Free Paul McCartney by Philip Norman Page A

condemned as ‘obscene’ and its rhythm as ‘jungle-like’–a racist allusion to its origins in black rhythm and blues. Rock ‘n’ roll singers were ridiculed as inarticulate morons, controlled by unscrupulous managers (all too true in most cases), whose fraudulence was summed up by their inability to play the guitars they flourished and spun about them. Every commentator agreed: it couldn’t be long before young people saw through the con-trick that was being perpetrated on them and the whole noisy nuisance blew over.
    But there was no going back. Thanks to Elvis, and the Teds, British boys en masse had discovered something previously unknown in their stodgy, sleepy country, except to a tiny metropolitan elite. They had discovered style. So Paul joined the queue at Bioletti’s barber shop, beside the Penny Lane roundabout, waiting for his former boyish tousle to be shaped into a toppling Elvis quiff and combed back at the sides into the two interwoven rear flaps known as a ‘duck’s arse’, or DA. Unfortunately, like many another 14-year-old would-be Elvis, he spent his weekdays in a school uniform whose cap was designed to be worn squarely on the head, to the ruination of any coiffure let alone this springy, aerated one.
    The Institute had a strict dress code, personally enforced by its headmaster, J. R. Edwards, popularly known as ‘the Baz’ (short for ‘bastard’). Nowhere was he more of a baz than over caps, which had to be worn at all times on pain of severe punishment. The only way Paul could do so without harming the precious cockade was to clamp his cap onto the back of his head like a Jewish yarmulka.
    Grammar school boys, too, now craved the Teds’ drainpipe trousers that British parents hated almost as much as they did rock ‘n’ roll music. Even the easy-going Jim could not abide ‘drainies’ and insisted Paul’s dark grey school trousers should retain their billowy 24-inch cuffs (although in Jim’s own pre-Great War boyhood, every Englishman from the prime minister downwards had been slim-shanked).
    Other boys were having furious arguments with their fathers on the subject–but not Paul. Few men’s outfitters yet sold tapered trousers ready to wear; the usual thing was for an alterations tailor to ‘take in’ a conventional baggy pair. Paul had his school ones taken in a little at a time, first to 20 inches, then 18, then 16, so that Jim wouldn’t notice the erosion.
    He found other ways of taking in his dad as well, without ever actually lying. ‘Near my house there was a tailor who’d do the job while you waited,’ Ian James remembers. ‘Paul used to leave for school wearing ordinary-width trousers, then have them altered at lunch-time. If Jim said anything about them when he got home, he’d say, “They’re the same pair you saw me go out in this morning.”’
    Most days on his bus journey to school, Paul sat next to a fellow Institute pupil, a pale, solemn-looking boy named George Harrison who lived in Upton Green, Speke, not far from the McCartneys’ former home in Ardwick Road, and whose father, Harry, worked as a bus-driver for Liverpool Corporation. Often, when the number 86 stopped on Mather Avenue to pick up Paul, Mr Harrison would be behind the wheel, so he’d get a free ride.
    George was a year his junior and in the class below his at the Inny, so during the day there was a wide social gap between them. But on the journey to and from school they could be friends. Paul was much impressed by an episode illustrative of their very different families. After some misdemeanour, George had received the Inny’s commonest corporal punishment, one or more strokes on the palm of the hand with a wooden ruler. ‘The teacher missed his hand and caught him on the wrist, and made a big red weal. The next day, his dad came to the school and punched the teacher on the nose. If I’d complained to my dad that I’d been beaten, he’d have said, “You probably deserved