The name Quarrymen had gone by the end of 1959. Paul and George were at the Institute, and had nothing to do with Quarry Bank High School, and John was now at the Art College. They had a succession of names after that, often made up on the spur of the moment. One night they called themselves The Rainbows because they all turned up in different coloured shirts.
The group had made no real progress for about the year after George had joined it, as far as George himself can remember, though his guitar playing was improving all the time.
‘I can’t remember even getting paid in the first year I was with them. We played mainly at fellows’ parties. We’d go along with our guitars and get invited in. We either got free cokes or plates of beans, that was about all.
‘The only times we got anywhere near real money was when we started entering for skiffle competitions. We’d get through the early rounds, keeping going to try and win something. But you never got paid for entering, just winning, and the rounds seemed to go on for ever. It was pretty daft of course, having no proper drummer and about 18 guitarists.’
Mrs Harrison was keen on George and his group, but Mr Harrison was very worried. He’d fought a losing battle over George’s clothes and his long hair, mainly because Mrs Harrison sided with George. ‘It’s his own hair,’ I used to say. ‘Why should anyone tell you what to do with what’s your own?’
‘But I wanted him to stick in at school and get a good job,’ says Mr Harrison. ‘I was very upset when I saw he was so mad on the group. I realized you had to be good in show business to get to the top and even better to stay there. I couldn’t see how they were going to get anywhere. My other two boys were well set up, Harry as a fitter and Peter as a panel beater. I wanted George to do as well.
‘But George said he wanted to leave school. He didn’t want to be any sort of pen-pusher.
He wanted to work with his hands. He decided with his mother he wanted to leave, unknown to me. He never took his school cert. He just left.’
George started work in the summer of 1959 when he was 16.
‘It became obvious I wasn’t going to get any qualifications. The most I could have got, pushing it, would have been two O levels. But you need two O levels before they even let you dig shit. So what good would that have been?
‘I stayed till the end of term, sagging off school most of the time to be with John at the Art College. Paul and I used to hang round there a lot.
‘I hadn’t a job for a long time when I left school. I hadn’t a clue. My dad was all keen on the apprenticeship thing, so I tried the apprentice’s exam for the Liverpool Corporation, but failed it. Eventually the youth employment officer came up with a job of being a window-dresser at Blacklers, the big department store. I went along, but it had gone. They offered me an apprenticeship as an electrician instead.
‘I enjoyed it. It was better than school. And with winter coming on, it was nice to be in a big warm shop. We used to play darts most of the time.
‘But I began to think at the time about emigrating to Australia. At least I tried to get my dad interested in us all going, as I was too young. Then I thought of Malta as I’d seen some travel brochures. Then I thought of Canada. I got the papers to fill in, but when I found my parents had to sign them for me, I didn’t bother. I felt something would turn up.’
Over at the McCartney household, Jim was struggling to bring up two teenage boys on the right lines. At least Paul was still at school, much to Jim’s pleasure. But with spending all his spare time with John and George, messing around with a beat group, it didn’t leave much time for school work.
Paul had still managed to stay in 5B, which was looked upon as the main English and languages stream, but he didn’t do very well in O levels. He managed to pass only one, Art.
He then thought about leaving, but couldn’t think of what job to do. His father was still keen for him to stay on. It seemed easier not to leave. School still gave him lots of time for playing. So he stayed on and went into the remove form, as he hadn’t enough O levels to get immediately into the sixth. He sat O levels again and got four more this time and so went into the sixth form.
‘School was still a complete drag, but there was an English master called Dusty Durband I liked, the only one I did. He was great. He liked modern poetry and used to tell us about Lady Chatterley, long before we’d heard of it, and The Miller’s Tale. He said they were considered dirty books, though they weren’t.’
This spark of interest kept him in the sixth form, although he did no work. Officially he was preparing two subjects, English and Art, for A level, as he was supposed to be going to go to a training college and become a teacher. Everybody knew he was more than capable of it. It kept Jim happy anyway.
‘I never thought much of the music Paul was interested in,’ says Jim. ‘That Bill Haley, I never liked him. There was no tune to it at all.
‘But one day I came home at 5.30 and heard them in the house playing. I realized then that they were getting good, not just bashing about. They were making some nice chords.’
Jim began to want to sit in with them, offering advice and hints about how he used to do it in the good old days of Jim Mac’s Band. Why didn’t they play some really good tunes? Like ‘Stairway to Paradise’? He’d always thought that was a really lovely number. He told them about how he used to run his band and how they should present their numbers.
They said no thanks, very much, just make some tea, eh, Dad? He said all right. But if they didn’t like ‘Stairway to Paradise’ how about some really jazzy numbers, like ‘When the Saints’? He could tell them a good way to do that. They said no, more firmly this time.
In the end, Jim restricted himself to making them food. He’d had to take up cooking, after a fashion, when his wife died. He found to his delight that although his own two, Paul and Michael, were very choosy about their food and were poor eaters — and when Paul was busy, he wouldn’t eat at all — John and George turned out to be gluttons who would eat anything at any time. ‘I used to work off all the stuff on to them that Paul and Michael had left. In the end, I didn’t have to disguise it but just say there was some leftovers here, would they like it. To this day I always have to make George some custard when he comes. He says my custard’s the best in the world.’
The group was improving, getting some primitive amps together and creating a louder beat, compared with the soft patterings of skiffle. ‘But each year seemed five years,’ says Paul.
They were now mainly playing at working men’s social clubs or church functions and had given up parties. They played at places like the Wilson Hall and the Finch Lane Bus Depot.
They went in for more and more competitions, like all the embryo groups. ‘There was this woman who played the spoons who kept on beating us,’ says Paul. ‘Then there was the Sunny Siders. This group had a great gimmick. They had a midget.’
The members of the group were still constantly changing. As nobody knew them, they could turn up on dates with anyone they could get. ‘We had a bloke called Duff as pianist for some time, but his dad wouldn’t let him stay out late. He’d be playing away one minute, and the next he would have disappeared, gone home in the middle of a number.’
For their public performances, they were usually all dressed like Teddy Boy cowboys, with black and white cowboy shirts with white tassels from the top pockets and black bootlace ties.
But they spent more time in George’s or Paul’s house than on stage. ‘We used to come back to our house and smoke tea in me dad’s pipe,’ says Paul. ‘Sometimes we’d bring a girl home or sit and draw each other. But most of the time we were playing guitars and writing songs.’