As the summer of 1961 fizzled to a close, John Lennon, flush with £100 for his 21st birthday (£1855 in 2024), wondered whether he could eke out just a little more sun. The dreamer was already high on the fruitful excursions he and his Beatles bandmates had made to Hamburg. These trips had left him curious about what the world outside of Merseyside had to offer. With the open adventures of On The Road seeping a spirit of abandon into the zeitgeist, getting out there seemed like an artist’s duty.
For Lennon, it seemed like an even more pertinent duty than playing gigs. He’d done that plenty of times with his bandmates in the preceding months anyhow. So, he hit up Paul McCartney with a daring plan: they’d purchase matching bowler hats and hitchhike their way to Spain. What the hats had to do with anything might sound mysterious, but it was a uniform that signified youthful escapism for two bosom buddies on the brink of superstardom and perhaps fearing the shackling impact that might have on them.
But in a less nebulous sense, Macca reckoned that their daft headwear was essential. “I had done a spot of hitchhiking with George and we knew you had to have a gimmick,” he recalls in Anthology, “We had been turned down so often and we’d seen that guys that had a gimmick (like a Union Jack round them) had always got the lifts. So I said to John, ‘Let’s get a couple of bowler hats.’ It was showbiz creeping in.”
Already, they were thinking like concept hikers, the avant-garde offshoot of regular folks thumbing a ride, prognosticating their mercurial future as a creative duo. “We still had our leather jackets and drainpipes – we were too proud of them not to wear them, in case we met a girl; and if we did meet a girl, off would come the bowlers,” McCartney continues. “But for lifts we would put the bowlers on. Two guys in bowler hats – a lorry would stop! Sense of Humour. This, and the train, is how we got to Paris.”
These daft goons were inseparable as they wove their way into Europe, enjoying a window of sun in more ways than one. Meanwhile, back home, George Harrison and Pete Best were left in the lurch, uninvited to this Indian summer shenanigan and forced to explain to angry promoters that they couldn’t fulfil their booked gigs because their frontmen had donned bowler hats and fled the country with a 100 quid in their pocket. And poor old Stu Sutcliffe was still holed up in Hamburg so certain that the band were over that he was openly discussing the end of the great fad with his German pals.
Enraged, Harrison and Best began auditioning for other bands. Oblivious, Lennon and McCartney just kept thumbing their way towards a promised harem of Brigitte Bardot lookalikes, blissful to the impending demise of their band, the only worry around pertaining to whipping their daft hats on in time should they happen upon one of these elusive Bardots on their bumbling travels.
They ran aground in Paris, fated to remain put thanks to the comfy beds that Lennon’s windfall could afford them. There are those who might say that this rather self-absorbed trip signposted the future for the dominant dynamic of the band. But, in truth, it’s closer to two best friends sensing that they were building towards the brink of something beyond their comprehension and wanting to tackle such a horizon on their own terms first.
Drunk on the buzzing exploration of utopias spoils, they funny walked their way through the arty district of Montmartre, agog at the sights and freshly determined to fulfil their own curated version. They eventually returned to a band in disarray, but now one with a firm direction, thanks to one final act of youthful waywardness before The Beatles truly began.https://youtu.be/n5k4PGv84CY
