Beatles (15 page)

He also went to the Pavilion. ‘That was where they had the nude shows. They would strip off absolutely starkers. Some of them were all right as well. It was funny, letting us in at that age. But it was just good clean dirty fun.’

Like John and the others, he was influenced by the skiffle phase and Bill Haley’s early rock numbers, but, like John again, it wasn’t till Elvis Presley that he was really bowled over. ‘That was the biggest kick. Every time I felt low I just put on an Elvis and I’d feel great, beautiful. I’d no idea how records were made and it was just magic. “All Shook Up”! Oh, it was beautiful!’

When he got his guitar, he tried to play Elvis numbers or whatever else was popular. His best impersonation was of Little Richard.

‘I used to think it was awful,’ says his father. ‘Absolutely terrible. I couldn’t believe anybody was really like that. It wasn’t till years later when I saw Little Richard, on the same bill as the Beatles, that I realized how good Paul’s impersonation was.’

‘The minute he got the guitar, that was the end,’ says Michael. ‘He was lost. He didn’t have time to eat or think about anything else. He played it on the lavatory, in the bath, everywhere.’

There was another friend from his class, Ian James, from the Dingle, who also got a guitar about the same time. He and Paul used to go around together, with their guitars. They played to each other, teaching each other bits they’d learned. ‘We used to go round the fairs,’ says Paul, ‘listening to the latest tunes on the Waltzer and trying to pick them up. We also tried to pick up birds. That never worked. I haven’t got the flair for picking them up like that.’

Both Paul and Ian James wore the same sort of white sports jackets – after the pop song ‘A White Sports Coat’. ‘It had speckles in it and flaps over the pockets. We used to have black drainies as well. We used to go around everywhere together dressed the same and think we were really flash. We both had Tony Curtis haircuts. It took us hours to get it right.’

Jim McCartney tried to stop Paul dressing the way he did, but didn’t get very far. ‘Paul was very clever,’ says Michael. ‘When he bought a new pair of trousers, he’d bring them home for Dad to see how wide they were and he would say OK. Then he would take them back and get them altered. If Dad noticed afterwards, he’d swear blind they were what he’d agreed.’

‘I was very worried he’d turn out a Teddy Boy,’ says Jim. ‘I had a dread of that. I said over and over again that he wasn’t going to have tight trousers. But he just wore me down. His hair was always long as well, even then. He’d come back from the barber’s and it would just look the same and I’d say, “Was it closed, then?”’

Paul was just as interested in girls as the guitar. ‘I got it for the first time at 15. I suppose that was a bit early to get it. I was about the first in my class. She was older and bigger than me. It was at her house. She was supposed to be babysitting while her mum was out. I told everybody at school next day, of course. I was a real squealer.’

Paul remembers vividly that day in the summer of 1957 when Ivan mentioned that he was going to Woolton Parish Church to see this group he sometimes played with, though he wasn’t actually playing with them that day. Paul said yes, he’d come along and see them. Might be a few girls to pick up.

‘They weren’t bad,’ says Paul. ‘John played the lead guitar. But he played it like a banjo, with banjo chords, as that was all he knew.

‘None of the others had even as much idea as John how to play. They were mostly just strumming along.

‘They played things like “Maggie May”, but with the words a bit different. John had done them up himself as he didn’t know them all.

‘They were playing outdoors in a big field. John was staring round as he was playing, watching everybody. He told me afterwards that it was the first time he tried sussing an audience, you know, sizing them up, seeing whether it was best to twist a shoulder at them, or best not to move at all.

‘I was in my white sports coat and black drainies, as usual. I’d just got them narrowed again during the dinner-hour from school. They were so narrow they knocked everybody out.

‘I went round to see them afterwards in the Church Hall place. I talked to them, just chatting and showing off. I showed them how to play “Twenty Flight Rock” and told them all the words. They didn’t know it. Then I did “Be Bop A Lula” which they didn’t know properly either. Then I did my Little Richard bit, went through me whole repertoire in fact. I remember this beery old man getting nearer and breathing down me neck as I was playing. “What’s this old drunk doing?” I thought. Then he said “Twenty Flight Rock” was one of his favourites. So I knew he was a connoisseur.

