CD Review: "Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood" by John Cale

Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood - the cover

John Cale released his latest CD, Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood, several months ago (October, 2012), and I’ve finally had the time recently to give it due attention and consideration.

Cale is a Welsh musician, composer, and singer-songwriter, who came to prominence in the mid-60s as a founding member of the seminal rock band The Velvet Underground. In the ‘70s he pursued a triple-career in the music business: behind the scenes, first, as an A&R man for Warner Brothers and Elektra; then, as a record producer for some of the most interesting artists of the period; and, finally, as a solo artist putting out a series of fascinating and diverse albums.

John Cale (not to be confused with J.J. Cale – the laid-back, American singer-songwriter, known as a purveyor of the so-called Tulsa Sound) is a classically-trained musician. His first instrument is viola, but he is also accomplished on guitar, bass, and keyboards. He studied music at Goldsmiths College, University of London in the early ‘60s – and got interested in avant-garde music – participating, for example, in a London concert produced by John Cage (Cale played piano).

John Cale in 2012

After moving to New York City in 1963 to pursue this interest in the avant-garde scene, Cale got involved in La Monte Young’s minimalist ensemble, the Dream Syndicate. In early ‘65 he co-founded The Velvet Underground with Lou Reed. The drone-laden sound Cale had explored with the Dream Syndicate heavily influenced his work with The Velvets: the songs “Venus in Furs” and “Heroin”, for example. He also championed the use of cacophony: viz. the pounding piano noise in “I’m Waiting for the Man”, and “All Tomorrow’s Parties”.  

Lou Reed may have been the band’s lead singer and primary songwriter, but it was Cale who had the most to do with the band’s experimental sound. He plays viola, bass and piano on the first two LPs – The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), and White Light/White Heat (1968). The relationship between Reed and Cale became fraught with tension - because of creative differences, but also because of a clash of personalities. John Cale left the group in 1968. Some say he was ousted by Reed, who engineered a coup d’état by giving the rest of the band an ultimatum: it’s him or me – choose.

John Cale (top-left) with The Velvet Underground: Lou Reed is front-left; Nico in the centre

Following his split with the Velvets, Cale began working as a record producer. Some of the notable LPs he produced in the early days were the debut albums from both The Stooges (1969), and The Modern Lovers (recorded in ’71 and ’72, but not released until 1976). He also arranged and played nearly all the instruments on Nico’s second album, Marble Index (1969), produced by Frazier Mohawk. Later on he also produced debut LPs for Patti Smith – Horses in 1975 – and Squeeze (1977). An impressive record of introducing new and innovative musicians to the mainstream.

A couple of years later John Cale began putting out solo albums of his own. For Columbia Records, he released Vintage Violence (1970), a rock LP with a set of folk-pop songs (Rolling Stone’s Ed Ward described it memorably as “a Byrds album produced by Phil Spector marinated in burgundy, anise and chili peppers”) and Church of Anthrax (1971), a set of minimalist pieces created in collaboration by Cale and Terry Riley.

The cover of John Cale's 1973 LP, "Paris 1919"

Then, switching to Reprise Records, for whom he worked as an A&R man, he put out The Academy in Peril (1972), a rock-classical fusion of instrumental pieces (two of which feature The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra) – dismissed, typically, by Robert Christgau with the pithy statement: “There must be more straightforward ways of imperilling the academy than mock-classical, mock-soundtracks.” This mis-step was followed by the majestic, and more traditional Paris 1919 (1973) – a gentler, baroque-rock sound – which, despite the enigmatic lyrics, was the most accessible of these first four albums, thanks, partly,  to the backing band, which featured three members of Little Feat (Lowell George, Wilton Felder, and Bill Payne).




