UK Edition
Lennon and McCartney: was rock's greatest partnership doomed from day one?
The annual fête at St Peter’s Church in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton on Saturday 6 July 1957 didn’t promise a great deal. There was a display by the Liverpool Police dogs, a fancy dress parade and an appearance by the band of the Cheshire Yeomanry.
There was also a performance by a skiffle group of local teenagers called The Quarry Men. As their 16-year-old singer John Lennon stood on a shallow outdoor stage and improvised a version of The Del-Vikings’ doo-wop song Come Go With Me, he was unaware that an encounter that afternoon would alter the course of his life and, in turn, the course of popular culture.
Into the church yard walked a 15-year-old lad called Paul McCartney. Sixty years to the day on from that meeting, the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership remains the greatest in history and The Beatles remain music’s most revered band. Without doubt, it remains pop music’s most important ever encounter.
But despite the years of globe-straddling success that followed, there were small suggestions even in those first days of underlying tensions from Lennon; tensions that would contribute to the messy collapse of the world’s biggest band a little over a decade later.
In 1957, Lennon was living in Woolton with his Aunt Mimi, after his mother Julia had handed over care of her son to her sister. Growing up, he said he spent life “entertaining myself, whilst secretly waiting to find someone to communicate with.” That someone walked into his life that warm July afternoon.
McCartney, who lived in nearby Allerton, was aware of the rebellious-looking lad nearly two years his senior, but he gave the Teddy Boy a wide berth. “You saw [John] rather than met him,” McCartney said of his future bandmate, quoted in The Beatles Anthology. “This Ted would get on the bus, and I wouldn’t look at him too hard in case he hit me, because he was just that much older.”
It was a school friend of Paul’s, a boy called Ivan Vaughan who was The Quarry Men’s occasional tea-chest bass player, who suggested he went to the fête. “Ivan said to me one day ‘The Woolton Village Fête is on Saturday. Do you want to come?’ I said ‘Yeah, I’m not doing anything’,” McCartney recalled. On arrival, he instinctively headed towards the music being performed on an outdoor stage, where the quiffed guy he’d avoided eye contact with on the bus was singing in a checked shirt.
“I remember coming into the fête and seeing all the sideshows. And also hearing all this great music wafting in from this little Tannoy system. It was John and the band,” McCartney told Record Collector in 1995. He particularly remembered watching Lennon making up the verses to Come Go With Me as he went along. “I just thought ‘Well he looks good, he’s singing well and he seems like a great lead singer to me.’ Of course, he had his glasses off so he was looking really suave. He was really the only outstanding member, all the rest kind of slipped away.”
The two met as the band were humping their gear inside the church hall for the evening show. Inside, they got talking and McCartney picked up a guitar.
“We talked after the show and I saw he had talent. He was playing guitar backstage, doing Twenty Flight Rock by Eddie Cochran,” Lennon said, again in Anthology.
Lennon was immediately drawn to the musicianship of the younger teen. McCartney showed Lennon how to properly tune the guitar as his instrument was tuned like a banjo, with five strings instead of six. McCartney also stood at the church’s upright piano and played Jerry Lee Lewis’s Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On. As he did so, Lennon leant over and played the upper octaves with his right hand, surprising the innocent McCartney with his beery breath.
Lennon was quietly mesmerised. “Paul could play guitar, trumpet and piano,” he recalled. “That doesn’t mean to say he has a greater talent, but his musical education was better. I could only play the mouth organ and two chords on a guitar when we met.”
After the fête, the band and McCartney — who was buzzing from hanging out with older, edgier lads — went to a Woolton pub, where they lied about their ages in an attempt to get served. There was talk of a gang from nearby Garston coming over the beat them up. McCartney felt, he has said, like he was suddenly in “Mafia land”.
What happened in the immediate aftermath of the meeting is disputed. According to Lennon’s recollection in the Anthology book, he turned to McCartney “right then” and asked him to join the band. Other sources recall it differently. According to Beatles biographer Philip Norman, it was Pete Shotton, The Quarry Men’s washboard player, who asked McCartney to join the group “a couple of weeks later”.
McCartney also recalls a gap. And although excited, he also remembered waiting a day to accept the invitation. Either way, McCartney said it was that rendition of Twenty Flight Rock in the church hall of St Peter’s, Woolton, that “got him into The Beatles”, as a later iteration of The Quarry Men was to become.
But there were tiny hints of underlying tension from the start, a tension that would never quite disappear over The Beatles’ extraordinary lifespan. By Lennon’s own admission, McCartney educated him in those very early days, even though the lessons contained a tricky twist. “Paul taught me how to play properly — but I had to learn the chords left-handed because Paul is left-handed. So I learnt them upside down, and I’d go home and reverse them,” Lennon said.
But as well as loving McCartney’s musicianship, Lennon also admitted to being reticent on meeting him. Although his instinct was to let McCartney join The Quarry Men, he was niggled by territorial instincts. The band was effectively Lennon’s, and in letting in a new recruit who was arguably a better musician, he risked ceding his superiority within the group.
“I’d been kingpin up to then,” Lennon candidly admitted. “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.”
“Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had in? To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger?” Lennon said.
Of course, the biggest band of all time grew from Lennon’s decision to invite McCartney to join. The Beatles sold over 800 million albums, had fifteen UK number one albums and wrote some of the world’s best-known songs.
But that insecurity would gnaw at Lennon for years. That sense of acquiescing control never quite left him, particularly towards the end of the band’s amazing run. And despite everything — despite the success, the money, the ground-breaking music, and that extraordinary twist of fête that warm July Saturday — it was an issue that would ultimately contribute to the official break-up of the world’s biggest band in 1970.