To Robert Bartel

CONTENTS

Information Page

Introduction: What You Got

LIFE BEGINS AT FORTY: LENNON IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

ASPECTS OF LENNON

Love

Life

Family …

Friendship

Work

Success

Bibliography

Introduction

What You Got

Following a biographical resume, The Gospel According To John Lennon takes the form of a pot-pourri of incidents and events in the subject’s life and death which draw attention to aspects of his extraordinary musical, literary and visionary talent. Far more than any mere pop star, John Winston Ono Lennon is now accorded the kind of acclaim afforded to a small handful of spiritual leaders, a state-of-affairs that certainly never existed in his lifetime, whether as unofficial leader of The Beatles or in the years after their demise.

On the face of it, the showbusiness sensation of the 20th century had no visible ‘leader’, which meant that fans could be fickle in their affections towards individuals yet still maintain overall loyalty to the group in its entirety. With uniform stage suits, impenetrable Liverpool accents and haircuts as distinctive as Hitler’s toothbrush moustache, the coherence of the quartet’s corporate image presented what seemed at first glance to be a single focus for worship. Ridiculous as it seems in hindsight, especially now that their individual characteristics are so apparent, there was a time when commentators couldn’t tell one individual Beatle from another. However, it was surely always the case that the crucial balance within the group that led to their success was a direct result of the inevitable differences between them.

Musically, the crux of The Beatles was the self-contained songwriting team of John Lennon and Paul McCartney which had become formidable by the time the group impinged on national consciousness with the chart entry of their debut single, ‘Love Me Do’, late in 1962. Very much the junior partner, George Harrison was to make tentative explorations as a writer, but he found John and Paul’s head start a tough yardstick. Furthermore, the careers of many other famous acts – including The Rolling Stones – were launched or stabilised by the gift of a Lennon-McCartney song.

Although the myth continues to propagate of ‘raw’ John and ‘melodic’ Paul, it was only their public personas that suggested diplomatic McCartney’s responsibility for ballads, leaving the ravers to rough old Lennon. On the likely conjecture that the principle composer was also lead vocalist, their most memorable numbers show an even split – for nearly every ‘Yesterday’, there is an ‘In My Life’; for every ‘I Feel Fine, a ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’; for every ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’, a ‘Revolution 9’.

In general, Lennon was the most experimental while McCartney sold more. Yet, although John, with sound reason, ridiculed what he called Paul’s ‘granny music’ in the last desperate months of The Beatles, he was to demonstrate an alarming capacity for tweeness throughout the time between the group’s disbandment in 1970 and his passing 10 years later.

As well as relevant quotes, anecdotes and episodes from these and earlier – and even posthumously – years from a lively four decades on this planet, The Gospel According To John Lennon will incorporate aspects of the late entertainer as a fated youth who was to metamorphose into a quasi-messianic symbol of hipness; whose talents as a vocalist and composer have been acknowledged by every such artist that has mattered, and whose activities and utterances were absorbed deeply and used to form answers by both the common pop consumer and the undergraduate flirting with bohemia before becoming a teacher, proprietor of a multinational corporation or, in the cases of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, a head of state.

Unlike that contained in a hagiography of some Dark Ages king, we are embarrassed by too much detail. The principal events of almost every day of Lennon’s life since 1962 have been chronicled in some publication or other, and even as sources of ‘new and rediscovered’ details continue to dry up, there are presently nearly 70 books concerning him alone that are readily available in high street book shops. Yet, to the faithful, no sentence is without value, no item too insignificant not to be intriguing.

As the Bible can be used to prove any religious or moral theory, so the millions of words written and spoken about John Lennon can warp his philosophy to any purpose, ranging from elevations to near-sainthood – as exemplified by a Scandinavian fanzine consisting entirely of visual representations of Lennon in the hereafter – to doorstoppers such as Albert Goldman’s The Lives Of John Lennon, which depicts him as barking mad after a lifetime of unsurpassed human frailty. While his deeds and personality have thus become more nebulous and ambiguous in retrospect, I will be dealing mostly with raw fact within the context of the myriad social, cultural, economic, environmental and other undercurrents and myths that polarise what we can surmise about Lennon’s intellectual, domestic, spiritual and other dimensions.

