John Lennon: The Life

The new McCartney-inspired professionalism was quickly in evidence. When the Quarrymen returned to New Clubmoor Hall to play a further gig for Charlie Mac on 23 November, 1957, they had swapped their former casual mélange of tartan shirts and striped knitwear for matching black jeans, white shirts and Western-style bootlace ties. A historic snapshot taken that night shows John and Paul sharing prominence at the front, each with his own stand microphone. While their sidemen are in shirtsleeves, they wear drapecut jackets, which, Eric Griffiths remembers, were of a creamy or oatmeal shade. Even in that quaint, pseudo-cowboy guise, they are so obviously the only two who matter.

A crucial factor in John’s early relationship with Paul was the concurrent reduction of Pete Shotton’s presence in his life. With the Quarrymen fully weaned to rock ‘n’ roll, Pete’s skiffle washboard was now an embarrassing anachronism. But he knew John thought too much of him to drop him from the group, however much of a passenger he became. Finally, one night at a drunken party in Smithdown Road, the situation was resolved without grief or embarrassment to either side. John picked up the washboard and smashed it over Pete’s head, dislodging the central metal portion and leaving the wooden frame hanging around his neck like a collar. Pete, as he remembers, sank to the floor, weeping tears of laughter mixed with relief. ‘I was finished with playing but I didn’t want to say so, nor did John. This way let me out and it let John out.’ Paul thus stepped neatly into Pete’s shoes as the partner, private audience and sounding-board John could not do without.

A major geographical coincidence also played its part in fostering their friendship. The art college to which John dispiritedly journeyed each day was literally next door to Paul’s school, the Liverpool Institute. The two seats of learning occupied the same L-shaped building whose neo-classical façade extended from Hope Street around the corner into Mount Street. Their respective populations worked in sight and earshot of one another and mingled in the cobbled streets outside during breaks and dinner hours. John was thus free to meet up with Paul privately all through the day as well as on Quarrymen business during the evening.

But rock ‘n’ roll and guitars were only part of what drew them together so immediately and powerfully in those last months of 1957. The affinity was intellectual as much as musical; they were top-of-the-form English literature students as much as would-be Elvises. Paul had read many, if not quite all, of the books that John had; he could quote Chaucer and Shakespeare and was a keen habitué of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. To his surprise, he discovered that the self-styled beer-swilling desperado who claimed to have hated all schoolwork secretly devoted hours to composing stories, poems and playlets, all via the disciplining medium of a typewriter. For all Paul’s neat, methodical ways, he shared John’s addiction to nonsense across its full historical spectrum, Lewis Carroll to the Goons. Phrases from Lennon works-in-progress, such as ‘a cup of teeth’ or ‘the early owls of the Morecambe’, produced another instant meeting of minds; the Lennon-McCartney collaboration in its earliest form consisted of sitting around and thinking up further puns for John to type.

Paul was always conscious that John came from a social drawer above his, however much John tried to disown it. ‘We [the McCartneys] were in a posh area, but the council house bit of the posh area. John was actually in one of the almost posh houses in the posh area…in fact, he once told me the family used to own Woolton, the whole village.’ It was also impressive that, whereas Paul and his brother had ‘aunties’, John had more formal and patrician-sounding ‘aunts’, with oddball nicknames like Mater and Harrie rather than plain, cosy Millie or Jin. For Paul, this whole Richmal Crompton, tennis-club atmosphere was summed up in the name Mimi, which he’d previously associated with 1920s flappers brandishing long cigarette holders.

Despite his pleasing appearance, politeness and charm, his reception at Mendips was initially not very cordial. Mimi by this point clearly could not conceive of John bringing home anyone but ‘scruffs’ whose aim could only be to lead him even further astray. Paul later said he found her treatment of him ‘very patronising…she was the kind of woman who would put you down with a glint in her eye, with a smile—but she’d put you down all the same.’ Mimi, for her part, felt suspicious of the way Paul invariably chose to sit on a kitchen stool at teatime as if, she said, ‘he always wants to look down on you.’

