“Paul and I would visit each other’s houses and listen to records and play guitars,” recalls Ian James. “My collection was mainly Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley. I enjoyed going round to Forthlin Road – Paul would play the piano, I would play guitar, and Mike would be on drums. We would make a heck of a racket in the front room, and Paul’s dad would be trying to place bets on the telephone in the other room. He would come in and complain, and we would have to be quiet for a few minutes. Jim McCartney was quite a character, and I used to have a great time there.”
After school the two boys would visit the record shops – NEMS, Currys, and Cranes – to hear the latest releases in the listening booths. They would seek out the traveling fairs at Sefton Park and Speke. “We would stand around the waltzer as they would be playing the latest rock ‘n’ roll hits,” explains Ian. “The first time I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was at the fairground at Southport – I was transfixed.”
Ian came from a musical family: his grandfather was the bandmaster at Dingle Salvation Army, and he had seven brothers who all played musical instruments – guitars, zithers, cornets, and banjos. When skiffle and rock ‘n’ roll exploded on the music scene, it created excitement among the teenagers, so Ian’s grandparents bought him a guitar from the Liverpool music store Hessy’s, and it was on this very guitar that Ian taught Paul his first chords. “I do remember teaching Paul the chords to ‘Twenty Flight Rock.’ I was playing right-handed. I might have changed the strings around for Paul, but that would have been quite a lengthy process, so it's more likely that he learned it right-handed.”
“We wanted to do a perfect imitation when we heard those old records, and Paul was a very good mimic,” comments Ian James. “Usually before morning assembly, there would be a crowd around him and he would be reviewing the previous night’s radio programs like The Goon Show. He could do all the silly voices very well. He could also sing Little Richard songs perfectly.”
“I remember Paul playing ‘I’ve Lost My Little Girl’ in his bedroom at Forthlin Road,” says school friend Ian James. “I was very impressed; I had never thought of writing a song myself.”
“Paul had a white sports jacket with black flecks in it, and I had a pale blue version. We would always wear them at the fairgrounds, as we thought that they were really cool. We also wore narrow trousers, as it was the trend at the time, and I took Paul to a tailor that I knew on Mill Street, and he would take in the width of the leg bottoms to whatever you wanted, so we went at lunchtime or after school. Paul’s dad said to him once, ‘Where did you get those trousers from?’ and Paul replied, quite truthfully, ‘They are the same trousers that I went out in this morning.’”
from The Beatles in Liverpool, Spencer Leigh (2014)