Without treating his most flippant remarks as gospel, this account will embrace personal memories from some of the key dramatis personae, and delvings into press archives, many of them quite obscure, as well as information derived from a re-examination of my own compacted miles of audio tapes and film footage; filing cabinets bulging with God-knows-what; folders vomiting cuttings and complete newspapers that are getting tattier by the day, and other nearly thigh-high clutter that fills the room where I wrote my many tomes concerning John Lennon and The Beatles.

Alan Clayson, June 2005

Life Begins At Forty: Lennon In The Twentieth Century

“I was always psychic, always saw things in a hallucinatory way – and it’s scary when you’re a child, because there’s nobody to relate to. I belonged to an exclusive club. When I looked in the mirror, I used to, literally, trance out into alpha.” Thus spake John Lennon, weeks before the ‘beautiful sadness’ of his death in New York at the trigger-jerk of Mark David Chapman, not so much a fan as a disciple whose adoration had been extinguished. “Are you John Lennon?” asked one of the cops in whose squad car he was hastened to hospital after the shooting. “Yeah,” gasped John. Then he died.

As it had been with the early demise of Hollywood heart-throb Rudolph Valentino in 1926, the slaying sparked off suicides. In an attempt to nip these in the bud, Yoko issued a statement via the New York Daily News, stressing that “when something like this happens, each one of us must go on”.

This was more considered than Paul McCartney’s “It’s a drag”, uttered the following night when accosted by a television camera crew with a stick-mike that was thrust towards him out of the blue. Unlike Paul, George Harrison cancelled the day’s recording session, and didn’t venture beyond the confines of his country estate in Oxfordshire until the dust had settled.

If as fearful as George and Paul – and, more pointedly, Yoko – of a copycat killing, Ringo Starr made a grand gesture on his late colleague’s behalf by catching an immediate flight to New York to offer condolences, even if he was heard to murmur ‘It was her who started all this’ as he and fiancée Barbara Bach waited for an audience with the widow in an ante-room at the Lennon home.

A hasty cremation at Hartsdale, a city mortuary, had already been arranged, even as Ringo and Barbara were being shepherded through the tightest security net to a purring Cadillac. Through its one-way windows, they glanced at stark headlines on newspaper stands and electronically transmitted images of Lennon and Ono on TV sets in appliance shops along the stop-start drive from Kennedy airport to the city centre.

Suntanned in the cold, they were self-contained spectators with no stake in the tragedy until, with no parking space in the Dakota forecourt, shock impinged itself on them as they hastened past clutching hands and the pitiless woomph of flashbulbs, in through a side door into the Dakota. As he comprehended the massed and extravagant lamentations behind that corridor of police barricades, Ringo “was not very happy with the vigil. Those people showed very little respect for either John nor Yoko. It was disgusting.”

Nevertheless, at Mrs Lennon’s request, many sent donations to the Spirit Foundation, a multi-purpose charity organisation set up by her and her late spouse in 1978. Far greater multitudes across the globe observed a 10-minute silence to pray for John’s soul at the same time on the Sunday after the shooting.

Most reckoned that John had been killed simply because this Chapman bloke – who’d been sighted sniffing round Todd Rundgren too – was as nutty as a fruitcake, though after trial he would be confined not to a mental institution but New York’s Attica Correctional Facility, coincidentally the setting of ‘Attica State’ from Lennon and Ono’s unremarkable 1972 album, Sometime In New York City.

The more credulous, however, paid heed to the theories and a compounding of eschatological analogies that had been flying up and down when flags were still at half-mast and the radio was broadcasting the dead man’s music continuously in place of listed programmes. Was it an Art Statement more surreal than anything John and Yoko had done in the dear, dead Swinging Sixties? Had Yoko reneged on an elaborate suicide pact? One particularly powerful rumour was that Ono had eaten Lennon’s ashes.

Then there was the notion that it had been a rite whereby some sort of ‘kingdom’ – the ‘Beatle generation’, now approaching middle-age – was to be rejuvenated by the sacrifice of its high priest in his prime. It said as much in The Golden Bough, one tome of spiritual nature Lennon had devoured in his search for faith. He had also embraced LSD, transcendental meditation and Krishna consciousness, a recipe of mind-bending intoxicants so powerful that the whole experience climaxed with Lennon summoning the other Beatles to a 1968 meeting in order to proclaim himself the Messiah.

Such conduct connected too with that of St Francis of Assisi, who preached naked as an act of holy self-abasement. As if it was a statement St Francis might have made too, Lennon assured Melody Maker, “I try to live as Christ did. It’s tough, I can tell you.”

