John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ one night only at the city’s boxing stadium, behind the Exchange railway station, on 3 May.

      Thanks to the combined rival attractions of Cynthia and Stu, Paul McCartney had recently felt himself taking ‘a bit of a back seat’ with John. But the Easter holiday of 1960 brought a major rebonding between them. Packing up a few clothes and their guitars, the pair hitchhiked 200 miles south to stay with Paul’s relatives Mike and Bett Robbins, who were now running a pub, the Fox and Hounds, in Caversham, Berkshire. They spent a week helping out at the pub, sharing a bed in an upstairs room as innocently as children.

      Their reward for unstinted bottle-stacking and glass-washing was to be allowed to perform for the Fox and Hounds’ customers over the weekend prior to their return home. Mike Robbins watched them rehearse and offered hints on presentation—for instance, that they shouldn’t tear straight into ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’, as they planned, but build up to it with an instrumental number, Les Paul and Mary Ford’s ‘The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise’. They gave their show seated on barstools in the pub lounge, billing themselves with a touch of Goonery as the Nerk Twins.

      Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent had by now reached the West Country, playing to yet another sold-out house at the Bristol Hippodrome on the Saturday night of 16 April. Before returning to Liverpool in three weeks, both had arranged to make a brief trip home to America. En route to catch a flight from Heathrow Airport right after the Bristol show, their hire car went out of control and smashed into a concrete lamp-post. Cochran, Vincent and Cochran’s girlfriend, the songwriter Sharon Sheeley, all suffered serious multiple injuries and were rushed to hospital in Bath. Cochran died two days later, fulfilling his own prophecy that he’d ‘be seeing Buddy soon’.

      On hearing what had befallen the two headliners of his co-promotion with Larry Parnes, Allan Williams understandably thought the show would have to be cancelled. Parnes, however, insisted that it should go ahead as planned on 3 May and that the hospitalised Gene Vincent would be fit enough to take part. In compensation for Cochran’s absence, Parnes provided extra acts from his London roster while Williams rounded up further local groups, among them Gerry and the Pacemakers, Bob Evans and His Five Shillings, and the Connaughts.

      The Beatals did not even try to get on the show, knowing they were automatically disqualified by their lack of a drummer. They could only watch from the audience as Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Cass and the Cassanovas, and Gerry and the Pacemakers in turn pulled out all the stops to impress Larry Parnes. A photograph of the packed ringside crowd picked up John standing near the front, his face half-hidden among a thicket of hysterical girls. From a distance of 30-odd feet, you can still see the envy and longing in his eyes.

      Despite its organisational shortcomings, the event gave Allan Williams instant huge prestige as Larry Parnes’ ambassador on Merseyside. Even John was sufficiently awed to forget his usual fierce independence where his music was concerned and beg help of this seeming miracle-worker. A few days after the concert, he buttonholed Williams at the Jacaranda’s kitchen door with a muttered plea to ‘do something’ for the Beatals.

      From the local talent on show at the boxing stadium, Parnes had singled out only one potential addition to his stable. John Gustafson, the darkly handsome bass player with Cass and the Cassanovas, was invited to accompany Parnes back to London and be groomed for stardom in his inimitable fashion.

      To the rest, the opportunity Parnes offered was not to become pampered thoroughbreds so much as all-purpose workhorses. He was currently in urgent need of musicians to back his solo vocalists on the extensive tours through Britain that were their most lucrative market. Billy Fury himself, the stable’s premier attraction, was about to begin a string of nationwide appearances, but as yet had no group to accompany him. Hiring local sidemen to play on shows in the north and Scotland was an attractively cheaper option for Parnes than paying to transport them all the way up from London.

      He therefore detailed Allan Williams to assemble the best performers at the boxing stadium along with other deserving candidates for a mass audition-cum-talent contest. The winners would get the job of touring with Billy Fury, while the runners-up would be assigned to lesser Parnes protégés like Duffy Power and Dickie Pride. Parnes would conduct the audition in person, returning in a week and bringing Fury with him to assist in the selection process. Under pressure from John, Williams agreed to overlook the Beatals’ second division status and let them take part. There was one essential precondition, however. A star from the Larry Parnes stable could not conceivably take the stage backed by musicians whose rhythm was ‘in the guitars’. They had less than a week to solve the problem that had defeated them for more than a year and find themselves a drummer.

      A bout of frantic asking around the groups at the Jacaranda turned up only one even remote possibility. From Brian Casser, the singer with Cass and the Cassanovas, they heard of someone named Tommy Moore, who occasionally sat in on drums at the Cassanovas’ own ad hoc club above the Temple Restaurant in Dale Street. Moore proved to be a forklift driver at Garston’s bottle factory, diminutive in size, nervous in manner and at age 36, in their eyes, practically an oldage pensioner. On the overwhelming credit side, he possessed his own full drum kit, could whack out a serviceable rock-’n’-roll beat and, best of all, did not collapse with laughter at the idea of joining up with them. After the briefest audition in John and Stu’s room at Gambier Terrace, Tommy Moore was in.

      The second pressing need was for yet another new name. ‘The Beatals’ had never really worked, either visually or aurally, and had led to much teasing from the acts who nightly beat them all over Liverpool. After further brainstorming by John and Stu, it was decided to become the Silver Beetles: not so much crawly live insects now as ornamental scarabs in some 1920s detective story. From rival musicians, the response was yet again an array of downturned thumbs. Style-conscious Brian Casser in particular urged them to follow the accepted formula—for instance, putting the silver and John’s name together for a Treasure Island effect, Long John and Silvermen, or Pieces of Silver, or Johnny Silver and the Pieces of Eight. But the scarabs had made their decision, and would not budge from it.

      The audition took place on 10 May at the Wyvern Social Club, a run-down premises in Seel Street that Allan Williams planned to convert into an upscale nightclub named the Blue Angel. Here the Silver Beetles found all the usual crushing competition with their right-on names: Rory Storm and the Hurricanes (featuring Ringo Starr’s ‘Starr Time’), Derry and the Seniors, Cass and the Cassanovas. Slim chance though the Silver Beetles stood of being chosen to back Billy Fury, there was at least the thrill of meeting the star himself as he sat at a table with Larry Parnes, rather like adjudicators in a school music festival. He was in every way the antithesis of his name: a shy, polite Wavertree lad, permanently coated in orange makeup, who cared less for girls than for his pet tortoise and already suffered from the heart trouble that would eventually kill him at 41. To create the necessary camouflage of his Liverpool origins, he spoke with a vaguely American accent but otherwise was refreshingly unpretentious, treating the Silver Beetles like potential sidemen as plausible as any others and signing an autograph when John nervously approached him on the others’ behalf.

      These pleasant preliminaries quickly turned into nightmare. The Silver Beetles’ new drummer, Tommy Moore, was supposed to rendezvous with them at the Wyvern after collecting some stray equipment from the Cassanovas’ club room in Dale Street. When their turn came to play, Tommy still had not arrived. To fill in for him, Allan Williams deputed Johnny Hutch from Cass and the Cassanovas, the intimidating tough guy who always so loudly dismissed John and his group as ‘a bunch of posers’ and ‘not worth a carrot’. ‘Johnny hated having to sit in with them,’ John Gustafson remembers. ‘He only did it because Allan told him to.’

      A local freelance photographer was on hand to capture them apparently blowing their big moment in agonizing detail. For once, they were wearing uniforms of a sort—dark shirts, matching jeans with patch pockets oddly outlined in white, and cheap two-tone Italian shoes that Parnes, in the half-light, mistook for ‘tennis СКАЧАТЬ