to other art-school girls, he expected only wholehearted approval. And certainly, the welcome at Mendips seemed warm—expressed in the usual Mimi fashion of an enormous egg-and-chips high tea with mounds of bread and butter, served on the morning room’s gateleg table. Unfortunately, the hand that hospitably poured the tea had also marked Cyn’s card in terms that nothing she could say or do hereafter would alter. In her, Mimi saw a rival for John’s affections who, even at this early stage, was unscrupulously dedicated to taking him away for ever.

Cynthia’s widowed mother, Lilian, was the opposite of Mimi: a small, hyperactive woman who cleaned their Hoylake home only at long intervals and spent much of her time buying secondhand furniture and knick-knacks at local auction sales. With her two sons now grown up and living away from home, she focused her whole attention on Cyn, much as Mimi did on John, and had definite ideas about which young men were and were not good enough for her. When Cyn first brought John home to tea, she dreaded the sharp maternal comparisons that were likely to be made with his predecessor, the so-eligible, so-Hoylake Barry. However, John was polite and respectful, as he could be when he liked, and the occasion went better than Cyn had dared to hope.

Under the rules of going steady, the next step was for Lilian and Mimi to meet. Mimi accepted an invitation to tea at the Powell home, turning up in her usual immaculate coat, hat and gloves, and, for a time, all went well. Then, in her abrupt fashion, she began complaining to Lilian that Cyn was distracting John from his college work. Lilian naturally defended Cyn, and in no time a furious argument was raging between the two women. John, who had a horror of domestic confrontation—no doubt implanted by all he had seen as a small boy—simply jumped up and bolted from the house. Cyn found him cowering at the end of the street, so she later said, ‘in tears’.

This whiff of adversity took the relationship to a level for which Cyn had been totally unprepared. John became obsessed with her, sometimes filling an entire letter with declarations of his love, bewailing their midnight farewells at Lime Street station until she agreed to throw away her last Hoylake scruples and spend whole nights with him in town. Fortuitously, Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray’s landlady at 9 Percy Street had rented the whole ground floor to a new tenant who in turn sublet its large back room to Rod. This made Rod and Stu’s first-floor studio-cum-bedsit more regularly available as a refuge for John and Cynthia. She would tell her mother she was staying with her college friend, Phyllis McKenzie; he would tell Mimi he was sleeping over with one of the Quarrymen after a late gig.

Although Cynthia showed John nothing but devotion, he became increasingly possessive and insecure. She had only to smile at another boy in the most casual, friendly way to throw him into anguished fantasies that it might be some kind of secret code for an affair in progress or about to begin. At one college hop, he punched a fellow student who’d merely asked her to dance. As they sat together, he would hold on tightly to her hand, as if afraid she might fly away at any moment. Cynthia later said that he often showed symptoms of a nervous breakdown—a diagnosis with which John himself later concurred. ‘I demanded absolute trust[worthiness] from her because I wasn’t trustworthy myself. I was neurotic, taking out all my frustrations on her.’

In these days, it was still considered quite normal for men of every stamp—and northern ones above all—to keep ‘their’ women in line by physical chastisement if and when they saw fit. ‘As a teenager all I saw were films where men beat up women,’ John would recall. ‘That was tough, that was the thing to do, slap them in the face, treat them rough, Humphrey Bogart and all that jazz…’ Cynthia’s autobiography, A Twist of Lennon, published in 1977, made no mention of having suffered physical abuse from him. Some 20 years later in a BBC documentary, she recounted how, one night when she was not seeing John, she and Phyllis McKenzie had gone to an out-of-town club and afterwards been given a lift home by two boys they had met. Next day at college, she mentioned the innocent episode to John. Phyllis then described finding her in tears after he’d ‘slapped her face’.

