The Quarrymen

• 1. Introduction

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  The Quarrymen began in Liverpool in 1956, when a teenager named John Lennon decided to start a skiffle group with his school friends. Within four years, that loose collection of young musicians would change their name to the Beatles and go on to reshape popular music. But the story of the Quarrymen is not just a prequel to that larger saga. It is a story of how a specific place and a specific moment in music history made everything that followed possible. What was the musical craze that gave Lennon an entry point into performance? Who were the friends and family members who quietly shaped the group's early sound? And what happened on the 6th of July 1957, in the garden of a church in Woolton, that set off a chain of events no one could have anticipated?

• 2. Skiffle and the Liverpool Scene

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  In the mid-1950s, a musical form called skiffle swept through Britain, reviving an American tradition that had been popular in the United States decades earlier. For British teenagers, its appeal was practical: skiffle did not demand expensive instruments or formal training. Lonnie Donegan was its most successful British champion, and the Quarrymen's early repertoire drew directly from his recordings. Songs like "Rock Island Line", "Jump Down Turn Around (Pick a Bale of Cotton)", "Alabamy Bound" and "Cumberland Gap" became the group's working material. Lennon and fellow guitarist Eric Griffiths took lessons in Hunt's Cross, Liverpool, though Lennon abandoned them quickly; they were grounded in theory rather than actual playing. Julia Lennon, John's mother, proved a more useful teacher. She showed Lennon and Griffiths how to tune their guitars to match the top four strings of a banjo, and taught them the chords of D, C, and D7, along with the Fats Domino song "Ain't That a Shame". They rehearsed at Lennon's aunt's house, called Mendips, at 251 Menlove Avenue, and at Griffiths' house on Halewood Drive. Julia's record collection added further material: Shirley and Lee's "Let the Good Times Roll" and Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-A-Lula" both found their way into the group's set.

• 3. Naming the Group

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  Lennon and Pete Shotton founded the initial skiffle group in November 1956, adding Bill Smith on tea-chest bass to round out the lineup. Both Lennon and Shotton have been credited with proposing the name Quarrymen, drawn from a line in the song of their school, Quarry Bank High School: "Quarrymen, old before our birth. Straining each muscle and sinew." The choice was deliberately ironic. Lennon found the school song's muscular imagery laughable, making it a private joke embedded in a public name. Smith's time in the group lasted only weeks before Nigel Walley, Ivan Vaughan, and Len Garry each took a turn on tea-chest bass. Drummer Colin Hanton and banjo player Rod Davis joined around the same period. The resulting lineup of Lennon, Griffiths, Shotton, Garry, Hanton, and Davis formed the first stable version of the group. Their flyers, designed by Lennon himself, advertised them as a "country-and-western, rock n' roll, skiffle band" and listed a phone number for Nigel Walley, who had transitioned from bass player to manager after Walley moved off the instrument. The group rehearsed first at Shotton's house on Vale Road, then shifted to a corrugated air-raid shelter in the back garden when the noise became too much, and eventually moved to Hanton's or Griffiths' house.

• 4. The Garden Fete and Paul McCartney

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  On the 6th of July 1957, the Quarrymen played at the St. Peter's Church Rose Queen garden fete in Woolton. They opened on the back of a moving flatbed lorry, riding alongside Morris dancers, Boy Scouts, Brownies, Girl Guides, and Cubs, all led by the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry. At 4:15 in the afternoon, they moved to a permanent stage in the field behind the church. It was during this performance, while the group was playing "Come Go with Me", that Paul McCartney arrived. Backstage in the Scout hut, Ivan Vaughan introduced McCartney to Lennon. McCartney then demonstrated his abilities: he tuned his guitar, sang Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock", Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-a-Lula", and a medley of Little Richard songs. The evening show brought an unexpected thunderstorm that cut the lights. A young schoolmate named Bob Molyneux recorded part of that performance on his Grundig TK8 portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, capturing versions of Lonnie Donegan's "Puttin' On the Style" and Elvis' "Baby Let's Play House". Walking home afterward, Lennon told Shotton they should ask McCartney to join. Two weeks later, Shotton ran into McCartney cycling through Woolton and passed along the invitation. McCartney said he would join after Scout camp in Hathersage, Derbyshire, and a family holiday at the Butlin's holiday camp in Filey, North Yorkshire. His official debut came on the 18th of October 1957 at a Conservative Club social at the New Clubmoor Hall in Norris Green. Lennon and McCartney both wore cream-coloured sports jackets, funded by Nigel Walley collecting half a crown per week from each member.

