About The Author

Born in Dover, England, in 1951, Alan Clayson lives near Henley-on-Thames with his wife, Inese, and sons, Jack and Harry. His portrayal in the Western Morning News as “the AJP Taylor of the pop world” is supported by Q’s “his knowledge of the period is unparalleled and he’s always unerringly accurate”. He has written many books on music, including best-sellers Backbeat (subject of a major film) and The Yardbirds, as well as for journals as diverse as The Guardian, Record Collector, Mojo, The Times, Mediaeval World, Eastern Eye, Folk Roots, Guitar, Hello!, The Independent, Ugly Things, The Times and, as a teenager, the notorious Schoolkids’ Oz. He has also performed and lectured on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as broadcast on national TV and radio.

From 1975 to 1985, he led the legendary group Clayson And The Argonauts and was thrust to “a premier position on rock’s Lunatic Fringe” (Melody Maker). As shown by the formation of a US fan club — dating from a 1992 soirée in Chicago — Alan Clayson’s following has continued to grow, as has demand for his talents as a record producer and the number of cover versions of his compositions by such diverse acts as Dave Berry — in whose Cruisers he played keyboards in the mid-1980s — and new-age outfit Stairway. He has also worked with The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Wreckless Eric, Twinkle, The Yardbirds, The Pretty Things and the late Screaming Lord Sutch, among others. While his stage act defies succinct description, he is spearheading an English form of chanson. Moreover, his latest album, Soirée, may stand as his artistic apotheosis, were it not for the promise of surprises yet to come.

Further information is obtainable from www.alanclayson.com.

Contents

Information Page

Prologue: “I Only Learnt To Play To Back Myself”

1 “Who Am I To Regard As Mother?”

2 “There Was Something Slightly Worrying About Him”

3 “His One Saving Grace Was That Stuart Liked Him”

4 “Aggressive Restraint, A Brando Type”

5 “Which Way Are We Going, Boys”

6 “I Don’t Know — What Do You Think?”

7 “Pinching Our Arrangements Down To The Last Note”

8 “Kids Everywhere Go For The Same Stuff”

9 “Controlled Weirdness”

10 “The Change In Him Was Like Jekyll And Hyde”

11 “An Escape Valve From The Beatles”

12 “Who’d Want To Be An 80-Year-Old Beatle?”

13 “The Look Of Fated Youth”

Epilogue: “And Now, Thank Christ, It’s Over”

Author’s Note

Selective Bibliography

Notes

To Valdis Eriks, Laura and Anika

“He’s dead but he won’t lie down”
— Old music-hall song

Prologue
“I Only Learnt To Play To Back Myself”

Just what the world needs, eh? Another book about John Lennon.

You probably know at least the bare bones of the story backwards, but for that aged Tibetan monk who still hasn’t heard of him, Lennon is recognised generally as the leader of a 1960s pop group called The Beatles, who sold — and still sell — millions of gramophone records. If Lennon — arguably, the group’s chief creative pivot — had shed most of his artistic load by 1968, he’d left such an ineradicable impression on the complacency of post-war pop that certain of his more jaw-dropping public activities were dismissed initially as the prerogative of celebrity.

Although the world become wiser to his failings — mainly via a decidedly erratic post-Beatles career — his omnipotence is such that veneration has yet to fade for countless fans in a languid daze from the fixity of gazing — figuratively, anyway — at the Dakota Building, the luxury apartment block in New York that was his family home for the final years of a life that was as triumphant as it was tragic. As a 1960s myth, rather than the mere man who was shot dead by a nobody called Mark David Chapman on 8 December 1980, John Lennon was built to last.

As early as 1963, a certain Billy Shepherd was preparing his The True Story Of The Beatles, the first of more biographies of The Beatles — together and apart — than anyone could have imagined then. Described by BBC radio presenter John Peel as “the engine room of The Beatles”,¹ Lennon has been particularly well served. Indeed, the principal events of almost every day of his life since 1962 have been accounted for in some publication or other, and even as sources of “new and rediscovered facts” continue to dry up, there are presently nearly 70 books concerning him alone still in print. How many have you read already?

Even before his hasty cremation, publishers were liaising with authors about posthumous explorations of every nook and cranny of John’s four decades on this planet. Raw information has been chronicled over and over again, whether cornucopias of listings — say, the 700 pages of Keith Badman’s day-by-day diary, The Beatles After The Break-Up — or Bill Harry’s vast, meticulous and culminant John Lennon Encyclopedia, which deals with people, places and things concerning the subject as accurately and as adequately as anyone might reasonably expect.

While these books cater for the devotee who derives deep and lasting pleasure from studying basic data, more opinionated tomes have ranged from near-hagiographies — such as Lennon by Carole Lynn Corbin — aimed at those for whom the former art student sits at the right hand of God to the likes of Every Sound There Is: The Beatles’ Revolver And The Transformation Of Rock And Roll, a collection of essays pitched at the consumer who attends a concert in order to chat about how “interesting” it was in licensed premises afterwards. In the privacy of his own home, he reads a lot, thinks a lot, but does nothing. Perhaps the word I’m looking for is intellectual. Dripping from the pens of college academics from across the globe, titles like “A Flood Of Flat-Sevenths”, “Premature Turns: Thematic Disruption In The American Version” and “Rearranging Base And Superstructure In The Rock Ballad” telegraph that you might need to have a dictionary of musicological terms — or at least a plain dictionary — close to hand.

