Authors: Philip Norman
“In the interval, we were told, ‘There’s a pint for you lads over at the bar.’ That pint turned into two pints, then three. When we went on for the second spot, we were
terrible
. All pissed. The bloke from the Pavilion never booked us. There was a row about it on the bus going home, and I
thought, ‘Right. That’s it. I’ll not bother playing with them again.’” At the next stop, even though it was before his destination, Colin hauled his drum set off the bus and did not turn up for any further gigs.
For some time afterward Johnny and the Moondogs, or the Quarry Men, or whatever they felt like calling themselves, remained poised on the edge of extinction. They would still get together and play, but only at small events like birthday parties, where the lack of a drummer did not count as much. One night, when they all arrived in different colored shirts, they called themselves the Rainbows. John and Paul would sometimes work as a duo, the Nurk Twins. George regularly sat in with a more stable group, the Les Stewart Quartet, at a club in West Derby called the Lowlands.
A short distance away, in the quiet thoroughfare of Hayman’s Green, stood a large Victorian house belonging to a family named Best. Johnny Best had originally been Liverpool’s main promoter of boxing matches in the city’s six-thousand-seat stadium. He had lately separated from his wife, Mona, leaving her the big old house with her bedridden mother, her two sons, Peter and Rory, a collection of paying guests, and assorted Eastern mementoes including a Hindu idol that flexed its many arms in the front hall.
Peter, her elder son, was then eighteen, and in the sixth form (senior year) at Liverpool Collegiate Grammar School. An outstanding scholar and athlete, he was also unusually handsome, in a wry, brooding way, with neat, crisp, wavy hair that gave him more than a look of the film star Jeff Chandler. If, in addition, he was somewhat modest and slow to push himself, then “Mo,” as he called his mother, would always be there to do it for him.
Under the house were extensive cellars, used for storage and the boys’ bicycles. Pete and Rory, fatigued by the long summer holiday of 1958, asked Mona Best if they could make a den down there for themselves and their friends. There were so many friends that Mrs. Best suggested making the cellar into a real club, like the Lowlands and city espresso bars. For the rest of that year, she, her two sons, and a team of potential members redecorated the cellar, installing bench seats and a counter above which, as a final touch, Mrs. Best painted a dragon on the ceiling. Her favorite film being
Algiers
, with Charles Boyer, she decided to call the new club the Casbah.
There then arose the question of finding a group to play on club nights. One of the girl helpers mentioned Ken Browne, who played at the Lowlands in Les Stewart’s quartet. Ken Browne paid the Casbah a visit while redecorations were still in progress, bringing with him another quartet member, George Harrison. “George didn’t seem to show too much enthusiasm for what we were doing,” Mona Best said, “but Ken Browne threw himself heart and soul into it. He’d come over and help us with the work at weekends.”
When George came back he brought with him two other musicians for the Casbah’s resident group. “John Lennon walked in with Paul McCartney, and John’s girlfriend, Cyn. We were still painting—trying to get ready for our opening night. John got hold of a paint brush to help us, but he was without his glasses and as blind as a bat. He started putting paint on surfaces which didn’t require paint. And all in gloss when I’d told him to use undercoat. On opening night, some of the paint still wasn’t quite dry.”
In sedate West Derby, the Casbah Coffee Club caught on with teenagers at once. Mona Best ran it in person, selling coffee, sweets, and soft drinks behind the miniature bar. John, Paul, George, and Ken Browne played, without a drummer and using Ken Browne’s 10-watt amplifier, for three pounds a night among the four of them. They all grew friendly with the Bests, especially with Pete, the handsome, taciturn elder son who, despite his plan to become a teacher, was keenly interested in rock ’n’ roll and show business. The group proved such an attraction that, at weekends, Mrs. Best would hire a doorman to keep out the rougher element.
“It all went fine,” Mona Best said, “until this one night when Ken Browne turned up with a heavy cold. I could see he wasn’t well enough to play. I said to him, ‘Look, you go upstairs and sit with Mother’—he often did that; she was bedridden, you see, and he’d sit and talk to her. I said, ‘I’ll bring a hot drink up to you.’ But Ken said no, he’d stay down in the club and watch. Just John, Paul, and George played, and at the end, I gave them 15s (75p) each. There was a bit of murmuring; then they said, ‘Where’s the other 15s?’ ‘I’ve given it to Ken,’ I told them.