At a significantly early stage, John and he began holding guitarpractice sessions away from the other Quarrymen. They tried playing seated side by side on John’s bed, but there was so little room to manoeuvre that the heads of their guitars kept clashing together. Most times they would end up in the covered front porch, to which Mimi often banished John—and where the brickwork gave their tinny guitars an extra resonance. Sharing new chords was complicated by Paul’s left-handedness, which meant that each saw the shape in an inverted form on his companion’s fretboard, then had to change it around on his own. ‘We could read each other’s chords backwards,’ Paul remembers, ‘but it also meant that if either of us needed to borrow the other’s guitar in an emergency we were forced into having to play “upside-down” and this became one of the little skills that each of us developed. The truth is that neither of us would let the other re-string his guitar.’

The McCartneys’ house in Forthlin Road was only a few minutes’ walk from the Springwood estate where John had his secondary and utterly different home. Paul was soon introduced to Julia and told of the arrangement whereby John lived with his aunt even though the mother whom he clearly adored, and who clearly adored him, was only a couple of miles away. Julia was captivated by Paul’s angelic charm and full of sympathy for the loss he’d suffered a few months before. ‘Poor boy,’ she would say to John, with what now seems heartbreaking irony. ‘He’s lost his mother. We must have him round for a meal.’ Paul in turn thought Julia ‘gorgeous’ and was impressed that she could play banjo, an accomplishment which even his highly musical father did not possess. Julia was always suggesting new numbers for the two of them to learn—mostly standards like ‘Ramona’ and ‘Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine’, which were to have as much influence on great songs still unwritten as would Elvis or Little Richard.

Despite the aching lack of a mother in Paul’s life, the modest council house where he lived with his cotton salesman father and younger brother seemed to John an enviably uncomplicated place. The result was that he and his guitar spent increasing amounts of time at 20 Forthlin Road, where the parental welcome was at first not a great deal warmer than Paul’s at Mendips. Jim McCartney was too much of a realist to try to ban John from the house, but he gave Paul a warning that was to prove not ill-founded: ‘He’ll get you into trouble, son.’

In his 1997 authorised biography by Barry Miles, Many Years from Now, Paul would describe how the two seeming opposites beheld a mirror image in much more than the chord-shapes on their respective fretboards:

John, because of his upbringing and his unstable family life, had to be hard, witty, always ready for the cover-up, ready for the riposte, ready for the sharp little witticism. Whereas, with my rather comfortable upbringing, a lot of family, lots of people, very northern, ‘Cup of tea, love?’ my surface grew to be easygoing…But we wouldn’t have put up with each other had we each only had that surface. I often used to boss him around, and he must have appreciated the hard side in me or it wouldn’t have worked; conversely, I very much appreciated the soft side in him.

John had a lot to guard against and it formed his personality; he was a very guarded person. I think that was the balance between us: John was caustic and witty out of necessity and, underneath, quite a warm character when you got to know him. I was the opposite, easygoing, friendly, no necessity to be caustic or biting or acerbic but I could be tough if I needed to be…The partnership, the mix was incredible. We both had submerged qualities that we each saw and knew. [We would] never have stood each other for all that time if we’d just been one-dimensional.

The practice sessions at Paul’s generally took place on weekday afternoons when both participants would ‘sag off’ from their respective studies at college and school. At first the sessions were simply to practise the songs they had learned, or were still struggling to learn, from records or the wireless. John in those days had a liking for purely instrumental numbers and, so Paul remembers, did ‘a mean version’ of the Harry Lime Theme, making his Gallotone Champion sound as much like a Viennese zither as it ever possibly could.

Bouts of playing would be punctuated by listening to the radio or to records, pun-making, sex talk and horseplay. The McCartneys had just acquired a telephone—no small thing for a council house in 1957—which Paul and John would use to make anonymous nuisance calls in funny voices to selected victims like John’s former headmaster, Mr Pobjoy. Once they tried writing a play together about ‘a Christ figure named Pilchard’ who was to remain enigmatically offstage throughout in the manner of Samuel Beckett’s Godot. ‘We couldn’t figure out how playwrights did it,’ Paul remembered. ‘Did they work it all out and work through the chapters, or did they just write a stream of consciousness like we were doing?’ Unable to resolve this dilemma, they gave up after page two.

The idea of writing original songs to perform, rather than merely recycling other people’s, was firmly rooted in Paul’s mind well before he met John. He had begun trying it virtually from the moment he acquired a guitar, combining melodic gifts inherited from his father with a talent for mimicking and pastiching the American-accented hits of the moment. His first completed song, ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, had been written in late 1956, partly as a diversion from the trauma of his mother’s death, partly as an expression of it. Around the time he joined the Quarrymen, he had something like a dozen other compositions under his belt, mostly picked out on the family upright piano, including a first draft of what would eventually become ‘When I’m Sixty-four’ (which he thought ‘might come in handy for a musical comedy or something’).