At another point on the spectrum is The Lives Of John Lennon by the late Albert Goldman, a best-seller that depicted Lennon as barking mad after a lifetime of incredible human frailty. Forgive my xenophobic paranoia, but I’ve read few books concerning British pop written by North Americans that have come anywhere near capturing the peculiarities of being British. I’m not even sure whether a non-Liverpudlian like myself is qualified to write about a Beatle, but I don’t waste sentences explaining what I mean by “winkle-pickers” and “not half”. I do not revolt readers by juxtaposing imagined British colloquialisms like “all of a blessed sudden” with hip Americanisms such as referring to a sex orgy as a “fuckfest”. I don’t think Ascot is a suburb of London. Crucially, anyone who refers to John Lennon’s “cockney chirpiness” — as a Rolling Stone journalist did in a biography of Paul McCartney — is a bit suspect.

In Canadian Geoffrey Giuliano’s Dark Horse, a “secret life of George Harrison”, Pete Best’s dismissal in 1962 is over in half a sentence, and not long afterwards The Beatles are winding up a world tour in San Francisco four years later. Furthermore, did John really shout, “Sieg heil, you mothers!” at the Kaiserkeller audience? And what’s all this about “after leaving Quarry Bank High School For Boys in 1953, George was enrolled at the Liverpool Institute"? Maybe Giuliano thinks “high school” means “primary school” over here. In any case, it was Lennon, not Harrison, who went to Quarry Bank. That was among Giuliano’s more glaring gaffs, but with self-interested vigilance I stumbled on a few other testaments to Rudyard Kipling’s “what should they know of England who only England know?” but, overall, Dark Horse was an untaxing read with little that was particularly new or significant revealed.

Yet, when I was approached to write this present account, I wondered how difficult it would be for me too to say anything fresh or valuable about John Lennon without taking liberties with the old backstage plot, treating his most flippant remarks as gospel or squeezing paragraphs from, say, drummer Jim McCarty’s observations when his Yardbirds secured a support spot with The Beatles’ during their 1964 season at Hammersmith Odeon. During an intermission, he saw Lennon standing at the top of a fire-escape at the back of the building in the teddy-bear costume he wore for one of the comedy sketches, which then filled part of the show. John was considering the purchase of one of a fleet of limousines from a London showroom. As it was inconvenient for the pop star to visit the garage during opening hours, its bowing, scraping proprietor had arranged for the vehicles to nose past the twilit foot of the metal stairway.

Another problem I had is this: I don’t know about you, but Lennon’s more orthodox music — both solo and with The Beatles — has become so embedded by 40 years of availability and airplay that I hear most of it nowadays no more than a sailor hears the sea. To ask my opinion about ‘She Loves You’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ or ‘Imagine’ is like asking me about railway lines or donkeys’ false teeth because I can’t say anything objective about them any more. They’re just there.

For reasons connected vaguely with this, and for psychological stimulation, I Blu-Tacked a picture of John Lennon on the wall. It hung there until I got sick of the wretched fellow gazing reproachfully at an untidy room that my piano and writing desk dominate like twin castle sinisters while, like a medieval scribe at his parchment, I deciphered exercise books full of scribble and transcribed interview tapes. While I was still establishing an order peculiar to myself, Lennon witnessed too the occasional wild-haired search for some mislaid jotting or other that had me ready to kill someone.

Bear in mind also that, as a soldier going over the top in the Great War, I have to screw myself up before talking to various members of the dramatis personnae about events that took place up to half a century ago — although over the years, I’ve become more desensitised about asking incisive questions that stop just short of open impertinence. If some of my interviewees here were politely evasive on occasions, that very silence often illuminated the back stairs of John Lennon’s life as surely as if they’d actually named names and told tales.

You see, I’m determined that this will be the last word on Lennon — or at least the last word on those aspects of Lennon and his associates that intrigue me. However, in a dark and lonely corner of my mind, a still, small voice tells me that it won’t be, because all publications to do with The Beatles and John Lennon remain such sound marketing exercises that I wonder if there’s ever going to be a cutting-off point. Apparently, someone’s at work on a biography of Mal Evans, one of the group’s road managers. Will there also be a book each from every act on the same label? Everyone who ever covered or revived a Lennon-McCartney song? The foresters who felled the trees to make the paper on which they were written?

I’ll stop being facetious for long enough to state that interest in John Lennon — for what he was and for what consumers think he has become — will endure because his influence as a vocalist and composer is and has been acknowledged by every pop artist that has mattered, and his lyrics are still quoted like proverbs.

During the four-year sabbatical before the brief re-emergence that climaxed in his sudden death, Lennon had become as unreachable an object of myth as Elvis Presley. There wasn’t a newspaper editor in the world who wouldn’t promise a fortune for a Lennon exclusive or an up-to-the-minute photo. Rock stars passing through the Big Apple made at least token efforts to gain an audience with the Grand Old Man, despite his many dubious antics in the past and the hearsay circulating about peculiar goings-on in the Dakota.