Cynthia’s second autobiography, published in 2005, had a harsher story to relate. One evening at a party, John ‘went mad’ after someone told him she was dancing with Stu Sutcliffe. They stopped as soon as they saw the look on his face, and Cyn hastened to mollify him. The next day, however, he followed her down to the ladies’ toilets in the college basement. When she came out, he hit her across the face so hard that her head struck a heating pipe on the wall; John then walked off without a word. As a result, she chucked him, and they stayed apart for three months until John persuaded her to take him back. Even according to this score-settling account, he was never again physically violent to her.

Summer of 1959 brought the multi-part exam that Intermediate students had to pass before moving on to their chosen speciality. Despite his dismal past performance in almost all the areas covered by the exam, John managed to scrape through. Well-wishers and not-so-well-wishers alike rallied round to help him make up the deficiencies of the past five terms. Stu Sutcliffe gave him a crash course in basic painting skills, devoting night after night to the task in an empty lecture room, while Cynthia waited patiently at an adjacent desk.

As well as taking the exam, he was required to submit course work in the form of paintings or drawings. ‘The trouble was, he hadn’t done anything like enough,’ Ann Mason remembers. One day, while I was going through my stuff with Arthur Ballard, I saw John standing there, looking a bit despondent. So I offered him some of my drawings to put in for the exam. I wondered if I’d get one of his tongue-lashings, but he just said “Oh, yeah…great!”’ Both Cynthia and Thelma Pickles would also later recall making similar contributions to his portfolio.

The college had just inaugurated a Department of Commercial Design, for which the polymathic Bill Harry was already bound. To Ballard, it seemed the obvious place to develop John’s talent for cartooning and satire. Because of his reputation as a troublemaker, however, the department head, Roy Sharpe, refused to accept him. A fuming Ballard retorted that Sharpe would be better off ‘teaching in a Sunday school’.

The college’s only alternative was to put John into the Painting School alongside Stu Sutcliffe, tacitly hoping that over the next two years Stu’s talent, energy and dedication might prove to be contagious.

In March 1958, Elvis Presley had been drafted into the US Army, the glorious inky billows of his hair planed to the scalp, his blue suede shoes traded for heavy-duty boots, the inimitable name rendered down to a mere serial number, the insolent flaunt of his crotch replaced by a stiff-backed salute.

‘The King’ was the greatest but by no means only loss to rock-’n’-roll’s barely erected pantheon. In February 1959, Buddy Holly was killed when his chartered plane crashed on a tour of the snowbound American Midwest, so leaving thousands of British boys—John among them—bereft of a friend whose speaking voice they had never heard, wondering where their next lesson in how to play rock music would come from. Yet just before his death, Holly, too, had apparently decided to move on from rock ‘n’ roll; his final recordings were thoughtful ballads, with his backing group, the Crickets, replaced by a string orchestra.

On every hand, deities that once had flashed and thundered invulnerably from the heavens now seemed to be plummeting to earth. During a 1957 Australian tour, Little Richard had seen Russia’s Sputnik space satellite flash through the night sky and interpreted it as a personal summons to him from God. Symbolically throwing a costly diamond ring into Sydney Harbour, he had given up singing ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and begun training for the ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis had been hounded out of Britain when it emerged that he was bigamously married to his 13-year-old cousin, Myra Gayle. Chuck Berry had been arrested on immorality charges connected with a teenage waitress, for which he would eventually receive two years’ imprisonment.

In the UK, however, rock was suffering no such vertiginous decline. Performers like Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and the Everly Brothers, who had become yesterday’s men in their homeland, continued to release records and play concerts in Britain—and across Europe—and be welcomed there as rapturously as ever. Britain also by now had its own fledgling rock-’n’-roll scene, which gained in strength and confidence as its American exemplar lost heart.

One British city, above all, devotedly kept the rock-’n’-roll flame alive. In Liverpool, dozens of scrubby skiffle groups of yesteryear had metamorphosed into rock combos whose names combined unalloyed Yank-worship with native humour and wordplay: Karl Terry and the Cruisers, Derry and the Seniors (a play on America’s Danny and the Juniors), Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Silhouettes, the Four Jays, the Bluegenes. Several of the groups were far more than mere Buddy Holly copyists, featuring pianos and saxes like the ‘rockin’ bands’ behind Little Richard and Larry (‘Bony Moronie’) Williams.

