And the mates were not always best pleased by the improvements he suggested. One of these was that as manager Nigel Walley should no longer receive an equal share of the collective earnings because he didn’t actually appear onstage. ‘Walloggs’, however, successfully resisted the idea, pointing to an upswing in the standard of recent gigs, which had included a performance for the social club at Stanley Abattoir. Another of Paul’s concerns was that Colin Hanton’s drumming was not of a high enough standard. In addition to playing guitar, piano and trumpet, Paul was a competent drummer and, as Len Garry remembers, was always beating on tabletops and chairs with his hands or sticks or even pieces of cutlery, as if to demonstrate how much better he would be at the job. But John defended Colin, thinking mainly of what a grievous loss his drum kit would be.
The new McCartney-inspired professionalism was quickly in evidence. When the Quarrymen returned to New Clubmoor Hall to play a further gig for Charlie Mac on 23 November, 1957, they had swapped their former casual mélange of tartan shirts and striped knitwear for matching black jeans, white shirts and Western-style bootlace ties. A historic snapshot taken that night shows John and Paul sharing prominence at the front, each with his own stand microphone. While their sidemen are in shirtsleeves, they wear drapecut jackets, which, Eric Griffiths remembers, were of a creamy or oatmeal shade. Even in that quaint, pseudo-cowboy guise, they are so obviously the only two who matter.
A crucial factor in John’s early relationship with Paul was the concurrent reduction of Pete Shotton’s presence in his life. With the Quarrymen fully weaned to rock ‘n’ roll, Pete’s skiffle washboard was now an embarrassing anachronism. But he knew John thought too much of him to drop him from the group, however much of a passenger he became. Finally, one night at a drunken party in Smithdown Road, the situation was resolved without grief or embarrassment to either side. John picked up the washboard and smashed it over Pete’s head, dislodging the central metal portion and leaving the wooden frame hanging around his neck like a collar. Pete, as he remembers, sank to the floor, weeping tears of laughter mixed with relief. ‘I was finished with playing but I didn’t want to say so, nor did John. This way let me out and it let John out.’ Paul thus stepped neatly into Pete’s shoes as the partner, private audience and sounding-board John could not do without.
A major geographical coincidence also played its part in fostering their friendship. The art college to which John dispiritedly journeyed each day was literally next door to Paul’s school, the Liverpool Institute. The two seats of learning occupied the same L-shaped building whose neo-classical façade extended from Hope Street around the corner into Mount Street. Their respective populations worked in sight and earshot of one another and mingled in the cobbled streets outside during breaks and dinner hours. John was thus free to meet up with Paul privately all through the day as well as on Quarrymen business during the evening.
But rock ‘n’ roll and guitars were only part of what drew them together so immediately and powerfully in those last months of 1957. The affinity was intellectual as much as musical; they were top-of-the-form English literature students as much as would-be Elvises. Paul had read many, if not quite all, of the books that John had; he could quote Chaucer and Shakespeare and was a keen habitué of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. To his surprise, he discovered that the self-styled beer-swilling desperado who claimed to have hated all schoolwork secretly devoted hours to composing stories, poems and playlets, all via the disciplining medium of a typewriter. For all Paul’s neat, methodical ways, he shared John’s addiction to nonsense across its full historical spectrum, Lewis Carroll to the Goons. Phrases from Lennon works-in-progress, such as ‘a cup of teeth’ or ‘the early owls of the Morecambe’, produced another instant meeting of minds; the Lennon-McCartney collaboration in its earliest form consisted of sitting around and thinking up further puns for John to type.
Paul was always conscious that John came from a social drawer above his, however much John tried to disown it. ‘We [the McCartneys] were in a posh area, but the council house bit of the posh area. John was actually in one of the almost posh houses in the posh area…in fact, he once told me the family used to own Woolton, the whole village.’ It was also impressive that, whereas Paul and his brother had ‘aunties’, John had more formal and patrician-sounding ‘aunts’, with oddball nicknames like Mater and Harrie rather than plain, cosy Millie or Jin. For Paul, this whole Richmal Crompton, tennis-club atmosphere was summed up in the name Mimi, which he’d previously associated with 1920s flappers brandishing long cigarette holders.
Despite his pleasing appearance, politeness and charm, his reception at Mendips was initially not very cordial. Mimi by this point clearly could not conceive of John bringing home anyone but ‘scruffs’ whose aim could only be to lead him even further astray. Paul later said he found her treatment of him ‘very patronising…she was the kind of woman who would put you down with a glint in her eye, with a smile—but she’d put you down all the same.’ Mimi, for her part, felt suspicious of the way Paul invariably chose to sit on a kitchen stool at teatime as if, she said, ‘he always wants to look down on you.’
At a significantly early stage, John and he began holding guitarpractice sessions away from the other Quarrymen. They tried playing seated side by side on John’s bed, but there was so little room to manoeuvre that the heads of their guitars kept clashing together. Most times they would end up in the covered front porch, to which Mimi often banished John—and where the brickwork gave their tinny guitars an extra resonance. Sharing new chords was complicated by Paul’s left-handedness, which meant that each saw the shape in an inverted form on his companion’s fretboard, then had to change it around on his own. ‘We could read each other’s chords backwards,’ Paul remembers, ‘but it also meant that if either of us needed to borrow the other’s guitar in an emergency we were forced into having to play “upside-down” and this became one of the little skills that each of us developed. The truth is that neither of us would let the other re-string his guitar.’
The McCartneys’ house in Forthlin Road was only a few minutes’ walk from the Springwood estate where John had his secondary and utterly different home. Paul was soon introduced to Julia and told of the arrangement whereby John lived with his aunt even though the mother whom he clearly adored, and who clearly adored him, was only a couple of miles away. Julia was captivated by Paul’s angelic charm and full of sympathy for the loss he’d suffered a few months before. ‘Poor boy,’ she would say to John, with what now seems heartbreaking irony. ‘He’s lost his mother. We must have him round for a meal.’ Paul in turn thought Julia ‘gorgeous’ and was impressed that she could play banjo, an accomplishment which even his highly musical father did not possess. Julia was always suggesting new numbers for the two of them to learn—mostly standards like ‘Ramona’ and ‘Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine’, which were to have as much influence on great songs still unwritten as would Elvis or Little Richard.
Despite the aching lack of a mother in Paul’s life, the modest council house where he lived with his cotton salesman father and younger brother seemed to John an enviably uncomplicated place. The result was that he and his guitar spent increasing amounts of time at 20 Forthlin Road, where the parental welcome was at first not a great deal warmer than Paul’s at Mendips. Jim McCartney was too much of a realist to try to ban John from the house, but he gave Paul a warning that was to prove not ill-founded: ‘He’ll get you into trouble, son.’
In his 1997 authorised biography by Barry Miles, Many Years from Now, Paul would describe how the two seeming opposites beheld a mirror image in much more than the chord-shapes on their respective fretboards:
John, because of his upbringing and his unstable family life, had to be hard, witty, always ready for the cover-up, ready for the riposte, ready for the sharp little witticism. Whereas, with my rather comfortable upbringing, a lot of family, lots of people, very northern, ‘Cup of tea, love?’ my surface grew to be easygoing…But we wouldn’t have put up with each other had we each only had that surface. I often used to boss him around, and he must have appreciated the hard side in me or it wouldn’t have worked; conversely, I very much appreciated the soft side in him.
