Читать книгу John Lennon: The Life - Philip Norman - Страница 15

I was never—repeat NEVER—known as Johnny Silver.

Just before Christmas, Mrs Plant, the long-suffering owner of 9 Percy Street, had paid her property a surprise visit and been horrified by what she’d found. A cache of antique furniture awaiting renovation in the basement had been chopped up and used as firewood to warm the ex-Quarrymen’s practice sessions and John’s illicit nights with Cynthia. The Adam fireplace in Stu Sutcliffe’s studio had been torn out to create a contemporary openhearth effect, and had since disappeared. (‘We left bits of it all over town,’ Rod Murray admits. ‘Like getting rid of a dead body…’) So outraged was Mrs Plant by this wholesale vandalism that she gave every tenant in the building an eviction notice.

By early January, Rod and Stu had found new accommodations at 3 Hillary Mansions, Gambier Terrace, a handsome Georgian-style block overlooking the unfinished Anglican cathedral. To share the spacious first-floor flat they enlisted three other college friends: Margaret Morris (known as Diz), Margaret Duxbury (known as Ducky) and John.

Aunt Mimi was informed of his decision to leave Mendips with typical bluntness. ‘He told me, “Mimi, all the others have flats on their own…and anyway, I don’t like your cooking,”’ she recalled. ‘He’d had it soft with me around to do all the cooking and washing for him. I knew even before he went that he couldn’t cope on his own. He didn’t even know how to light a gas-cooker, let alone cook a tin of beans. He told me he could live off “Chink food”. I said to myself, “We’ll see, John Lennon, we’ll see.”’

The flat consisted of three oversized bed-sitting-rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom with a Geyser water heater, lit by a flame that responded with a threatening Woomph! if anyone tried to light it. As signatory of the lease, Rod chose the best quarters, at the front, with the cathedral view and fancy iron balustrade; John and Stu took the barnlike room at the rear.

For John, the Gambier Terrace flat served two equally important purposes. It provided a place for him, Paul and George to rehearse with their new bass player, his new flatmate. And it allowed him to spend unrestricted nights with Cynthia, albeit in conditions even more rough-and-ready than at Percy Street. The room he shared with Stu was also a communal art studio for the other tenants, and so permanently littered with shabby easels, half-squeezed paint tubes, empty bottles, misappropriated traffic signs, old fish-andchips wrappings and cigarette ends. ‘The floor was filthy,’ Cynthia recalled. ‘Everything was covered with muck.’ On mornings when the Geyser failed and they had to wash in cold water, they would arrive at college ‘looking like a couple of chimney sweeps’.

But, as Mimi had predicted, it wasn’t long before John’s appetite for self-reliance waned and he began to miss the home comforts he had always taken for granted. ‘For about three weeks I didn’t hear from him. Then one night he arrived back on the doorstep looking very sorry for himself. I said to him, “I’m cooking dinner, do you want some?” but he was too proud to admit that he was hungry or that he couldn’t stand living away. He went away again that night, but about a week later he turned up again. This time I was cooking a steak pie, and I didn’t bother asking whether he wanted any or not. That got him mad. He could smell the food and yet he was too stubborn, too proud, typical John really, to let on that he was hungry or that he’d made a mistake.

‘In the end the smell got too much for him and he burst in on me, saying, “I’ll have you know, woman, I’m starving!” He wolfed his food down and then he decided it was getting late and that he wanted to stay in his room for the night. It was his way of coming back without admitting he was wrong to leave.’ From then on, he made regular trips home to get his washing done and fill up on Mimi’s cooking. But even the most succulent of her steak pies couldn’t lure him back permanently from Gambier Terrace, Rod, Diz, Ducky and Stu.

The idea had been that Stu would master the bass within a week or so, then take his place as an equal among John’s onstage brotherhood. Unfortunately, it was not as simple as that. Stu’s small hands, so quick and sure while painting, drawing or sculpting, showed none of the same deftness with his shiny new Hofner President. Even the most basic underlay patterns of rock ‘n’ roll were laborious for him to learn and troublesome to execute. He was angered and frustrated by his slow progress and would have given up altogether had not John sat with him for hours in their huge back room at Gambier Terrace, demonstrating the patterns time and again on the bass strings of his own Club 40. Just as Stu had made John believe in himself as an artist, so he was now determined Stu should believe in himself as a musician, whatever the evidence might be to the contrary.

He therefore insisted that Stu should join Paul, George and him onstage when still all too obviously the rawest of beginners. The principal object was to show off the Hofner President: as George later recalled, ‘Having a bass player who couldn’t play was better than not having a bass player at all.’ To hide his embarrassment, Stu would turn on his James Dean persona, wearing dark glasses and standing with his back half-turned to the audience as if lost in some mystic communion with his fretboard, rather than just lost.

Apart from getting Stu up to standard, the most urgent task was finding a name for the new lineup. Johnny and the Moondogs had been no more than a hasty improvisation for Carroll Levis and was now too much redolent of lost chances and premature homeward trains. Rather than the modish formula of such-and-such and the so-and-sos, Stu suggested they should revert to another plain collective noun, ideally one with the chirpy unpretentiousness of Buddy Holly’s Crickets. Pursuing this entomological theme, they came up with the Beetles, unaware that it had been Holly’s own original choice. (Contrary to myth, it had nothing to do the Beetles motorcycle gang in Marlon Brando’s The Wild One, which none of John’s circle had seen.) To avoid an off-putting image of crawly black bugs, John changed it to Beatals—not a pun on ‘beat’ music at this stage, but on beating all competition.

