There was some consolation in an upsurge of British rock ’n’ roll, and a television show capable of reflecting it. Oh Boy! every Saturday night, on the solitary commercial channel, filled a dark stage, as in some Miracle play, with major American performers like Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, and their British counterparts, Marty Wilde, Dickie Pride, Duffy Power, Vince Eager, and Tony Sheridan. There was also a new young Elvis copy, Cliff Richard, whose lip unfurled at the corner like a faulty window blind, and whose backing group, the Shadows, featured in equal prominence around him, stepping to and fro with their guitars in unison. Their first single, “Move It,” was the first successful British version of American rock ’n’ roll, with its junglelike bass rhythm and clangorous lead guitar.
Up in Liverpool, the three guitarists in a group still called the Quarry Men watched Oh Boy! every Saturday night, crawling close to the television screen when the Shadows came on, to try to see how they did that stupendous “Move It” intro. Paul worked it out first and at once jumped onto his bike with his guitar to hurry over to John’s.
Of all the original, top-heavy skiffle group, apart from John himself, only one member remained. They still had Colin Hanton, the little upholsterer, and the drum set he was paying thirty-eight-pounds for in installments. They only kept him on, as Colin well knew, for the sake of those drums. Having a drummer, however unsatisfactory, made the difference between a real group and three lads just messing around with guitars.
Without Nigel Walley to manage them, their playing was on a haphazard basis, at birthday parties, youth club dances, or social clubs, where they would perform for a pie and a pint of ale. To Colin, the ale was consolation for knowing they only wanted him for his drums, and for the increasingly acid remarks made by Paul about his playing.
Both John and George now owned electric guitars. John’s was a fawn-colored Hofner “Club 40,” semisolid, with two knobs on it, while George had persuaded his mother to help him raise thirty pounds for a Hofner “Futurama,” a cheap version of Buddy Holly’s two-horned Fender Stratocaster. But neither could yet afford to buy an amplifier. Better-equipped groups would usually lend them an amp for their orphan guitar leads. Failing that, George the trainee electrician would wire both his and John’s instruments to the club or dance hall’s public address system.
In mid-1958, they scraped up £5 between them to make a demonstration record that, they hoped, might act as a more impressive calling card than the printed ones in Nigel’s wallet. The “studio” they chose was in the back room of a private house in Kensington, Liverpool, owned by an elderly man named Percy Phillips. The group that day comprised John, Paul, George, Colin Hanton, and a temporary recruit named John Lowe. Their money bought them a two-sided shellac disk, its A-side a cover version of the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day” with John singing lead and George rather tinnily reconstructing Buddy Holly’s guitar licks. Of far more individuality was John’s B-side vocal, a country-ish ballad called “In Spite of All the Danger,” written by Paul with help from George. However, the first duty of all amateur groups in 1958 was to mimic hot sounds in the charts. Their Crickets cover was what they played and replayed, to themselves and anyone else who would listen.
Colin Hanton was still with them when a second chance arrived to become Carroll Levis “Discoveries.” Again, with every other local group, they presented themselves at the Empire theater to be auditioned by the great man—this time for his Granada Television talent show. They got through the Liverpool heats, and were booked to appear in the semifinals at the Hippodrome Theater studios in Manchester. Before they left they changed their name to Johnny and the Moondogs.
The journey to Manchester was overshadowed by their general poverty. “We hadn’t worked out in advance how much it would cost us to get there by train and by bus,” Colin Hanton says. “When we got on the bus in Manchester Paul discovered he hadn’t got enough money to get home again. He was panicking all over the place. ‘What am I going to do? This is serious.’ A bloke stood up at the front to get off and, as he passed Paul, he stuck a two-shilling piece (10p) into his hand. Paul got up and yelled down the bus stairs after him, ‘I love you.’”
Poverty robbed them of their opportunity to appear on television with Carroll Levis’ infant ballerinas and players of musical saws. The final judging, on the strength of the audience applause for each act, did not take place until late evening, after the last bus and train back to Liverpool had gone. Johnny and the Moondogs, with no money to spend on an overnight hotel stay, had to leave before the finale.