John Cale during the Island years

After a decade in New York City and southern California, Cale moved back to London in 1973. He quickly fell-in with like-minded rock musicians there, and hit a creative – if not commercial – peak with three albums in the mid-70s for Island Records: Fear (1974), Slow Dazzle (1975), and Helen of Troy (1976). Joining him on stage and in the studio were the likes of Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera, Chris Spedding, and Phil Collins. After Cale left Island, they put out a best-of album called Guts (1977). And twenty years later came The Island Years (1996) a double-CD containing all three albums, and some out-takes and B-sides. It’s the one to pick up if you want to check out much of the best of his early stuff (and to get it at a reasonable price).

Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood is John Cale’s fifteenth studio album, released in early October of last year by Double Six Records – as a digital download, a CD, and a 180 gram vinyl LP. It’s his first album since blackAcetate in 2005. The opening track, “I Wanna Talk 2 U”, a collaboration with musician/producer Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse), was released as a single in July 2012. And that was followed by a second single release – “Face to the Sky” – at the end of August.

Cale in a video for the single, "Face to the Sky"

Apart from Danger Mouse’s single contribution to the album, the key figures in this enterprise were John Cale – who produced everything else on the CD, wrote all the songs (apart from the opening track, co-written and produced by Brian Burton), did all the lead vocals, and played keyboards, synths, guitars, viola and bass – and Dustin Boyer, who recorded the album and provided backing vocals and some guitar and synth parts. Also on the album are Michael Jerome Moore (drums), Joey Maramba and Erik Sanko (both on bass), and Cale’s daughter Eden – who does backing vocals on “Hemingway”.

Most of the music for Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood was recorded in Cale’s home studio in Los Angeles in 2011 and 2012. He says that most of the tracks began with him noodling about on the keyboard of an MPC mini-synthesizer. And then they grew steadily by adding layer after layer: the electronic drum parts, for example, were usually overdubbed with real drumming. And then bass guitar, viola and guitar were added. So the foundation of most tracks was a sound, or rhythm – not a finished song. And it shows. This is an album primarily of sonic experiments, instead of a coherent set of songs.

I listened to this album over and over, giving it extra opportunities to impress. It’s a bad sign, usually – indicating a mediocre or dull effort. I wanted to like this album, but repeated listening failed to improve my response to it, failed to reveal any hidden gems.

Part of the problem is the personality and attitude that Cale brings to his music. He has always been an ambivalent character – who can combine in the same album laid-back, pop-oriented songs and in-your-face, aggressive, expressions of fear and paranoia. Oftentimes, he’s perched uneasily in between – and it’s not always easy to discern where he’s coming from. On top of that, his aloof persona and abstruse lyrics create a stance that is difficult to penetrate. If the music is warm and approachable – I’m thinking of an album like Paris 1919 here – he can get away with it. But if the music is cold and hard, like the synthetic and electronic stuff on here, the entire effect is alienating – which is problematic for an artist placed ostensibly in the singer-songwriter tradition. And there’s no getting away from the fact that there is a vitriolic undercurrent to many of these songs.

June 1, 1974: Cale, Eno, Nico and Kevin Ayers

Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood begins promisingly. The lively opening track is a collaboration between Cale and Brian Burton (“Danger Mouse”). It sets the mood for the entire enterprise – driven by a rhythmic, electronic groove. Cale says they were aiming at a Motown-feel on this track – hard to sense, really, apart from the catchy chorus and the riff-laden keyboard track. The lyric is an odd mix of trite chorus (“Hey up, wake up; I wanna talk to you”) and obscure verses. In a final verse that might be deemed (unkindly!) as a presentiment of what is to come, Cale sings:

It felt like we were undecided

But there was plenty left to say;

But the combination sounded wrong again. 

The rest of the album is produced and written by Cale. The second track, “Scotland Yard”, has a hard-edged, “industrial” sound – John Cale in his aggressive mode, with a characteristically ominous lyric. Scotland Yard is synonymous with the HQ of the Metropolitan Police Service – the police force that is responsible for most of London. The jist of the lyric seems to concern our innate sense of guilt and shame:

Living, knowing you’ve done nothing wrong;

Living, as if you’ve done something wrong.