Stu also acted as their manager, insofar as there was anything to manage, and during March drafted a weightily worded and not overly truthful appeal for bookings to an unnamed promoter or club manager. ‘As it is your policy to present entertainment to the habitues of your establishment, I would like to draw your attention to the Quar [crossed out] “Beatals”. This is a promising group of young musicians who play music for all tastes, preferably rock and roll…’ But their gigs remained mostly stuck at the piffling level of student dances and socials, where they were usually known as ‘the college band’. Stu’s painting tutor, Austin Davis, had them to play at a party he gave at his Huskisson Street flat early in 1959. The event went on for about two days and was so riotous that Davis’s wife, the future novelist and Dame of the British Empire Beryl Bainbridge, had to remove their two young children from the premises. (Later, it would even be cited among the grounds for the couple’s divorce.)

Outside pub hours, John and Stu were generally to be found at a little coffee bar in Slater Street, on the fringes of Chinatown, called the Jacaranda. At night, its basement became a club, attracting crowds from all the surrounding black and Asian quarters, with dancing to a West Indian steel band and liberal consumption of spiked soft drinks and the substance still known, if at all, as Indian hemp. ‘The Jac’ was also a haunt of heavyweight local groups—Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Cass and the Cassanovas, and others—who would meet there after their night’s gigs around town.

To John, these were almost godlike figures, with their carefully blow-waved hair, matching Italian suits, flashy guitars and so-enviable drummers. Each group pumped out its American rock-’n’-roll repertoire with Liverpudlian eccentricity and flamboyance. Ted ‘Kingsize’ Taylor, a brawny apprentice butcher, kiss-curled and tartan-jacketed, combined the personae of Solomon Burke and the Big Bopper. ‘Cass’, aka Brian Casser, and his three sidemen wore shawl-collared tuxedos with Chicago gangster-style black shirts and white ties, and hung up their own special banner on the stage behind them. Most extrovert by far was blond, suntanned Rory Storm, aka Alan Caldwell, a mountaineer manqué who during his set would clamber up one side of the stage proscenium, not stopping until he clung precariously 40 or more feet above his audience. Even so, he was not selfish with the limelight, granting his drummer Ringo Starr a special solo spot billed as Starr Time.

The star groups’ foot soldiers often proved more approachable than their commanders. At the Jacaranda, John struck up a friendship with the Cassanovas’ bass guitarist, 19-year-old John Gustafson, aka Johnny Gus. Generous about sharing bass-playing tips, Gustafson also became a willing accomplice to John’s love of exhibitionistic sick humour. ‘When we walked round town,’ he remembers, ‘we’d pretend to be two old cripples, helping each other across the road.’ One day he went back to the Gambier Terrace flat with John and Stu to hear John play the latest Lennon-McCartney composition, ‘The One After 909’.

Johnny Gus’s friendliness was counterpointed by the Cassanovas’ hard-man drummer, Johnny Hutch, who intimidated even members of his own group, and made no secret of regarding musicians who were also art students and grammar-school boys as ‘a bunch of posers’. ‘John was always terrified of Johnny Hutch’, Gustafson says. It didn’t stop him from going down to the Jacaranda’s basement when Cass and the Cassanovas were setting up, and asking to sit in with them on a couple of numbers. ‘He played “Ramrod”, the Duane Eddy instrumental,’ Gustafson remembers. ‘And Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, doing the guitar breaks as well as the vocal. We had to admire his nerve.’

The Jacaranda’s owner, Allan Williams, was one of the more colourful figures to be found around Liverpool 8. A stocky Welshman, with curly hair and a piratical black beard, he had worked as a door-to-door salesman and artificial jewellry manufacturer before starting his coffee bar, with his Chinese wife, Beryl, on capital of just £100. At 29, Williams had no particular interest in teenage music, preferring the Welsh hymns and thirties ballads for whose dramatic tenor rendition he was famous in pubs from Canning Square to Upper Parliament Street. But, like many another small provincial entrepreneur, he was attracted by its increasingly powerful scent of easy money.

John was familiar to Allan Williams as leader of the ‘right crowd of layabouts’ from art college who sat around the Jac, nursing the same frothy coffee or fivepenny (2p) portion of toast and jam for hour after hour of conversation about Kierkegaard or Chuck Berry. To begin with, however, his entrepreneurial eye focused on Stu Sutcliffe’s art rather than John’s music. Among Stu’s recent projects was a series of vivid abstract murals, designed and painted in partnership with Rod Murray, one of which now adorned the front window of Ye Cracke, another the interior of a Territorial Army hall in Norris Green. Williams commissioned the pair to do the same for the Jac’s street window and the walls of its basement club. For the latter, they created a garish voodoo-inspired design, then roped in John and another sometime flatmate, Rod Jones, to help them paint it.

Britain in 1960 had only one nationally known pop manager. This was Larry Parnes, a young Londoner, originally in the dress business, who had helped launch the nation’s first teenage idol, Tommy Steele. Since striking gold with Steele, Parnes had gone about the country seeking out handsome young men and turning them into rock singers under American-flavoured pseudonyms that blended the cute with the suggestive: Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride. From among this so-called Larry Parnes Stable, the most successful was Billy Fury, who, as Ron Wycherly, had previously worked as a deckhand on a Liverpool tugboat—though, of course, that unglamorous fact was always played down by his publicists.