For a 15-year-old Liverpool schoolboy—indeed, for any ordinary mortal—this was breathtaking presumptuousness. In Britain’s first rock-’n’-roll era, as for a century before it, songwriting was considered an art verging on the magical. It could be practised only in London (naturally) by a tiny coterie of music-business insiders, middle-aged men with names like Paddy or Bunny, who alone understood the sacred alchemy of rhyming arms with charms and moon with June.

The writing first appeared on the wall for Paddy and Bunny in November 1957, when ‘That’ll Be the Day’ by the Crickets topped the UK singles chart. It was the most uproariously guitar-driven rock-’n’-roll song yet, with its jangly, wind-chime treble intro and solo and its underlay of thudding bass. The Crickets’ leader, 21-year-old Buddy Holly, was a multi-faceted innovator: the first white rock-’n’-roller to write his own songs, the first to sing and play lead guitar, the first to subsume himself into a four-person group whose name was a whimsical collective noun. Holly’s vocal style was as unique as Presley’s and, if possible, even more acrobatic, veering between manic yells, lovelorn sighs and a hiccuping stutter that could fracture even a word like well into as many as eight syllables.

For British boys struggling to make the leap from skiffle to rock, Holly was less a god than a godsend. Most of the previous American rock-’n’-roll hits, including almost all of Elvis’s, had been far beyond their power to reproduce with their piping little voices and tinny instruments. But the songs that Holly wrote and recorded were built on instantly recognisable chords, Es and Ds and B7s, their familiar changes and sequences rearranged to create a drama and stylishness they’d never seemed remotely capable of before. Equally imitable were the vocal backings, the blurry Ooos, Aahs, and Ba-ba-bas that were presumed (mistakenly) to come from Holly’s three fellow Crickets. With these elementary tools, every fading-from-fashion skiffle group could instantly refashion itself as a top-of-the-range rock combo.

Holly’s most radical departure from established rock-’n’-roll style was an outsized pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. Coincidentally, this was a time when the new beatnik culture, simultaneously emanating from New York and Paris, and the first screen appearances by Anthony Perkins, had led many young men to cultivate just such an earnest, intellectual air. Holly’s glasses, allied to his neat appearance and polymathic talent, made him appear like some star student, sitting exams in each sphere of rock and passing every one with honours.

With Buddy on the charts, John no longer needed to feel his poor sight automatically cast him down among the nerds, drips, weeds and swots. After years of fruitlessly begging him to wear his glasses, Mimi now found herself being pestered to buy him a new pair, with frames far more conspicuous than the ones he had. Mimi, of course, had no idea who Buddy Holly was or why he should have superseded Elvis as John’s mental menu for breakfast, dinner and tea. She bought him the black horn-rims because she could refuse him nothing, in the hope that he’d now spend less of his time walking around half-blind.

She might as well have saved her money. Even Buddy Holly-style frames could not overcome John’s phobia about being seen in glasses. He put them on only when absolutely necessary, for close work at college or his practice sessions with Paul at Forthlin Road. To be allowed to see him wearing them was a mark of intimacy, granted to almost no females and only a select circle of males. Among the latter was Paul’s brother Michael, a keen amateur photographer whose lens sometimes caught the horn-rimmed John studying his guitar fretboard with a librarian’s earnestness. But by the time Mike clicked his shutter again, the horn-rims would have vanished.

That winter of 1957-58 brought a stream of further Buddy Holly songs—‘Oh Boy’, ‘Think It Over’, ‘Maybe Baby’—each intriguingly different from the last yet still as easy to take apart and reassemble as children’s building blocks. For John and Paul in their facing armchairs, it was the most natural step from playing songs Buddy had written to making up ones he might easily have done. Paul would later describe how they’d sit there, strumming Buddyish chordsequences, exchanging Buddyish hiccups—‘Uh-ho! Ah-hey! Ah-hey-hey!’—until inspiration came.

