John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ in for me, so you can just see a bit of my head peeping through. Some of the lads didn’t know what was happening, but John did. You have only to look at his face…and the smirks of his gang. I remember him laughing out loud when we were finally presented with the photograph, and he saw the empty space behind him where I should have been.’

      Fortunately, Mr Pobjoy never noticed the gap at one end of the school group or the blur of an intruding head at the other. On the last day of term, 17 July, the letter went to Liverpool College of Art, recommending John for entry. The head also supplied a personal reference that generously accentuated the positive: ‘He has been a trouble spot for many years in discipline, but has somewhat mended his ways. Requires the sanction of “losing a job” to keep him on the rails. But I believe he is not beyond redemption and he could really turn out a fairly responsible adult who might go far.’

      It was not such a tremendous coup that had been accomplished on John’s behalf. Under the easygoing educational system of late-fifties Britain, virtually anyone showing the faintest glimmer of creative ability could get a place at art college and be assured a generous local authority grant to support them. From this large intake, it was accepted that only a tiny minority would turn into actual artists. Some would become teachers, and a few would gravitate into the undeveloped sphere of design and graphics still mundanely known as commercial art. For the rest, studying art was merely an exotic interlude when they could put on airs and acquire calligraphic handwriting before yielding to the banalities of a business career or marriage.

      Becoming an art student introduced John to a part of inner Liverpool that was almost unknown to him. Around the college’s grey Victorian façade in Hope Street lay a raffish area of coffee bars, bric-a-brac shops and student lodgings catacombed among elegant Georgian streets and curving terraces originally built for the city’s shipping aristocracy. On St James’s Mount towered the sandstone bulk of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral, begun in 1904—and destined not to be fully inaugurated until 1978. Close at hand lay Britain’s oldest West Indian and Chinese communities, the former bubbly with calypso and steel-band music, the latter so well assimilated that some pubs announced closing time in Cantonese as well as English. The mix of period grandeur and bohemian informality reached its apogee in the Philharmonic Dining Rooms—adjacent to the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s recital hall—which boasted wood panelling to rival any first-class saloon on the great transatlantic ships, and men’s urinal stalls carved from rose-coloured marble.

      John was to study for a National Diploma in Art and Design, a course intended to occupy him full-time for the next four years. During the first two, he would take a range of subjects, including graphics, art history, architecture, ceramics, lettering, even basic woodworking. An exam would then decide if he had reached a sufficient standard to continue in some specialist field like painting or sculpture. Since he did not qualify for a grant until aged 18, he remained dependent on Mimi, who, as well as providing free board and lodging at Mendips, gave him a weekly allowance of 30 shillings for his bus fares and meals.

      For his first day as an art student, he wore his best grey-blue Teddy boy suit, set off by a Slim Jim tie and Elvis-inspired blue suede shoes with fancily stitched uppers. He was a defiant daub of rock-’n’-roll proletarianism set down among middle-class-aspiring jazzers of the very same type who’d stopped the Quarrymen’s show at the Cavern club. An observant girl named Ann Mason, who also started the Intermediate course that day, remembers how painfully he stood out among the Shetland knits and duffle coats, and his dogged air of determination not to care.

      He had little idea of what studying art would entail, beyond an ardent hope, fostered by the co-members of his wankers’ circle, that sketching nude women came into it somewhere. In fact, his daily timetable as an Intermediate student proved dispiritingly similar to life at the school from which he thought he had escaped. As at Quarry Bank, an attendance roll was called each morning, then came lessons in classrooms or the steep-tiered lecture theatre, when oldish men in tweed suits, with a war-veteran air, spouted facts about Renaissance painters and pediments that he hadn’t the smallest interest in studying. Before being allowed to draw a real person from life, he had to do hours of tedious groundwork in human anatomy, consisting largely of copying outsized plaster ears or arms or parts of the articulated human skeleton that the college numbered among its teaching aids.

      Among the earliest kindred spirits he discovered was Helen Anderson, a beautiful 16-year-old from Fazakerley who had previously attended the college’s junior art school. A precociously talented painter, Helen had been featured in the national press a few months earlier when Lonnie Donegan, the King of Skiffle himself, commissioned her to do his portrait and invited her to stay with him and his family during the sittings. John had read about this at the time, and, as soon as he arrived at college, made a point of seeking her out and demanding to hear the story firsthand. ‘He explained that Lonnie was a bit of a hero to him,’ Helen remembers. ‘He wanted to hear everything that had happened. And I had to tell him again and again.’

      Mimi’s hope was that, if nothing else, art college might lessen the influence of Donegan and Elvis over John, and stimulate him to pursuits more elevated than travelling around by bus with a wallpaper-covered tea chest. There certainly was reason enough for the Quarrymen to have disintegrated that summer. Rod Davis, their banjo player, had unrancorously drifted away, feeling of no further use amid the increasingly rock-’n’-roll repertoire—which meant none of their personnel now had any connection with Quarry Bank High School. However, John was determined to keep the group going, however awkwardly it sat with his new student persona, and for the present did not bestir himself to think up an alternative name.

      On 18 October, four months after having been invited to become a Quarryman, Paul McCartney finally took his place in the lineup. Though he had attended a few practice sessions back in August, his stage debut had been postponed by a spell at Boy Scout camp and a visit with his father and brother to Butlins Holiday Camp in Filey.

      His first appearance with the Quarrymen was at the New Clubmoor Hall, a Conservative club in the Liverpool suburb of Norris Green. The booker was one Charles McBain, aka Charlie Mac, a local impresario best known for presenting strict-tempo ballroom dancing, whose press advertisements used the motto ‘Always Gay’. Paul had been awarded his own instrumental spot using his f-hole Zenith on Arthur Smith’s ‘Guitar Boogie’. But at the crucial moment, as he recalls, he was attacked by ‘nerves leading to sticky fingers. [It] was one of the first gigs I’d ever played, and the sheer terror of it got to me.’ Charlie Mac adjudicated the overall performance much as he would have done a samba competition, scribbling ‘Good and bad’ on one of Nigel Walley’s business cards.

      Despite that equivocal judgement, the Quarrymen began to make regular appearances at McBain’s various ‘Rhythm Nights’, chiefly at Wilson Hall opposite the Garston bus depot. Though a step up in prestige from church fêtes and youth clubs, the prospect was a daunting one. Garston was famously the haunt of Liverpool’s toughest Teds outside the docks—velveteen-collared psychopaths who waged gang warfare with weapons that, in some cases, would not have shamed the Spanish Inquisition. A Garston Ted bent on a night’s pleasure first wrapped around his wrist a thick leather belt studded with industrial-size washers, its buckle filed to razor sharpness to increase its efficacy as a flail. Some sewed razor blades into their jacket revers as a surprise for anyone who tried grabbing them by the lapels.

      The only sure way not to fall foul of these awesome beings—pulling the thorn from the lion’s paw as it were—was to give them the rock ‘n’ roll they loved. In this endeavour John now had an accomplice who was not only gifted at imitating Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis but could also passably simulate the dementia of rock’s ultimate chaos-maker, Little Richard. One night at Wilson Hall while the Quarrymen were in midset, a massive Ted clambered up onstage and went eyeball-to-eyeball with Paul in classic Liverpool ‘look, pal…’ mode. But it was merely to request him, quite politely in Garston terms, to sing ‘Long Tall Sally’.

      Paul’s presence had СКАЧАТЬ