As well as manufacturing homegrown teen idols, Parnes was also the principal importer of American rock-’n’-roll stars to their ever-faithful British constituency. That first spring of the brand-new decade, he brought over Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran to costar with indigenous acts in a touring spectacular billed as the Fast-Moving Anglo-American Beat Show. Vincent in the flesh proved a disconcerting figure, weasely and emaciated, though still aged only 25, with one leg in braces following a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Cochran looked much the same glossy young hunk who’d inspired Paul McCartney to sing ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ but was secretly prey to the darkest fears and neuroses. He had been hit hard by the death of his close friend Buddy Holly a year earlier, and now believed himself fated to meet a similarly premature end.

The Fast-Moving Anglo-American Beat Show came to the Liverpool Empire for a week in mid-March, playing to rapturous capacity audiences that included John, Cynthia, Paul McCartney—and Allan Williams. Paul would always remember the demented female shriek that went up as the curtains opened to reveal Eddie Cochran with his back turned, nonchalantly running a comb through his hair. John, however, was furious when the screaming drowned out Cochran’s virtuoso playing of his wafer-thin red guitar.

After the show, Williams sought out Larry Parnes and suggested how Liverpool’s evidently fathomless adoration of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran might be exploited still further. Williams’s grandiose idea was a joint promotion between Parnes and himself that would combine the American stars and other Parnes acts with the best of Merseyside’s own rock-’n’-roll talent. Parnes took the bait, agreeing to bring Vincent and Cochran back for a second appearance, supported by other nationally-known groups like the Viscounts and Nero and the Gladiators, while Williams supplied local crowd-pullers like Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Cass and the Cassanovas. The spectacular would be for one night only at the city’s boxing stadium, behind the Exchange railway station, on 3 May.

Thanks to the combined rival attractions of Cynthia and Stu, Paul McCartney had recently felt himself taking ‘a bit of a back seat’ with John. But the Easter holiday of 1960 brought a major rebonding between them. Packing up a few clothes and their guitars, the pair hitchhiked 200 miles south to stay with Paul’s relatives Mike and Bett Robbins, who were now running a pub, the Fox and Hounds, in Caversham, Berkshire. They spent a week helping out at the pub, sharing a bed in an upstairs room as innocently as children.

Their reward for unstinted bottle-stacking and glass-washing was to be allowed to perform for the Fox and Hounds’ customers over the weekend prior to their return home. Mike Robbins watched them rehearse and offered hints on presentation—for instance, that they shouldn’t tear straight into ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’, as they planned, but build up to it with an instrumental number, Les Paul and Mary Ford’s ‘The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise’. They gave their show seated on barstools in the pub lounge, billing themselves with a touch of Goonery as the Nerk Twins.

Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent had by now reached the West Country, playing to yet another sold-out house at the Bristol Hippodrome on the Saturday night of 16 April. Before returning to Liverpool in three weeks, both had arranged to make a brief trip home to America. En route to catch a flight from Heathrow Airport right after the Bristol show, their hire car went out of control and smashed into a concrete lamp-post. Cochran, Vincent and Cochran’s girlfriend, the songwriter Sharon Sheeley, all suffered serious multiple injuries and were rushed to hospital in Bath. Cochran died two days later, fulfilling his own prophecy that he’d ‘be seeing Buddy soon’.

On hearing what had befallen the two headliners of his co-promotion with Larry Parnes, Allan Williams understandably thought the show would have to be cancelled. Parnes, however, insisted that it should go ahead as planned on 3 May and that the hospitalised Gene Vincent would be fit enough to take part. In compensation for Cochran’s absence, Parnes provided extra acts from his London roster while Williams rounded up further local groups, among them Gerry and the Pacemakers, Bob Evans and His Five Shillings, and the Connaughts.

The Beatals did not even try to get on the show, knowing they were automatically disqualified by their lack of a drummer. They could only watch from the audience as Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Cass and the Cassanovas, and Gerry and the Pacemakers in turn pulled out all the stops to impress Larry Parnes. A photograph of the packed ringside crowd picked up John standing near the front, his face half-hidden among a thicket of hysterical girls. From a distance of 30-odd feet, you can still see the envy and longing in his eyes.

Despite its organisational shortcomings, the event gave Allan Williams instant huge prestige as Larry Parnes’ ambassador on Merseyside. Even John was sufficiently awed to forget his usual fierce independence where his music was concerned and beg help of this seeming miracle-worker. A few days after the concert, he buttonholed Williams at the Jacaranda’s kitchen door with a muttered plea to ‘do something’ for the Beatals.

From the local talent on show at the boxing stadium, Parnes had singled out only one potential addition to his stable. John Gustafson, the darkly handsome bass player with Cass and the Cassanovas, was invited to accompany Parnes back to London and be groomed for stardom in his inimitable fashion.

To the rest, the opportunity Parnes offered was not to become pampered thoroughbreds so much as all-purpose workhorses. He was currently in urgent need of musicians to back his solo vocalists on the extensive tours through Britain that were their most lucrative market. Billy Fury himself, the stable’s premier attraction, was about to begin a string of nationwide appearances, but as yet had no group to accompany him. Hiring local sidemen to play on shows in the north and Scotland was an attractively cheaper option for Parnes than paying to transport them all the way up from London.

He therefore detailed Allan Williams to assemble the best performers at the boxing stadium along with other deserving candidates for a mass audition-cum-talent contest. The winners would get the job of touring with Billy Fury, while the runners-up would be assigned to lesser Parnes protégés like Duffy Power and Dickie Pride. Parnes would conduct the audition in person, returning in a week and bringing Fury with him to assist in the selection process. Under pressure from John, Williams agreed to overlook the Beatals’ second division status and let them take part. There was one essential precondition, however. A star from the Larry Parnes stable could not conceivably take the stage backed by musicians whose rhythm was ‘in the guitars’. They had less than a week to solve the problem that had defeated them for more than a year and find themselves a drummer.

