After the departure of Garry and Griffiths, the supply of paid gigs dwindled almost to nothing. For the next year, as graver matters overshadowed John’s life, his group would teeter constantly on the edge of extinction yet somehow never quite topple over it.
During this extended drought, most of the occasions when he shared a stage with his two young Liverpool Institute sidekicks had nothing to do with performing. Although the Institute and the Art College occupied the same building complex, they did not interact in any way, and all interior connecting corridors had been sealed since their hiving-off from the old Mechanics Institute in the 1890s. However, there was an exterior side passage from the Institute to a section of the college yard close to a door that led to its cafêteria. Several times a week in their lunch break, Paul and George would do their best to obliterate their school uniform by buttoning their black raincoats to the neck over their ties. Then they would slip along the passage into the college precincts to meet up with John in the cafeteria.
It was strictly against the rules of both college and school: had the two intruders been recognised by anyone in authority, they would have been ejected and reported to their headmaster. As Paul remembers, the thrill of danger always suffused this lunchtime habitat of John’s, where egg and chips were served instead of dreary school meat and veg, where fascinating females engaged in racy banter with arty young men, and where everyone could smoke as they pleased. ‘You’d see Paul and George sneak in,’ Ann Mason remembers. ‘Then John would join them, looking quite nervous. The cafeteria had a stage, which we used for our college plays and shows. They usually sat up there together, because it was near the door, I suppose in case Paul and George needed to make a quick exit.’
John and Paul meanwhile continued writing songs together, seated in their facing chairs in the McCartney living room. After something like six months of these mostly illicit afternoon sessions, they had around 20 compositions they thought worth preserving—though for what, they still had no idea. Paul kept them in a school exercise book, their lyrics and chord sequences set out in his neat hand, each page headed ‘A Lennon-McCartney Original’ or ‘Another Lennon-McCartney Original’.
In every songwriting partnership they had ever heard of, one partner produced the melody, the other the lyrics. John and Paul made no such division of labour; both did words and music. Each song on which they collaborated was not only an expression of their mirrorimage affinity but also an exercise in one-upmanship. From opposite sides of the fireplace, they would bat new ideas and chord changes back and forth like a table tennis match, each half-hoping the rally would continue for ever and half that his opponent might miss and the ball go bouncing out of control among the coal scuttle and the fire tongs.
To begin with, they used the traditional Tin Pan Alley lexicon of moon, June, true and you, from which rock ‘n’ roll, for all its seeming iconoclasm, had not significantly departed. ‘There’s no blue moon that I can see/There’s never been in history,’ ran one lyric destined to go nowhere. Now and then, the composers would subconsciously reveal their common grounding in English literature. A casual pingpong exchange around G major, for instance, produced the phrase ‘love, love me do,’ a locution straight from the Lewis Carroll era (‘Alice, Stop daydreaming, do!…’). Tape recorders at this date were still cumbersome reel-to-reel machines, costing far more than the pair could hope to scrape up between them. Consequently, they had no idea how their voices sounded together, nor any means of preserving rough versions of songs that might deserve to be polished later. Instead, a simple rule of thumb was adopted: if they came up with a new number on one day and could both still remember it on the day after, it worked.
So the titles kept accumulating in Paul’s exercise book, some predictable and derivative, others already giving off an unmistakable tang of originality and humour: ‘Keep Looking That Way’, ‘Years Roll By’, ‘Thinking of Linking’, ‘Looking Glass’, ‘Winston’s Walk’. In relation to their present life as musicians, the exercise was completely pointless. The audiences for whom the Quarrymen played, when they did manage to play, wanted nothing but skiffle chestnuts or American rock-’n’-roll covers. Those Lennon-McCartney Originals seemed destined not even to enjoy the limited exposure of John’s ‘Daily Howl’.
The old skiffle scene was growing more sophisticated in every way. Whereas once groups would audition for gigs in person, many of them now preferred to put songs on tape to circulate among promoters and club managements. Since the Quarrymen had no tape recorder, nor access to one, there was only one way so to advertise themselves. In the Kensington area of Liverpool was a small studio where, for not too high a price, amateur performers could have their efforts enshrined on an actual gramophone record. Somewhat as a last resort in their hunt for work, the Quarrymen found the requisite cash between them and booked an appointment.
The studio was owned by an elderly man named Percy Phillips, who operated it single-handedly in a back room of his Victorian terrace house. Here, one afternoon in mid-1958, John, Paul, George and drummer Colin Hanton assembled, plus a schoolfriend of Paul’s named Duff Lowe, who was blessed with the gift of playing Jerry Lee Lewis-style arpeggios on the piano.
Even at this important moment, Lennon-McCartney Originals were left in the background. For their A-side, they chose ‘That’ll Be the Day’, Buddy Holly’s breakthrough hit with the Crickets, released in September of the previous year. They had been trying for months to work out Holly’s back-somersaulting guitar intro and, thanks mainly to John, had just succeeded in getting it note-perfect. The B-side was ‘In Spite of All the Danger’, a country-and-western pastiche—and a rather good one—written by Paul with help from George, which explained Duff Lowe’s presence on piano. John took the lead vocal on both tracks, with Paul and George singing backup harmonies.
The experience of ‘making a record’, about which they had been boasting to their friends and families, proved rather lacking in glamour. They were allowed only a single take for each song, then had to sit and wait while Mr Phillips cut the disc on a machine somewhat like an industrial lathe. The price was £5, but for an extra £1, he told them, he could first transfer their recording to tape and help them edit it before putting it on wax. ‘We’d only just managed to raise the five quid between us,’ Colin Hanton remembers. ‘John said there was no way we were paying another £1.’
Their money bought them just the one shellac disc in the new, shrunken 45 rpm size, with a yellow label saying ‘Kensington’ and the song titles and composer credits handwritten by Percy Phillips. Nigel Walley duly hawked it around the clubs and dance halls, but without notable success. Merseyside as yet had no local radio that might have picked it up, nor discotheques that might have introduced it to live audiences. The most effective plugger turned out to be Colin’s printer friend, Charles Roberts, who worked for the Littlewoods mail-order organisation. Roberts managed to get John’s rendition of ‘That’ll Be the Day’ played over the public-address system to Littlewoods’ largely female employees.
The disc became the common property of its makers, each enjoying custody of it in turn, one week at a time. John had it for a week then passed it to Paul, who had it for a week then passed it to George, who had it for a week then passed it to Colin, who had it for a week, then passed it to Duff Lowe who had it for the next two decades, until it was worth a fortune.
All these new people and preoccupations in his life had helped blind and deafen John to an unbelievable thing going on under his very nose. Aunt Mimi was having a clandestine affair with her lodger, the biochemistry student Michael Fishwick. Yes, Mimi, that brisk suburban Betsey Trotwood, who seemed so scornful of normal feminine susceptibilities—scornful of the entire male species—had a lover half her age and only eight years older than the nephew in her care.
She had taken to Fishwick from the moment he arrived at Mendips as a 19-year-old undergraduate in 1951. It was not just that the Yorkshire teenager was studious and serious beyond his years and able to provide the intellectual stimulation Mimi had craved in her mundane marriage to George Smith. Something