At the bottom of the heap, so far down that few people even knew they existed, were John Lennon and the Quarrymen. Indeed, despite all the shaping-up that had gone on since Paul’s arrival, there was serious doubt if they would last very far into 1959. 1 January found them back onstage at Wilson Hall, playing for the overdue Christmas party of the Garston bus depot’s social club. The booking had came through George Harrison’s bus-driver father, who in his spare time acted as the club’s entertainments secretary and compère. Harry Harrison had also persuaded the manager of a nearby cinema, The Pavilion, to drop by and catch their act with a view to giving them further work in the future.

‘To start with, everything went really well,’ drummer Colin Hanton remembers. ‘We were even given our own dressing-room to rehearse and tune up in. The act went over great—all the bus-drivers and clippies [conductors] really dug us. When they tried to draw the stage curtains after our first set, something went wrong with the mechanism, and the curtains wouldn’t pull. John made a joke about it to the audience, which got a big laugh, and we played an extra number while the problem was sorted out. When we came offstage, feeling really pleased with ourselves, we were told “There’s a pint for each of you lads at the bar.” We ended up having more than just a pint, so for our second set we were pissed out of our minds, all except George—and we were terrible.’

The after-effects of beer and failure inevitably led to a row on the bus journey home. As an older working man, Colin had no taste for sick humour and took exception when Paul began joking around in John’s ‘spastic talk’—‘thik ik unk’, and so on. After a heated exchange, he jumped up, rang the bell one stop too early, piled his drums off the bus, and never showed up for another performance.

John was thus left alone with his two schoolboy sidemen Paul and George—a matchless combination one of these days, but back in British rock-’n’-roll’s Ice Age an unmitigated catastrophe. For without a drummer, however indifferent, three acoustic guitarists, however resourceful, could not hope to be taken seriously as a live group. Without the underpinning beat of bass pedal, snare and tom-tom, their songs did not qualify as rock, merely a form of jumped-up skiffle or folk that in the average riotous Liverpool hall would have to fight even to be heard. They put a brave face on it, and approached several promoters for work as a non-percussive trio, but from each one came the same brusque query: ‘What about your rhythm?’ John’s hopefully reassuring reply of ‘The rhythm’s in the guitars’ was the cue for slammed doors all over town.

One that remained slightly ajar led to a place he had previously thought an impregnable bastion of anti-rock-’n’-roll prejudice. Stu Sutcliffe and Bill Harry both sat on the entertainments committee of the art college’s student union, and managed to talk down the trad jazz zealots sufficiently to get the Quarrymen occasional bookings for college dances. At Stu’s and Bill’s prompting, the committee also voted funds to buy an amplifier, officially for the use of all visiting entertainers but in practice so that John, Paul and George could give the rhythm in their guitars some extra bite.

The college provided only occasional gigs, for negligible payment, and John, at least, took them with not much more seriousness than public rehearsals. One day, Helen Anderson had to give him a bright yellow cable-stitch sweater she was wearing when he hadn’t bothered to put together a stage outfit for that evening’s show. In exchange, he gave her his Quarry Bank exercise book, with its carefully indexed cartoons of ‘Shortsighted John Wimple Lennon’, ‘Smell-type Smith’ and the rest.

Times became so slow for the Quarrymen that George Harrison took to sitting in with other small-scale groups, in particular one called the Les Stewart Quartet, who appeared regularly at the Lowlands coffee bar. George’s defection looked to become permanent when the Stewart Quartet were offered a residency at a club named the Casbah, which was about to open in the Liverpool suburb of West Derby. It belonged to an attractive, dark-eyed woman named Mona Best, whose husband, Johnny, had for many years been Liverpool’s main boxing promoter. At the outset it was not intended as a serious business venture, simply a meeting place for Mrs Best’s sons Rory and Peter and their friends in the basement of their rambling Victorian home in Hayman’s Green. But on the eve of opening night, 28 August, the quartet broke up in acrimony, and Mrs Best asked George if he knew any musicians who could take their place. He volunteered himself, John and Paul.