A bout of frantic asking around the groups at the Jacaranda turned up only one even remote possibility. From Brian Casser, the singer with Cass and the Cassanovas, they heard of someone named Tommy Moore, who occasionally sat in on drums at the Cassanovas’ own ad hoc club above the Temple Restaurant in Dale Street. Moore proved to be a forklift driver at Garston’s bottle factory, diminutive in size, nervous in manner and at age 36, in their eyes, practically an oldage pensioner. On the overwhelming credit side, he possessed his own full drum kit, could whack out a serviceable rock-’n’-roll beat and, best of all, did not collapse with laughter at the idea of joining up with them. After the briefest audition in John and Stu’s room at Gambier Terrace, Tommy Moore was in.

The second pressing need was for yet another new name. ‘The Beatals’ had never really worked, either visually or aurally, and had led to much teasing from the acts who nightly beat them all over Liverpool. After further brainstorming by John and Stu, it was decided to become the Silver Beetles: not so much crawly live insects now as ornamental scarabs in some 1920s detective story. From rival musicians, the response was yet again an array of downturned thumbs. Style-conscious Brian Casser in particular urged them to follow the accepted formula—for instance, putting the silver and John’s name together for a Treasure Island effect, Long John and Silvermen, or Pieces of Silver, or Johnny Silver and the Pieces of Eight. But the scarabs had made their decision, and would not budge from it.

The audition took place on 10 May at the Wyvern Social Club, a run-down premises in Seel Street that Allan Williams planned to convert into an upscale nightclub named the Blue Angel. Here the Silver Beetles found all the usual crushing competition with their right-on names: Rory Storm and the Hurricanes (featuring Ringo Starr’s ‘Starr Time’), Derry and the Seniors, Cass and the Cassanovas. Slim chance though the Silver Beetles stood of being chosen to back Billy Fury, there was at least the thrill of meeting the star himself as he sat at a table with Larry Parnes, rather like adjudicators in a school music festival. He was in every way the antithesis of his name: a shy, polite Wavertree lad, permanently coated in orange makeup, who cared less for girls than for his pet tortoise and already suffered from the heart trouble that would eventually kill him at 41. To create the necessary camouflage of his Liverpool origins, he spoke with a vaguely American accent but otherwise was refreshingly unpretentious, treating the Silver Beetles like potential sidemen as plausible as any others and signing an autograph when John nervously approached him on the others’ behalf.

These pleasant preliminaries quickly turned into nightmare. The Silver Beetles’ new drummer, Tommy Moore, was supposed to rendezvous with them at the Wyvern after collecting some stray equipment from the Cassanovas’ club room in Dale Street. When their turn came to play, Tommy still had not arrived. To fill in for him, Allan Williams deputed Johnny Hutch from Cass and the Cassanovas, the intimidating tough guy who always so loudly dismissed John and his group as ‘a bunch of posers’ and ‘not worth a carrot’. ‘Johnny hated having to sit in with them,’ John Gustafson remembers. ‘He only did it because Allan told him to.’

A local freelance photographer was on hand to capture them apparently blowing their big moment in agonizing detail. For once, they were wearing uniforms of a sort—dark shirts, matching jeans with patch pockets oddly outlined in white, and cheap two-tone Italian shoes that Parnes, in the half-light, mistook for ‘tennis shoes’. John and Paul had decided that the way to catch the great man’s eye, and distract his attention from the flawed lineup, was to leap and jump around like Elvis at his most hyperactive. In painful contrast to these joined-at-the-hip ravers, self-conscious George barely moved at all, while Stu, as usual, was too ashamed of his poor bass playing even to face front. Behind this mismatched ménage sat their temporary drummer, Johnny Hutch, in ordinary street clothes, making his feelings clear with every passionless roll and perfunctory cymbal smash.

The audition, as expected, proved to be a carve-up among Merseyside’s heavy hitters. The plum job of backing Billy Fury went to Cass and the Cassanovas, while Derry and the Seniors were hired for Fury’s stablemate, Duffy Power. But, despite the Silver Beetles’ lack of lustre, something about them appealed to Larry Parnes. It so happened that Parnes also needed backing musicians for another of his artists, Johnny Gentle, who was booked for a Scottish tour from 20 to 28 May. The Silver Beetles, to their astonishment, were offered the job at a fee of £18 each.

Though its dates fell smack in the middle of college and school term time, there was no question of anyone turning it down. George had by now left Liverpool Institute to become an apprentice electrician and, like Tommy Moore, could take the time as holiday. Paul, theoretically cramming for his A-levels, persuaded his father that a spell of travelling around Scotland would give his brain a rest. Stu and John simply cut college classes for a week, a decision that horrified Stu’s teachers—and his mother Millie—because he was just about to take his finals. John did not tell Mimi about the tour, knowing too well what a storm of protest it would unleash. A week was about the maximum time he could disappear off her radar screen without making her wonder what he was up to.