John, however, was less a divinity than someone who turned his headline-hogging life into an open and often ludicrous book in which he said things most folk didn’t want to hear. He wasn’t obliged to do this, of course. Indeed, the repercussions of The Beatles gouged so deep a wound on pop that it wouldn’t have mattered if, in the years that followed, their founder member had failed to pursue even a sporadic recording career, let along one that contained odd sparks of the old fire that powered him onwards and upwards when The Beatles were stuck on the Liverpool-Hamburg treadmill.

Even Lennon’s latter-day lyrics are still quoted like proverbs, despite the strange goings-on during his four final years spent mainly as a ‘househusband’ in the Big Apple’s smart Dakota Building. Attempting to master his inner chaos, he granted his and his second wife’s only child, Sean, far more paternal attention than most can expect from a famous father.

During this period too, he became as unreachable an object of incommunicado myth as Howard Hughes. Rock stars passing through the Big Apple felt compelled to make at least token efforts to pay their respects to the Grand Old Man, and 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, especially in the light of tales about his antics behind closed doors.

Sometimes these were so bizarre as to be reminiscent of those he actuated as a troublesome and troubled teenager. His intangible ‘something else’ had first manifested itself when he was charismatic leader of an entourage united in terrified admiration, as he held forth for hours in a favoured pub or coffee bar, and acted the lunatic around art college and Liverpool’s pubs and shopping centres. He appeared able to cajole his disciples into doing almost anything.

In 1966, the media were to sensationalise his off-the-cuff comments about religion in London’s Evening Standard. When reprinted in the US teenage magazine Datebook, his suggestion that The Beatles ‘are more popular than Jesus now’ and that ‘Christianity will go, it will vanish and shrink’ were repeated out of context by the general media and interpreted as blasphemy. Let us not forgot that this was a land that was accustomed to pop stars being devoid of independent opinion, where Colonel Parker’s manipulation of Elvis Presley set the “sir-and-ma’am” standard of a walking digest of truth, justice and the American way.

The repercussions of this episode fuelled The Beatles’ decision to down tools as a working band, and began their journey to a position wherein John Lennon was barely recognisable as the chirpy “yeah-yeah-yeah” Moptop.

Three years later, with hair splayed halfway down his back and bearded to the cheekbones, he’d smoked a Lucky Strike cigarette during a white-costumed wedding, as recorded in The Beatles’ last British number one, ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’. Each chorus began with the exclamation, ‘Christ!’, which restricted airplay, but it was the ‘Bed-Ins’ and associated stunts that completed the metamorphosis of 1963’s ‘nasty bastard’ – as one associate described him – to one of the world’s most renowned pacifists.

Next up was John’s eponymous debut album as a solo artist with its personal exorcisms – notably in ‘God’. Further soul-baring surfaced on the Imagine follow-up, though its utopian title track would endure as Lennon’s most memorable post-Beatles song. Certainly, today’s pop pickers have been brought up to regard it as his finest composition, and ‘Imagine’ continues to be placed at the top of these ‘Hundred Greatest Pop Songs’-type polls that rear up periodically in newspapers and on television.

Yet John Lennon hadn’t had all that much going for him when he was treading the boards with The Quarry Men skiffle group in 1957. While he could just about find his way around his instrument, he aroused little enthusiasm for either his singing or maiden attempts at songwriting. On the surface, he wasn’t that brilliant at anything then. Into the bargain, a combination of a middle-class upbringing centred on the Church and drudgery in a grammar school C-stream had produced an adolescent with a ‘bad’ attitude, albeit one with 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 when he shuffled from bedroom to doormat for first grab at the Daily Express, then a broadsheet that did not label a buyer politically as much as it would later. Others jerked him from a velvet-blue oblivion back in the dungeons where The Beatles slept during their first visit to Germany in 1960.

Even after the group “Made It,” tomorrow would seem a year away as, more often than not with Paul McCartney, 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 a private quality control might engross him and Paul until day became night with the pair surrounded by overloaded ash-trays, smeared coffee cups and pages full of scribblings and notations peculiar to themselves.