‘It was John. He’d just had a few beers. He was 16 and I was only 14, so he was a big man. I showed him a few more chords he didn’t know. Ian James had taught me them really. Then I left. I felt I’d made an impression, shown them how good I was.’

Pete Shotton, however, doesn’t recall Paul making any big impression. Pete, being completely unmusical, was a bit harder to impress by ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, however brilliantly executed.

‘I didn’t really take in Paul that first meeting,’ says Pete. ‘He seemed very quiet, but you do when you meet a group of new blokes for the first time. I wasn’t really jealous of him, not at first. He was so much younger than us. I didn’t think he was going to be a rival. Me and John were still the closest pals. I was always John’s friend. I loved him, that’s why.’

John remembers mulling over the meeting with Paul in his mind afterwards, before he decided on anything. This was unusual for him, to think things out instead of barging on with whatever he wanted.

‘It was with being pissed,’ says John. ‘It must have slowed me up.

‘I was very impressed by Paul playing “Twenty Flight Rock”. He could obviously play the guitar. I half thought to myself – he’s as good as me. I’d been kingpin up to then. Now, I thought, if I take him on, what will happen? It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line, if I let him join. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.’

About a week later Paul went over to Menlove Avenue on his bike to see Ivan. He cycled up through the golf course from Allerton. On his way back he met Pete Shotton. ‘Pete said they’d been talking about me. Did I want to join their group? I said OK, right.’

Paul’s first public performance, as a member of the Quarrymen, was at a dance at the Conservative Club in Broadway. Paul was going to do his own little solo bit that evening, probably ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, but something happened and he didn’t.

But later on, after the dance, he played a couple of tunes to John he had written himself. Since he’d started playing the guitar, he had tried to make up a few of his own little tunes. The first tune he played to John that evening was called ‘I Lost My Little Girl’. Not to be outdone, John immediately started making up his own tunes. He had been elaborating and adapting other people’s words and tunes to his own devices for some time, but he hadn’t written down proper tunes till Paul appeared with his. Not that Paul’s tunes meant much, nor John’s. They were very simple and derivative. It was only them coming together, each egging the other on, which suddenly inspired them to write songs for themselves to play. From that day, they never stopped.

‘I went off in a completely new direction from then on,’ says Paul. ‘Once I got to know John it all changed. He was good to know. Even though he was two years older than me and I was just a baby, we thought the same sort of things.’

What happened in the subsequent months was that John and Paul got to know each other. They spent all their time together. They both stayed away from school and went to Paul’s house,
while his dad was out at work, and ate fried eggs and practised guitar chords. Paul showed John all the ones he knew. John’s banjo chords, taught to him by Julia, were obviously useless. As Paul is left-handed, after he had shown John what to do, John had to go home and do it in the mirror on his own, then get it the right way round.

Pete Shotton began to feel a bit out of it. ‘My days with the group soon came to an end,’ says Pete. ‘We were playing at someone’s party in Smithdown Lane. It was a right piss-up really. John and I got hilarious, laughing like mad at each other’s jokes. Then he broke my washboard over my head. I lay there, in tears, with it framed round my neck. It wasn’t the life for me any more, playing in a group. Apart from feeling no good, I didn’t like standing up there. I was too embarrassed.’

Ivan Vaughan had long since left the group, though he was still a friend, of John’s at home and of Paul’s at school.

Paul began to think more and more of the possibility of a great friend of his from his school joining the group. This friend had taken up skiffle and rock and Elvis about the same time, but was coming on even better than most people. Paul thought he would bring him along to see John. He was even younger than Paul, but he didn’t think that would matter, as he was so good.

Ivan Vaughan was annoyed when he did. Ivan had taken along first of all Len Garry and then Paul McCartney from the Institute to meet John. He looked upon the procuring as his prerogative. He didn’t like the idea of Paul taking someone else along.

This new friend was not just much younger, he didn’t even make any pretence at being an intellectual, the way Paul did. George Harrison, as the friend was called, was a real out-and-out Teddy Boy. Ivan couldn’t understand why the Quarrymen should be interested in him.