Having gouged so deep a wound in pop culture, it might not have mattered if, in the years left to him since the sundering of The Beatles in 1970, Lennon had not continued even a sporadic recording career, let along one containing odd sparks of the old fire that used to power him when The Beatles were stuck on the Liverpool-Hamburg treadmill. At that time there had been so many ideas — and not only musical ones — chasing through his mind that it was all he could do to note them down. Flames of inspiration would kindle during a 20-minute dawdle to Hamburg’s main railway station to buy yesterday’s Daily Express. Others jerked him from a velvet-blue oblivion back into the dungeons where The Beatles slept during their maiden visit in 1960.

Even after the group made it, tomorrow would seem a year away as with McCartney, more often than not, John would figure out a chord sequence to fragments of melody or rhymes to form a couplet. From a mere title, the ghost of maybe a sketchy chorus would smoulder into form and a red-eyed objectivity and private quality control might engross him and Paul until evening became morning with the two surrounded by cigarette butts, smeared coffee cups and pages full of scribbled verse and notation peculiar to themselves.

As he’d never learned to sight-read or write musical script, John was untroubled by the formal dos and don’ts that traditionally affect creative flow. There were only the stylistic clichés and habits ingrained since his teenage self had positioned as-yet-uncalloused fingertips on the taut strings of his first guitar. “I only learnt to play to back myself,”² he’d admit later.

On 9 December 1980, a BBC television reporter asked George Martin, The Beatles’ producer, if he thought that the deceased was a great musician.

“He was a great man,” replied the diplomatic Martin.³

John Lennon wasn’t a virtuoso, far from it, but he functioned fully (most of the time) according to his capacity within the context of The Beatles and was able to cross the demarcation line of John (rhythm guitar), Paul (bass guitar), George (lead guitar) and Ringo (drums) when it was necessary to cut corners. He played lead, for instance, on both ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’ — on which neither Harrison nor Starr were present — and ‘Get Back’. He was no slouch on keyboards, either, having been hunched over a Vox Continental organ when necessary — admittedly, unheard above the screams — during The Beatles’ final tour.

Yet John Lennon hadn’t had all that much going for him when he trod the boards as an amateur with the skiffle outfit The Quarry Men in 1957. While he could just about find his way around his instrument then, he aroused little fervour for either his singing or his first attempts at composition. On the surface, he wasn’t that brilliant at anything then. And yet…

Alan Clayson
December 2002

1 “Who Am I To Regard As Mother?”

At 6:30pm on Wednesday 9 October 1940, John Winston Lennon was prised into the world at Liverpool’s Oxford Street Maternity Hospital. The BBC Home Service weatherman had forecast that the night and the next day would be dull but mild, which they were. Dull but mild it remained for more or less the next fortnight. But one evening before the baby was brought home, wailing sirens and flares illuminated the sky as the Luftwaffe dropped ton upon booming ton of death and destruction in and around the slip-slapping wharfs of the docklands where the Mersey sweeps into the Irish Sea.

The following morning, brick dust crunched beneath the hooves of dray horses dragging coal through mean streets to rusty ships, but Julia Lennon’s firstborn was destined for a comfortable middle-class home — with a fitted dining-room carpet, not lino — in Menlove Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares of Woolton, a village-like suburb that aligned itself more with rural Lancashire than Merseyside, embracing mock-Tudor colonies, golf clubs and boating lakes.

After his father, Freddie, a seaman of Irish extraction, vanished to all intents and purposes when John was five, so soon did the concept that there is no God but Mummy, and Daddy is the prophet of Mummy. With Freddie represented — perhaps unfairly — as the villain of the piece, the subsequent complications of his wayward mother’s love-life and domestic arrangements made it more convenient for the child to grow up in Mendips, the semi-detached villa of Julia’s childless sister, Mary Smith (whom John would always call by his cradle articulation “Mimi”) and her ex-serviceman husband, George, once an infinitesimal cog in the global hostilities but now running his late father’s dairy business. George was to die suddenly when his nephew by marriage was 14.

As John was to discover, Julia lived nearby with her second family, and bound by the invisible chains that shackle child to parent he used her council house as a bolthole whenever strait-laced Mimi’s rearing methods became oppressive. The innate confusion of “Who am I to regard as mother?” affected John’s ability to trust adult authority figures, whom he mocked and abused as a defence against being rejected by them — particularly after Julia was killed in July 1958 by a car with a policeman, late for his shift, at the wheel.

Moreover, despite the extenuating circumstances, he felt that he’d been cast out by his mother as well as by Freddie, having had enough experience of her to know what he was missing, hence the bitterness inherent in outbursts against teachers, friends and his devoted aunt. She usually blamed doubtful company for John’s mischief when, short-trousered and gaberdine-raincoated, he began his formal education on 12 November 1945 in the kindergarten at Moss Pits Lane Infant School, a few streets’ dawdle from Mendips.