Colin Hanton appeared with them as drummer for the last time one Saturday night at the Picton Lane busmen’s social club. They had got the engagement through George Harrison’s father, who acted as MC there and, with Mrs. Harrison, ran a learners’ ballroom dancing class. From George’s dad had come the important news that a local cinema manager would be dropping in to see whether Johnny and the Moondogs were suitable to put on in the interval between his Sunday picture shows.
“At the beginning, that night went really well,” Colin Hanton says. “We were all in a good mood—pulling George’s leg and saying, ‘There’s George’s dad; where’s his bus?’ It was a real stage they’d put us on, with a curtain that came up and down. The curtain got stuck, so we played six numbers, not five, in our first spot. The busmen and clippies were all cheering, they really dug us.
“In the interval, we were told, ‘There’s a pint for you lads over at the bar.’ That pint turned into two pints, then three. When we went on for the second spot, we were terrible. All pissed. The bloke from the Pavilion never booked us. There was a row about it on the bus going home, and I thought, ‘Right. That’s it. I’ll not bother playing with them again.’” At the next stop, even though it was before his destination, Colin hauled his drum set off the bus and did not turn up for any further gigs.
For some time afterward Johnny and the Moondogs, or the Quarry Men, or whatever they felt like calling themselves, remained poised on the edge of extinction. They would still get together and play, but only at small events like birthday parties, where the lack of a drummer did not count as much. One night, when they all arrived in different colored shirts, they called themselves the Rainbows. John and Paul would sometimes work as a duo, the Nurk Twins. George regularly sat in with a more stable group, the Les Stewart Quartet, at a club in West Derby called the Lowlands.
A short distance away, in the quiet thoroughfare of Hayman’s Green, stood a large Victorian house belonging to a family named Best. Johnny Best had originally been Liverpool’s main promoter of boxing matches in the city’s six-thousand-seat stadium. He had lately separated from his wife, Mona, leaving her the big old house with her bedridden mother, her two sons, Peter and Rory, a collection of paying guests, and assorted Eastern mementoes including a Hindu idol that flexed its many arms in the front hall.
Peter, her elder son, was then eighteen, and in the sixth form (senior year) at Liverpool Collegiate Grammar School. An outstanding scholar and athlete, he was also unusually handsome, in a wry, brooding way, with neat, crisp, wavy hair that gave him more than a look of the film star Jeff Chandler. If, in addition, he was somewhat modest and slow to push himself, then “Mo,” as he called his mother, would always be there to do it for him.
Under the house were extensive cellars, used for storage and the boys’ bicycles. Pete and Rory, fatigued by the long summer holiday of 1958, asked Mona Best if they could make a den down there for themselves and their friends. There were so many friends that Mrs. Best suggested making the cellar into a real club, like the Lowlands and city espresso bars. For the rest of that year, she, her two sons, and a team of potential members redecorated the cellar, installing bench seats and a counter above which, as a final touch, Mrs. Best painted a dragon on the ceiling. Her favorite film being Algiers, with Charles Boyer, she decided to call the new club the Casbah.
There then arose the question of finding a group to play on club nights. One of the girl helpers ment
ioned Ken Browne, who played at the Lowlands in Les Stewart’s quartet. Ken Browne paid the Casbah a visit while redecorations were still in progress, bringing with him another quartet member, George Harrison. “George didn’t seem to show too much enthusiasm for what we were doing,” Mona Best said, “but Ken Browne threw himself heart and soul into it. He’d come over and help us with the work at weekends.”
When George came back he brought with him two other musicians for the Casbah’s resident group. “John Lennon walked in with Paul McCartney, and John’s girlfriend, Cyn. We were still painting—trying to get ready for our opening night. John got hold of a paint brush to help us, but he was without his glasses and as blind as a bat. He started putting paint on surfaces which didn’t require paint. And all in gloss when I’d told him to use undercoat. On opening night, some of the paint still wasn’t quite dry.”
