Without Paul McCartney, The Beatles as we know them would never have existed. There would be no ‘Let It Be’, no ‘Get Back’, no ‘Blackbird’. In fact, band members used to say that without McCartney’s nagging, they might never have actually finished an album. But before all of that, McCartney needed to audition for his place in the group.
Back in 1957, 16-year-old John Lennon was already the lead singer in a band called The Quarrymen with friends from his school. McCartney came across Lennon when he went to a church fête with his friend Ivan, where Lennon’s band happened to be playing. Having already learnt to play guitar thanks to a £15 acoustic he got for trading in his trumpet, McCartney asked to join.
McCartney, like all other teenagers at the time, was newly enamoured with rock and roll as the genre slowly started to be played on the radio. When he stumbled across Lennon’s band, McCartney was excited to find a group playing the music he loved in his hometown.
During an interview with Record Collector, McCartney recalls the performance: “I just thought, ‘Well, he looks good, he’s singing well, and he seems like a great lead singer to me. Of course, he had his glasses off, so he really looked suave.”
He continues: “I remember John was good. He was really the only outstanding member; all the rest kind of slipped away.”
Instantly, he was determined to join the band and managed to get an audition with Lennon. Famously, McCartney started out his audition by actually teaching Lennon how to tune his guitar properly as The Quarrymen’s guitars were all in banjo tuning by mistake. He then played Lennon a song that wowed the band, instantly bringing him into the fold and starting the long, incredible history of their creative partnership.
The song McCartney chose to impress the band was Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’. Released only that same year, chosen to show off his knowledge and love of rock ’n’ roll, McCartney’s rendition of the track was enough to earn him a spot.
In his biography and lyric book, The Lyrics: 1956-Present, McCartney remembers the experience: “I’d just turned fifteen at this point, and John was sixteen, and Ivan knew we were both obsessed with rock and roll, so he took me over to introduce us,” he writes.
Adding: “One thing led to another – typical teenage boys posturing and the like – and ended up showing off a little by playing Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ on the guitar. I think l also played Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ and a few Little Richard songs too.”
A true moment of serendipity that led to music history, McCartney ponders that moment a lot, continuing on to write, “To this very day, it still is a complete mystery to me that it happened at all. Would John and I have met some other way if Ivan and I hadn’t gone to that fête? I’d actually gone along to try and pick up a girl. I’d seen John around – in the chip shop, on the bus, that sort of thing – and thought he looked quite cool, but would we have ever talked? I don’t know.”
McCartney would later bring his school friend George Harrison into the band after Harrison auditioned for Lennon on a bus. Ringo Starr wouldn’t join the band until 1962, a time when the boys persuaded him to quit his own group, Rory Storm and The Hurricanes. The rest is history. As Paul McCartney puts it, “It’s one of the wonderful lessons about saying yes when life presents these opportunities to you. You never know where they could lead.”
