“It really started when I got to know John first because my mum and dad wanted a bit of peace on a Sunday afternoon. So they packed my off to St. Peter’s Sunday School. In my class was Pete Shotton, Ivan Vaughn, Nige Walley, Geoff Rhind, Barbara Baker. There must have been fifteen or so of us. When John came to live with his Aunt Mimi, she obviously also wanted a quiet Sunday afternoon, and packed John off to St. Peter’s. [...]
“We were all in this Sunday class aged five or six, and in our house, as in many other houses, he was known as “that Lennon”, in the phrase, “You stay away from that Lennon,” which didn’t help, it only made him more attractive! [...]
“[John and I] were outside a record shop, and the sound of Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line came wafting out of the shop, and I thought, ‘Wow! That is absolutely fantastic. I’m going to have some of that!’ So I started pestering for a guitar or a banjo. Eventually we found out that an uncle of ours, who played in a dance band in North Wales, he played the fiddle and the musical saw. My brother had the saw and I had the fiddle, and his brother-in-law, who played in the same band, had a banjo and a guitar which he was selling. By the time we found out about it, the guitar had already been sold, which is to my eternal regret because if I’d got the guitar instead of the banjo, McCartney probably never would have got into the Quarrymen! But that’s another story!
“I went into school the following day and said to my friend, Eric Griffiths, “Oh Eric, I got a banjo the other other day.”
“Oh yes?” he said. “Do you want to be in a group?”
“The problem was not finding people who knew how to play, it was finding people who had an instrument! So I said, “Who’s in this group?” So he said himself on guitar, Pete Shotton on the washboard and Bill Smith on tea chest bass, and John Lennon on guitar. They were all friends of mine in the same year, so that was how it started and that was how I got in.”
[Rod Davis, Banjo player in The Quarrymen, via The Liverpool Echo, 2017]
Photos: The Quarraymen playing on 6th July, 1957, the day John met Paul.
(1. Geoff Rhind, 2. Unknown (maybe Geoff Rhind?).
