Beatles (19 page)

For their public performances, they were usually all dressed like Teddy Boy cowboys, with black and white cowboy shirts with white tassels from the top pockets and black bootlace ties.

But they spent more time in George’s or Paul’s house than on stage. ‘We used to come back to our house and smoke tea in me dad’s pipe,’ says Paul. ‘Sometimes we’d bring a girl home or sit and draw each other. But most of the time we were playing guitars and writing songs.’

John and Paul wrote about 50 songs in their first couple of years together. Only one was ever used later – ‘Love Me Do’.

The first thing they did when they started a new one was write ‘Another original by John Lennon and Paul McCartney’.

They were both getting more adept at playing the guitar, thanks partly to watching the big stars of the day on TV. ‘I watched the Shadows backing Cliff Richard one night. I’d heard them play a very clever introduction to “Move It” on the record, but could never work out how they did it. Then I saw them do it on TV. I rushed out of the house straight away, got on me bike and raced up to John’s with me guitar. “I’ve got it,” I shouted. And we all got down to learning it right away. It gave us a little bit of flash to start off our numbers. I also got some good chords from listening to “Blue Moon”.’

As they were always keen to enter any competition, however crummy, there was great excitement when the biggest competition organizer of the day arrived in Liverpool. The advertisement in the
Liverpool Echo
said that ‘Mr Star-Maker, Carroll Levis’ was due to pay a visit soon as part of his Carroll Levis Discoveries TV show. The show was going to be recorded in Manchester but he was to hold a local audition in Liverpool, at the Empire Theatre, to see which Liverpudlian talent was fit for the programme itself in Manchester.

John, Paul and George, like half the teenage population of Liverpool, went along for the audition. They got through and were invited to Manchester to do the real show.

Mrs Harrison remembers the excitement of it. ‘George was dead thrilled by this letter which had come through the post one day. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. The letter was addressed to some group called “The Moondogs”.’

The Moondogs was what they had become, a name thought up on the spur of the moment for the Carroll Levis Show. They were on the bill as ‘Johnny and the Moondogs’. All groups had a leader in those days, like Cliff Richard and the Shadows. So they put John’s name first. He was the leader anyway, if anyone was.

They did their bit in Manchester and got a reasonable amount of applause afterwards. The whole basis of the Carroll Levis Show was that at the end each group returns, does a few bars from its piece again, and the audience claps like mad, or otherwise. It is this final clap which is registered and the winners decided.

But Johnny and the Moondogs, being poor Liverpool lads, with no transport of any kind to get them back to Liverpool, couldn’t wait. The show was running late and they were about to miss their last train back to Liverpool. They hadn’t enough money for a night in a Manchester hotel. So when the time came for the final applause, they had gone.

Naturally, they didn’t win. They weren’t even spotted, or noticed, or given any encouragement by the talent spotters around.

For John, Paul and George it was a big disappointment. Their first time within touching distance of the big-time professionals had come and gone.

At the Art College John and Stuart were becoming even closer friends. Stu spent most of his time following the group round and watching them practise. He and John together managed to persuade a college committee to buy them a tape recorder, ostensibly for use by all students. John took it over for himself, to record his group playing, so that they could hear what they sounded like. They also got a ‘public address system’ bought for use at college dances. This ended up as part of his group’s amplification equipment.

Stu was still as interested in art, despite spending so much time with John and his group. He entered some paintings for the John Moores Exhibition, one of the best exhibitions of its type, not just on Merseyside but throughout Britain. It is named after John Moores, a member of the wealthy Liverpool family that is connected with Littlewoods football pools and the mail order firm. Stuart Sutcliffe, although still a student, won a prize worth £60, a huge sum and a great success for one so young.

John, his best friend and biggest influence, immediately saw a way of using the money in the best possible way. Stu had always been saying that he wished he could play an instrument and really
be in their group, instead of just hanging around. John said now was his chance to join. With his £60, he could buy a bass guitar. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t play. They would teach him.