• 5. George Harrison and the Phillips Recording

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  George Harrison first saw the group perform on the 6th of February 1958 at Wilson Hall, where McCartney made the introduction. Harrison auditioned in March at Rory Storm's Morgue Skiffle Club, playing "Guitar Boogie Shuffle". Lennon, believing Harrison was too young at 15, remained unconvinced. McCartney arranged a second encounter on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, where Harrison played "Raunchy" directly for Lennon. That performance did the work no argument could. Harrison's joining shifted the group further from skiffle and also ended Lennon's reliance on banjo-style tuning. Around the same time, John Duff Lowe, another school friend of McCartney's, joined on piano. The group now had four guitarists. Lennon and McCartney eventually pressured Eric Griffiths to buy a bass guitar; when he refused, citing the expense, they convinced Walley to fire him. Walley regretted this and gradually withdrew from the group. Len Garry contracted tubercular meningitis and spent seven months in hospital, never playing with the group again. In March, McCartney bought an Elpico amplifier and he and Harrison added pickups to their guitars, giving the Quarrymen an electric sound for the first time. Percy Phillips operated a recording studio at 38 Kensington, Liverpool, situated between a kitchen and a front room that served as an electrical goods shop. Phillips had just turned 60 when Harrison heard about the studio from guitarist Johnny Byrne of the Raving Texans. On the 12th of July 1958, the Quarrymen booked a session there, recording straight to disc to save the cost of tape. A single microphone stood in the centre of the room; Lennon suggested Hanton drape a scarf over his snare drum to reduce the volume. They recorded "In Spite of All the Danger", credited to McCartney and Harrison, and Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day". Phillips handed over a fragile 78rpm record when they were done. The group passed it around, one week each, and eventually it was lost. John Duff Lowe rediscovered it in 1981 and sold it to McCartney for an undisclosed sum. Those two recordings later appeared on the Beatles' album Anthology 1.

• 6. Trio, Name Changes, and the Casbah

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  Shortly after the Phillips session, Hanton quarrelled with the others and quit. Lowe lost contact after leaving Liverpool Institute. On the 15th of July 1958, Julia Lennon was killed in a road accident, dealing Lennon a blow that left the group mostly dormant through the summer. Lennon took a job at a restaurant at Liverpool Airport. McCartney and Harrison spent that period hitchhiking in Wales, playing with a local skiffle group called The Vikings. The three performed only a handful of times through the rest of 1958. Without a drummer or a bass player, they answered questions about the gap by saying simply, "The rhythm's in the guitars." In the fall, they auditioned again for Canadian impresario Carroll Levis, this time under the name Johnny and the Moondogs. They passed the first heat in Liverpool and reached the finals in Manchester, where they played Buddy Holly's "Think It Over" to positive response. They could not stay until the results were announced. As Lennon left, he picked up a cutaway electric guitar left near the stage door, later remarking that the trip had not been a total loss. After that audition, the group renamed themselves Japage 3, combining letters from John, Paul, and George. Lennon's art school friend Derek Hodkin agreed to manage them, but bookings dried up regardless. By May, Japage 3 was effectively finished. In the summer of 1959, an opening arrived: Mona Best planned to open a club in her cellar and had promised the space to the Les Stewart Quartet if they helped convert it. When Harrison and fellow Quartet guitarist Ken Brown missed a show, Stewart fired them and abandoned the residency. Harrison offered to recruit Lennon and McCartney. Under the Quarrymen name again, the four-guitarist lineup opened the Casbah Coffee Club on the 29th of August 1959 to an audience of around 300 teenagers, performing through one microphone connected to the club's small PA system.

• 7. Becoming the Beatles

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  The Casbah residency lasted four months. In January 1960, Brown fell ill; when Mona Best insisted the group still pay him, Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison refused, and the residency ended. Lennon then persuaded fellow art school student Stuart Sutcliffe to buy a bass guitar and join. The group had no bookings but rehearsed constantly to let Sutcliffe find his footing on the instrument. They returned to Phillips' Sound Recording Services to record Lennon's original "One After 909", though that recording did not survive. The four disliked the name Quarrymen and cycled through alternatives; one was Los Paranoias. By March 1960, Lennon and Sutcliffe had settled on a new name: the Beatles, chosen for its double meaning and as a nod to Buddy Holly's band the Crickets. The group added Pete Best, Mona's son, on drums and continued performing across Liverpool and in Hamburg before signing to Parlophone Records in 1962. The album Open for Engagements, the reformed Quarrymen's debut studio record, was released in 1994 and consisted largely of the 1950s skiffle and rock they had played decades earlier.

• 8. Reunions and Aftermath

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  Since the Beatles dissolved in 1970, and especially after John Lennon's murder in 1980, the surviving original members of the Quarrymen have returned to the stage on several occasions. In 1997, all five members who had performed at the Woolton garden fete forty years before reunited: Pete Shotton, Rod Davis, Len Garry, Eric Griffiths, and Colin Hanton. The trigger was the 40th anniversary of that performance, and of the moment Lennon and McCartney first met. The reunion led to ongoing tours across the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Japan, Russia, Cuba, and other countries. In 2000, producer Martin Lewis recorded the group performing "Come Go with Me" for the Michael Lindsay-Hogg film Two of Us, a film about the last day Lennon and McCartney saw each other in April 1976. Eric Griffiths died in 2005. Pete Shotton died in 2017. John Duff Lowe died in February 2024. Len Garry died in March 2026. The group's fourth studio album, Grey Album, released in 2012, took its name as a reference to the Beatles' self-titled record, sometimes called The White Album. Colin Hanton, who has held the drum chair since 1956, and Rod Davis, who joined in 1957, remained among the performing members into the 2020s.