As he’d never learned to sight-read or write musical script, John was untroubled by the formal do’s and don’ts that traditionally affect creative flow. There were only the stylistic cliches and habits ingrained since his teenage self had positioned yet uncalloused fingertips on the taut strings of his first guitar. Grappling with his muse, he drew from virtually every musical and literary idiom he had ever encountered since he was prised into the world at 6.30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 9, 1940 at Liverpool’s Oxford Street Maternity Hospital. The BBC Home Service weatherman had forecast a dull but mild night – which it was. Dull but mild it remained for more or less the next fortnight. However, one evening before the baby was brought home, wailing sirens and flares illuminated the sky as the Luftwaffe dropped tonne upon booming tonne of death and destruction in and around the slip-slapping wharfs of dockland where the murky 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 first born was destined for a comfortable middle-class home – with a fitted dining-room carpet, not lino – along Menlove Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in Woolton, a village-like suburb that aligned itself more with Lancashire than Merseyside.

After his father, Freddie, a seaman of Irish extraction, vanished 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 boy to grow up in ‘Mendips’, the semi-detached villa of Julia’s childless sister Mary Smith – who 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.

His natural mother Julia – so John was to discover – lived nearby with her second family and, bound by the invisible chains that shackle child to parent, he used her council house as a bolt-hole whenever strait-laced Mimi’s rearing methods became too 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. Despite the extenuating circumstances of her sudden death in 1958, he felt he’d been cast out by his mother as well as 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.

Mimi usually blamed doubtful company for John’s mischief when, short-trousered and in gaberdine raincoat, he began his formal education in autumn 1945 in the kindergarten at Moss Pit Lane Infant School, a few streets dawdle from Mendips. The following April, John was removed for disruptive behaviour and, chastened by this disgrace, commenced a less wild career at Dovedale Road Primary. 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, had been published in 1917.

Lennon, however, would go way beyond the rough-and-tumble of acceptable boyhood larks after gaining a place at Quarry Bank, the suburban grammar school that was nicknamed ‘the Police State’ by the more liberal of local seats of learning for its pretentious affectations and Draconian discipline. An Eton-esque house system was in full force there, as was corporal punishment, administered as often as not with the swish of a bamboo cane on buttocks or outstretched palm.

It wasn’t long before John was transformed from a capable if uninvolved pupil to one 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 nuisance in class, a known truant, a sharer of smutty stories and an initiate of a caste who’d graduated from the innocence of tooth-rotting boiled sweets to the lung-corroding evil of cigarettes. Indeed, the adult John would tear the cellophane off up to three 20-packs a day.

Leading by example, Lennon had some kind of vice-like grip on his allies in delinquency. “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.”

Never standing when he could lean, hands rammed in pockets and chewing gum in a half-sneer, the ‘bad’ attitude of that Lennon boy – destructive, lazy, narcissistic and, as far as he dared, a bully – was reflected too in extra-curricular activities that had little bearing on what he was supposed to be learning at Quarry Bank. Absorbing a hidden curriculum, he’d developed a messy aptitude as an illustrator and writer of comic verse and stories.

Most relevant to this discussion, however, is John Lennon’s acquisition of a guitar, the instrument that Elvis Presley hung around his neck. Lennon didn’t only like Presley, he worshipped him from the moment he heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, the Tennessean’s debut chart entry, and saw the first photograph of him published in Britain – on January 21, 1956 in Record Mirror – as a hybrid of amusement-arcade hoodlum and nancy boy.

Aunt Mimi bought John’s acoustic guitar from Frank Hessy’s in central Liverpool. This musical equipment store’s profit graph for guitar sales had taken a sharp upward turn during the craze for skiffle – seen now as the most homogenously British offshoot of rock’n’roll – that peaked in 1957 when ‘King of Skiffle’ Lonnie Donegan scored six successive Top 30 hits, including two number ones. Like punk after it, anyone who’d mastered basic techniques could have a go. Most skiffle combos were formed for the benefit of performers rather than audience, but nationwide there were thousands of skifflers thrumming home-made basses and percussion instruments, singing through nostrils just like Lonnie, and thrashing that E-chord on cheap, finger-lacerating guitars for all they were worth.

John’s innate bossiness ensured a walkover in the power struggle for leadership of The Quarry Men, the school outfit created in the image of that fronted by Donegan. Though the style was based on blues, hillbilly and further sub-divisions of North American folk music, the less purist Quarry Men also embraced US classic rock – and it was this element that impressed Paul McCartney when he attended a performance at Woolton summer fete in July 1957. Not long after Paul joined, the younger George Harrison succeeded 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 ‘real world’ of work, marriage or National Service.