The following April, John was expelled for disruptive behaviour and, chastened by this disgrace, commenced a less wild career at Dovedale Road Primary School. For a while, he modelled himself on “William Brown”, Richmal Crompton’s outrageous 12-year-old from a well-to-do rural family, whose first exploit, Just William, was published in 1917.⁴ Lennon, however, was to go beyond the rough-and-tumble of acceptable boyhood larks on passing his 11 Plus and gaining a place at Quarry Bank, a grammar school nicknamed “the Police State” by the Liverpool Institute, Prescot Grammar, the newer Liverpool Collegiate and other more liberal seats of learning for its pretentious affectations and Draconian rigmarole. An Eton-like house system was in full force there and so was corporal punishment, administered as often as not with the swish of a bamboo cane on buttocks or outstretched palm.

John might have fared better at a secondary modern, where 11 Plus “failures” went, or better still a comprehensive, had one been established on Merseyside by the early 1950s with the schools’ more pronounced “education for all” concept theoretically enabling children to follow what best suited their abilities and inclinations as they developed. As it was, it didn’t take long for John to transform from a capable if uninvolved pupil to a C-stream hard case, hanging onto his place at Quarry Bank by the skin of his teeth. By the end of his second year there, he had become a sharer of smutty stories and magazines of female lingerie and a mainstay of the smoking club behind the bicycle sheds. Indeed, the adult Lennon would be tearing the cellophane off up to three 20 packs a day.

As well as overt offences, John was a more insidiously bad influence on others via his insulting “politeness” to teachers, his red-herring time-wasting tactics in class, his copied homework and his dumb insolence when directed to spit a sweet into the litter bin during lessons.

Similarly leading by example outside school, Lennon had some kind of vice-like grip on his allies in delinquency, some of whom weren’t so much friends as disciples whom he could usually persuade to do almost anything. Among them was the type of specimen that might be lured into some shaming faux pas, sent on a fool’s errand, driven to near-suicide with mind games and slapped hard on the back or around the face under the flag of aggressive friendliness so that he’d have to grin at John with tears in his eyes. He’d want to join the gang, but he’d be a figure of fun at best, at worst the arbitrary object of aggression, and in between an outsider denied the social intercourse that king-bee Lennon and his alpha-boys took for granted. Outwardly unbothered and faithful, he struggled not to put his foot in it when John threw down a few words like small change to a beggar, before that butterfly concentration alighted elsewhere.

Some of Lennon’s “victims”, however, either weaned themselves off him or started to snap back. A few went so far as to put up their fists and look fierce, noting how swiftly their antagonist would back down. “I used to beat them up if they were small enough,” John was to admit, not especially ruefully, “but I’d use long words and confuse them if they were bigger. What mattered was that I stayed in charge.”⁵

Not standing when he could lean, hands rammed in pockets and chewing gum in a half sneer, the attitude of that Lennon boy — lazy, destructive, narcissistic and, as far as he dared, a bully — was also reflected in further extra-curricular activities that had little bearing on what he was supposed to be learning at school. Absorbing a hidden curriculum, he’d developed a messy aptitude as an illustrator and writer of comic verse and stories since Dovedale Primary. On a par with this at Quarry Bank, however, was his interest in the guitar, the instrument that Elvis Presley hung around his neck. Lennon didn’t only like Presley; he worshipped him — no other word would do. John Lennon worshipped Elvis Presley — the Hillbilly Cat, the Memphis Flash, the King Of Western Bop — from the moment he heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, the Tennesseean’s debut entry in the newly established New Musical Express record charts, and saw the first photograph of him published in Britain” as a hybrid of nancy boy and amusement-arcade hoodlum. As far as John was concerned, Elvis was to die metaphorically when manager Colonel Tom Parker’s smoothing of his rough diamond began in 1958, with the stressing of an uncomplaining diligence while the young star was on National Service in the US Army.

Other of the Quarry Bank schoolboy’s rock ‘n’ roll heroes went down, too. Little Richard, a chart fixture with such set-works as ‘Rip It Up,’ ‘Long Tall Sally’ and 1958’s ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ — all dominated by his vamping piano and declamatory vocals — eschewed pop for the Church. Whilst at theological college and a subsequent ministry, he was to issue little but religious material for several years.

Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, was also prone to vigorous bouts of evangelism, but he continued to play the devil’s music after 1957’s ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’, and attendant electrifying appearances on US television catapulted him to international attention. The momentum was sustained with such as ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ and ‘High School Confidential’ before a tour of Britain brought to light his bigamous third espousal to an under-aged cousin.

Chuck Berry would be off the air, too, after ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘Johnny B Goode’ and other self-penned items, which celebrated in song the pleasures that were available to American teenage consumers. In 1959, Berry was to serve the first of two jail terms, which put temporary halts to his career. Nevertheless, this incarceration served to boost his cult celebrity status in Britain where he’d been seen “duckwalking” derisively with a crotch-level guitar only in Jazz on A Summer’s Day, a film documentary about the Newport Jazz Festival.