The Casbah’s opening saw John graduate at last from the vermilion Gallotone Champion guitar (‘Guaranteed not to split’) that his mother had bought two years previously. In August, he persuaded Mimi to stake him to a Hofner Club 40 semi-solid model (i.e., playable both acoustically and electrically) with a fawn-coloured cutaway body, a black scratchplate and an impressive cluster of tone- and volume-control knobs. The trip they made to collect it from Hessy’s in Whitechapel would be enshrined in Mimi’s memory as buying him his first guitar for the—to her—hefty sum of £17. In fact, that was merely a down payment: the Club 40’s retail price was £28 7s, which instalment-plan charges (supposedly to be met by John) increased to £30 9s.

John, Paul and George played at the Casbah for seven successive Saturday nights, still billed as the Quarrymen and augmented by a fourth guitarist named Ken Brown, a member of the disbanded Les Stewart Quartet. The club proved an instant hit, attracting such crowds that Mrs Best had to hire a doorman to back up her own formidable presence behind the snack and soft drinks bar. West Derby’s weekly paper did a story headlined ‘Kasbah [sic] Has New Meaning for Local Teenagers’, accompanied by the first-ever press picture of John in performance with the new Club 40, supporting its cutaway body on one white-trousered knee and clearly glorying in his power to reach the topmost notes on the fretboard.

Among the Saturday-night regulars was Dorothy (Dot) Rhone, a petite 16-year-old from Childwall, whom John took to calling Bubbles, even though her hair didn’t have so much as a ringlet. Dot was drawn to his ’rugged’ looks the moment she set eyes on him but, learning that he already had a steady girlfriend, agreed to go out with Paul McCartney instead. Despite her extraordinary cuteness, she was even milder than Cynthia Powell and submitted without protest to the same rules from Paul that John imposed on Cyn—total adoration, fidelity, availability and revising her appearance and wardrobe to look as much as possible like Brigitte Bardot. ‘Paul was always supposed to be the charming one, but John was more compassionate,’ she remembers. ‘When Paul and I had a row, he’d often tell Paul to be nicer to me.’

In Mona Best’s happy combination of club and Enid Blytonish secret den, the Quarrymen seemed to have found an ideal home. Mrs Best made them part of her family circle, frequently inviting them upstairs for cups of tea or meals in the rambling house, which was crammed with exotic mementos of her Indian upbringing. They grew particularly friendly with her younger son, Peter, a strikingly handsome 18-year-old whose reserved manner and crisply styled hair earned him frequent comparison with the film star Jeff Chandler.

Then, on the Saturday night of 10 October, everything suddenly turned sour. Ken Brown, the new fourth Quarryman, reported for duty with a bad cold. In her matriarchal fashion, Mrs Best decided he wasn’t well enough to play and sent him upstairs to sit in the warm with her elderly mother. At the evening’s end, however, she still gave him his quarter share of the Quarrymen’s £3 fee. John, Paul and George protested that, as Brown hadn’t performed, he shouldn’t be paid; when Mrs. Best stood firm, the three of them walked out in a huff.

However John might blag about the rhythm being ‘in the guitars’, it was clear that if his group was to go on playing anywhere outside the art college’s basement, they had to find a drummer to replace Colin Hanton. But the task seemed a hopeless one. All the good players around were already comfortably ensconced in prestigious groups like Cass and the Cassanovas or Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, where their personalities as well as percussive showmanship often proved as great a draw as the singers. The Cassanovas had upholsterer John Hutchinson, aka Johnny Hutch, a famous tough guy known to hit equally hard whether the skin in question covered drum or human jaw. The Hurricanes had Ritchie Starkey, a sad-eyed boy from the tougher-than-tough Dingle area whose love of flashy finger ornamentation had led him to adopt the stage name Ringo Starr.