PART II TO THE TOPPERMOST OF THE POPPERMOST (#ulink_dc01ea0c-1d16-53bb-aa3d-ed1d545deaa7)

7 MY MUMMY’S DEAD (#ulink_62d90daf-4eec-59ef-9183-b4339c918ece)

It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

By his second term at Liverpool College of Art, John was known as the most problematic student in any age group or any course: a troublemaker and subversive who resisted doing serious work himself and tried his utmost to distract his fellow students from theirs. Most of his instructors quickly decided he was unteachable, demanded little or no work from him, and avoided any confrontation over his behaviour. His sculpture tutor, Philip Hartas, for one, was frankly intimidated by ‘a fellow who seemed to have been born without brakes.’

The sullen sartorial outsider of registration day had metamorphosed into something vaguely resembling an art student, though he would never completely discard his would-be tough Teddy Boy persona. ‘I became a bit artier…but I still dressed like a Ted, with tight drainies,’ he recalled. ‘One week I’d go in with my college scarf…the next week I’d go for the leather jacket and jeans.’

The young people with whom he now spent his days were a great deal less shockable than his old classmates at Quarry Bank. The word fuck and its derivatives—still absolutely taboo in polite society and all printed matter—were used throughout college with a casualness that even the doggedly foul-mouthed Woolton Outlaw at first found surprising. Many students had flats of their own, and so could have sex whenever they pleased, in privacy and comfort rather than hastily and furtively in the cold outdoors. Almost everyone, male and female, drank heavily and chain-smoked; some even took illegal drugs, mostly acquired through the neighbouring West Indian community—though John, at this stage, did not even dream such things existed.

On the outside, he might have been all swagger and defiance, but inside he was consumed with self-doubt, believing that he had got into college only by a fluke and possessed no aptitude for the work he was expected to do. ‘I should have been an illustrator or in the painting school,’ he complained years later. ‘But I found myself in Lettering. They might as well have put me in sky-diving for the use I was at lettering.’ (Once again, he sold himself short: the private sketchbooks containing his cartoons, nonsense poems and stories were always lettered immaculately.)

‘I think he felt frustrated, though he would never admit it,’ recalled one of his first tutors, Arthur Ballard. ‘There he was, surrounded by people who had some talent with art, and I think he felt in a bit over his head. He would act in a daft manner to distract people and probably take away the fact that he wasn’t as good an artist as they were. He would act the fool, but underneath all that I could see he actually was a thinker.’

John liked Arthur Ballard, a friendly, red-whiskered bear of a man who had once been the army’s middleweight boxing champion. But in Ballard’s classes, he initially shone no brighter than in any others. Every Friday the members of his 12-person Intermediate group were expected to display a painting or drawing in progress for assessment by Ballard and general discussion and criticism. John’s offerings were always far below the standard of the others’; on many occasions, he seemed too embarrassed to show anything at all.

In an attempt to stimulate John’s enthusiasm, Ballard would sometimes take him to a club called the Basement in Mount Pleasant, run as a sideline by the painter Yankel Feather. ‘Ballard used to come in with this very serious-looking young lad, and talk to him for hours at a time,’ Feather remembers. ‘Even in those days, I used to think he looked sort of half-Japanese. I remember the look he always used to give me, as if he wanted to tangle with me and see what I was made of.

‘At the back of this old wine-cellar we used to have a grand piano with half its keys missing. John would get on that sometimes, and do Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”. One time when he was bashing away, I told him “If you don’t stop that fucking noise, I’ll throw you out!” In the vestibule of the club, I’d hung this big semi-abstract painting that I’d done; and as John walked past it on this day, he got a key or something out of his pocket and ripped the canvas along its whole length. “Cheerio, boss,” was all he said.’

Ballard was beginning to despair of conjuring any worthwhile work from John when, in an empty lecture room one day, he happened on a notebook full of caricatures of college professors and students, poems and satirical commentaries, which he thought ‘the wittiest thing I’d ever seen in my life’. The book contained no clue as to its author; Ballard had to do some detective work before discovering it was John’s. He didn’t let on that he’d found it until the next time his class were pinning up their work for discussion. ‘I brought out [his] notebook and we discussed the work in it,’ Ballard remembered. ‘John had never expected anyone to look at it, let alone find it funny and brilliant. “When I talk about interpretation, boy, this is the kind of thing I mean as well,” I told him. “This is the kind of thing I want you to be doing.”’