George Harrison is the only Beatle to come from a large family and the only one whose family background is normal and undramatic. He is the youngest of the four Beatles and the youngest of the four children of Harold and Louise Harrison. He was born on 25 February 1943, at 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree, Liverpool.

Mrs Harrison is stocky, jolly, very friendly and outgoing. Mr Harrison is thin and thoughtful, precise and slowly deliberate. He left school at 14 and worked for a firm that made mangles, the sort once used by housewives on washday. He got 7s. 6d. a week for taking them round on a handcart, then dragging them into people’s houses.

He wanted to join the navy, but his mother wouldn’t let him. His father had been killed at Mons during the First World War and he thinks this put her off all services. But she allowed him to join the Merchant Navy. He was at sea from 1926 to 1936 as a steward with the White Star Line.

He met his wife Louise in 1929. ‘No, let me tell this story,’ she said. ‘It’s the funniest thing you ever heard. I’d met him and some other boys in the street one day. One of the other boys had said give us your address, I’m going off to Africa tomorrow and I’ll send you a bottle of scent. Well, I thought, it’s a bottle of scent, but Harold snatched my address and went off with it.

‘What a pandemonium his first letter caused. It had the White Star flag on, so I knew it must be him. There was a deaf
and dumb man in the kitchen, the day it came, getting a can of water. My mother was always very kind to everyone.

‘Letters were very rare in those days, at least we never got any. This deaf and dumb man bent down and picked up my letter, even though he couldn’t read. I could see it said “Miss Louise French” and I tried to grab it from him. But somebody else snatched it. It went round everybody before I got it, with everyone howling at all the kisses. I had to iron it before I could read it.’

Harold and Louise were married on 20 May 1930. Not in a church, but in Brownlow Hill Register Office. She was a Catholic, but he was not.

Her father had originally come from Wexford in Ireland and had at first spelled his name the Irish way, with a double ‘ff’. He was six foot two and he was at one time a commissionaire at New Brighton Tower and then a lamplighter.

‘When he was away during the First World War, my mother became a lamplighter herself. She was up a lamppost one day and somebody accidentally took the ladder away. She was left hanging by her hands from the bar and had to fall in the end. She was eight months pregnant as well. But the baby was lovely. Nine pounds.’

Harold and Louise moved into 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree, when they got married and lived there for 18 years. It was a simple terrace house, two up and two down, and cost ten shillings a week. It is just a few miles away from the areas in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney were living.

Harold was still at sea and Louise was working as an assistant in a greengrocer’s shop, a job she kept up until shortly before the birth of their first child Louise in 1931. Their second child, Harold, was born in 1934. Not long after, Harold decided to leave the Merchant Navy. He was fed up anyway, but most of all he wanted to see more of his children.

‘I was by then a first-class steward on £7 7s. a month. Twenty-five shillings of that a week was sent home for my wife. I never had enough money, even when we got some “good
bloods” on board. I did a lot of cruises and this is what we called people with money who gave us big tips. In my spare time I used to cut people’s hair. I was trying to save up in order to come ashore and look for a job.’

‘He used to write home and tell me how hard the life was,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘He would take his trousers off at night, hang them on the line, but before they’d stop swinging, he was in them again.’

Harold came ashore in 1936. There was a slump on. He was on the dole for 15 months. ‘With two kids, I was allowed 23 bob a week. Out of that there was the ten bob rent to pay, plus coal, and food for all of us.’

In 1937 he managed to get a job as a bus conductor and in 1938 became a bus driver. In 1940 their third child Peter was born and in 1944 along came George, the fourth child and third son.

‘I went upstairs to see him that first day,’ says Mr Harrison. ‘I couldn’t get over it. There he was, a miniature version of me. Oh no, I thought. We just couldn’t be so alike.’

‘George was always very independent,’ says Mrs Harrison. ‘He never wanted any assistance of any kind. When we used to send him to Mrs Quirk’s the butcher’s we’d give him a note but he’d throw it away the minute he got outside our house. Mrs Quirk used to see his little face coming over the counter and know who it was. “Haven’t you got a note?” she would say. “I don’t need one,” George’d say. “Three-quarters of best pork sausages please.” He’d not be much more than two and a half when he did that. All the neighbours knew him.’