There was a general feeling that, as employees of Parnes, however junior and temporary, they should adopt stage names after his own well-tried principle. So Paul became Paul Ramon, thinking it had a sultry, tango-dancing feel; George became Carl Harrison in homage to Carl Perkins, the writer of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’; and Stu became Stu de Stael after the Russian abstract painter Nicolas de Stael. In later years, John would deny with some annoyance that he did follow Cass’s advice after all and identify himself with the peg-legged sea cook of Treasure Island. ‘I was never—repeat NEVER—known as Johnny Silver,’ he wrote to music journalist Roy Carr more than a decade later, ‘I always preferred my own name…There was one occasion when a guy [Cass?] introduced me as Long John and the Silvermen…in the days of old when they didn’t like the word Beatle!! I’m actually serious about this…it gets on my TIT!’ But according to Paul, ‘He was Long John throughout that Scottish tour…and he was quite happy to be Long John.’

Johnny Gentle was, in fact, yet another fellow Liverpudlian, a former merchant seaman named John Askew who had first found his voice by singing to fellow crewmen and passengers (although, of course, no one wanted to know about any of that). Aged 24, he was the usual mix of brawny good looks and big hair from the Parnes template. But despite extensive promotion as a gentler alternative to Fury and Power, he had not yet made any impact on the UK record charts.

He did not meet his new backing group until they came off the train at Alloa. There was time for only half an hour’s rehearsal before they went onstage together at the Town Hall in nearby Marshill. This first show was so bad that Parnes’ Scottish co-promoter, a sometime poultry farmer named Duncan McKinnon, almost sent the Silver Beetles back to Liverpool on the next train. But Gentle liked them and managed to convince McKinnon they would improve with practice.

Any illusions about the glamour of rock-’n’-roll touring melted away quicker than a Scotch mist. The six remaining gigs were not in big cities like Glasgow or Edinburgh but remote towns scattered up the northeast coast and deep into the Highlands: Inverness, Fraserburgh, Keith, Forres, Nairn and Peterhead. The venues were ballrooms, municipal buildings or agricultural halls, with Gentle heading a bill otherwise composed of local singers and groups. He and his five sidemen travelled together with their equipment in one small van, driven by a McKinnon employee named Gerry Scott. ‘We were playing to nobody in little halls,’ George remembered, ‘until the pubs cleared out, when about five Scottish Teds would come in and look at us.’

While Gentle, as the star, was accommodated in hotels, the sidemen had to make do with shared rooms in grim Highland boardinghouses and bed-and-breakfasts, where Calvinist texts decorated the walls and light and heat were measured out by coin meter. Thanks to their rock-bottom allowance from Parnes, they could afford to eat only in the cheapest workmen’s caffs and fish-and-chip shops. John’s cold comfort holidays at his Uncle Bert’s croft in Durness, away to the west, seemed luxurious by comparison.

As things turned out, few Scottish teenagers even realised they were watching ‘Long John’ Lennon, Paul Ramon, Carl Harrison and Stu de Stael—or even the Silver Beetles, for that matter. Press advertisements and posters billed them simply as ‘Johnny Gentle and his group’. There had apparently been some loss of nerve over the new name: a gig at Lathom Hall on 14 May saw them truncated to the Silver Beats and, according to Johnny Gentle, they had reverted to calling themselves the Beatals by the time they reached Alloa.

Fortunately for them, the star was a through-and-through Scouser whose life in the Parnes stable had not made the least swollenheaded. So John, Paul and George put themselves out for Johnny, conscientiously learning his Ricky Nelson ballad repertoire, goosing it up with livelier Presley numbers like ‘Wear My Ring Around Your Neck’. He in turn did what he could to make them more like a conventional, uniformed backing group. ‘They’d come without any proper stage clothes,’ he remembers. ‘George had a black shirt and I had one, too, that I didn’t wear. So I let them have that, and we scraped up enough money between us to buy another one so that at least their three front men would look roughly the same.’

On their van journeys through the Highlands, John took the lead in quizzing Gentle about life as a teen idol and the quickest route to achieving it. ‘He was inquisitive about everything…what was Billy like…what was Marty like…should he and the others go to London and try to get discovered…where would they stay? He was going places, and he knew it even then. At one place after we played, he and the others got pushed aside by some girls crowding round to get my autograph. John shouted out “That’ll be us some day, Johnny.”’

The long intervals of discomfort and boredom that had to be endured gave extra edge to John’s sarcastic tongue and his impulse to pillory human weakness or frailty wherever they revealed themselves. Tommy Moore, the group’s too-elderly drummer, was a frequent target of Lennonesque practical jokes—often cruel, usually pointless, sometimes perpetrated for an audience no larger than himself. As Tommy lay in bed at night, John would softly open the door of his room, lasso his bedpost with a towel, then pull the bed by slow degrees toward the door. However tireless the baiting of Tommy, he got off lightly in comparison with Stu Sutcliffe. It was as if standing onstage with the Hofner president like a sunburst millstone around his neck robbed Stu of everything that had made John respect, or even like, him. The others took their cue from John, mocking Stu’s musicianship and appearance, making sure he always got the van’s most uncomfortable seat, the metal ledge over the rear wheel. ‘We were terrible,’ John would later admit. ‘We’d tell him he couldn’t sit with us or eat with us. We’d tell him to go away, and he did.’

Inverness found the star and his group for once in the same overnight accommodation, with the bonus of a pretty view across water. Here it emerged that Billy Fury was not the only Parnes singer in the arcane business of writing his own material. Gentle, too, had already composed several Buddy Holly-ish songs, and he took advantage of this respite to work on a half-finished ballad called ‘I’ve Just Fallen’. John, who was listening in, mentioned that he did ‘a bit of songwriting’ and suggested that Gentle’s middle eight—the gear change after the opening couple of verses—didn’t quite work. He had a spare middle eight, he said, that Gentle was welcome to put into the song.