Yet he had abilities that went far beyond cartooning, even if he chose to reveal them only in flashes, and almost never on demand. He certainly was not the poor relation in his set when they were sent out of college to sketch from life in the cathedral precincts or the Williamson Square livestock market. The accepted method was to work in small dabs and stabs, with painstaking shading and crosshatching. John, however, could capture a face or object in a single bold, unwavering line, much as one of his earliest artist heroes, Henri Matisse, was wont to do. He was also capable of impressing his painting tutor, an energetic Welshman named Charlie Burton. ‘I thought he had the potential to be very good,’ Burton says. ‘But he didn’t really have the right temperament for a painter, which means spending a lot of time on your own. John always had to have a crowd around him—and he had to be in control of them. One day, I told his group what I wanted them to do, and went out of the room for a few minutes. When I came back, John had them all rolling around in fits of laughter. Then he gave them a look as if to say “What a load of absolute idiots you lot are.” Chilled them to the bone, he did.’

Just as he and his fellow Woolton onanists had fantasised, his course did include life drawing of a nude female, to which Intermediate students eventually graduated from Grecian busts and the college skeleton. Not only that: June Furlong, the model who usually sat for John’s group, was a gorgeous 27-year-old with the kind of voluptuous severity as a rule seen in shadowy ‘art’ photographs. A forthright Scouser despite her exotic looks, she had modelled at most of London’s premier art schools and was on friendly terms with many famous painters, among them Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.

June ran the life class more strictly than any tutor, quelling the smallest hint of unrest among its male members with a ferocious eye, creating the rigidly practical atmosphere of—in her own phrase—‘a clinic’. She had received advance warning of John’s fractiousness, and prepared herself for the worst when she saw him perched with dangling legs on the wooden shelf above the sink where students washed their brushes and palettes. (The shelf’s being just too high to sit on with comfort made it irresistible to John.)

‘But I never had the slightest bit of trouble with him,’ June remembers. ‘And never had a bad word from him. When he came in for a class, he’d pull his chair right up close to me and we’d talk, talk, talk for the whole time—about art, about the colleges where I’d worked in London and all the artists I’d met. And there was something about him you couldn’t help but take notice of, even though no one seemed to think his work was much good. I remember thinking “You, mate…you’ll either end up at the bottom or you’re going to the very top.”’

Clinical though June made the ambience, fascinating though her anecdotes about Augustus John and the Slade Art School, she was still the sexiest woman John had encountered outside Brigitte Bardot films or the pages of Razzle magazine. He once made an attempt to proposition her, as hundreds must have done before him, but was rebuffed without serious damage to his amour propre. ‘I said to him “How much money have you got, John? I’m not sitting over a half of bitter at Ye Cracke, you know. I go to the Adelphi.”’

He needed an accomplice at college no less than at school, and Russell Jeffrey Mohammed soon stepped into the role of Ginger to his William, Lotton to his Shennon. Jeff Mohammed lived in Didsbury, Manchester, but boasted a complex pedigree—a father who was an Indian silk merchant and an Italian mother born within the sacred precincts of Vatican City in Rome. Aged 27, ten years older than John, he epitomised the college’s open-door policy; before deciding to study art, he had experimented with a variety of jobs and done National Service as a military policeman in Malaya.

Jeff was tall and handsome, with the bearing of a prince and a voice that still bore traces of the public school to which his polyglot parents had sent him. He played jazz clarinet and was a passionate trad enthusiast who treated the latter encroachments of modern jazz as a personal insult. When the great Humphrey Lyttelton temporarily forsook the Dixieland style to make records with a more modern feel, Jeff waited until Lyttelton played a gig in Manchester, then confronted him, denounced him as a traitor, and ended by punching him in the nose.

By the time he met John, his eccentricities were already a byword among his fellow students. When he received his grant money, he would change it all into half-crown coins, turn the light off in his bedroom, then fling them far and wide, so that in later weeks when he became hard up, there was always hope of finding a stray halfcrown under his bed or on top of his wardrobe. One of his favourite tricks was to select a pub or workmen’s ‘caff’ where every face was uncompromisingly white and fling open its door with a ringingly authoritative cry of ‘Right! All foreigners out of here!’

Despite their age difference, the pairing of John and Jeff Mohammed had something inevitable about it. They belonged to different work groups and so spent most of each day apart, but wherever their paths crossed, John’s manic laughter instantly redoubled. Although Jeff’s greater worldliness and experience were part of the attraction for him, they always treated each other as equals. They had the same fondness for books, poetry and language, the same interest in mildly occult things like Ouija boards and palmistry, the same unerring eye for human oddity, the same inexhaustible compulsion to make fun. Even their mutually inimical musical tastes, trad versus rock, caused no serious disagreement. Jeff never managed to turn John on to Satchmo Armstrong or Kid Ory, just as he himself remained impervious to the magic of Elvis and Buddy Holly. However, he possessed a large collection of jazz record albums, in those days almost the only kind to feature contemporary design and typography on their covers. John grudgingly conceded there was something in the look, if not the sound.