“They didn’t like that. They wanted the full three pounds. But it was too late. I’d already given Ken his fifteen shillings. There was a bit of arguing, and Ken said, right, that was it, he’d finished with them. The other three walked out of the club there and then.
“Pete, my elder boy, had been getting more and more interested, watching the others play. I remember Ken Browne saying to him, ‘Right. I’m out of that lot. Come on, Pete: Why don’t you and I get a group up now?’”
Twice each week, Arthur Ballard would leave the college of art on Hope Street to conduct a private tutorial with the student he considered the most gifted of all under his charge. The student, a white-faced, tiny boy named Stuart Sutcliffe, refused to work in college; he had his own cramped studio, in the basement of a house in Percy Street, where Ballard would visit him, bringing a half-bottle of Scotch whisky for refreshment. The tutorial was a morning’s talk, during which Sutcliffe never stopped painting. “He worked with large canvases, which wasn’t at all fashionable then,” Arthur Ballard says. “He was so small, he almost had to jump with his brush to reach the top.”
Among the students, Stu Sutcliffe was something of a cult. His pale, haunted face, topped by luxuriantly swept-back hair, gave him a more than passing resemblance to James Dean, the Hollywood star who had become legendary to that generation for the hectic fame and shortness of his life. Stu was aware of the resemblance, cultivating it with dark glasses and an air of brooding far from his true personality.
He was born of Scottish parents in Edinburgh in 1940. His father, Charles, a marine engineer, moved to Liverpool on wartime attachment to Cammell Laird’s shipyard and subsequently went to sea as a ship’s engineer. The rearing of Stuart and his two younger sisters was left to their mother, Millie, a preschool teacher. Charles and Millie had a volatile relationship, veering from intense mutual affection to passionate rows, generally on the eve of his departure back to sea. From the earliest age, Millie Sutcliffe said, Stu strove to take on the role of her protector. “I’d sometimes be sitting in my chair with my head in my hands. Stuart would sit at my feet, looking up at me. ‘You’re tired,’ he’d say. ‘Come on, we’ll put the little ones to bed, then you and me must have a talk.’”
He had entered art college from Prescot Grammar School, below the normal admittance age, and had quickly revealed a talent of dazzling diversity. His first terms, in addition to prosaic curriculum work, produced notebooks thronging with evidence of a facility to reproduce any style from Matisse to Michelangelo. Derivative as his student work was, it had a quality that excited Arthur Ballard—a refusal to accept or transmit
anything according to convention. “Stu was a revolutionary,” Ballard says. “Everything he did crackled with excitement.”
Early in 1959, the path of Hope Street’s most promising student crossed that of its most uninspired and apathetic one. At Ye Cracke, the student pub in Rice Street, beneath the etchings of Wellington greeting Blücher at Waterloo and Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, Stu Sutcliffe fell into conversation with John Lennon.
The intermediary was a friend of Stu’s named Bill Harry, a curly-haired boy who had won his way from a poor childhood on Parliament Street to become the college’s first student of commercial design. Bill was a prolific amateur journalist, a writer and illustrator of science fiction “fanzines,” and, like Stu himself, an omnivorous reader. They would sit for hours in Ye Cracke, discussing Henry Miller and Kerouac and the “beat” poets, Corso and Ferlinghetti.
In Bill Harry, John found someone not standoffish and superior as he had thought all his fellow students to be, but down-to-earth, friendly, humorous, and encouraging. Bill knew already of John’s interest in writing, and one lunchtime at Ye Cracke, asked if there was anything of John’s that he could read. He remembers with what embarrassment John dragged some scraps of paper from his jeans pocket and handed them over. Instead of the Ginsberg or Corso pastiche he had expected, Bill Harry found himself reading a piece of nonsense about a farmer that made him gurgle with laughter.
Stu Sutcliffe’s effect on John was more complex. For Stu, in 1959, resembled neither Teddy Boy nor jazz cellar habitué. He had evolved his own style of skin-tight jeans, pink shirts with pinned collars, and pointed boots with high, elasticized sides. His dress, in fact, was disapproved of by the art college far more than John’s but was tolerated because of his brilliance as a student.