Buddy Holly And The Crickets also wrote their own songs and this ability, plus the compact sound of two guitars, bass and drums on the group’s only UK tour, was one of the major elements that coalesced to produce the British beat boom. This 1958 visit was in the wake of a string of international smashes, which began with the previous year’s ‘That’ll Be The Day’. However, in the aftershock of his fatal aeroplane crash in 1959, US obituarists tended to write off Holly as a has-been in professional as well as absolute terms.

It was no coincidence that, after Buddy’s British trek and subsequent death, sales of guitars boomed at Frank Hessy’s music shop in central Liverpool. John Lennon, however, had acquired one as a result of an earlier craze traceable to “king of skiffle” Lonnie Donegan being permitted to sing one or two blues-tinged North American folk tunes to the accompaniment of washboard, double bass and his own guitar strumming while a member of Chris Barber’s Jazz Band. “Really, it was me doing impressions of Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly, Josh White and Lonnie Johnson,” confessed Lonnie when I interviewed him two years before his death in November 2002, “as well as Woody Guthrie, Hank Snow, Hank Williams…but they came out as Lonnie Donegan.”

From a 1954 Barber album on Pye Records, there were sufficient BBC Light Programme airings of Lonnie’s ‘Rock Island Line’ to warrant its issue as a grudging spin-off single in autumn 1955. Its alarming climb into the sleepy Top 20s of both Britain and the United States made it expedient for the 24-year-old to go solo. “I didn’t see success in the USA as long term,” estimated Donegan. “I had every intention of coming back and rejoining Chris Barber, but the agent booked me for all sorts of rock ‘n’ roll shows all over America. The first one was with Chuck Berry in Cleveland. I was doing very well, but then I received a telegram from Pye saying, ‘Come Home. “Lost John” at Number Two.’ I was shocked at all the skiffle clubs that had opened everywhere and the thousands of guys trying to imitate Lonnie Donegan. It was uncanny how much John Lennon sounded like me on that Quarry Men tape that turned up a few years ago.”

When ‘Rock Island Line’ boomed from the loudspeakers just before the main feature in a Grantham cinema, Roy Taylor, a member of The Harmonica Vagabonds with fellow members of the YMCA, claimed, “I couldn’t believe my ears! Next morning, I bought the record. Then I bought a guitar and started a skiffle group called just The Vagabonds. For our repertoire, Lonnie couldn’t turn out records fast enough.”

Future Trogg Chris Britton in The Hiccups in Andover, Van Morrison with Belfast’s Sputniks, Peter Smith (later Crispian St Peters) of Swanley’s Hard Travellers and other hitmakers-in-waiting listened hard to Donegan, who bossed the ensuing craze throughout its 1957 prime and beyond. Backed by his own Skiffle Group, Donegan’s driving whine and vibrant personality lacquered further adaptations of similar North American material, which, if failing to further his cause in the land from whence it came, kept him in domestic smashes, even after he offended purists by tilting for wider acceptance with chestnuts from the golden days of Empire, such as chart-topping ‘Putting On The Style’ and ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’, an adaptation of the Merseyside folk ditty ‘My Old Man’s A Fireman On The Elder-Dempster Line’.

“The platform for working at that time was the variety theatres to a very general public,” explained Lonnie. “You could work half the year, and spend the rest doing nothing. I was headlining over dancing girls, comedians, jugglers, whatever, and couldn’t just stand there like one of Lowry’s Matchstick Men, because I had to learn to back-project, announce and get laughs. You had to perform, not just play. Otherwise, you died and got no more work.”

No skiffle purist, John Lennon didn’t mind Lonnie thus broadening his appeal. After a fashion, he too was extending himself beyond US folk songs. At first, he hadn’t played his new guitar much, although Julia — who plinked a banjo — had taught him a few less-than-full chords before she died. Rather than progress beyond these, he’d focused more on cultivating a lustrous, brilliantined pompadour tapering to sideburns like scimitars, even going through a phase of flicking back his quiff just like Elvis, pretending that it wouldn’t stop falling over his eyes.

Sometimes, in a time-honoured ritual of thwarted eroticism, he’d place a Presley single on the record player in his bedroom and arrange himself in front of the wardrobe mirror, standing there with his guitar. From the opening bars to the coda, he’d curl his lip and pretend to slash chords and pick solos with negligent ease. He’d mouth the lyrics, yeah-ing and uh-huh-ing to thousands of ecstatic females that only he could see.

Once, an only-too-real female burst in. Gaping at the arched eyebrow and crooked smile in the doorway, John felt no end of a fool. Then Aunt Mimi gazed into the middle distance and spoke in generalities. The gist was that it’s heartbreaking to see people struggling desperately to be something they can never hope to be. Their vain attempts to scale the heights of their dreams give glimpses of high comedy to someone watching but bring themselves nothing but misery. Tragi-comedy is only truly funny to the truly heartless — but there’s no tragedy in being untalented if you’ve no knowledge of it. It’s a bearable state, even a happy one, until someone opens your eyes to it. Ignorance — or arrogance — can be a very protective shell.