We know that we’ll get by

Just wait and see.

Just like the song tells us

The best things in life are free.

Although never to make the charts, ‘I’ve Just Fallen’ had a respectable enough career ahead of it. A year later, the producer John Barry picked it up as an album track for Britain’s then most successful pop star, Adam Faith. In 1962, Gentle himself recorded it as a B-side under the new name of Darren Young. That simple minor-key middle eight—for which he received neither credit nor payment—thus represents the first John Lennon words and music ever to be professionally recorded. Ironically, both versions appeared on Parlophone, the label that soon would spout out his hits like a geyser.

En route from Inverness to Fraserburgh, Gerry Scott, the van driver, was feeling hung-over, so he asked Johnny Gentle to take a spell behind the wheel. At a confusing road fork, Gentle turned the wrong way and hit an approaching car head-on. The impact hurled a sleeping John from the back of the van into the front and sent the piled-up stage equipment cannoning into Tommy Moore with such force that two of his front teeth were loosened. The first arrivals at the crash scene were a pair of teenage girls from a nearby house; recognising Gentle, they took the opportunity to collect autographs from him and his five dazed companions.

Fortunately no police were involved, but Tommy Moore had to be driven to hospital suffering from concussion. Despite his traumatised state, there was no question of Tommy being excused his so-crucial role onstage. While he was still being treated in casaulty, John turned up accompanied by the show’s promoter and virtually frog-marched him off to duty. He had only a confused memory of playing that night, full of painkilling drugs and with a bandage round his head.

Things went rapidly downhill from there. The sidemen had by now spent all their small subsistence allowance from Larry Parnes, but had seen no sign of the second instalment Parnes was meant to send them via Allan Williams. For the tour’s last couple of days, they were reduced to semi-vagrancy, skipping out of cafés without paying and sleeping in the van. Good-natured Johnny Gentle, who suffered no such hardships, offered to telephone Parnes on their behalf to chase up the missing payment. When Gentle seemed not to be pitching it strongly enough, John grabbed the receiver. ‘He didn’t hold back. It was like “We’re fuckin’ skint up here. We haven’t got a pot to piss in. We need money, Larry!”’ Gentle remembers. ‘Anyway, it seemed to work because Williams did send them up a few pounds more.’ Stu’s mother also made a contribution to help pay for their train tickets home.

If the Scottish tour did little for the Silver Beetles’ finances (Tommy’s girlfriend was horrified to think how much more he could have made in a comparable period at Garston bottle works), at least it put them on a significantly improved footing back in Liverpool. Johnny Gentle sang their praises to Larry Parnes, saying he would happily tour with them again and urging Parnes to put them under permanent contract. But Parnes had enough on his plate with solo singers like Dickie Pride, the so-called ‘Sheik of Shake’, who was prone to drink, drugs and stealing cars. He preferred not to risk multiplying such headaches by five.

In any case, the Silver Beetles had by now acquired a managercum-agent in Allan Williams—albeit one who would always regard the office more as a burden than a privilege. Williams began handling their Merseyside bookings under the same loose arrangement he had with their one-time gods Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Derry and the Seniors. In between, they were granted a second-string residency in the Jacaranda basement, appearing every Monday, when the West Indian steel band had the night off.

Early in June, an arts festival at the university brought the celebrated young poet Royston Ellis on what he intended to be only a short visit to Liverpool. Nineteen-year-old Ellis was a beat poet in the literal sense, having conceived the unprecedented notion of fusing highbrow spoken verse together with lowbrow—or, rather, no-brow—live rock ‘n’ roll. Other than John Betjeman, he was the only British poet regularly seen on prime-time television, when he would read his work backed by, among others, Cliff Richard’s Shadows and the future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.

After his Liverpool University gig, Ellis gravitated to the Jacaranda, there falling into conversation with ‘a dishy-looking boy’ whose name turned out to be George Harrison. Later that evening, George took him to Gambier Terrace to meet John and Stu. They all hit it off so well that Ellis was invited to miss his train from Lime Street and stay over on one of the mattresses on the floor. During his stay, he showed his new friends a useful aid to staying awake in their all-night lives as musicians and artists. Ordinary nasal inhalers, sold over the counter at every drugstore, contained wicks impregnated with Benzedrine. One had only to break the plastic tube and chew the wick inside to get the same effect as any expensive pep pill. ‘I also told them that statistically one person in every four was homosexual,’ he remembers. ‘John’s eyes widened at that.’

Since Ellis had plenty of money and was an enthusiastic cook, the cuisine at Gambier Terrace during his stay improved dramatically. His most ambitious culinary effort, a chicken pie with mushrooms, unfortunately got left for too long in the decrepit gas stove and burst into flames, almost setting fire to the whole kitchen. John, he recalls, was fascinated by the idea of combining rock music and poetry, and awed that someone of his young years should already have published a poetry collection. Ellis replied that his real ambition was to turn out prose for the lucrative mass market; as he put it, he wanted to be ‘a paperback writer’.

To end his visit, he gave a poetry reading at the Jacaranda, backed by John, Paul, George, Stu and Tommy. The event was such a success that Ellis urged them to forget their college, work and school commitments and just go for it in London, the way he himself had done from Pinner, Middlesex, three years earlier. His valediction, so he claims, was to end their wavering between Silver Beetles and Beatals, and nail the pun properly at last. It should be ‘Beatles’, he told John, as a double play on beat poetry and beat music.