Among a fragmenting Quarry Men’s principal assets were John’s instinctive if indelicate crowd control, and the vocal interplay between himself and McCartney. Yet the power structure whereby George was to be subordinate to John and Paul for as long as they stayed together was founded on the handshake that had formalised the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership – or so you’d read when the myth gripped harder – during John’s final year at Quarry Bank.

He left in July 1957 with a reputation as a round peg in a square hole – and a kinder testimonial than he may have expected. This enabled him to enrol at Liverpool’s Regional College of Art a few weeks later where, before the year was out, John, Paul, George and a turnover of other musicians were being engaged as a recurring support act at Students Union dances. By then, every other item in their repertoire was a salaam to Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and further rock’n’roll behemoths. The only concession to the oncoming general popularity of traditional jazz was Louis Armstrong’s ‘When You’re Smiling’ – albeit with John inserting saucy references to college staff into its lyrics. “Their sound was rubbish,” thought Gerry Marsden, another parochial singing guitarist, “but John – and Paul – stood out as talented. Somehow, whatever John did was just different. He seemed to have absorbed all the rock’n’roll influences, and then come out the other side with entirely his own variation on them.”

Lennon’s preoccupation with the group took its toll on his studies. What did stereoplastic colour, Vorticism and tactile values matter when he and the lads were the support that evening for the Merseysippi Wall City Jazz Band at Gateacre Labour Club?

A lecture-disrupting clown too, academic failure seemed inevitable from the start. In preparation for The Entrance to class on the very first day, he’d risen early to spend an inordinate amount of time combing his hair into a precarious pompadour, glistening with Brylcreem. For quick adjustments, he stuck a comb in the top pocket of a concessionary sports jacket buttoned over the lilac shirt that Mimi detested. Then he walked to the ‘bus stop in approved cavalry twills, but when he alighted, he had a slightly pigeon-toed gait, having changed somehow during the jolting journey into drainpipe jeans, so tight that it looked as if his legs had been dipped in ink. Thus attired, he’d stood at the college portals, and narrowed short-sighted eyes. He was too vain to be seen wearing the spectacles he’d needed since Dovedale Primary.

The new undergraduate’s self-image was at odds with the only subject he kept quiet about – his privileged upbringing amidst the golf clubs, boating lakes and mock-Tudor colonies of Woolton. An inverted snob, he’d already embraced the machismo values of more proletarian Merseyside males, and generally came on as the Poor Honest Wacker – a working-class hero, in fact, although the only paid work he ever did, apart from as a musician, was as a labourer at a local waterworks, Scaris and Brick, for a month during a summer recess. Nonetheless, by the end of his first term at college, he was speaking in florid Scouse, laced with incessant swearing.

He’d also latched onto the notion that northern women were mere adjuncts to their men. John’s overwhelmed girlfriend – and future wife – Cynthia Powell, appeared to tolerate this role as well as the jealous anxieties that caused him to clench his fists and make exasperating scenes if she so much as said a civil hello to any male not on his mental list of those he considered to have no romantic interest in her.

She came to realise too that when John was in the public eye, he played the fool as if on cue. “He worked so hard at keeping people amused, he was exhausting,” said Rod Murray, another student. “One day, I saw him running down the street, holding a steering-wheel – no car, just the wheel. He said he was driving down to town.” Lennon’s buffoonery would sometimes deteriorate into a nonsensical – and frequently alcohol-fuelled – frenzy, and soon would come the escapades that would get him barred from pubs. Merseyside polymath Adrian Henri once witnessed him lying on the floor of one local tavern, Ye Cracke, pretending to swim. Told by the landlady to stop, John replied that he daren’t because he’d be sure to drown.

Back in class, his tutors could not help but imagine that he did very little relevant reading. “You had the feeling that he was living off the top of his head,” remarked Philip Hartas, in charge of foundation sculpture. “He was a fellow who’d been born without brakes. His objective seemed to be somewhere over there that nobody else could see, but he was going, and in that process, a lot of people got run over. He never did it to me, but he had this very sarcastic way of talking to people.”

Impatient of prolonged discussion on Art, it was a veneer of self-confidence rather than any heavily veiled air of learning that swiftly made Lennon a centre of attention. Among those defending him against those at college who wanted him expelled was course tutor Arthur Ballard, who conducted seminars in Ye Cracke. Even 40 years later, this was regarded as, well, unorthodox. In the late Fifties, it verged on lunacy.