Track 3, “Hemingway”, is a song about the famous American author – focused on his trip to Spain during the 1930’s Civil War. Cale thinks that Hemingway was traumatised by the experience (“you saw Guernica fall”) coming away from it with a “thousand-yard stare”. Interesting idea, but not accurate. Hemingway was not in Guernica during the brutal carpet-bombing the city suffered from the Luftwaffe. The track ends with a classic piece of Cale-cacophony – banging down randomly on the keys of an acoustic piano.

“Face to the Sky” is the first, and best, of a long run of tracks that use auto-tune and vocoder – at various levels of intensity – to manipulate John Cale’s vocals. Used sparingly, I can deal with it – but when the effect is laid on thickly (as it is in “December Rains” and “Mothra”) and over half-a-dozen tracks, I just find it very annoying. It’s not as if Cale needs the vocal support. He has a distinctive and expressive baritone voice that is able to convey meaning and emotion. If he thinks that the distorted vocals add interest and contemporary edge to the music, he is, unfortunately, mistaken. And why so much of it?

With “Vampire Café”, the electronic aura of the music finally pays off. This track has a quirky poly-rhythm – featuring Michael Moore on drums and Cale doing a distinctive, lopey bass line. The lyrics are typically impenetrable, but the overall effect is brooding and atmospheric. “Midnight Feast” has a similar feel, but is not as interesting musically.

The end of the album includes two tracks which work better because they don’t try so hard – and are not so cluttered with overdubbed electronic gadgets and synthesizer parts. “Living With You” is a surprisingly direct and simple lyric – so simple, in fact, that it sounds ironic in its triteness:

I’ve got four walls and a roof;

Gonna put the roof on top;

I’ve got glass for the windows,

We’ll have windows to look through.

Has domestic bliss ever sounded as uninvolving as this? And the closing line is a real conundrum: “You wanna be living like me with you.” The inclusion of an acoustic guitar part, here, is a relief, after the interminable electronic gloss of most of the album.

The closing track, “Sandman (Flying Dutchman)” is also a less-cluttered and more direct piece – dominated by guitar, viola overdubs, and lots of overdubbed vocals. It is a lovely, affecting conclusion – out-of-sync really with what has preceded it. Ironically, the track got stalled because Cale couldn’t decide what else to add – and so left it as is.

Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood is a classic piece of studio experimentation – focused too much on sonics and production techniques, and forgetting about the need for a good set of songs. The songwriting is aimless and evasive – the vagueness increased often by Cale’s intellectual abstractness. Nothing much is a direct statement, here, or a clear sentiment. Cale tries to convince with vamped-up and energetic electronics. It’s not enough – the end-result is an adventurous and upbeat effort that is surprisingly inert and uninteresting.

Essay: Quarter Days & Cross-Quarter Days

Mayor John Close consults with Wiarton Willie

Another Groundhog Day has come and gone (last Saturday, 2 February). Did you follow the proceedings? I checked it out; but, as usual, I was confused. Is it six more weeks of winter if the little varmint sees his shadow? Or does that indicate an early spring? I forget. And what does it mean if the groundhogs disagree? Because now there are a whole pack of the rodents across this continent busy with this prediction each year. Free-enterprise prognostication, thank you very much!

Our local prognosticator, Wiarton Willie, is based – as his moniker implies – in the small town of Wiarton, located at the southern end of the Bruce Peninsula. Groundhog Day, of course, occurs on the second day of February each year and human beings have been officially consulting Willie on this day for the last 57 years.

Did you know that Wiarton Willie is an albino groundhog!

And the verdict for 2013? Willie did not see his shadow, apparently, so that means – I looked it up – there will be an early spring. How do we know that he didn’t see his shadow, you ask. Well, it’s a bit of a scam. South Bruce Peninsula mayor John Close looked into Willie’s plastic cage (plastic?) to see if he could observe any shadows. Wait, isn’t that supposed to be the groundhog’s job? Why not just ask Willie, Mr. Mayor? Too complicated, it seems. So, Mr. Close gazed long and hard. “It’s an early spring,” he declared, much to the relief of the expectant crowd.