There has probably never been a title whose authorship was more fiercely disputed. But Ellis’s stay at Gambier Terrace and this final, irrevocable name change undoubtedly did coincide. Early June brought two regular bookings over the water in Cheshire for the same promoter, Les Dodd: one at the Grosvenor Ballroom in Liscard, Wallasey, the other at Neston Institute on the Wirral. For the Grosvenor gig, the Wallasey newspaper advertised the Silver Beetles, ‘jive and rock specialists’; a local press story on their Neston debut a few days afterward called them the Beatles. This second mention still listed the pseudonymous Paul Ramon, Carl Harrison and Stu de Stael, but the name of ‘their leader’ was given as plain John Lennon once more.

The Scottish tour had left Tommy feeling more battered than his drums, not to mention grievously out of pocket; he was also tired of the sarcasm and backbiting that John ceaselessly orchestrated against Stu, and—as a conscientious workingman—appalled by John’s beatnik philosophy. ‘Lennon once told me he’d commit suicide rather than get a conventional job. “Death before work”—those were his very words. His girlfriend, Cynthia, was sitting in the front seat of the van at that time.’ On 11 June, Tommy failed to rendezvous with his colleagues at the Jacaranda for that night’s appearance at the Grosvenor Ballroom. Yielding to pressure from his girlfriend, he had decided to return to his more lucrative job on the forklift at Garston bottle works, so becoming the only person ever to resign from the Beatles.

The gap was temporarily filled by a picture framer named Norman Chapman, an accomplished spare-time percussionist whom they happened to overhear late one night practising alone in an office building close to the Jacaranda. Chapman proved amenable to joining them and fitted in well enough, but he had time to play only three gigs at the Grosvenor—including an impromptu reunion performance with Johnny Gentle—before being spirited away as one of the very last victims of National Service. The Beatles were beatless yet again.

With no outside promoter willing to book them, almost the only work to be had through that hot Mersey midsummer was in Allan Williams’s own ever-growing entertainments empire. Williams’s newest venture was a strip club in Kimberley Street, just off Upper Parliament Street, grandiosely styled the New Cabaret Artists Club and run in partnership with a West Indian calypso musician known as Lord Woodbine. Here during their virtually gig-free July, the Beatles made a one-shot afternoon appearance as backing group to a stripper named Janice, with Paul McCartney taking the drummer’s seat. In terms of eroticism, it barely packed the charge of John’s college life-drawing class, particularly since Janice expected her musicians to play appropriate mood pieces like ‘The Gipsy Fire Dance’ from sheet music.

Around the middle of the month, Allan Williams was drinking at Ye Cracke when he fell into conversation with a couple of out-of-town journalists. They said they were from the Empire News, the dullest of Britain’s downmarket Sunday papers, and were researching a feature article on how college students managed on their state grants. Seeing a chance to get himself into the article, Williams held forth at length on the poverty of Liverpool art students (omitting to mention his own opportunistic employment of them as decorators and strip-club musicians). He then took the journalists to John and Stu’s Gambier Terrace flat, introduced them to its occupants, and hung around while interviews were conducted and photographs taken.

Williams had been misled, however. The hacks were not from the Empire News, but from its huge-circulation and scandal-hungry stablemate, the People. Nor was the article about student grants, but about the growing influence of America’s beatnik movement among British youth. In America, beatniks had been considered at worst faintly comic, with their folk music, horn-rimmed glasses and earnest reading of Camus and Sartre. In Britain—or, at least, to Britain’s gutter press—they had taken over from Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls as symbols of juvenile delinquency.

THIS IS THE BEATNIK HORROR screamed a double-page spread in the People on Sunday, 24 July. A purportedly nationwide survey gave harrowing details of the ‘unsavoury cult’ that was said (without any evidence) to have turned young Americans by the thousand into ‘drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies…and outright thugs and hoodlums’. As an instance of the ‘unbelievable squalor that surrounds these well-educated youngsters,’ the report described a three-room flat in ‘decaying Gambier Terrace in the heart of Liverpool’. The accompanying photograph showed several of the tenants in what was called the living room, but was actually John’s and Stu’s bedroom. No squalid detail was left unlisted, from its broken armchairs and debris-strewn table to the floor ‘littered with newspapers, milk bottles, beer and spirits bottles, bits of orange-peel, paint-tubes and lumps of cement and plaster of Paris.’

Of the figures shown in the picture, Allan Williams alone was recognisable, by his black beard—his journalist pals taking pains to make clear he was just a visitor who’d dropped in to Beatnik Hell to ‘listen to some jazz’. The only tenants mentioned by name were Rod Murray and Rod Jones. Mid-July being holiday time, John was probably not even in residence, but back enjoying the home comforts and steak pies of Mendips. This very first time that the media searchlight shone into his life, it missed him completely.

Before August 1960, everything that John, Paul, George and Stu knew about Hamburg between them could have been written comfortably on the back of a postage stamp. They knew it vaguely as a northern port in the then Federal Republic of West Germany, whose name often appeared on the sterns of ships tying up in the Mersey. They knew of it even more vaguely as the one city on mainland Europe whose sexual daring surpassed even that of Paris. For years, Liverpool mariners had brought home lurid tales about its red-light district, the Reeperbahn, where female nudity was said to flourish on a scale as yet undreamed of in Britain and the cabarets to feature barely imaginable acts with whips, mud, live snakes or even donkeys. The tarts of Lime Street seemed like maiden aunts by comparison.