While Ballard recognised Lennon’s abilities as a cartoonist, Bill Harry, a graphics student, reckoned that “You could see in John’s written output the heritage of Lewis Carroll. He also reminded me of Stanley Unwin, his malapropisms, etc., but there was an Englishness about it when everyone else was copying the Americans.”

The atmosphere of bohemian Liverpool was sufficiently similar to that of New York’s vibrant beatnik district, Greenwich Village, that muckrakers from the Sunday People were sent there and to other supposed storm centres of squalor to root out what would be headlined ‘THE BEATNIK HORROR!’ Lashing those present in Rod Murray’s flat with booze, the newshounds assured them that it was to be a feature on the problems of making ends meet on student grants. It certainly was a problem, concurred John Lennon, who didn’t actually live there, though he was trying to persuade Aunt Mimi that everyone who was anyone had their own studio apartment near college. Yet, as ‘Mendips’ – his official address – was within city limits – just – he didn’t qualify for living expenses anyway. Nevertheless, with others eager to get their pictures in the paper, he obeyed a directive to dress down and make the place more untidy. You want the readers to think that you’re poor, starving students, don’t you?

On July 24, 1960, two million read the Sunday People’s beatnik article, which was printed alongside a photograph that was the first Britain at large saw of John Lennon. Sporting sunglasses, and with sideburns past his earlobes, he had pride of place, lolling about on the littered floor amongst Murray, Bill Harry and other self-conscious ‘beatniks’. He looked as if he probably slept in his vest.

John, see, was suddenly modelling himself on Van Gogh or Modigliani and not Elvis Presley or those who followed in his wake. Much of this was down to the influence of Stuart Sutcliffe, a gifted painter, whose lecture notebooks were as conscientiously full as Lennon’s were empty. When written or practical assessment was pending, John would cadge assistance from Stuart – or Cynthia – as openly as he would cadge a Woodbine. Through Stuart too, Lennon shook off enough ingrained indolence to transfer from lettering to painting and actually do a bit of work. He also became less bored in the theoretical side of it to the extent that, now and then, a lecture was not approached as an opportunity for illicit relaxation or exercising his wit at the tutor’s expense.

It was certainly through Stuart that what Paul McCartney would describe as the hitherto suppressed ‘closet intellectual’ surfaced in Lennon. “John debunked a lot of intellectual analysis,” said Sutcliffe’s younger sister, Pauline, “particularly when people found in his output roots in all sorts of literary and artistic figures that he would claim never to have been familiar with.”

In turn, Sutcliffe’s wonderment at Lennon extended to observing rehearsals in the College of Art’s Life Room whenever George Harrison and Paul McCartney absconded from lessons to meet up with John. Though engagements were still few and far between – and often undertaken for as little as a round of fizzy drinks – The Quarry Men, though not the most exciting act going on Merseyside, were becoming adept at bypassing potentially ugly moments at bookings, often via Lennon’s growing ability to ‘read’ an audience.

The outer reaches of their circuit hadn’t extended beyond Liverpool until autumn 1959 when the group – now renamed Johnny & The Moondogs, and consisting of just John, George and Paul – made it through to the final regional heat of Carroll Levis’s Star Search, the spiritual forerunner of ITV’s Opportunity Knocks, at the Hippodrome Theatre in Manchester. However, the need to catch the last train back to Liverpool put the tin-lid on any chances of instant stardom here as it left too early for the band to be judged by volume of applause at the contest’s finale. Nevertheless, this crestfallen headway mattered more to the group than any progress they were making at college, school or work.

The boys became a common sight, sitting for hours at a kidney-shaped table in the Jacaranda, a coffee bar owned by Allan Williams, who began acting in a quasi-managerial capacity for the group after Stuart Sutcliffe found the wherewithal to make a down-payment on one of these newfangled electric bass guitars at Hessy’s so that he could join John’s group. With Lennon, Sutcliffe also originated a more attention-grabbing name, ‘The Silver Beatles’ – with, added John, ‘ “Beatles” spelt like in “beat music”.’

