When I began researching Shout in Liverpool at the end of the 1970s, John Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s childhood homes hadn’t yet been acquired by the National Trust and turned into shrines attracting thousands of visitors each year.
Often I’d be the sole pilgrim at these and other still-unmarked Beatle landmarks such as Penny Lane and Strawberry Field (its correct spelling) which together inspired the greatest-value pop single ever released.
I came to realise what a social divide had existed within the songwriting partnership of the century during the class-obsessed 1950s: John brought up amid bourgeois gentility by his snobbish Aunt Mimi, Paul the son of a £12-per-week commercial traveller working in Liverpool’s still-flourishing cotton trade.
Yet their creative symbiosis was so complete that right-handed John could play left-handed Paul’s guitar (he took some time to switch to bass) and vice-versa, and one could finish a song the other had started, right through to the magnificent A Day In The Life.
John’s Aunt Mimi’s spotless ‘semi’ in Menlove Avenue, Woolton, was an unlikely venue for the embryo Beatles with its aspiring name (Mendips), its faux-Tudor touches and the glassed-over front porch she insisted they use for practice-sessions to spare her their ‘horrible racket.’
And when 14 year-old George joined them, as she told me, his Teddy Boy clothes and chewy Scouse accent so offended her that she banned him from the house.
Above all, Mendips held memories of John’s biological mother, Julia, who’d given him to her older sister when he was six years-old because Mimi wanted a child without the necessary preamble with her husband, George.
A few yards from the front gate, Julia was run over and killed by a speeding motorist just as the adolescent John was getting to know and appreciate her. Paul had lost his mother, Mary, to breast cancer two years earlier, so they were bonded by heartbreak as well as music.
Paul’s own tiny Council home in blue-collar Allerton lay only a ten minute walk away, but the characters of the two suburbs were as different as West and East Berlin in postwar Germany.
There, by contrast, when Paul discovered rock ‘n’ roll he received only encouragement from his widower father, Jim, who’d led an amateur dance band in the 1930s and imbued him with the love of romantic ballads and Broadway show tunes that would equally influence his songwriting.
Most biographers’ days are spent buried in archives, sifting through their subjects’ diaries and letters, but mine had had no time for such things, bar the odd postcard home as they racketed around the world.
Rather, I was writing an oral history as pioneered and perfected by the great American reporter, Studs Terkel. And, as I soon learned, the best sources were people who’d never spoken on the record before, rather than those accustomed to being interviewed and delivering a much-rehearsed routine.
I also discovered that, when writing a biography, what you need above all is luck and that it can come suddenly out of nowhere and take the most wildly improbable form.
My first, unrecognised, stroke of biographer’s luck put me in the way of a woman named Olive Johnson. Olive had known Mary McCartney, Paul’s mother, whom he lost to breast cancer when he was 14. Mary remained an angelic presence in Paul’s mind and eventually the inspiration for his song ‘Let It Be.’
Olive’s mother, Bella, was a nurse working at the same clinic as Mary, and Olive had been like a big sister to Paul and his younger brother, Michael. ‘I remember the special treat she used to make them at tea-time,’ Bella said. ‘Apple sandwiches with sugar.’
The Johnsons had been staunch friends to Paul’s father, Jim, as he buckled to the task of bringing up the boys single-handedly after Mary’s death. The younger brother Olive worried about, the elder not so much. ‘Michael was the one you felt you wanted to love and protect. With Paul, you loved him but you knew you’d never have to protect him.’
Just before our interview, as it happened, I’d been dumped by my then girlfriend, and the approach of Easter seemed to me infinitely sad. I made no mention of it to Olive or her mother Bella, but the latter sensed something and gave me a tin of home-made scones to take back to London.
Liverpool Institute High School, which both Paul and George attended, was still functioning in all its Victorian grandeur, as was Quarry Bank High School in Calderstones Park, where John had been a notorious disruptor and clown.
There I viewed the punishment book listing the crimes for which he and his best friend, Pete Shotton, received more or less continuous beatings and detentions: ‘Gambling on school field during house-match’… ‘Throwing blackboard-duster out of window.’
I found my way to Woolton village, that leafy oasis in Merseyside’s smoggy industrial plain, and to the little field beside St Peter’s Church where Paul saw John for the first time, fronting his skiffle group, the Quarrymen, in competition with needlework stalls and coconut-shies at its summer fete.
Equally unchanged was the adjacent church hall with its harmonium and musty hymn-books where he impressed the Quarrymen’s leader (already a bit drunk in mid-afternoon) by singing Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ and playing guitar at the same time.