Musical nobodies John, Paul and George might be, yet they still had the chutzpah to enter their names against the cream of Liverpool’s drummer-enhanced groups when heats for another Carroll Levis ‘Nationwide Search for a Star’ competition was held at the Liverpool Empire. To camouflage the drummer problem, they appeared as a vocal trio with John in the centre, minus guitar, resting one hand on Paul’s shoulder and one on George’s. It was an effective and rather daring idea, since Paul’s and George’s left-and right-handed guitar necks pointed neatly in opposite directions, and physical contact between young males, onstage or off, was still taboo.

The need to pull out something special for Carroll Levis also finally extinguished that tired old skiffle handle, the Quarrymen. For days beforehand, John and Paul racked their brains for a new name with an American lilt that hadn’t already been taken by some other group, national or local. Their final choice was a nod to a currently successful US instrumental act, Johnny and the Hurricanes, and also to rock ‘n’ roll’s founding father, Alan ‘Moondog’ Freed. When they took the stage for their first heat at the Empire, it was as Johnny and the Moondogs.

They performed two Buddy Holly songs, ‘Think It Over’ and ‘Rave On’, with enough panache to reach the area semi-finals at the Hippodrome theatre in Manchester on Sunday, 15 November. As with John’s previous Carroll Levis experience, the winners were decided in an end-of-show finale, when the applause for each contestant was measured on Levis’s Clapometer. Unluckily, however, this climax came at a much later hour in Manchester than it had in Liverpool. Too poor to afford an overnight hotel stay, Johnny and the Moondogs had to leave before the finale to catch their last bus and train home. All three of them felt bitterly disappointed and cheated, though only John actively expressed his resentment of the competitors who were able to stay. ‘That night,’ Paul remembers, ’someone [in a rival group] was relieved of his guitar.’

With no drummer in prospect, an easier and slightly cheaper way of strengthening the beat was to add one of the electric bass guitars now in general use around Merseyside bandstands. The electric bass with its fretted neck being relatively easy to play, John did not have to break in another outsider, but could simply invite one of his art college friends to make up a fourth with Paul, George and him. During another late-night jam session at 9 Percy Street, he threw the bass player’s job open to both Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray—whichever was first to get hold of the requisite instrument. Rod set to work to build his own, using equipment in the college woodworking department to cut out its body and neck. He was just pondering how to electrify and string it when he found he’d been beaten to the post.

Every two years, the Littlewoods football-pool magnate John Moores sponsored an exhibition at Liverpool’s illustrious Walker Art Gallery to which local painters and sculptors were invited to submit works. For the John Moores show of November 1959, Stu intended to offer one of his outsized abstracts, consisting of two 8-by-4-foot panels. With Rod Murray’s help, he took the first of the finished canvases to the exhibits’ assembly point, then got sidetracked by John and the others at Ye Cracke, and somehow never got around to delivering the second panel. Unaware that they were looking at only half the intended picture, the judges included it among only a handful of local entries to hang at the Walker. So enamoured of Stu’s technique was the great John Moores that he bought the single panel for an impressive £65.

The windfall allowed Stu to splash out on an impressive Hofner President bass guitar and step into the vacancy in John’s group. John reassured him that he’d soon pick up bass playing, since it didn’t involve learning ‘chords and stuff’, just simple, repetitive patterns over four strings rather than six. A friendly bassist with a rival group, Dave May of the Silhouettes, agreed to coach him in the rudiments.

His college tutors, and several of his friends, felt that Stu was making a disastrous wrong turn. No one could have been a stronger supporter of John’s music than Bill Harry—as he would one day prove in spades. Yet he felt mystified, and rather let down, that someone at such exalted level in the visual medium should wish to start at the very bottom of rock ‘n’ roll. ‘The image was what appealed to Stuart more than the music,’ Harry says. ‘He loved the romance of it. And the fact that John wanted him in the group. He just couldn’t say no to John.’