The two were most commonly to be found at Ye Cracke, an eccentric little mock-Tudor pub in Rice Street, just a couple of blocks from college, where both students and teaching staff would democratically forgather. Its art-college clientele favoured the larger rear bar whose walls displayed two outsized etchings—one of Marshal Blucher greeting the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, the other of Horatio Nelson’s death at Trafalgar. John’s and Jeff’s favourite roost was a bench below the Nelson scene, between side panels of British sailors watching their admiral’s last moments. The horrified look on every face in the composition led John to retitle it Who Farted?

This being the north, the beer came in pints, in straight glasses rather than tankards, wherein to leave the slightest drop cast doubt on the drinker’s very manhood. Army life had made Jeff a seasoned drinker whose affability never faltered as the score of pints mounted. But John, then and always, needed little more than the proverbial ‘sniff of the barmaid’s apron’ to put him under the influence. And a drunk John, then and always, turned into an addle-brained kamikaze, ready to insult anyone and assault anyone. ‘I always got a little violent on drink,’ he would admit. ‘[Jeff] was like a bodyguard for me. So whenever I got into some controversy, he’d ease me out of it.’

Occasionally they made up a threesome with Jeff’s girlfriend, Ann Mason, whose sharp eye had noted every wrong detail of John’s Registration Day outfit and who—like other females on their course—regarded him with an uneasy mixture of distaste and awe. Ann says that while Jeff’s pranks always had an underlying kindliness, John seemed to recognise no boundaries of conscience or compassion in his urge to flout authority and do down the softies and drips. On the annual Panto Day, for instance, when the college joined with Liverpool University to raise money for charity, he would simply pocket the contents of the collection tin he had taken through the streets. He also continued his boyhood habit of shoplifting, even though the risks in central Liverpool were far greater than in rural Woolton. One of his habitual targets was an art-materials shop run by a pair of old ladies, both too shortsighted to realise how many of their brushes, pencils and sketchbooks he was filching.

One day, when John and Ann sat near each other in a lecture, she began idly sketching him. Later, in one of the painting rooms, she developed her sketch into the first full-length portrait she had ever done—and the only one she ever would. John sat for her for a couple of hours with surprising patience, though, as she recalls, ‘I had to pretend I wasn’t painting him and he pretended he wasn’t posing.’ The portrait shows him seated on a turned-round wooden chair with his arms folded tightly over its back and his knees thrust out on either side; he is wearing a dark jacket and olive suede shoes (bought on a grant-spending spree with Jeff) and his usually hidden Buddy Holly glasses. The effect is of barely contained energy: a figure coiled to spring, or maybe run for cover.

John may have learned next to nothing from his college teachers. But that does not mean he learned nothing at college. His friendship with Stuart Sutcliffe amounted to a one-man degree course, even if largely conducted in student flats and smoky bar-parlours. And here, no scholarship boy with a virtuous cargo of O-level passes could have been more attentive, receptive or enthralled.

Stu was the same age as John but had arrived at college from Prescot Grammar School a year earlier. He was far and away the most talented student in the place, gifted with a seemingly effortless mastery of every medium he touched, drawing, painting or sculpture. He was also phenomenally energetic, filling canvases and sketchbooks with work of a maturity that dazzled his instructors, then hurtling on to the next thing almost before they had time to articulate their praise. Small and feminine featured, with luxuriant backswept hair, he was often likened to the short-lived screen idol James Dean—a comparison that would prove all too sadly appropriate. In fact, the dark glasses he often wore denoted a more obscure role-model, Zbigniew Cybulski, protégé of the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda and sometimes called ‘the James Dean of Poland’.

Stu functioned on an altogether more grown-up level than John. Though his Scottish middle-class parents lived in Liverpool, he had a flat in Percy Street, which he shared with his close friend Rod Murray. Recognising him to be in a class of his own, the college let him do much of his work there also. His main tutor, the tolerant Arthur Ballard, would drop by regularly to see him, bringing half a bottle of whisky for refreshment, but seldom made any effort to control the roaring flood of his creativity.