Paul and George were equally keen on the idea, as they needed another member for the group. From what George remembers, Stu was offered an alternative – he could buy himself a bass or a set of drums. They needed both as they had three stars on guitars and no backing of any sort. ‘Stu had no idea how to play it,’ says George. ‘We all showed him what we could, but he really picked it up by playing on stage.’

In those early days, as can be seen from photographs, Stu usually had his back to the audience, so that no one could see how very few chords he was playing. They were doing more and more engagements, still earning only a few bob, playing at working men’s clubs and socials. But as the beat group boom took over Liverpool, little teenage clubs slowly began to spring up. They were basically coffee clubs, on the lines of the hundreds of coffee bars, serving espresso coffee amidst lots of rubber plants and bamboo, which had arisen all over the country. The Liverpool ones occasionally put on live shows for the teenagers, which gave the hundreds of beat groups somewhere to play.

The beat groups could never get into the traditional sort of clubs, like the Cavern. They were only for jazz fans and jazz bands, which was considered a much higher art form. The beat groups were all scruffy and amateur and Teddy Boyish. It was a working-class art form, full of electricians and labourers. There was a tendency to look down upon all beat groups and the people who played in them.

‘We were always anti-jazz,’ says John. ‘I think it is shit music, even more stupid than rock and roll, followed by students in Marks and Spencer pullovers. Jazz never gets anywhere, never does anything, it’s always the same and all they do is drink pints of beer. We hated it because in the early days they wouldn’t let us play at those sort of clubs. We’d never get auditions because of the jazz bands.’

The beat groups were by now all trying to get wired up, with
electric guitars and amps, which skiffle groups had never done. There were other rock-type singers who had come along in Elvis’s wake, like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, spawning many British imitators.

But it was still in London that everything in Britain happened. Britain’s first rock and roll singer who had any national success in Britain on the lines of the American stars was a Cockney, who made it in London through the London coffee bars – Tommy Steele. Then there was Cliff Richard, who modelled himself completely on Elvis. John, George and Paul seem to have been unaware of Tommy Steele, at least they can’t remember him making any impression on them. But they actively hated Cliff Richard and the Shadows. John says it was Cliff’s sort of Christian image, even then, that offended him. But they also hated the traditional pop ballads Cliff Richard went on to sing.

Paul, as the one who always tried to make things happen, was prepared to play down their likes and dislikes and chat up anyone who looked like helping them. He was always trying hard to get them some publicity in the local newspapers.

He wrote a letter around this time to a journalist called Mr Low they had met in a pub.

‘
Dear Mr Low
,

I am sorry about the time I have taken to write to you, but I hope I have not left it too late. Here are some details about the group
.

It consists of four boys: Paul McCartney (guitar), John Lennon (guitar), Stuart Sutcliffe (bass) and George Harrison (another guitar) and is called
…

This line-up may at first seem dull but it must be appreciated that as the boys have above average instrumental ability they achieve surprisingly varied effects. Their basis beat is off-beat, but this has recently tended to be accompanied by a faint on-beat; thus the overall sound is rather reminiscent of the four in the bar of traditional jazz. This could possibly be put down to the influence of Mr
McCartney, who led one of the top local jazz bands (Jim Mac’s Jazz Band) in the 1920s
.

Modern music, however, is the group’s delight, and, as if to prove the point, John and Paul have written over fifty tunes, ballads and faster numbers, during the last three years. Some of these tunes are purely instrumental (such as “Looking Glass”, “Catswalk” and ‘Winston’s Walk”) and others were composed with the modern audience in mind (tunes like “Thinking of Linking”, “The One After 909”, “Years Roll Along” and “Keep Looking That Way”)
.

The group also derive a great deal of pleasure from rearranging old favourites (“Ain’t She Sweet”, “You Were Meant For Me”, “Home”, “Moonglow”, “You are My Sunshine” and others)
.

Now for a few details about the boys themselves. John, who leads the group, attends the College of Art, and, as well as being an accomplished guitarist and banjo player, he is an experienced cartoonist. His many interests include painting, the theatre, poetry, and, of course, singing. He is 19 years old and is a founder member of the group
.

