The sobering story of Paul McCartney’s first-ever live performance: “A bit plonky”
Whenever you’re doubting just how attainable a glittering career in rock and roll really is, it’s worth bearing in mind that everybody has to start somewhere. Even The Beatles, whose place at the top of music history is borderline unbeatable and the reputation of the stardom almost contradicts the idea of DIY musicianship, they too had to make it off the back of humble beginnings.
For them, it was in the damp walls of Liverpool’s Cavern Club, in which they played a staggering 300 times before setting off on a globetrotting tour that would end in historic acclaim.
Back then, they were just another band of misfits trying to build off of the blues rock movement that was sweeping the Western world and more importantly, back then, they were just another band making mistakes on stage.
Contrary to rumoured belief, The Beatles didn’t just descend upon Earth as the polished musical outfit that topped the charts for a large part of the 1960s; in the beginning, they were a troupe of budding musicians who were just figuring out how to hone their songwriting. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were as prolific as ever when it came to finishing a song, but they weren’t always the titans of experimentation that we came to expect.
In fact, McCartney remembers one very specific song that reminds him of that tricky era, where he was growing into himself as a songwriter. He recalled, “‘Like Dreamers Do’ was one of the very first songs I wrote and tried out at the Cavern.”
He added, “We did a weak arrangement, but certain of the kids liked it because it was unique, none of the other groups did it. It was actually a bit of a joke to try your own songs. For you to write it yourself was a bit plonky, and the songs obviously weren’t that great, but I felt we really had to break through that barrier because if we never tried our own songs we’d just never have the confidence to continue writing.”
But as McCartney recalled, the crucial takeaway from their shows was that the kids loved it. Despite the relatively unfinished nature of their ideas, they were at least their own ideas, and so with that, a storm began to brew inside the Cavern Club walls, and The Beatles were at the very eye of it.
Because that performance of ‘Like Dreamers Do’ would have likely come during those early Cavern Club days for the band, in 1961. But it was just two years later, in 1963, when the band played their final show in the venue, to a frenzied crowd just desperate to catch a glimpse of the band soon to be setting sails for the glittering coastlines of musical immortality.
By that point, the songwriting prowess of the band’s leading partnership, along with the backing support of George Harrison and Ringo Starr, wasn’t to be disputed, and any growing pains in performance would have been swiftly drowned out by deafening fan screams.
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