A more urgent need, of course, was a drummer, something that had been lacking since the dying days of the original Quarry Men. Early in 1960, they found one in Tommy Moore, though it was assumed that, with his heart in jazz, 26-year-old Tommy would suffice only until the arrival of someone more suitable. Drummer or not, at this stage The Silver Beatles were derided as ‘posers’ by certain members of Cass & The Cassanovas, Rory Storm & The Hurricanes, Derry & The Seniors and other more workmanlike outfits, not least because John and Paul had pretensions to become composers. Surely anyone with any sense realised that neither a teenager in a dance hall nor the director of the BBC Light Programme would be interested in home-made songs.

Nevertheless, The Silver Beatles were developing into a credible attraction in welfare institutes, far-flung suburban dancehalls, and, indeed, any venue that had embraced regular ‘beat’ sessions. Moreover, Lennon had spat out what remained of his well-spoken Lancashire plum in his singing as well as his speaking, and now had a baritone that was bashed about and lived in – in other words, the voice of a great rock’n’roll vocalist. By European bel canto standards, John Lennon as a young adult ‘couldn’t sing’ – not ‘real singing’, as sonorous as Elvis when he tried hymns. Unlike Presley, Lennon had lost all vowel purity and nicety of intonation, probably because he had been endeavouring conscientiously to sound like the classic rockers while his voice was either still breaking or just freshly broken. An uncertain church choir soprano had been corrupted for all time by say, the hollered arrogance of Jerry Lee Lewis, neo-hysterical Little Richard, Gene Vincent -’The Screaming End’ – and, to a surprisingly lesser extent, hot-potato-in-the-mouth Presley.

John’s singing grew more strangled as he broke sweat and his adolescent spots rose through the lacto-calomine lotion and turned red. He was probably nothing without the public-address system, but when he became intense, every sound he dredged up was like a brush stroke on a painting. Backing off until the microphone was at arm’s length, just a sandpapery quaver during a dragged-out note could be as loaded as a roar with him almost swallowing it.

Yet The Silver Beatles were absent from the local fare advertised low on the bill when, on May 3, 1960, Gene Vincent headlined a three-hour extravaganza at Liverpool Boxing Stadium, promoted by Allan Williams. The celebrated pop svengali Larry Parnes had ensured that Lance Fortune, Julian X and others among the less bright stars in his management stable were also included, though a last minute addition to the show, Gerry Marsden’s ensemble, Gerry & The Pacemakers, represented the first division of regional popularity.

In the Jacaranda after the show, Parnes thought aloud about a further, albeit not so ambitious, joint venture with Allan Williams. He wanted, so he explained, an all-purpose backing outfit for use by one of his singers for a string of one-nighters in Scotland. A name he kept mentioning was Billy Fury, a Liverpudlian then on the crest of his first Top 10 breakthrough. Larry would bring Billy along if Allan could hastily assemble some groups for him to audition.

Though John Lennon was present in the Jacaranda too that night, he was unable to summon the courage to approach the Great Man, but two nights later, he asked Williams if The Silver Beatles could audition for the job. Allan assented, but pointed out that they’d be up against Derry & The Seniors, Cass & The Cassanovas, Gerry & The Pacemakers, you name ’em – the very upper crust of Liverpool pop. Yet The Silver Beatles won on the day, insofar as Parnes scribbled on his note-pad, “Silver Beetles [sic] – very good. Keep for future work.”

Future work came sooner than expected. Not quite a fortnight after Parnes heard them, John, Paul, George, Stuart and Tommy were off on eight dates in Scotland, backing not Billy Fury, but a lesser Parnes luminary, Johnny Gentle. As each man’s small wage dwindled, the spurious thrill of ‘going professional’ gave way more and more to stoic cynicism, particularly following an engagement notable for Tommy Moore drumming with his head in bandages. He’d been the sole casualty when the van had crumped into a stationary car that afternoon. He had also become a prime target of Lennon’s ruthless derision, especially now that young George had started to stick up for himself. Moreover, via shameless manoeuvring, John eased himself between the sheets of the only single bed available in one bed-and-breakfast stop-over, while Tommy and everyone else out of favour spent as comfortable a night as was feasible in sleeping bags on the floor.

Well before they steamed back to Liverpool, a disgruntled Moore – with only two pounds left to show for his pains – had had enough of washing in streams, shaving in public-convenience hand-basins, staring across a wayside cafe’s formica table as that loathsome Lennon tunnelled into a greasy but obviously satisfying chips-with-everything fry-up, not to mention the van, that mobile fusion of lunatic asylum and death trap.

