John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

Scottish teenagers even realised they were watching ‘Long John’ Lennon, Paul Ramon, Carl Harrison and Stu de Stael—or even the Silver Beetles, for that matter. Press advertisements and posters billed them simply as ‘Johnny Gentle and his group’. There had apparently been some loss of nerve over the new name: a gig at Lathom Hall on 14 May saw them truncated to the Silver Beats and, according to Johnny Gentle, they had reverted to calling themselves the Beatals by the time they reached Alloa.

      Fortunately for them, the star was a through-and-through Scouser whose life in the Parnes stable had not made the least swollenheaded. So John, Paul and George put themselves out for Johnny, conscientiously learning his Ricky Nelson ballad repertoire, goosing it up with livelier Presley numbers like ‘Wear My Ring Around Your Neck’. He in turn did what he could to make them more like a conventional, uniformed backing group. ‘They’d come without any proper stage clothes,’ he remembers. ‘George had a black shirt and I had one, too, that I didn’t wear. So I let them have that, and we scraped up enough money between us to buy another one so that at least their three front men would look roughly the same.’

      On their van journeys through the Highlands, John took the lead in quizzing Gentle about life as a teen idol and the quickest route to achieving it. ‘He was inquisitive about everything…what was Billy like…what was Marty like…should he and the others go to London and try to get discovered…where would they stay? He was going places, and he knew it even then. At one place after we played, he and the others got pushed aside by some girls crowding round to get my autograph. John shouted out “That’ll be us some day, Johnny.”’

      The long intervals of discomfort and boredom that had to be endured gave extra edge to John’s sarcastic tongue and his impulse to pillory human weakness or frailty wherever they revealed themselves. Tommy Moore, the group’s too-elderly drummer, was a frequent target of Lennonesque practical jokes—often cruel, usually pointless, sometimes perpetrated for an audience no larger than himself. As Tommy lay in bed at night, John would softly open the door of his room, lasso his bedpost with a towel, then pull the bed by slow degrees toward the door. However tireless the baiting of Tommy, he got off lightly in comparison with Stu Sutcliffe. It was as if standing onstage with the Hofner president like a sunburst millstone around his neck robbed Stu of everything that had made John respect, or even like, him. The others took their cue from John, mocking Stu’s musicianship and appearance, making sure he always got the van’s most uncomfortable seat, the metal ledge over the rear wheel. ‘We were terrible,’ John would later admit. ‘We’d tell him he couldn’t sit with us or eat with us. We’d tell him to go away, and he did.’

      Inverness found the star and his group for once in the same overnight accommodation, with the bonus of a pretty view across water. Here it emerged that Billy Fury was not the only Parnes singer in the arcane business of writing his own material. Gentle, too, had already composed several Buddy Holly-ish songs, and he took advantage of this respite to work on a half-finished ballad called ‘I’ve Just Fallen’. John, who was listening in, mentioned that he did ‘a bit of songwriting’ and suggested that Gentle’s middle eight—the gear change after the opening couple of verses—didn’t quite work. He had a spare middle eight, he said, that Gentle was welcome to put into the song.

      We know that we’ll get by

      Just wait and see. Just like the song tells us The best things in life are free.

      Although never to make the charts, ‘I’ve Just Fallen’ had a respectable enough career ahead of it. A year later, the producer John Barry picked it up as an album track for Britain’s then most successful pop star, Adam Faith. In 1962, Gentle himself recorded it as a B-side under the new name of Darren Young. That simple minor-key middle eight—for which he received neither credit nor payment—thus represents the first John Lennon words and music ever to be professionally recorded. Ironically, both versions appeared on Parlophone, the label that soon would spout out his hits like a geyser.

      En route from Inverness to Fraserburgh, Gerry Scott, the van driver, was feeling hung-over, so he asked Johnny Gentle to take a spell behind the wheel. At a confusing road fork, Gentle turned the wrong way and hit an approaching car head-on. The impact hurled a sleeping John from the back of the van into the front and sent the piled-up stage equipment cannoning into Tommy Moore with such force that two of his front teeth were loosened. The first arrivals at the crash scene were a pair of teenage girls from a nearby house; recognising Gentle, they took the opportunity to collect autographs from him and his five dazed companions.

      Fortunately no police were involved, but Tommy Moore had to be driven to hospital suffering from concussion. Despite his traumatised state, there was no question of Tommy being excused his so-crucial role onstage. While he was still being treated in casaulty, John turned up accompanied by the show’s promoter and virtually frog-marched him off to duty. He had only a confused memory of playing that night, full of painkilling drugs and with a bandage round his head.

      Things went rapidly downhill from there. The sidemen had by now spent all their small subsistence allowance from Larry Parnes, but had seen no sign of the second instalment Parnes was meant to send them via Allan Williams. For the tour’s last couple of days, they were reduced to semi-vagrancy, skipping out of cafés without paying and sleeping in the van. Good-natured Johnny Gentle, who suffered no such hardships, offered to telephone Parnes on their behalf to chase up the missing payment. When Gentle seemed not to be pitching it strongly enough, John grabbed the receiver. ‘He didn’t hold back. It was like “We’re fuckin’ skint up here. We haven’t got a pot to piss in. We need money, Larry!”’ Gentle remembers. ‘Anyway, it seemed to work because Williams did send them up a few pounds more.’ Stu’s mother also made a contribution to help pay for their train tickets home.

      If the Scottish tour did little for the Silver Beetles’ finances (Tommy’s girlfriend was horrified to think how much more he could have made in a comparable period at Garston bottle works), at least it put them on a significantly improved footing back in Liverpool. Johnny Gentle sang their praises to Larry Parnes, saying he would happily tour with them again and urging Parnes to put them under permanent contract. But Parnes had enough on his plate with solo singers like Dickie Pride, the so-called ‘Sheik of Shake’, who was prone to drink, drugs and stealing cars. He preferred not to risk multiplying such headaches by five.

      In any case, the Silver Beetles had by now acquired a managercum-agent in Allan Williams—albeit one who would always regard the office more as a burden than a privilege. Williams began handling their Merseyside bookings under the same loose arrangement he had with their one-time gods Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Derry and the Seniors. In between, they were granted a second-string residency in the Jacaranda basement, appearing every Monday, when the West Indian steel band had the night off.

      Early in June, an arts festival at the university brought the celebrated young poet Royston Ellis on what he intended to be only a short visit to Liverpool. Nineteen-year-old Ellis was a beat poet in the literal sense, having conceived the unprecedented notion of fusing highbrow spoken verse together with lowbrow—or, rather, no-brow—live rock ‘n’ roll. Other than John Betjeman, he was the only British poet regularly seen on prime-time television, when he would read his work backed by, among others, Cliff Richard’s Shadows and the future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.

      After his Liverpool University gig, Ellis gravitated to the Jacaranda, there falling into conversation with ‘a dishy-looking boy’ whose name turned out to be George Harrison. Later that evening, George took him to Gambier Terrace to meet John and Stu. They all hit it off so well that Ellis was invited to miss his train from Lime Street and stay over on one of the mattresses on the floor. During his stay, he showed his new friends a useful aid to staying awake in their all-night lives as musicians and artists. Ordinary nasal inhalers, sold over the counter at every drugstore, contained wicks impregnated with Benzedrine. One had only to break the plastic tube and chew the wick inside to get the same effect as any expensive pep pill. ‘I also told them that statistically one person in every four was homosexual,’ he remembers. ‘John’s eyes widened at that.’

      Since Ellis had plenty of money and was an enthusiastic cook, the cuisine at Gambier Terrace during his stay improved dramatically. His most ambitious culinary