Shout! by Philip Norman

timber merchant’s circular book room, with finely inlaid shelves, where he had been caned so many times—it would not be defiantly, as before, but to ask Mr. Pobjoy, in all humility, if the Quarry Men could play for ten minutes during the interval at the sixth form dance.
    Another source of engagements was St. Peter’s parish church, Woolton. John had sung in its choir and disrupted its Sunday school, and he and Pete Shotton still belonged to its youth club, which met in the hall across the road for badminton and ping-pong. The Quarry Men would play at the youth club “hops,” unpaid and glad of an opportunity to use a stage, and experience acoustics larger than those of John’s mother’s bathroom. When John broke a guitar string he was reimbursed from church funds.
    The group existed on the most casual basis, expanding and shrinking according to members available. Already there was some dissent between Rod Davis, who wished to play pure folk music, and John with his passion for Elvis. Pete Shotton was in it only for laughs, as he strove to make clear on all occasions. Little Colin Hanton, drumming irregularly, with his birth certificate in his top pocket, was more interested in pubs and pints of Black Velvet. Fights sometimes broke out between the musicians as they were performing, or with members of the audience whose criticisms were untactfully voiced. Fights broke out also if a spectator believed a Quarry Man to be ogling his girlfriend, and clambered up among them to take revenge. John Lennon, for some reason, was always the principal target of such attacks, and was seldom averse to using his fists. “Except if it was a really big bloke,” Nigel Walley says. “Then John’d be as meek as a mouse. He’d always manage to talk his way out.”
    “There were these two particular big Teds,” Rod Davis says. “Rod and Willo their names were. They were the terror of Woolton. Rod and Willo were always looking for us and threatening to do us over. One night when we got off the bus—with all our gear, and the tea chest as well—Rod and Willo were there, waiting for us. They came chasing after us in their long coats, and we scattered. I know we left the tea chest behind on the pavement.”
    The tea chest, which Rod’s mum had covered with wallpaper, remained a prominent feature of Woolton village for about a week afterward.Sometimes it would be standing on the pavement; sometimes it would have migrated to the middle of the road.
    The role of bass player was transferred after this to Len Garry, another Liverpool Institute boy whom Ivan Vaughan had introduced into the Lennon circle. Nigel Walley, whose consuming interest was golf not skiffle, assumed the duties of manager. With his sun-tanned complexion and shining white teeth, “Walloggs” was amply suited to a diplomatic role. He took bookings for the Quarry Men and prevailed on local shopkeepers to put advertisements in their windows for no fee. He gave out formal visiting cards that read:
Country. Western. Rock ’n’ Roll. Skiffle
The Quarry Men
OPEN FOR ENGAGEMENTS
    Summer was just beginning when the Quarry Men played at an open-air party in Rosebery Street. A printer friend of Colin Hanton, who had designed the label on their bass drum, was helping to organize festivities to celebrate Liverpool’s 750th anniversary as a city. Though the engagement lay some distance from Woolton—and in a rough district of Liverpool 8—it was welcomed for the beer it promised, and the girls. The Quarry Men played standing on the tailgate of a truck, which had to be moved because somebody was ill in the bedroom above. They played in the afternoon, then again in the evening, after strings of colored bulbs had come alight on the back-to-back houses.
    Colin Hanton had, as usual, preceded the engagement by going to a pub, producing his birth certificate, and downing several pints of Black Velvet. By himself at the end of the trailer, he played his drums in happy disregard for