This embarrassing episode may have goaded John to make a more cursory go at learning his instrument properly, bringing him to realise that certain basic chord cycles recurred over and over again in skiffle and classic rock. Yet the fascination of holding down an E major chord didn’t interfere with his work on the visuals, getting all the Elvis Presley moves off too, even though there wasn’t room in the bedroom for feigning a collapse and crawling to the edge of a imaginary stage. The chief motivation for his efforts, of course, was connected with the fleeting flashes of knicker as girls jived in gingham whenever he went to a dance.

A hard-won mastery of basic musical and choreographic techniques, combined with the rising sap of puberty, therefore found him at the central microphone — indeed, the only microphone — with The Quarry Men, as a perk of being in a pop group was, so he understood, readier licence to talk to girls, at least, than most of the other chaps who’d paid to shuffle about in the gloom beyond the stage with a built-in sense of defeat.

Almost as a matter of course, John had a walkover in whatever power struggle there was in The Quarry Men. As well as an ingrained bossiness, he could claim real and imagined genealogical links with showbusiness. There was, apparently, a Liverpool-Irish grandfather, Jack Lennon, who’d emigrated to North America and been in a touring revue called Andrew Robertson’s Kentucky Minstrels prior to returning to Merseyside as a pub entertainer. However, John kept quieter about The Lennon Sisters – Dianne, Peggy, Kathy and Janet — who came to national attention in the USA as featured vocal group on light orchestral supremo Lawrence Welk’s weekly television show, all scripted grinning and harmless fun. And when they were signed to Coral — Buddy Holly’s label — in 1955, they became known as singers of catchy tunes with jaunty rhythms, as demonstrated in their US novelty hit a year later with ‘Tonight You Belong To Me’.

This Lennon sisters had no place in John’s index of possibilities as a Quarry Man. In the burning glare of the footlights — if there were any — at what posters then billed as “swing sessions” in this village institute or that social club, he sometimes incurred the dislike of the expected cluster of teddy boys and other male riff-raff on one side of the hall, keeping up a baleful barrage of catcalls and barracking, whilst the girls danced round each other’s handbags opposite. Narrow-eyed with frustration and alcohol, if they could get it, their objective for being there might metamorphose into more brutal sensual pleasure than the pursuit of sex.

Such attention was partly self-inflicted because of John’s visible and omnipotent hold over the other Quarry Men, just like Lonnie Donegan had held sway over his Skiffle Group. If Lonnie looked like a used-car salesman offstage, the King of Skiffle could be mesmeric in concert, creating true hand-biting excitement as he piled into numbers that the Group didn’t know, taking on and resolving risky extemporisations and generating a sweaty, exhilarating intensity never before experienced in British pop. In retrospect, it’s not silly to put Lonnie Donegan on a par with Jimi Hendrix.

More typical of the genre than either hitmaking Donegan or raw amateurs like The Quarry Men was Ricky Richards’ Skiffle Group, resident in the Skiffle Cellar, a stone’s throw from the 2 I’s, central London’s more renowned shrine of British pop. After nearly half a century, their entire recorded output — 12 hitherto-unissued tracks, taped mostly in the double-bass player’s Wembley home — was made available for public consumption on a small record label in 2002.

In all conscience, I cannot resort to cheap laughs at Ricky and his ensemble’s expense because, as well as being a slice of cultural history, the CD entitled Shake It Daddy is also entertaining, but not because it’s so bad it’s good; as well as making a fair lo-fi fist of numbers that were common property of other outfits all over the country, the lads turn in two Richards originals — including the title song — which stand as tall as their workman-like versions of ‘John Henry’, ‘Wreck Of The Old ‘97’, ‘Putting On The Style’ et al.

Give him credit, too. Ricky’s fretboard picking was held in high regard by the discerning Tony Sheridan, then emerging — albeit briefly — as one of Britain’s most sensational rock ‘n’ roll guitarists. Both were destined for walk-on parts in Lennon’s life after he left Quarry Bank in July 1957.

When the predictably poor results of John’s GCE O-levels fluttered onto the doormat a few weeks later — he’d failed all of them, albeit by only one grade — Aunt Mimi made an appointment to discuss her charge’s future with the headmaster, Mr William Pobjoy, who informed her that John’s most legitimate contribution to school affairs had been when The Quarry Men performed during the interval at the sixth form’s end-of-term party.

Mimi hadn’t realised until recently, she said, that John’s wretched skiffle group even had a name, let alone gone beyond just messing about with guitars. His fooling around on the Spanish model she’d been badgered into buying him was all right as a hobby, she’d told him, but she’d thought she’d die of shame if he ever appeared onstage with a pop group. He’d answered back that a boy he knew called George Harrison only had to ask for one of these electric guitars and it was his. Well, that’s as may be, but showbusiness isn’t a reliable living, is it? You couldn’t see it as a career unless you’d been born into it.

Even then, Mr Pobjoy chipped in, if you were a vocalist in the popular style, you had to “mature” with an output that veered between sentimental ballads and singalong ditties. Look at Lonnie Donegan and, before him, indigenous entertainers like Max Bygraves, Ronnie Hilton, Donald Peers (“the Cavalier of Song”) and the neo-operatic Lee Laurence.