Stu’s passionate commitment to his painting, and to art and literature in all young and vital forms, communicated itself to John in a way that no formal teaching had been able to do. From Stu, he learned of the French Impressionists, whose rebellion against accepted values made that of rock ’n’ roll seem marginal. Van Gogh, even more than Elvis Presley, now became the hero against whom John Lennon measured the world.
John’s sudden enthusiasm for his college studies to some extent benefited Paul also. Paul, still revising for O-levels at the institute, was only
too glad to join in intellectual discussions, passing himself off as a student from the nearby university. For George Harrison, it was more arduous, since John among his art college cronies was even more inclined to be witty at George’s expense. But he was fifteen now, and not such a kid, and learning to answer John back.
This new era revived the group, which had been languishing again since the dispute at Mrs. Best’s. Stu and Bill Harry both sat on the Students’ Union committee, and were thus able to get bookings for John, Paul, and George to play at college dances. The trouble was, although John and George had electric guitars, they no longer had Ken Browne and his 10-watt amplifier. On Stu Sutcliffe’s recommendation, the Students’ Union agreed to buy an amplifier for them to use, on the understanding, of course, that it should not be taken away from college.
Stu’s interest in rock ’n’ roll was a purely aesthetic one. He passionately wanted to join a group as an adjunct to the personal image he had created for himself. As John and he became closer friends, the idea grew that Stu, in some or other capacity, should join John’s group. That he possessed no ability on any instrument was not considered a disqualification. If he were to buy a guitar—or, better still, some drums—he surely would be able to learn in the way the other three had. Unfortunately, Stu, with his small grant and his straitened family circumstances, had no money to spend at Hessy’s music shop.
In 1959, the biennial John Moores Exhibition took place at Liverpool’s illustrious Walker Art Gallery. Mr. Moores was the city’s commercial patriarch, deriving fortunes from football pools, shops, and mail-order catalogs, of which a sizable part was philanthropically devoted to encouraging the arts on Merseyside. This was the second Moores Exhibition, offering four thousand pounds in prize money and attracting some two thousand entries from all over the British Isles. A canvas submitted by Stu Sutcliffe was one of the handful selected for hanging.
Aunt Mimi remembered John’s unfeigned pleasure in Stu’s achievement. “He came
rushing
in to tell me.… ‘You’ll never guess; it’s the Moores Exhibition. You must come and see it. And look
nice
!’
“We went to the Walker Art Gallery and John took me up to this enormous painting. It seemed to be all khaki and yellow triangles. I looked at it and I said, ‘What
is
it?’ Well! John got hold of my arm and hustled me outside; I wasn’t allowed to see another picture in the show.
‘How could you
say
a thing like that, Mimi?’ He gave his chest a big thump, and bellowed, ‘Art comes from in here!’”
As well as hanging in one of Europe’s principal galleries, Stu’s painting was bought, by the great John Moores himself, for sixty-five pounds. “He’d never really had any money before,” Millie Sutcliffe said. “I knew he’d got one or two little debts he needed to pay. The rest would see him right, I thought, to buy his paints and canvases for a few weeks.
“His father was home, and went up to Stuart’s room while he wasn’t there. It was his father who found this thing that Stuart had spent
all
the John Moores prize money on. ‘That’s right, Mother,’ he said. ‘It’s a bass guitar. I’m going to play with John in his group.’”
FOUR
“THE BASS DRUM USED TO ROLL AWAY ACROSS THE STAGE”
I
n Slater Street, on the edge of Chinatown, there was a little coffee bar, with copper kettles in its window, called the Jacaranda. John Lennon, Stu Sutcliffe, and their art college friends went there almost every day, between classes or in place of them. The coffee was cheap, toast with jam cost only fivepence a slice, nor was the management particular about the time its customers spent wedged behind the little kidney-shaped tables. Whole days could be spent, over one cold coffee cup, looking through the window steam at passing Chinese, West Indians, dockers, and men going to and from the nearby unemployment office.
To the Jacaranda’s black-bearded owner, Allan Williams, John and his friends were “a right load of layabouts.” Williams had studied them at length while passing coffees and toasted sandwiches through from the back kitchen where his Chinese wife, Beryl, cooked and kept accounts. He had particularly noticed the slightly built boy in dark glasses whom the others teased for carrying art materials round with him in a carrier bag. He could not but notice the one called John, who expertly dredged money from the purse of the blonde girl who sat next to him, and could even cajole free drinks and snacks from the more susceptible waitresses.