Paul is 18 years old and is reading English Literature at Liverpool University. He, like the other boys, plays more than one instrument – his specialities being the piano and drums, plus, of course
…’

The rest of Paul’s highly colourful mix of fact and fiction is, unfortunately, missing. He wasn’t, of course, 18 or at Liverpool University, but it was true, as he indicated by the dots, that the group didn’t have a name. Later in 1959 they started seriously trying to think of what to call themselves, just as they’d done for the Carroll Levis audition, as it looked as if they were about to get another important audition.

This is when the idea of calling themselves the Beatles came up. No one is definitely sure how it happened. Paul and George just remember John arriving with it one day. They’d always been fans of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. They liked his music, and
the name of his group. It had a nice double meaning, one of them a purely English meaning, which Americans couldn’t have appreciated. They wished they’d thought of calling themselves the Crickets.

Thinking of the name Crickets, John thought of other insects with a name that could be played around with. He’d filled books as a child with similar word play. ‘The idea of beetles came into my head. I decided to spell it BEAtles to make it look like beat music, just as a joke.’

That was the real and simple origin of their name, though for years afterwards they made up different daft reasons each time anyone asked them. Usually they said a man with a magic carpet appeared at a window and told them. Though they’d at last thought of a name they liked, they weren’t permanently called the Beatles for a long time.

They met a friend who who asked them what their new name was. They said Beatles. He said you had to have a long name for a group. Why didn’t they call themselves Long John and the Silver Beatles? They didn’t think much of his idea either. But when this important audition came up and they were asked what they were calling themselves they said ‘Silver Beatles’, which was a name they stuck to for the rest of that year, 1959.

The important auditioner was none other than the famous Larry Parnes, then the king of British rock and roll who had in his stable Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Duffy Power and Johnny Gentle. They’d heard about Larry Parnes coming to Liverpool while hanging around the Jackaranda, a club where many beat groups used to play. This was owned by a Liverpool-Welshman called Allan Williams. He also ran the Blue Angel, the club in which the Larry Parnes audition was going to be held.

They arrived at the Larry Parnes audition without a definite name – it was only when one of Larry Parnes’s assistants asked them for a name that they came out with Silver Beatles. They also arrived without a drummer. A drummer they’d been using had promised to turn up, but didn’t. Once again, they were drummerless.

A drummer who was at the Blue Angel for the audition with another group did them a favour and stood in with them. He was Johnny Hutch, looked upon as one of the top three drummers of the time in Liverpool. There is a photograph of the Silver Beatles taken at that audition (
see here
). Johnny Hutch is sitting at the back looking very bored and superior. As usual, you can’t see much of Stu. He has his back to Larry Parnes, trying hard to hide his fingerwork on the bass.

The audition was to find a backing group for Billy Fury. Larry Parnes didn’t think any group was good enough, but he offered the Silver Beatles a two-week tour of Scotland, as the backing group to one of Larry Parnes’s newest but unknown discoveries, Johnny Gentle. It was in no sense their tour. The Silver Beatles were to be very minor. But it was their first ever proper engagement as professionals, and a real tour at that, however short and however second-rate.

George, who was then coming on for 16, took his two weeks’ holiday so that he could go. Paul at the time was about to sit his O levels, but he had no intention of missing the chance of a tour for something as trivial as studying for his GCE. Ivan Vaughan, his friend at the Institute, remembers arguing with him and saying he was silly to go off and not do any work for his exams. Paul somehow managed to convince his father that he’d been given two weeks’ holiday off school. They’d been told to take things easy. He said he would be back just in time for the exams and the tour would be a good rest for his brain. No wonder he passed only one subject.

They had to get yet another new drummer for this tour of Scotland. He was called Thomas Moore. They can’t remember anything else about him, except that they went to his flat to get him and that he’d been living on the dole. Thomas Moore, apparently, was his real name. The Silver Beatles, in this first flush of being pro, all wanted to change their names. That was the fashion.