But Willie is just one of the groundhogs busy in North America. What did the rest of his fraternity think? Mixed opinions, I’m afraid. Punxutawney Phil – down in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania – and Winnipeg Willow, in Manitoba, agreed with Willie (early spring); but Shubenacadie Sam, in Nova Scotia, and Quebec’s Fred, it seems, went and saw their shadow, predicting six more weeks of winter.

But why the second day of February each year, anyway? That’s the interesting matter, not the phoney malarkey they do with the groundhogs. Well, it’s all about dividing up the year – part astronomy, and part culture. The year, of course, is divided first into quarters – the seasons. This is fairly straightforward, although it is quite surprising how many people cannot explain the basic astronomy: that the seasons are created by two essential facts – the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the axis of the Earth’s rotation is at a 23.5° tilt. The summer and winter solstices occur at the precise time of the Sun’s transit over the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn; and the spring and autumn equinoxes occur at the precise time of the Sun’s transit over the Equator. These four events each year – the solstices and equinoxes – create the so-called quarter days. So far, so good. But the long, three-month gaps between quarter days (especially the winter one) have people often counting the days between each – especially when anticipating the end of the coldest stretch of the year.

And this is where culture is important. If you are anxiously counting the frigid days of winter, you are likely to notice that day upon which you are exactly half way to spring. That’s where the further sub-divisions come in. If you divide each season (91-and-a-bit days) in half, you create four more markers – the so-called cross-quarter days that lie half-way between solstices and equinoxes. Groundhog Day, therefore, is one of four cross-quarter days – lying half-way (about 45 days) between the quarter days of winter solstice and spring equinox – the middle of winter, in other words. Groundhog Day is all about pausing at this bleak mid-point in winter and pondering the possibility of a mild spring.

This dividing up of the year into particular feasts and festivals is a fascinating thing. It makes the year more interesting: a parade of dramatic events and observances. This used to be done more significantly in the past – in our more mytho-poetic past. These days, in our modern, secular, scientific world – dominated by a homogeneous, 24/7 ethos – we have a rather impoverished and drab succession of days that are often difficult to distinguish from each other – beyond the basic commercial division between workdays and weekends. In my youth, I experienced a lot more of these seasonal observances in the Liturgy of the Church – made more interesting because they were movable feasts, whose exact moment was based on the lunar calendar, rather than the Sun’s. And then there were the vestigial celebrations, based on the pre-Christian pagan feast days – many of which were “Christianized” and moved slightly, in order to disguise their pagan origins.

Let’s look at the solstices and equinoxes first (the quarter days) – they are more familiar – and then consider the more obscure, cross-quarter days.

At the winter solstice, the sun is at its lowest altitude above the horizon. This usually occurs on 21 December. In the northern hemisphere, this is the shortest day of the year (the least amount of daylight). The term Yule is a pagan word. In ancient Britain, the Druids cut mistletoe that grew on the oak tree and gave it to each other as a blessing. Mistletoe was a symbol of life in the dark and harsh months of winter. The Druids also started the Yule log tradition. The celts believed that the Sun stood still for twelve days in the middle of winter (now that’s a real “solstice”!); they burned a Yule log to conquer the darkness, to banish evil spirits, and to bring luck for the year ahead. This must be one of the underlying origins of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Christmas day (the nativity of Jesus) was set on 25 December, instead of 21 December, to differentiate it from the pagan observances.

Summer Solstice at Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain

On the summer solstice, the Sun would be at its highest elevation above the horizon – marking the longest day of the year (the most hours of daylight). The pagan term for midsummer day is Litha. This festival has been of great importance in the Scandinavian and Baltic countries. The burning of bonfires (representing the incredible heat and light provided by the Sun) is a common ritual of these celebrations. In England, people gather at Stonehenge and wait for the rising sun to emerge above the horizon, aligning with the monument’s Heel Stone and Slaughter Stone. The Christian liturgy puts the birth of John the Baptist close to the summer solstice. He was said to have been born six months before Jesus.