Again, that’s as may be, replied Mimi, but John’s nonsense about wanting to make his way as a “pop star” was nearly as appalling as a girl announcing that she wanted to shake her backside in a burlesque troupe. In the perceived moral decline of the country since the war, such a viewpoint was to remain the norm in decent provincial households, where patterned wallpaper was the only hint of frivolity and where the 1950s wouldn’t end until about 1966.

That was one reason why John was a nuisance at school. That he was one, Mimi had suspected from the beginning, if only because his behaviour there impacted at home in constant turmoil over his choice of friends, his insolence, his speech, his manners, his slouch, those crude drainpipe jeans and him sculpting his hair in that stupid quiff-and-ducktail style, with side-whiskers like one of these teddy boys: secondary modern ne’er-do-wells who, garbed in seedy flash finery, prowled the evening streets in packs, looking for things to destroy and people to beat up.

Lately, Mimi continued, she’d started to position herself at the front window whenever she’d deduced that John was about to leave the house. He didn’t have to catch her eye; even sensing her glaring, quivering and tight-lipped disapproval was enough for him to return and change out of the more ridiculous clothes he’d got past her quality control.

When he next got a word in edgeways, Mr Pobjoy — who had given the boy a kinder written testimonial than either he or Mimi might have expected — suggested that the Youth Employment Centre might not find John beyond redemption and that an apprenticeship of some kind wasn’t out of the question. Alternatively, he recommended that John could do worse than join the Regular Army.

However, as Aunt Mimi wouldn’t hear of her fallen angel entering the world of work before she considered he’d completed his “education”, the outcome of a rather fraught discussion was that John was to be enrolled at Liverpool’s Regional College of Art that September. Entry standards for the establishment were particularly lax, to the point of being non-existent beyond evidence of a slight artistic turn.

The Quarry Men survived their leader’s transfer to the higher-education establishment in the city centre, although by then he had come to seek the particular company of a lad named Paul McCartney, enlisted into The Quarry Men in July 1957. The fact that his elder son was joining a group fronted by that John Lennon was a severe test of paternal support, but McCartney’s widowed father accepted Paul’s case for the defence, that John had been a square peg in a round hole at Quarry Bank and that he was a fine fellow when you got to know him.

Moreover, for all his loutish affectations, Lennon knew how he was supposed to behave when introduced to other boys’ parents. McCartney, forever rejoicing in his council-estate origins, “never realised John put on this ‘working-class hero’ stuff. Nobody had a set of Winston Churchill books. Nobody had an aunt, ‘cause we called ‘cm ‘aunties’. ‘Aunt’ was very posh. Nobody had relatives who were dentists or worked at the BBC, as two of John’s Scottish relatives did. Nobody had relatives in Edinburgh, my dear! This was a middle-class structure in which John was very much part of. When symphonies came on the radio, my family just went, ‘Oh bloody hell!’ and switched the station.”⁷

The Quarry Men’s new pianist, John Duff Lowe, was in the same form as Paul at Liverpool Institute and met John in the McCartney living room in the city suburb of Allerton. “It wasn’t a particularly momentous encounter,” he recalled, “though when you’re 16, anyone 18 months older is often a bit intimidating. John also used to dress in what you’d loosely describe as teddy-boy gear. Paul’s father — like all parents — was paranoid that his children were going to turn into teddy boys, pushing bottles into people’s faces and creating mayhem in the clubs. The uniform indicated someone who was looking for trouble. John gave the impression of being like that but was actually quite a nice guy.

“George Harrison came into the group a week or two after me. Prior to us, the band had Rod Davis on banjo, Pete Shotton on washboard, Eric Griffiths on guitar, Colin Hanton on drums, Len Garry on tea-chest bass, John Lennon and, right at the end of the skiffle era, Paul McCartney.”

Without the others, Paul and John began to practise and even write songs together, sometimes truanting to do so. They even lugged their instruments with them when, on the spur of the moment, they went hitch-hiking in the south of England one Easter holiday. That was when they’d really become friends.

Although their style was based on blues, hillbilly and further subdivisions of North American folk music, the pre-McCartney Quarry Men also embraced rock ‘n’ roll, and it was this element that had impressed Paul when he’d attended a performance in 1957 at Woolton summer fěte (which someone taped for then-unimagined posterity, as well as the ears of an elderly Lonnie Donegan). So began one of the most crucial liaisons in pop. Not long afterwards, George Harrison deputised for and then superseded original lead guitarist Eric Griffiths, who, like most of the other personnel, regarded skiffle as a vocational blind alley, a trivial pursuit to be thrust aside on departure to the world of work, marriage or National Service.

John Duff Lowe’s growing disinclination to remain a Quarry Man, however, was mostly because of geography: “I lived in West Derby, on the opposite side of Liverpool to all the others. Whereas Paul could easily bike round to John’s house, it was a journey on two buses for me. I didn’t tend to get involved during the week. We’d rehearse on Sunday and perform the following Saturday if anyone would have us. Also, whenever we turned up anywhere, the quality of the hall pianos varied so much. They were often either out of tune or had notes missing. This especially annoyed John, as the guitars had to be retuned to the piano.”