I met all the one-time Quarrymen, Pete Shotton, Rod Davis, Len Garry and Colin Hanton, and their manager Nigel Walley (‘Walloggs’, John called him) who still had a block of their rather formal business-cards:
COUNTRY WESTERN ROCK ‘N’ ROLL SKIFFLE OPEN FOR ENGAGEMENTS.
Walley offered me one as a souvenir but, having no interest in collecting Beatles memorabilia (fool!) I arranged for my newly acquired researcher, Mark Lewisohn, to buy it for £15. Today, it must be worth hundreds.
Just before John met Paul, he’d started at Liverpool College of Art, following what was then the usual path for boys of a creative bent on whom mainstream education had no effect, and much to the further dismay of his socially-conscious aunt.
His tutor, Arthur Ballard, a former middleweight boxing champion, told me how he arrived at college still traumatised by the sudden, violent death of his mother – a trauma that the world’s adoration would never fully erase.
He’d cry all alone in secret alcoves, Ballard recalled, or try to booze into oblivion. ‘One day I got on a bus and found him on the top deck, lying across the back seat, pissed out of his mind. He’d been up there for hours with no idea where he was.’
Some solace came through Ballard’s enthusiasm for his cartoons, which he didn’t (and never would) regard as ‘real’ art; friendships with fellow students like Stuart Sutclffe and Bill Harry; and dating the gentle, long-suffering Cynthia Powell, whom he’d later marry.
The art college and the school both Paul and George attended were in adjoining premises, with a connecting door which one day would rank alongside the magic portal to Narnia or Harry Potter’s Platform 9¾.
At lunchtime, the Institute boys would illegally sneak through it with their guitars, rendezvous with John and rehearse in an empty life-drawing room under his group’s new (and generally-derided) name, the Beatles.
Inevitably, some Liverpool interviewees I sought had a cynical attitude to writers and needed convincing – usually through a third party close to them – that I’d be different from the rest.
So it was with Pete Best, the drummer whom the Beatles abruptly sacked and replaced with Ringo Starr on the very threshold of fame. First I had to audition for Best’s formidable Anglo-Indian mother, Mona, whose Casbah ‘coffee club’ had been their first regular venue.
Best was cast out for not being a good enough drummer after two years in which his bandmates had seemed quite content with his performance.
His mother believed the real reason was jealousy: he was broodingly handsome, rather like the Hollywood star Jeff Chandler, and always had more girls than any of the others, even Paul, swooning over him.
I’d visualised a man struck almost dumb with shame and humiliation after two decades of working as a baker’s deliveryman and local government clerk rather than drumming for the greatest band in history. But when we met in the Adelphi Hotel’s cocktail bar, he couldn’t stop talking about being ‘cut and dried and hung out on the line’ by the Beatles while he downed moody pint after pint.
He was certainly a little like Jeff Chandler but one noticed only his eyes, still fathomless with pain at his treatment two decades ago and mourning for what he’d missed.
Liverpool’s reluctance to commemorate its four most famous sons was nowhere plainer than in the fate of the Cavern, that reeking, insanitary cellar-club in cobbled Mathew Street, close to the docks, where the four had reached their peak as a live band.
It had had a decent existence post-Beatles but closed in 1974 when its last owner went bust. A petition to save it got nowhere and its triple-arched vault was filled in to make way for a car-park.
Very much still in business, though, directly opposite its site was The Grapes pub where the bands used to congregate between sets in their sweat-soaked suits with their pints of mild. Here I met two crucial characters from the Beatles’ scuffling years, Allan Williams and Bob Wooler.
The shambolic Williams had fixed their first performances in Hamburg’s red-light district and delivered them there by van, without work permits - telling them that if challenged they should masquerade as students on vacation - and then pretty much leaving them to it.
Since relinquishing them to their nonpareil manager, Brian Epstein, he’d styled himself ‘The Man Who Gave The Beatles Away’ (amended by John to ‘The Man Who Couldn’t Give The Beatles Away’) and peddled china mugs with that inscription as symbols of the mug he’d been.
Wooler, the Cavern’s resident deejay, had been of great practical help, giving them tips about polishing up their stage-act and lending them rare American R&B records from his personal collection to cover - and so stay ahead of the competition – like Barrett Strong’s Money or Chan Romero’s Hippy Hippy Shake.
Williams and Wooler were old friends and inveterate drinking partners and did a kind of cross-talk act, the wild Welsh scouser playing off the portly, pedantic ex-deejay. Yet, like Pete Best, both had the unmistakable look of those who’d helped the Beatles to the starting-line but been left behind when they soared into the stratosphere.
I was to meet other such desolate Liverpool eyes many more times around the city and it would always upset me.