It was a long time ago, and most of the people that were there are now dead, but we think it went like this.
It was the 6th July 1957, that's a definite. It was at Woolton, a small town which sits snug and unassuming on the outskirts of Liverpool. It was a heatwave, or at least that's what the paper said. A scorcher; perfect for a picnic, or in this case -- a fete.
It is easy to imagine the scene on that fete day: the melting icing off the fairy cakes, men sprawled in their deckchairs, red faces shielded from the sun glare by damp flannels. Push chairs and prams and coconut shies and hook-a-ducks and trying not to think about the howling bombs and the young men in uniform who never came home.
A fete of course needed entertainment. This time, imagination is not our only tool of time travel as the programme has survived remarkably intact. At first glance, its offerings of scheduled fun in the form of a sedate dinner dance and watching a little local girl in a scratchy costume, picking her nose, be paraded around as the Rose Queen seem borderline offensively inoffensive. Indeed, anyone reading it would be forgiven for skimming through the list before casting it from their mind, returning it to its seemingly natural state of a forgotten moment in time. But to look a little closer, to peer between the Cheshire Yeomanry and the police dog show would reveal, hidden in plain sight, a 4:15 performance of The Quarrymen: the forerunner to arguably the most influential band to ever exist, fronted by a boy who would later grow to become one of the most celebrated, parodied, idolised, despised and ultimately discussed men of the twentieth century: John Lennon.
Of all the miracles of that particularly miraculous day, one of the most surprising is that a photo of the Quarrymen's afternoon slot was taken and preserved for us to see. Looking at the photo, it is hard to marry the image of the teenager in the centre with his teddy boy curls and check top with the mop-topper or the peace protester that he has no idea he will one day be. We know from interviews though that he is already imagining a better world, at least for himself. Life had not been kind to him, leaving him sore to touch, to handle. But he has a dream or four. That day, his dream is to be a rock 'n' roller. We can see he's already got the essentials. He has the hair, the band and the crowd, even if it is made up of only vaguely interested fete goers and the odd supportive or unsupportive relative. He even has the cool arrogant rock'n'roll glare towards the crowd down pat, though this may be more from his refusal to wear glasses and the fact that he has had a beer or two. Myopic, drunk and brittle, our view of him from photographs is very different to what would have been seen by the crowd that day, but to him it would have made little difference. The crowd can see him, as we can, but to him all is a blur of motion.
John can't see, and we can't see but we know there is somewhere in that crowd, a teenager. A plump 15-year-old in an oatmeal-coloured jacket and hair that had perhaps until recently been likened to his mother's, but was now just his own. It must be hot for him in that oatmeal jacket. Why he's wearing it in the first place is contentious. The oatmeal-jacketed boy, when he is a man, will say that he was there to pick up a girl. His friend Ivan Vaughn next to him will say there was no girl and the suit and the hair and the everything were for the eyes of the boy onstage who, for maybe the last time ever, is completely unaware of him.
On the other hand the boy in the oatmeal jacket, whose name is Paul, can see John as clear as if the sun that day rested only on his curls. Paul will relish telling interviewers throughout the coming decades about that moment, of seeing and listening to this cool-looking older boy standing there, notionally singing 'Come Go With Me', a song that had come sneaking in through the docks from America and into the sitting rooms and bedrooms of only a select few in Liverpool. More impressive to Paul than the obscure song is the fact that John has got the words wrong and is playing on the banjo chords his mother taught him. Yet, somehow, it doesn't seem to matter. Through his bravado, the boy singing now of penitentiaries has turned a wrong into an almost right. Its a sublime, funny, exciting knife-edge, thrilling to a teenager who had learnt too soon the fragility of all around them. Paul will be less keen to tell interviewers, but will tell friends that really it didn't matter what the boy did onstage that day. He already knew what he wanted, had known since he had seen the boy at the chippy, on his paper-round and on the bus where he had stolen glances at the back of his curly head. He wanted to be in a band with that boy, and he was going to make it happen.
Time shifts, skips and judders as we move away from the song to later in the day at St Peter's just a few minutes away from the fete ground. St Peter's today looks very different than it did on the day of the fete. There are no queues, no plaques, no rope marking the stage, no pieces dismantled and stolen as relics for shrines of a very different type of worship. This is all because what is about to happen hasn't happened yet. The future starts only with the boy Ivan walking through the door with Paul in tow to meet the sweaty and exhausted Quarrymen, who had, unbeknownst to themselves, already taken their allocated places in the church hall for this moment in music legend.
For a turning point in world history, it began with little ceremony. By all accounts of those present, the first pleasantries exchanged were about what you'd expect from a bunch of hot, tired and slightly drunk boys meeting a younger boy too busy nervously shuffling his feet and perspiring for any meaningful conversation.
The moment becomes the moment when Paul with an attempt at nonchalance, requests he play a tune or two on John's guitar. John, with his own affected indifference, hands him the instrument, eyes narrowed, leaning so close that Paul can feel his beer breath puff against his face. The second Paul has the guitar in hand, he retunes it, flips it and bursts into a sudden rendition of 'Twenty Flight Rock', his voice soaring to the ceiling of the hall and filling the nook and cranny of the space with his echoes. To us looking in through folds of time, the boy Paul recalls a skiffle pop Orpheus, each note summoning the dead to life with his music. For those there at the time who were not yet figures of history but drunk teenagers on a hot day in a church hall, opinions were far more mixed.
To Chris the boy looks like nothing, because he was on the loo at the time and missed the whole thing.
To Pete Shotton standing next to John, biting his lip raw, the boy looks like the sudden, unceremonious end of childhood.
To John Lennon, perplexingly, he looks like Elvis.
Why John Lennon thought that the sweaty boy in front of him clinging to his last residue of puppy fat looked like the American King of Rock and Roll has been the subject of much debate. It could have been the heady combination of booze, nearsightedness and the heat of the day. Perhaps in fairness the boy with his oatmeal suit and his dark hair and his swagger did look like a young recreation of the king; and if the king can come in Memphis, why not in Liverpool? Or did this brilliant boy with his dancing fingers seem like the messiah, King of Kings, whose coming promised a way out of their war-hemorrhaged city? Or maybe all dreams of salvation were irrelevant and the boy was simply beautiful, just beautiful. And to a 50's tender hearted teddy boy there was nothing quite so beautiful as Elvis.
The song ends and begins here -- their story from here on shifting and splitting into millions of viewpoints, multiplying and mutating on and on into infinity. It will be the job of later biographers and writers and singers to try to fit so many eyes into one needle of coherent narrative. But that is the concern for historians and screenwriters and disgruntled biographers. Let them hash that out forever. Let us linger here instead, right here in this rare moment of certain uncertainty with Paul finishing his final note: the definite moment where the two boys' eyes meet and the future unfurls around them. Their shared look is not love, not yet. It's not even acceptance. But it is something, a feeling as fragile and tender as a bird wing, of being on the cusp of flight.
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