A group without a drummer was no use to anyone. Into the bargain, British trad jazz was now midway through a brief golden age. Its bands were more numerous than ever, as were places they could play. In the Cavern, Liverpool’s main jazz stronghold, manager Ray Mc Fall would dock the fee of any group that dared to launch into a rock’n’roll number within its hallowed and clammy walls. The Cavern had put up with skiffle in the past, but what it couldn’t tolerate was lowbrow rock’n’roll. It was, scowled McFall, detrimental to the club’s reputation.

In summer 1960, therefore, all the future seemed to hold for John, Paul, George and Stuart – now trading as just plain ‘Beatles’ – was the trivial round of recurring local bookings. These included a mercifully brief weekly residency at the Grosvenor Ballroom in a suburb of Wallasey on the opposite bank of the Mersey to Liverpool. Though these were profitable – to promoter Les Dodd anyway – they were a magnet for adolescent disorder and hooliganism. Fists often swung harder than The Beatles, who felt compelled to maintain ghastly grins as their music soundtracked someone getting half-killed in the gloom beyond the footlights. Dodd soon reverted to his old policy of admitting only the overtwenties, and keeping the music to a strict tempo: no jiving, no rock’n’roll and, definitely, no teenagers.

On being told of the loss of the Grosvenor one afternoon in the Jacaranda, Lennon shook a frustrated fist in the direction of London, which was perhaps four hours away on the train, but might as well have been on Alpha Centauri. So The Beatles loitered in central Liverpool’s pubs and cafes with other rock’n’rollers in the same boat, small-talking, borrowing equipment, comparing notes, gossiping, betraying secrets. Out would pour lies about how close they were to their first single coming out and how they were a sure-fire certainty to open for Screaming Lord Sutch when his never-ending itinerary next reached the north, carrying on as if these were possibilities long after the trail went cold – if the trail had ever existed in the first place.

It was small wonder that The Beatles were open to an offer of work in Germany. This came about via Bruno Koschmider, owner of the Kaiserkeller, a club in the Hamburg’s Grosse Freiheit, one of the most notorious red-light districts in Europe. He needed a comparable draw to Tony Sheridan, a British singing guitarist of unusual flair, who was administering a powerful rock’n’roll elixir at a rival establishment, The Top 10. Bruno’s first contact was Allan Williams who sent Derry & The Seniors. Within days, the Kaiserkeller was thriving, and Koschmider’s thoughts turned to the Indra, his strip club. With few customers most evenings, it could only be more profitable to put on pop there too.

When another group was requested, Bruno’s Man in Liverpool did not dismiss the idea of sending The Beatles – with the proviso that they enlist a drummer. At the Casbah, a teenage haunt where they’d played as The Quarry Men, they discovered that proprietor Mona Best’s handsomely saturnine son Pete was beating the skins with the club’s resident quartet, The Blackjacks. With the information that The Blackjacks were about to disband, there was no harm, The Beatles supposed, in asking the fellow if he fancied a trip to Hamburg.

Pete Best would pack his case with his mother’s full approval, but 19-year-old Lennon – whose life, incidentally, was nearly half over – had to jump the highest hurdle of parental opposition. Nevertheless, the disapproving Mimi washed her hands of the whole business, although she would not acknowledge – as John did – that his ignominious art college career was over.

On August 17, 1960, John breathed foreign air for the first time when the night ferry docked at the Hook of Holland. Many hours later, he and the others climbed down from Allan Williams’ overloaded mini-bus outside the Kaiserkeller, plusher than any palais they’d seen on Merseyside. It was, therefore, a disappointment when Herr Koschmider, taking charge of his human freight, conducted them round the dingy Indra and then to three small and windowless rooms adjoining a toilet in a cinema over the road. This was where The Beatles would sleep. It would have sickened pigs but after a couple of hours convalescent sloth Lennon had recovered enough of his ebullience to joke about Stalag 13, Red Cross parcels and forming an escape committee.

“Raus! Raus! Schnell! Schnell!” he barked when The Beatles rose to give their first ever performance outside the United Kingdom. How could he have imagined that, six years later, they’d be giving a scream-rent concert at the city’s Ernst-Merck-Halle – a German equivalent of the London Palladium – to which they’d be driven in state in a fleet of Mercedes with Polizei outriders.