Unlike London’s Soho or New York’s 42nd Street, the Reeperbahn had no history of fostering music alongside the sex. But by the late fifties, thanks mainly to West Germany’s American military occupiers (who, of course, included Elvis Presley) rock-’n’-roll culture was seeping in even there. To attract the younger customers, a club owner named Bruno Koschmider hit on the idea of presenting live beat groups at his establishment rather than simply relying on a jukebox like his competitors. The requisite live sound being still beyond West German musicians, or Belgian or French ones, Koschmider had no option but to recruit his groups from Britain. Through a convoluted chapter of accidents that would need a chapter of its own to relate, the place from which he ended up recruiting them was Liverpool, and the person who became his main supplier was Allan Williams.

Williams’s first export to Herr Koschmider and the Reeperbahn had been the highly professional and versatile Derry and the Seniors. So powerful a draw did they prove at Koschmider’s club, the Kaiserkeller, that he sent an enthusiastic request for more of the same. Despite protests from the Seniors, that such a ‘bum group’ would spoil the scene for everyone else, Williams decided to offer the gig to the Beatles.

The engagement was for six weeks, beginning on 16 August; it could not be slotted in among other commitments like the Johnny Gentle tour, but would require all of them to abandon their various respectable courses in life for the precarious existence of fulltime musicians. They would be working for an unknown employer in a foreign city hundreds of miles away, among a people who, not many years previously, had tried to bomb their country into extinction. Nonetheless, the response to Williams’s offer was an instant, resounding affirmative.

To the many admirers of Stu Sutcliffe’s art, the decision seemed little short of insane. He had just been awarded his National Diploma in Art and Design with painting as his specialist subject, and was about to begin a postgraduate teacher-training course. He himself fully realised what was at stake, and had initially refused the Hamburg offer, but then John had said that the Beatles wouldn’t go without him, and he couldn’t let John down.

His tutor, Arthur Ballard, was appalled by this seemingly pointless sacrifice of a brilliant future, and furious with John—and Allan Williams—for encouraging it. Stu had been such an exceptional student, however, that the college showed willingness to bend the rules for him. He was told he could begin his postgraduate course later in the academic year if he wished.

Paul McCartney and George Harrison were also putting excellent career prospects at risk, as their respective families and teachers unavailingly told them. Paul had just taken his A-levels and, like Stu, planned a teaching career, probably specialising in English. George had an apprenticeship as an electrician at Blacklers, the central Liverpool department store, which in those days virtually guaranteed him employment for life.

Alone of the five, John seemed to have nothing to lose. He had no prospect of gaining any meaningful qualification from art college, and no idea what he wanted to do as a career. The sole obstacle to be reckoned with was his Aunt Mimi. As his guardian, albeit never legally recognised as such, Mimi had the power to veto the whole trip. And, to be sure, her mixture of horror and mystification when first told about it were precisely as John expected. Mimi had no more understanding of rock ‘n’ roll than when she first sent him out to practise in Mendips’ soundproof front porch four years previously; to her, it was still no more than a hobby that interfered with his studies, involved the most unsavoury possible people and places, and could never conceivably earn him anything like a proper living.

Now, at least, John could reply that it would be earning him a living. The Beatles’ collective weekly wage in Hamburg would be close to £100, which admittedly boiled down to only about £2.50 per day each, yet still seemed astronomical compared with the pittances they were paid in Liverpool. Fortunately, Mimi had never even heard of the Reeperbahn, let alone what was reputed to happen there. Her objections to ‘Humbug’, as she persisted in calling it, were that John would be giving up college and that he’d be associating with the erstwhile bombers of Liverpool. In the end, she decided—probably rightly—that if she didn’t give permission, he’d simply run away, and then might never come back again.

Like most British teenagers in 1960, John had never been abroad and did not even possess a passport. To apply for one, he had to produce his birth certificate, a document that had somehow gone missing after the frantic tug-of-love that had followed his birth. It turned up in the nick of time—but the way to Hamburg wasn’t all smooth sailing yet.

The Beatles’ new employer, Herr Koschmider, would obviously expect them to have a drummer. In the absence of any successor to Norman Chapman, Paul agreed to take on the role permanently, assembling a scratch kit from odds and ends that previous incumbents had left behind. The problem was that Koschmider had requested a group exactly like Derry and the Seniors—i.e., a quintet. That left only two weeks to find a fifth Beatle. At one point, John even considered asking Royston Ellis to join, in the role of ‘poet-compère’, as if he expected the Reeperbahn to be like some earnestly attentive student union.

On 6 August, complaints from surrounding residents about noise, drunkenness and violence shut down the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey, thereby depriving the Beatles of their last regular Merseyside gig. For want of anything better to do that night, they ended up at the Casbah coffee club in Hayman’s Green.

In the ten months since John, Paul and George had played there as the Quarrymen—and walked out in a huff over a 15-shilling payment—the homely basement club had gone from strength to strength under Mona Best’s vigorous management. Even more gallingly, Ken Brown, the former Quarryman and cause of that bitter 15-bob tiff, had formed a new group, the Blackjacks, who now regularly drew bigger weekend crowds than even Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. A major factor in their success was Mrs Best’s moodily handsome son, Peter, playing a sumptuous new drum kit in a pale blue mother-of-pearl finish (with real calfskins), which his adoring mother had bought him.

Pete Best and his blue drums solved both of the Beatles’ predeparture problems at a stroke. ‘We just grabbed him and auditioned him,’ John remembered. ‘He could keep one beat going for long enough, so we took him.’