Free Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney by Howard Sounes Page B

up with a guy who just looked cool, and his best mate John protected him all the time.’
    Paul had recently dropped and broken his cheap Rosetti guitar. Having decided the guitar was a write-off, the boys enjoyed stomping it to pieces, after which Paul had little choice but to play the Top Ten piano during their set. One night when he was at the keyboard, Paul made a rude remark about Astrid. Nobody remembers exactly what he said, but it was bad enough to cause Stu to lose his temper. Slightly built though he was, Stu swung a punch at Paul. ‘Don’t you ever say anything about Astrid again!’ he said, defending his sweetheart.
    ‘I’ll say what I like!’
    This altercation is often presented as the only time Paul and Stu came to blows. In fact, ‘they were always fighting,’ says Ruth Lallemann, who remembers the boys regularly pushing and shoving each other. ‘You didn’t talk about things. You fought.’ George Harrison said he had ‘a lot of fist fights with Stuart’ to establish a pecking order. Tony Sheridan adds: ‘Paul didn’t get on with [Stu]. There was animosity. There was open fighting on stage … Some ugly stuff went on.’ This particular fight over Astrid was bad enough to signal the end of Stuart’s tenure as a Beatle. He quit the band soon afterwards to live with Astrid and study art in Hamburg, remaining friendly with the boys. Indeed, as soon as Stuart left the band Paul seemed better inclined towards him. As a musician, Stu held them back; now he could just be a mate. As neither John nor George wanted to take up Stuart’s bass - the least glamorous instrument in a band - this job fell to Paul, who needed a new instrument. To get him started, Stu generously leant him his expensive Höfner. Later Paul bought the smaller, cheaper Höfner violin bass, which became his signature instrument. It is a mark of Paul’s talent, and strength of personality, that despite being on a backline instrument he remained an equal front man with John.
    Soon after Stu’s departure the boys were talent-spotted by a German music publisher, who hired them to back Tony Sheridan on a recording session for Polydor. The result was a single, ‘My Bonnie’, released locally in August 1961. Credited to Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, the track is a lively cover of the traditional song ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’, starting quietly, then breaking into a rave-up, Paul hollering with joy in the background. It made number 32 in the German singles chart that year, and remains a very engaging record.
    The band returned to Liverpool before ‘My Bonnie’ was released, finding themselves increasingly in demand on Merseyside where there were now scores if not hundreds of similar ‘beat bands’. The stock in trade of nearly all these groups was American songs, often learned from discs brought into Liverpool by sailors, becoming proprietorial about tunes they considered their own, though bands would swap songs. ‘I remember swapping with George “Roll Over Beethoven”; and I let him do “Jambalaya”,’ recalls Gerry Marsden, leader of Gerry and the Pacemakers. Bands were rivals - for gigs, exposure and the El Dorado of a record contract - but also mates. One memorable night at Litherland Town Hall the Beatles and the Pacemakers joined forces. ‘We said, “Let’s have one band for tonight.” And we called it the Beat-makers: the Pacemakers and the Beats [sic],’ remembers Marsden. The musicians swapped instruments. Paul played the town hall piano, the Pacemakers’ pianist played sax. ‘We had a ball.’
    THE MOP-TOP
    When John turned 21 in October 1961 he received £100 ($153) as a gift from a well-to-do aunt, an act of such munificence Paul never forgot it, often remarking that nobody had ever given him a hundred quid. The gift highlighted a subtle but significant class difference between the friends. ‘To us John was upper class,’ Paul commented for the Beatles’ multi-media documentary project,