Video will appear as you scroll through the story
The Beatles · S1 E6
The Quarrymen
John starts a skiffle group at Quarry Bank school. Washboard, tea-chest bass, and a fifteen-year-old who thinks he's Elvis Presley
A bedroom in Mendips, Woolton, 1956. Fifteen-year-old John Lennon drops the needle on Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel, and the world before that moment and the world after it become two completely different places.
John tears his voice apart on this cover of the Isley Brothers classic. This is the raw, uncontainable energy that started in a school band in Woolton and ended up shaking the world.
Twist and Shout (1963)
George Martin saved this for the very end of the Please Please Me session on February 11, 1963, because he knew John's voice would not survive it. The entire album was recorded in a single day. John had been singing for nearly ten hours, had a cold, and his throat was raw. Martin gave him one shot. John ripped through the song in a single take, his voice cracking at the edges. They attempted a second take but his voice was gone.
“Nothing really affected me until I heard Elvis. If there hadn't been an Elvis, there would not have been the Beatles.”
— John Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 2000
TAP TO REVEAL: What is the earliest Beatles recording in existence, and where was it hiding?
Quarry Bank High School
Harthill Road, Woolton, Liverpool. The school where John Lennon formed the Quarrymen in 1956, naming the band after the school itself. Now called Calderstones School.
One After 909 (The Beatles)
From Let It Be (1970). John wrote this at about seventeen during the Quarrymen days: a simple rock and roll number about catching the wrong train. The Beatles tried recording it multiple times over the years and never got it right until the rooftop concert on January 30, 1969, where they finally nailed it with a grin.
What homemade instrument did Pete Shotton, John's best friend, play in the Quarrymen?
The Quarrymen are loud, rough, and not particularly good. But on July 6, 1957, they play a church fete in Woolton, and in the audience is a fifteen-year-old boy who knows every word to every song they play.
0 XP earned this session