Jim McCartney would no more let Paul skip school than allow that boy in the house, so subterfuge was vital. Afternoon sessions, two till five, ended with a hurried wafting around of smoke and washing of dirty dishes … though by then they’d often written another song. “He’ll get you into trouble, son,” Jim warned Paul. Parents had been saying that about John Lennon since he was five – and rightly so, because he did. But this hadn’t stopped a solid gang of pals – intelligent grammar-school boys, as Paul McCartney was – idolising him as their leader. And what high and hysterical times he gave them in return.
In 1956-7, when John was 16, he turned his gang into his group, the Quarry Men, and for a while they rode the skiffle craze up on stage belting out rhythmic prison songs of the American South. John sang and played guitar, forever the frontman. But he was – first, last, always – a rocker, and his group was now charging headlong in that direction; newspaper ads for the dances they played were already calling them rock ’n’ skiffle, though actually it was rock all the way. And later, when John – now 17 and clearly the coolest kid on the block – generously invited Paul to join them, the 15-year-old was so keen to make himself indispensable that deceiving dad was but the flimsiest of obstacles.
Paul was conscious of the age gap. To him, John was “the fairground hero, the big lad riding the dodgems”, a grown-up Teddy Boy who swore, smoked, scrapped, had sex, got drunk and went to college, who strutted around with Elvis Presley sideburns, upturned collar, hunched shoulders and an intimidating stare (which Paul would soon learn was born of insecurity and acute short-sightedness). Lennon radiated a life-force that turned heads everywhere: he was wickedly funny and fast with it, he was abrasive, incisive and devastatingly rude, and he was musical, literate and beguilingly creative. Whether painting, conceiving strangely comic poems, or committing cruel drawings and odd stories to the written page, he was a boy beyond convention and control, a lone ranger. He was everything his friends wanted to be, and said everything they wanted to say but wouldn’t dare. John Lennon always dared.
The more hours John and Paul spent together the more they found these things out, uncovering humour and harmony right down the line. They’d both read Alice in Wonderland and Just William; both were consumed by The Goon Show and talked the talk familiar only to those who imbibed the lingo.
The Beatles at a wedding Reception at the Harrison’s, in 1958, still known as The Quarry Men. (Mark Lewisohn)
Then there were girls. Paul, despite the age gap, matched John in his ceaseless lust; John was already a sexual adventurer, Paul wasn’t far behind. Both had shed their virginity and were eager for whatever action they could get. Birdspotting was a way of life and often now a combined quest. But top of their hit parade, always, was American rock and roll music – hearing it and playing it. Two years earlier it wasn’t known to them, now it was what they lived and breathed for. There weren’t yet a hundred recordings to cherish but John and Paul knew them all, and when they weren’t listening to or playing them they were talking about them. Elvis Presley was God, it was as simple as that. John and Paul listened to his records in the way only besotted fans do, thrilling to the minutiae.
Just recently, the Crickets had burst into their lives too, a breakthrough almost as essential. Under their leader Buddy Holly, the Crickets introduced the group sound: vocal, electric guitar, bass and drums. Three singles – That’ll be the Day, Peggy Sue and Oh Boy! – had arrived in Britain at the perfect moment, their easy-to-play music encouraging thousands of bored skiffle groups to begin making the switch to pop and rock. It was the start of everything.
John and Paul loved the Crickets (even the name had their regard) and were inspired to write songs in Buddy’s style. Towards the end of 1957, John wrote Hello Little Girl and Paul came up with I Lost My Little Girl; the similarity in their titles was coincidental but both were steeped in the Crickets’ sound. Now they would write together.
John and Paul’s passion for rock and roll wedded them heart and soul, and Liverpool Corporation’s education committee also played a part. Unless the Quarry Men had a booking somewhere, Jim McCartney’s disapproval of John meant Paul couldn’t see his friend at night. They had to be more shrewd. Situated up the hill from the city centre, Liverpool College of Art – where John, newly enrolled, was already proving himself a handful – happened to adjoin Liverpool Institute, Paul’s grammar school. The two buildings had been one, so with a quick dash through their respective exits John and Paul would arrive together on the same stretch of street at the same moment and were truants for the afternoon – “sagging off”. John would have his guitar ready.