The spring equinox (equinox means literally “equal night” – referring to the equal amounts of daylight and night time on this day) occurs usually on 21 March. The Church put the Feast of the Annuciation of the Blessed Virgin on 25 March – again close to, but not exactly on, the day of actual astronomical significance.

And the autumn (or “fall”) equinox, usually falling on 21 September, marks the other day of the year with equal amounts of daylight and night time. In the Church liturgy, Michaelmas Day was placed on 29 September, close to this equinox. Michaelmas Day honoured the Archangel Michael, who defeated Lucifer in heaven. In the medieval period this was an important day: first, because it was one of the Church’s Days of Obligation (believers were required to attend Mass that day and receive communion); secondly, because it was the end (and beginning) of the husbandman’s year. By this date the harvest would be over, and the bailiff, or reeve, would settle the accounts for the year. A new reeve was usually elected on this day by the manor’s peasants.

Now the quarter days used to be very important in the British tradition. They were the four dates in the calendar when servants were hired and rents were due. They fell on four religious festivals aligned with the solstices and equinoxes: Lady Day (March 25), Midsummer Day (June 24), Michaelmas (September 29) and Christmas (December 25). In England payments on leaseholds, and rents on land, are often still due on the old English quarter days. This made sure that debts and unresolved lawsuits would not linger on for more than three months. Accounts had to be settled and noted in public records. The British tax year still begins on Lady Day – the old Lady Day of 25 March under the Julian calendar (now 6 April in the Gregorian calendar).

Candlemas at Gloucester Cathedral in England

The cross-quarter days are also three months apart and each one lies half-way between the quarter days. February 2, as we’ve seen, is Groundhog Day. But in the Church liturgy, it was celebrated as Candlemas. In pre-Christian times this day was celebrated as the Feast of Lights. The Church transformed it into a day that commemorates the ritual purification of Mary forty days after the birth of her son, and Jesus’ presentation in the temple at Jerusalem. It became the day when the candles that would be used throughout the coming year would be blessed – hence, the name Candlemas, or the Festival of the Candles. Candles are symbolic of the light that Jesus brought into the darkness of the world. In the pagan world, this day was known as Imbolc. It marked the beginning of spring. Imbolc has been traditionally associated with the beginning of lactation in ewes and the start of the lambing season.

Dancing around the Maypole on May Day

The next cross-quarter day is May Day. The pagan origins of this day are more evident than that of 2 February. In celtic societies this was the pagan festival of Beltane. It marked for them the beginning of summer. This explains, therefore, why the quarter day that follows (the summer solstice) is referred to as Midsummer Day. Common rituals on Beltane included bonfires and fertility rites. Dancing around the Maypole (surely a phallic symbol!) and crowning the Queen of the May were popular activities. In Germany, this festival is known as Walpurgis Night – and the evening activities are dominated by large bonfires. In the Roman Catholic tradition, May is celebrated as Mary’s month, beginning on 1 May with a celebration in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Mid-way between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox is Lammas (1 August). The name derives from Anglo-Saxon – hlaf-mass, which means “loaf-mass”. Lammas is the festival of the wheat harvest – the first harvest festival of the season. Traditionally, loaves made from the new crop of wheat were brought to Church. They were blessed and then often broken into four pieces and placed in the corners of the barn, to protect the newly-harvested grain from pests and diseases. In parts of England, tenants were required to deliver quantities of fresh wheat to their landlords on or before the first of August. In pre-Christian times this day was marked by the pagan feast of Lughnasadh – also celebrated as a harvest festival.

