The moment Paul McCartney first spotted John Lennon: “A cool looking guy”
It’s July 6th, 1957. St Peter’s Church Hall in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool, is hosting its annual summer fête, raising funds for the building and generally bringing the community together. There are games, food, and kids running around, and a skiffle band playing in the background is made up of a gaggle of schoolboys. In the crowd, another boy is watching on, planning how to talk to them after the show. It’s the day music changed forever as The Beatles began right there.
On stage stood 16-year-old John Lennon, leading his early band, The Quarrymen. In the crowd was 15-year-old Paul McCartney, eagerly watching and plotting how he might approach them after the show. Determined to find a way into the group—or at least secure an audition—McCartney seized his chance and impressed the band with a rendition of ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, even as they teased him for playing the guitar upside down to accommodate his left-handedness. Despite the playful ribbing, Lennon was sold on the young McCartney and welcomed him into the fold. The rest, as they say, is history.
Everyone knows the story from then on. Together, Lennon and McCartney would become two of the world’s most powerful songwriters. They would spend years working together, not only being prolific but pioneering too. Once the lineup the world knows was finally together, including George Harrison and Ringo Starr, the four of them would forever change the look and sound of rock music. They reach fame and success on a level that had never been seen before. They’d push the world of production to new and exciting places alongside George Martin. They open doors the music world didn’t even know existed before they unlocked them, and they’d do all of that in less than a decade.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact that July 6th, 1957, had on the course of music history. For McCartney, though, it was simply the day he met his best friend—a personal moment when a teenage boy found his new crowd.
It wasn’t, however, the first time McCartney had seen Lennon. “I’d seen him a couple of times and thought, ‘Wow, you know, he’s an interesting looking guy,'” he told the BBC in conversation with Sean Lennon.
Older, musical, cool and already in a band – McCartney was caught between envying Lennon and wanting to be his friend as he would see him around town. “And then I once also saw him in a queue for fish and chips and I said, ‘Oh, that’s that guy off the bus,’” he continued, adding, “I’m talking to myself, in my mind I thought, ‘I saw that guy off the bus, oh he’s pretty cool-looking. Yeah, you know, he’s a cool guy.'”
With several other possible run-ins, July 6th only ended up being a historical day as McCartney finally got up the courage to introduce himself. “I knew nothing about him except that he looked pretty cool. He had long sideboards and greased back hair and everything… it was the Teddy Boy look. All of us were trying to do a bit of that at that point, so if you ever noticed someone who was trying to do it you thought, ‘I’ll probably get on well with him,'” he said, recalling how his teenage brain tried to think the whole thing through.
But in the end, he just had to take a leap and say the hello that changed the world.
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