From a stop on Catharine Street, they’d board the 86 bus, a green double-decker like those driven by Harry Harrison, father of Paul’s young schoolfriend George. Within 30 minutes of sneaking out, they’d be inside Paul’s terraced council house at 20 Forthlin Road, empty in the daytime. The McCartneys had only been here six months when Paul’s mother Mary died, and now Jim, 55, was trying to cope alone with their two teenage boys and maintain his wife’s high standards and principles. Paul’s Auntie Gin and Auntie Mill came over to clean, iron and cook for them on alternate Monday afternoons: Paul’s sessions with John were only possible Tuesdays to Fridays. There was the irony. It was only because Jim wanted Paul to stay away from the troublemaker that he was sagging off school, courting trouble like he’d never done before. (So it was “Dad’s fault”.)
And so to the songwriting. As John later said, “Practically every Buddy Holly song was three chords, so why not write your own?” Stated so matter-of-factly, it could seem that writing songs was an obvious next move, but it wasn’t. Teenagers all over Britain liked Buddy Holly and rock and roll, but of that large number only a fraction picked up a guitar and tried playing it, and fewer still – in fact hardly anyone – used it as the inspiration to write songs themselves. John and Paul didn’t know anyone else who did it, no one from school or college, no relative or friend … and yet somehow, by nothing more than fate or fluke, they’d found each other, discovered they both wrote songs, and decided to try it together.
Paul recalls the method: “We’d sit down and say, 'OK, what are we going to do?’ and we’d just start off strumming and one or the other of us would kick off some kind of idea and then we’d just develop it and bounce off each other.” Their first song was Too Bad About Sorrows. It was never properly recorded, possibly never completed, and the pair only ever let out the first couple of lines: “Too bad about sorrows, too bad about love, There’ll be no tomorrow, for all of your life.” They sang the vocal in unison, as they did most of these songs. They called their second song Just Fun.
Paul McCartney with his father and brother Mike (Getty Images)
“They said our love was just fun/ The day that our friendship begun.
“There’s no blue moon that I can see/ There’s never been in history.”
John’s first two attempts at songwriting, a year earlier, had already vanished from his memory, never to return, so he and Paul knew they had to keep proper track of their ideas. They’d no means of recording them and neither could read or write music, so Paul appropriated a Liverpool Institute exercise book, maybe 48 feint-ruled pages, in which every new song had a fresh page. In his neat left-handed script, generally using a fountain pen, he wrote the words (they were always words, never lyrics) with chords shown by their alphabetical letter. Unable to describe the melody, they decided early on that if they couldn’t remember something the next day, they could hardly expect it to stick in the mind of anyone else, in which case it was “c – p” and deserved to go. But sometimes Paul wrote atmospheric directions. For one song it was, “Ooh ah, angel voices”.
And on the top of every new page, above the song title, Paul wrote: ANOTHER LENNON-MCCARTNEY ORIGINAL, in homage to American teams like Rodgers-Hammerstein. “We decided on that very early on,” says Paul. “It was just for simplicity really, and – so as to not get into the ego thing – we were very pure with it.” Despite the equal credit, competition was none the less an ever-essential component. John had complete admiration for Paul’s facility with harmony and melody, his musicianship and invention; Paul respected John’s musical talent and envied his original repartee. Yet while combining their skills as a team, they remained competitive as individuals, each trying to outdo the other. It became a vital artistic spur: John would call it “a sibling rivalry … a creative rivalry”, Paul spoke of “competitiveness in that we were ricocheting our ideas”. Each tried to impress the other out of sheer fear of what he might say in return. Both were rarely less than candid, and the thought that a new song might be branded “c – p” was usually more than enough to continually raise standards.
(Photo: Rex Features)
John and Paul had an abundance of ambition, and top of their lists was to be rich. John’s Aunt Mimi, his surrogate parent since the age of five, told him “possessions don’t bring happiness but they make misery a lot easier”, which was one comfort, but mostly John wanted money to avoid having to work. Art college was only a means of delaying the inevitable another four or five years, though he was unlikely even then to have a clear idea how to earn a living. He could only ever see himself as a painter or poet or writer or musician and they didn’t give out those jobs down the labour exchange. John and conformity were ugly bedfellows – he’d no discipline or desire for office or factory work, and had his own dismissive phrase for such jobs: “brummer striving”.