In sedate West Derby, the Casbah Coffee Club caught on with teenagers at once. Mona Best ran it in person, selling coffee, sweets, and soft drinks behind the miniature bar. John, Paul, George, and Ken Browne played, without a drummer and using Ken Browne’s 10-watt amplifier, for three pounds a night among the four of them. They all grew friendly with the Bests, especially with Pete, the handsome, taciturn elder son who, despite his plan to become a teacher, was keenly interested in rock ’n’ roll and show business. The group proved such an attraction that, at weekends, Mrs. Best would hire a doorman to keep out the rougher element.
“It all went fine,” Mona Best said, “until this one night when Ken Browne turned up with a heavy cold. I could see he wasn’t well enough to play. I said to him, ‘Look, you go upstairs and sit with Mother’—he often did that; she was bedridden, you see, and he’d sit and talk to her. I said, ‘I’ll bring a hot drink up to you.’ But Ken said no, he’d stay down in the club and watch. Just John, Paul, and George played, and at the end, I gave them 15s (75p) each. There was a bit of murmuring; then they said, ‘Where’s the other 15s?’ ‘I’ve given it to Ken,’ I told them.
“They didn’t like that. They wanted the full three pounds. But it was too late. I’d already given Ken his fifteen shillings. There was a bit of arguing, and Ken said, right, that was it, he’d finished with them. The other three walked out of the club there and then.
“Pete, my elder boy, had been getting more and more interested, watching the others play. I remember Ken Browne saying to him, ‘Right. I’m out of that lot. Come on, Pete: Why don’t you and I get a group up now?’”
Twice each week, Arthur Ballard would leave the college of art on Hope Street to conduct a private tutorial with the student he considered the most gifted of all under his charge. The student, a white-faced, tiny boy named Stuart Sutcliffe, refused to work in college; he had his own cramped studio, in the basement of a house in Percy Street, where Ballard would visit him, bringing a half-bottle of Scotch whisky for refreshment. The tutorial was a morning’s talk, during which Sutcliffe never stopped painting. “He worked with large canvases, which wasn’t at all fashionable then,” Arthur Ballard says. “He was so small, he almost had to jump with his brush to reach the top.”
Among the students, Stu Sutcliffe was something of a cult. His pale, haunted face, topped by luxuriantly swept-back hair, gave him a more than passing resemblance to James Dean, the Hollywood star who had become legendary to that generation for the hectic fame and shortness of his life. Stu was aware of the resemblance, cultivating it with dark glasses and an air of brooding far from his true personality.
He was born of Scottish parents in Edinburgh in 1940. His father, Charles, a marine engineer, moved to Liverpool on wartime attachment to Cammell Laird’s shipyard and subsequently went to sea as a ship’s engineer. The rearing of Stuart and his two younger sisters was left to their mother, Millie, a preschool teacher. Charles and Millie had a volatile relationship, veering from intense mutual affection to passionate rows, generally on the eve of his departure back to sea. From the earliest age, Millie Sutcliffe said, Stu strove to take on the role of her protector. “I’d sometimes be sitting in my chair with my head in my hands. Stuart would sit at my feet, looking up at me. ‘You’re tired,’ he’d say. ‘Come on, we’ll put the little ones to bed, then you and me must have a talk.’”
He had entered art college from Prescot Grammar School, below the normal admittance age, and had quickly revealed a talent of dazzling diversity. His first terms, in addition to prosaic curriculum work, produced notebooks thronging with evidence of a facility to reproduce any style from Matisse to Michelangelo. Derivative as his student work was, it had a quality that excited Arthur Ballard—a refusal to accept or transmit anything according to convention. “Stu was a revolutionary,” Ballard says. “Everything he did crackled with excitement.”
Early in 1959, the path of Hope Street’s most promising student crossed that of its most uninspired and apathetic one. At Ye Cracke, the student pub in Rice Street, beneath the etchings of Wellington greeting Blücher at Waterloo and Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, Stu Sutcliffe fell into conversation with John Lennon.
