to display advertisements for the Quarrymen free of charge in their front windows. He also gave out business cards, expressed with old-fashioned formality and claiming an impressive command of musical styles:
Country—Western—Rock ‘n’ roll—Skiffle
THE QUARRY MEN [sic] Open for engagements
Their fee varied between £3 and £5, according to length of performance, divided among six of them, since their manager also took an equal share.
John’s insistence on putting rock ‘n’ roll first onstage, if not in print, was to cause Nigel many headaches with promoters of skiffleonly venues, as well as some little embarrassment in his day job as an apprentice golf pro. In the Lee Park clubhouse, he had become friendly with a doctor named Sytner, whose son, Alan, was about to open a jazz club in central Liverpool. Its premises were the cellar of an old warehouse in Mathew Street, and—in a conscious echo of jazz joints on the Parisian Left Bank—it was to be named the Cavern. Alan Sytner agreed to book the Quarrymen (advertising them as ‘Quarry Men’) for a skiffle session in company with other local groups, including the Deltones, the Dark Town Skiffle Group, and the Demon Five.
But the Cavern in this first incarnation proved hostile territory, peopled by traditional jazz fans of the most earnest and intolerant kind. Skiffle they could tolerate, for its blues and folk ancestry, but rock ‘n’ roll had much the same effect on them as a string of garlic on a vampire. John nonetheless launched into his Presley and Fats Domino numbers, oblivious of the nauseated silence that greeted each one. ‘I tried to argue with him,’ Rod Davis remembers, ‘not because I was a purist myself, but because it was so obviously a suicidal thing to do with that particular audience.’ John carried on regardless, so ‘lost’ that when a note was passed up to him, he took it to be a song request. But it was from the Cavern’s management, and contained a single terse instruction: ‘Cut out the bloody rock.’
Just as it had for his father, Alf, two decades earlier, the Empire Theatre in Lime Street represented John’s ultimate ambition as a performer. True to its time-honoured place on the music-hall Number One Circuit, the Empire now presented all the country’s top skiffle and rock-’n’-roll stars, usually at the head of a traditional variety bill whose jugglers and comedians had to struggle to make themselves heard over anticipatory teenage screams.
Alf Lennon had never gotten further than backstage at the Empire. But his son received an early chance to tread its hallowed boards when a Carroll Levis Discoveries show came through town in June 1957. Levis was an oleaginous Canadian, known in glamour-hungry and credulous postwar Britain as ‘Mister Star-maker’. During the fifties, he used to tour provincial theatres, holding talent contests for every kind of would-be entertainer, from singers and comedians to parakeet trainers and players of musical saws.
When the Quarrymen turned up at the Empire for the contest’s Sunday heats (minus Rod Davis, whose religious parents would not let him take part), they found several other skiffle groups also hungry to be discovered by Mister Star-maker. Their main competition, they decided, was a group from Speke, the Sunnysiders, who included a midget named Nicky Cuff on tea-chest bass. The Sunnysiders’ act was partly comic, with Cuff (in everyday life, a workmate of Colin Hanton’s) running onstage dressed in a top hat and tails and explaining that he’d lost his way to the Adelphi Hotel. His other gimmick was being able to stand on his tea chest while belabouring its single string.
The Quarrymen did better, however, getting through to the Wednesday-night finals while the Sunnysiders’ comic dimension actually lost them points. But on the Wednesday, when winners were judged on audience applause, John’s outfit found themselves up against a group from Wales who had arrived with a busload of supporters to cheer them on. Rod Davis remembers how these Welsh skifflers used extrovert showmanship, flinging themselves around, even lying flat on the stage, ‘while we just stood still, like purists’. Nonetheless, the applause-measuring ‘Clapometer’ initially showed a dead heat between the two groups. But on a retry, the Welsh group were announced to be just ahead. So Mister Star-maker—not for the only time, it would turn out—missed the greatest discovery of his life.
Rock ‘n’ roll continued to defy every forecast of its imminent selfdestruction, boosted by an unexpected endorsement from Hollywood. Late 1956 had seen the release of a film comedy called The Girl Can’t Help It, originally intended as a vehicle for the huge-bosomed screen goddess Jayne Mansfield, with jibes at teenagers and their music by way of a subplot. Instead, the satire on rock somehow turned into a celebration of it—to this day, still the most potent ever captured on celluloid.
When The Girl Can’t Help It finally reached Liverpool early in the summer of 1957, it showed John America’s new rock-’n’-roll stars as living beings for the very first time—minus Elvis, admittedly, but featuring cameo performances by others he worshipped almost as much, plus a few he’d barely heard of, all in voluptuous Eastmancolor and megascreen CinemaScope. Here was Little Richard shrieking the title song in voice-over as Jayne Mansfield’s mighty cleavage sashayed along a street, making men’s glasses shatter in their frames and milk spurt out of bottles as though in premature ejaculation. Here was Eddie Cochran, a hunky young Elvis clone, singing ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ while aiming his gorgeous vermilion guitar to left and right like a tommy gun. Here was another white newcomer, Gene Vincent, a bony ex-sailor with an eerily high and sibilant voice, keening a second classic piece of rock-’n’-roll Jabberwocky, entitled ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’. Here, even more fascinatingly to John, were Vincent’s backing group, the Bluecaps: not merely tacked-on session men but fellow spirits who shared their leader’s aura of dissipation and menace, and counterpointed his vocal with almost animalistic whoops and yaps and cackles.
The messages from jukeboxes and Radio Lux were not all uproar and anarchy. Early June brought the first chart appearance of the Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, two former child country stars whose almost feminine close harmony created some initial confusion with Britain’s own Beverley Sisters. The Everlys’ number-six hit, ‘Bye Bye Love’, so appealed to John’s softer, melodic side—never mind the notion of having someone so close as a brother to sing with—that he began looking around for a partner to form an Everly-style duet. Since his usual blood brother, Pete Shotton, couldn’t sing a note, he had a few tentative vocalising sessions with Len Garry. But the closer-than-Everly brotherhood he was destined to form only a few weeks from now would not be called Lennon and Garry.
On 22 June, Liverpool celebrated the 750th anniversary of the charter it had been granted by King John. The occasion was marked by street parties throughout the city, each street competing with its neighbours in lavishness of decoration, food and outdoor entertainment. Like several others, Rosebery Street catered to the younger element by having a skiffle group, in this case John and the Quarrymen. Rosebery Street was deep in the heart of Liverpool 8, a quarter where grammar-school boys from Woolton normally would not care to stray. But it was also the home of Charles Roberts, Colin Hanton’s printer friend, who had stencilled QUARRY MEN on his bass drum, so a quid pro quo was felt to be in order.
The Quarrymen played on the back of a coal lorry, giving one performance in the afternoon and another in the early evening. At the second, their audience included a hugely proud Julia, who made the long bus journey from Bloomfield Road, bringing John’s halfsisters, Julia and Jackie. The two little girls sat on the lorry’s tailboard while Julia watched from the Roberts family’s living room.
Many cameras were in use that day, and one of them chanced to take the first-ever picture of John in performance. There he is on the coal-dusty stage, wearing the checked shirt Julia had bought him at Garston’s open-air market, singing raptly into a stand microphone whose cord extends perilously and through the open ground-floor window of the house behind, to the nearest accessible electrical outlet. His fellow Quarrymen are grouped slightly behind him, all but for little Colin Hanton, in a garish two-tone jumper, who sits some way to the left—‘half-cut’, as he now admits, on pints
