When John Lennon met Paul McCartney. July the 6th, 1957.

Jun 8, 2022
6 min read

Collage of young Beatles with guitars, old photos and handwritten notes; caption says When John Lennon Met Paul McCartney, July 6th, 1957.

On 6 July 1957, a 16-year-old John Lennon was playing at a church fete in Woolton, Liverpool, with his skiffle group the Quarrymen. A 15-year-old Paul McCartney was in the crowd. By the end of the afternoon, they'd been introduced in a Scout hut by a mutual friend, McCartney had shown Lennon how to tune a guitar and knocked out three songs from memory, and Lennon had started turning over in his head whether inviting this kid to join the band was a good idea. Within seven years they'd written "She Loves You," "A Hard Day's Night," "Help!," and "Yesterday." The Beatles as we know them started in a churchyard in Woolton.

The Man Who Made It Happen

The person responsible for the introduction was Ivan Vaughan, and his role in pop history has been consistently underplayed. Ivan was born on 18 June 1942 in Liverpool, which happens to be the exact same birthday as Paul McCartney. The two met when they both enrolled at the Liverpool Institute in September 1953. Ivan had known John Lennon since they were small children. They'd grown up near each other in Woolton, and Ivan played tea-chest bass in the Quarrymen from time to time.

The reason Ivan was at Liverpool Institute rather than Quarry Bank with John comes down to parental interference. The Vaughans were worried about their son spending too much time around Lennon, who already had a reputation for trouble, and steered him toward Liverpool Institute instead. This put Ivan in the same school as McCartney. Without that parental intervention, the person connecting Lennon to McCartney might never have existed in the right place.

Ivan had been telling Paul about the Quarrymen and suggested he come to the fete. Paul was noncommittal at first. Ivan's winning argument, according to accounts from people who were there, was that it was a good place to meet girls. Paul decided to come.

Young band performing on a flatbed truck in a residential street.

The Fete at St Peter's Church

The Woolton village fete at St Peter's Church was a quintessentially English summer afternoon event: cake stalls, games, a Rose Queen procession, Morris dancers, Boy Scouts, Brownies, Cubs, and a display by the City of Liverpool Police Dogs. The Quarrymen played three times that day. First they rode through the village on the back of a flatbed lorry, part of a procession led by the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry. At 4:15 in the afternoon, they played a set on a permanent stage in the field behind the church. The evening ended with a Grand Dance in the church hall.

John Lennon sang lead, as always. He played guitar and fronted the band with the kind of performance described by everyone who saw the early Quarrymen as confident, physical, and slightly reckless. Julia Baird, Lennon's half-sister, was there that afternoon. She described the scene in her memoir Imagine This:

"The entertainment began at 2pm with the opening procession, which entailed one or two wonderfully festooned lorries crawling at a snail's pace through the village on their ceremonious way to the Church field."

Paul arrived during the 4:15 set. The song the Quarrymen were playing as he walked in was "Come Go with Me" by the Del-Vikings, a recent American chart hit. Lennon liked the song and had been playing it, but he didn't know the lyrics. He was improvising them, making them up as he went, keeping the rhythm and melody but filling in the words with whatever sounded right. Paul later recalled hearing Lennon singing it through the tannoy as he approached: the confidence of it, the way Lennon performed as if he knew exactly what he was doing even when he was winging it.

Poster advertising Garden Fete, Crowning Rose Queen, Saturday, July 6th, 1957.

The Scout Hut Introduction

Between the afternoon set and the evening dance, Lennon had a few minutes while the band set up equipment in the church hall. It was in this window, in the Scout hut near the church, that Ivan Vaughan brought Paul over and introduced them.

Paul McCartney was, by most accounts, immediately impressive. He was younger than Lennon, slightly rounder, not yet the lean teenager he'd become, but he was confident and he clearly knew his music. He showed Lennon how to tune a guitar by ear, something Lennon had been doing by feel and approximation. Then he played.

He played Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock," a fast American rock and roll number with complex chord changes. He knew every word. He played Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-A-Lula." He did a Little Richard medley. He played it all with an authority that impressed every Quarrymen member present. The thing that mattered most to Lennon, according to Pete Shotton's later account, was that Paul knew the lyrics. Real lyrics. Not improvised fillers, not made-up words, but the actual songs as recorded. That was practically unusual for a working-class teenager in Liverpool in 1957.

Pete Shotton, Lennon's closest friend and the Quarrymen's washboard player, later recalled what Lennon said to him on the walk home. He was thinking about whether to invite McCartney to join. The tension wasn't whether Paul was good enough. He clearly was. The tension was whether letting in someone that good was worth it, because someone that good might end up taking over. Lennon was the leader of the Quarrymen, and he'd built it to his own specifications. A 15-year-old who could play better than him and knew all the words was both an asset and a threat. Lennon's conclusion, by the time he got home, was that the asset outweighed the threat.

Old manuscript page, handwritten text: 'From Her Open, 9-34 words.' — Paul McCartney remembers the day he met John Lennon

The Invitation and What FollowedThe Bob Molyneux Tape

The afternoon at Woolton on 6 July 1957 was captured, partially, on an audio recording. Bob Molyneux, a local amateur recording enthusiast, brought a reel-to-reel tape recorder to the fete and recorded parts of the Quarrymen's performance. The tape was forgotten for decades. Molyneux held onto it without realising what he had, and it only came to public attention in 1994 when it was included in the Beatles Anthology documentary project. It was the oldest known recording of John Lennon performing.

In 1994, Molyneux sold the tape at Sotheby's for approximately £78,500. It's an extraordinary document: a crackly, imperfect recording of teenagers playing skiffle at a village fete, with no idea that any of it mattered. You can hear Lennon leading the Quarrymen through their set, confident and slightly chaotic, on the same afternoon that McCartney walked through the gate and changed everything.

Young 1950s rock and roll band performing live for an audience. — A photo from Oct. 14, 1957 shows Paul McCartney’s first performance with the Quarry Men (from left): drummer Colin Hanton, McCartney, bassist Len Garry, John Lennon and guitarist Eric Griffiths.

Why It Mattered

There are arguments about whether the Lennon/McCartney partnership was the most significant creative collaboration in 20th-century popular music, but there aren't many serious ones. Between 1963 and 1970, working together and increasingly in competition with each other, they produced twelve studio albums and dozens of songs that reshaped what pop music was for and what it could sound like. The partnership started, improbably, because a teenager was told a church fete was a good place to meet girls.

The relationship between Lennon and McCartney lasted, in various forms, until Lennon's death in 1980. It wasn't always warm. The split of the Beatles in 1970 produced years of public bitterness, including a venomous letter Lennon wrote to Paul and Linda McCartney in 1971, which reads like a document from a completely different relationship to the one that started in a Scout hut in Woolton. What happened in that Scout hut in 1957 created, eventually, both the greatest songwriting partnership of its era and the most public and acrimonious rupture of it.

St Peter's Church in Woolton is now a tourist destination for Beatles pilgrims. The churchyard where Lennon and McCartney first crossed paths, where Lennon used to sit on the graves as a teenager, is marked and visited. Every year on 6 July, a small ceremony marks the anniversary. The fete still happens. Occasionally, the surviving original Quarrymen members play at it.