The intermediary was a friend of Stu’s named Bill Harry, a curly-haired boy who had won his way from a poor childhood on Parliament Street to become the college’s first student of commercial design. Bill was a prolific amateur journalist, a writer and illustrator of science fiction “fanzines,” and, like Stu himself, an omnivorous reader. They would sit for hours in Ye Cracke, discussing Henry Miller and Kerouac and the “beat” poets, Corso and Ferlinghetti.
In Bill Harry, John found someone not standoffish and superior as he had thought all his fellow students to be, but down-to-earth, friendly, humorous, and encouraging. Bill knew already of John’s interest in writing, and one lunchtime at Ye Cracke, asked if there was anything of John’s that he could read. He remembers with what embarrassment John dragged some scraps of paper from his jeans pocket and handed them over. Instead of the Ginsberg or Corso pastiche he had expected, Bill Harry found himself reading a piece of nonsense about a farmer that made him gurgle with laughter.
Stu Sutcliffe’s effect on John was more complex. For Stu, in 1959, resembled neither Teddy Boy nor jazz cellar habitué. He had evolved his own style of skin-tight jeans, pink shirts with pinned collars, and pointed boots with high, elasticized sides. His dress, in fact, was disapproved of by the art college far more than John’s but was tolerated because of his brilliance as a student.
Stu’s passionate commitment to his painting, and to art and literature in all young and vital forms, communicated itself to John in a way that no formal teaching had been able to do. From Stu, he learned of the French Impressionists, whose rebellion against accepted values made that of rock ’n’ roll seem marginal. Van Gogh, even more than Elvis Presley, now became the hero against whom John Lennon measured the world.
John’s sudden enthusiasm for his college studies to some extent benefited Paul also. Paul, still revising for O-levels at the institute, was only too glad to join in intellectual discussions, passing himself off as a student from the nearby university. For George Harrison, it was more arduous, since John among his art college cronies was even more inclined to be witty at George’s expense. But he was fifteen now, and not such a kid, and learning to answer John back.
This new era revived the group, which had been languishing again since the dispute at Mrs. Best’s. Stu and Bill Harry both sat on the Students’ Union committee, and were thus able to get bookings for John, Paul, and George to play at college dances. The trouble was, although John and George had electric guitars, they no longer had Ken Browne and his 10-watt amplifier. On Stu Sutcliffe’s recommendation, the Students’ Union agreed to buy an amplifier for them to use, on the understanding, of course, that it should not be taken away from college.
Stu’s interest in rock ’n’ roll was a purely aesthetic one. He passionately wanted to join a group as an adjunct to the personal image he had created for himself. As John and he became closer friends, the idea grew that Stu, in some or other capacity, should join John?
??s group. That he possessed no ability on any instrument was not considered a disqualification. If he were to buy a guitar—or, better still, some drums—he surely would be able to learn in the way the other three had. Unfortunately, Stu, with his small grant and his straitened family circumstances, had no money to spend at Hessy’s music shop.
In 1959, the biennial John Moores Exhibition took place at Liverpool’s illustrious Walker Art Gallery. Mr. Moores was the city’s commercial patriarch, deriving fortunes from football pools, shops, and mail-order catalogs, of which a sizable part was philanthropically devoted to encouraging the arts on Merseyside. This was the second Moores Exhibition, offering four thousand pounds in prize money and attracting some two thousand entries from all over the British Isles. A canvas submitted by Stu Sutcliffe was one of the handful selected for hanging.
Aunt Mimi remembered John’s unfeigned pleasure in Stu’s achievement. “He came rushing in to tell me.… ‘You’ll never guess; it’s the Moores Exhibition. You must come and see it. And look nice!’
“We went to the Walker Art Gallery and John took me up to this enormous painting. It seemed to be all khaki and yellow triangles. I looked at it and I said, ‘What is it?’ Well! John got hold of my arm and hustled me outside; I wasn’t allowed to see another picture in the show. ‘How could you say a thing like that, Mimi?’ He gave his chest a big thump, and bellowed, ‘Art comes from in here!’”