Hundreds more than could actually have been there were to reconjure a night within the Mersey hinterland at maybe a church youth club with a wholesome, self-improving reek about it. They’d handed over the sixpence (2 1/2 p) admission to a with-it vicar in a cardigan, who’d booked The Quarry Men to perform in a playing area with a solitary white bulb as the lightshow and a microphone and two of the three guitars plugged perilously into one amplifier via two shared jacks. The other was fed through something soldered together from a kit advertised (“with a ten-watt punch”) in Melody Maker.

This latter arrangement was the work of George Harrison, a bus driver’s son, happy just to be around the beery breathed John, three years his senior and a fully fledged rock ‘n’ roller who boasted about how he’d tilted successfully for the downfall of some girl’s underwear. An educated guess, however, is that John Lennon at 17 was probably still a virgin, like the vast majority of his adolescent peers. In days before the birth-control pill and the Swinging ‘60s, pre-marital sex was a much bigger issue. To sceptical cronies, a changing-room lothario at Quarry Bank would boast of carnal capers that everyone guessed were tall tales. He might have got to “third base” after a lot of effort, but only a “cheap” girl didn’t “save herself” for her future husband. Until recently, John had imagined that girls went all the way only if they really loved you, and even then a true daughter of the 1950s would have none of it while yet unwed. Nevertheless, through some undignified fumblings, Lennon discovered that even a youth club’s most arch proto-feminist — the sort who looked as if she couldn’t wait for a game of ping-pong, followed by a chat about life after death over an orange squash — her whole tweedy, earnest being was screaming for sex just as much as any bloke.

Although George Harrison was the most heterosexual of males too, his heart would feel like it had burst through its ribcage whenever the great Lennon lowered himself to actually speak to him, no matter how nastily. Once, George brought a friend to be introduced to Lennon, but without looking around the cocky so-and-so outstretched his fingers over his left shoulder for the newcomer to shake. Had John then offered anything other than slights, exploitations and jokes at his expense, George might have been worried about his position as the lowest of the low in The Quarry Men hierarchy. Unaware that Lennon was an inwardly fearful youth whose successful promotion of himself as a physical and verbal fighter had brittle substance, it gave young Harrison a feeling of belonging.

Yet while George was looked down upon by John, this was balanced by the former’s freshly acquired skills as a trainee electrician, notably ensuring that overloaded amps with naked wires were rendered less lethal and less likely to cut out halfway through a number. George had also taught himself ripostes to counter John’s sarcasm, his callous teasing and, more recently, the near-impossibility of having a sensible conversation with him.

Of all The Quarry Men, John Lennon was the loudest in praise of BBC radio’s The Goon Show, a development of the offbeat humour and topical parodies of an earlier series, Crazy People, which starred Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Harry Secombe, veterans of entertainments organised by the armed forces from their own ranks. Incongruous parallels, casual cruelty and stream-of-consciousness connections not only made The Goon Show different from mainstream series like Educating Archie and The Clitheroe Kid, but also ushered in that stratum of fringe-derived comedy that culminated in the late 1960s with Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Aspects of The Goons became apparent, too, in the stylistic determination of such as Scaffold, The Bonzo Dog (Doo-Dah) Band and, less directly, The Beatles, particularly in their first two films. It was also evident in Lennon’s associated slim volumes, In His Own Write and 1965’s A Spaniard In The Works. Many of the assorted oddments that filled these books dated from the first broadcasts of The Goon Show and John’s habit of scribbling nonsense verse and surreal stories supplemented by Milligan-esque cartoons and caricatures, a habit that intensified with exposure to the programme.

John was also among those irritating people who re-enacted Goon Show sketches the next day during the programme’s high summer, which was reflected in spin-off double-A-side hit-parade entries in the UK in 1956 for ‘I’m Walking Backwards For Christmas’/‘Bluebottle Blues’ and ‘The Ying Tong Song’/‘Bloodnok’s Rock ‘n’ Roll’. While these singles were released on Decca, solo records by Milligan, Sellers and Bentine, as well as two album anthologies entitled The Best Of The Goon Shows, came to be issued by Parlophone, a subsidiary of EMI, another of Britain’s four major record labels. The discs were produced by George Martin, elevated to headship of Parlophone in 1954 at the age of only 29.

To The Quarry Men, George Martin was an unknown figure in an unknown future in 1958, when the group was a vehicle for John Lennon’s self-projection as an aspirant Donegan or Presley. Because John imagined himself a firm enforcer of his own discipline at rehearsals, there had been disenchantment amongst certain of the others, exemplified by premature departures motivated by his ruthlessness in sticking to the job in hand. Over-sensitive souls walked out, mortally offended, to dissect his character and musical ability with bitter intensity.

Yet middle-aged ex-Quarry Men from the Woolton Fěte era would reunite and perform again for fun and profit. Moreover, hardly a day would go by without them remembering with doleful affection one who had been the Woolton Flash as surely as Elvis had been the local equivalent light years away in Memphis.

2 “There Was Something Slightly Worrying About Him”

“The Quarry Men wasn’t that special a thing,” reckoned John Duff Lowe, “and I was getting fed-up with the hour-long journey from West Derby to rehearsals, and my girlfriend used to moan. Also, A-levels came along, plus parental pressure.”