Before she died, Mary McCartney had wanted Paul to become a doctor; Jim hoped he’d go to university and become a teacher or writer … but Paul wanted to be a star and had the confidence and talent to shoot for it. And with stardom he’d be rich. About £75,000 would cover what he wanted. As he later said, “If you’d asked me for my fantasies when I was 16 years old, standing at a bus stop waiting to go to Garston on the 86, I’d have said, 'guitar, car and a house’, in that order. That was it – the entire thing.”
These would have been among the thoughts crowding Paul’s mind as he walked from Allerton to Woolton to visit John. His house, on a busy dual-carriageway, was a semi-detached suburban villa given the name Mendips by its previous occupants. Paul came here less frequently than John’s covert visits to Forthlin Road, turning up mostly on weekends. Conditions at Mendips were different: there was no need for stealth but Mimi made clear what could and couldn’t be done.
After the first visit, Paul knew not to use the front door but to walk down the side and knock at the back, which led into the kitchen. Mimi would call upstairs, “John, your little friend’s here.” She had always been patronising about his friends, letting him know if she considered them lower class or in some other way not good enough for him.
When Mimi said this the first time, John assured Paul, “That’s just the way she is, you mustn’t be offended.” Mimi’s husband (John’s Uncle George) had died, and as the combination of a modest rental income and her widow’s state pension was barely going to fund John’s feeding and raising, she took in lodgers, students from Liverpool University. There was always at least one in residence, sometimes three or four, and their need for quiet study meant that Mimi frequently had to remind John to keep the noise down. Also, like her nephew, she was a gluttonous reader and relished peace and quiet. At this house, John and Paul musical sessions took place in the porch.
Mendips, the childhood home of John Lennon (Getty Images)
The McCartneys had always lived in council houses, cheek-by-jowl with the working classes. It gave them a usefully solid grounding in that particular reality, although Paul’s strongly aspirational mother made sure they considered themselves a cut above. By Paul’s personal definition, John was middle class, and though there was much about his friend’s domestic situation he didn’t yet know or understand, this was how Paul saw and admired it. “John’s family was rather middle class and it was a lot of his appeal to me. I’m attracted to that type of person, particularly in the British. John had relatives up in Edinburgh and one of them was a dentist – none of us knew people like that. So I was attracted to that.”
Paul spotted several other signposts to indicate John’s higher standing. In Mendips’ front room was a full bookshelf that included Sir Winston Churchill’s four-volume A History of the English-speaking Peoples and six-volume The Second World War – 10 leather-bound folio editions John said he’d read, and had. They didn’t just have cats, they had pedigree cats. Paul had aunties, but Mimi was John’s aunt. Then there was Mendips itself – “a house with a name, that was very posh; no one had houses with names where I came from, you were numbers”. It was all irresistibly magnetic, but Paul’s predicament never changed: his dad didn’t approve. This wasn’t going to stop him, but he loved his dad and valued his own good reputation too much to openly rebel like John. It made John mad, and all the more determined to be the troublemaker Jim said he was.
“Paul always wanted the home life,” he’d say. “He liked it with daddy and the brother … and obviously missed his mother. And his dad was the whole thing. Just simple things, [like] he wouldn’t go against his dad and wear drainpipe trousers. He treated Paul like a child all the time, cut his hair and telling him what to wear, at 17, 18. I was always saying, 'Don’t take that s--- off him!’ I was brought up by a woman so maybe it was different – but I wouldn’t let the old man treat me like that.”
Through sheer force of personality, John Lennon changed others’ lives, and many went willingly on the journey. For Paul McCartney, who had a fundamental need to be noticed, stepping forward with John was a natural move – he was aligning himself with someone people couldn’t avoid, and who thrust two fingers up to things in a way he envied but would rarely do in full view. At the same time, Paul could apply gloss, where needed, to minimise John’s trail of damage. Their musical group was formed in John’s image and driven ever onward by his restlessness, but without Paul he would have upset too many people too many times to make the progress they both craved. Paul’s other strengths were his great talent, his burning ambition and his high self-regard, and when John felt them becoming overbearing he’d pull him down a peg or two, as only he could.
And so Lennon-McCartney stood shoulder to shoulder as equals, connected at every level, their considerable talents harmonised, their personalities meshed, their drive unchecked, their goal in focus. They were a union, stronger than the sum of their parts, and everything was possible.