All Hallows Day in Hungary

The final cross-quarter day of the year is All Hallows Day (1 November). In the pagan tradition, this day was known as Samhain; it marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. Cattle were usually brought down from their summer pastures, and most of them were slaughtered, in order to provide food for the long winter months. Bonfires were often lit. The people and their livestock would march between two bonfires as a cleansing ritual, and bones of slaughtered cattle were thrown into the flames. The souls of the departed were often invited to attend the rituals and honoured places were set up for them at table. These rituals are often likened to the Christian festivals of the dead that take place on this day. The Church instituted this day in order to honour the souls of all the martyrs of the Church and, by extension, all those faithful who had passed on to the next world. All Hallows Day was established by Pope Gregory III in the eighth century and was made a Holy Day of Obligation (unless it fell on a Saturday or Monday).

The feast of Halloween (Hallows Eve) was influenced by harvest festivals and pagan festivals of the dead. It spread throughout the U.S., under the influence of Irish and Scottish immigrants in the nineteenth-century. The Puritans of the north-east U.S. strongly opposed the festival – recognising its pagan influences.

Guy Fawkes Day (“Bonfire Night”) in Britain – despite its political and religious origins – is almost certainly a displaced hold-over of some of the Samhain traditions.

So there you have it. Instead of a year of twelve months and four seasons, we can think of our year as an annual cycle of eight festivals and feasts: four quarter days and four cross-quarter days. And whether you’re a Christian, ‘pagan’, or devout secularist, there must be something in there to honour or celebrate!

Photo Essay: Lennon & McCartney's Liverpool Homes

The heart of the matter - Woolton and Allerton

Me next to the Lennon statue on Mathew St. in Liverpool (2003)

The photo essay that follows features primarily my own photographs,  documenting my personal links to Liverpool – my time at school on Menlove Avenue, in the   Liverpool suburb of  Woolton, and how that experience intersects with the lives  of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and The Beatles. I share with you here some of the Beatles-related photographs I’ve taken over the years in Liverpool. And I try to give you some interesting context for each picture. There are four different time periods pictured here, with four different cameras. Analog photographs and digital pictures.



1968-1969

In the summer of 1968, the boarding school I was attending moved its location from a tiny village in rural Shropshire (near market Drayton) to the teeming city of Liverpool. What a culture shock that was. From the quiet seclusion of one of England’s most agricultural counties, we moved to the bustling, urban sprawl of a large city in the north-west industrial county of Lancashire!

From this - St. Edward's College in Shropshire ... (photo from 2006)

... to this - Woolton College on Menlove Avenue in Liverpool (Kodachrome slide from 1976)

The new location of my school – which changed its name in the process from St. Edward’s College to Woolton College – was now on Menlove Avenue, an attractive, suburban boulevard in south-east Liverpool. We moved from a school housed in a huge, red-brick, three-storey, country mansion built in the late-nineteenth century to a cheaply-designed and pre-fab styled building – a typical piece of ugly 60s architecture. 

Entrance to Woolton College (1976 Kodachrome slide)

The new college was erected on a piece of property that also contained The Gables – another Victorian mansion which housed the prep school run by the same Catholic order of teaching brothers that had just opened Woolton College. Woolton College was going to be a grammar school with a mixed roster of boys – boarders from all over England (there were several of us, for example, who came from Southampton, on the south coast) and day-students, who had come through St. Joseph’s – the prep school next door.

St. Joseph's College - a prep school located here in The Gables (Kodachrome slide from 1976)

For us – the boarders who had finished their previous school year (1967-1968) in the idyllic surroundings of Cheswardine village in Shropshire, and were beginning the next year in Liverpool – the changes in setting and life-style would be abrupt and, for some of us, quite profound. The innovations in the Church which Vatican II had wrought had been slowly manifesting themselves in the liturgy and  policies of all Catholic institutions. But the secluded setting in Shropshire had artificially cocooned us from the rampant secularism of the modern world. In September of 1968 I was starting Fifth Form on Menlove Avenue, in the suburbs of Liverpool – the home of my favourite pop band, The Beatles. What changes the next five months would bring!

" ... Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes; there beneath the blue suburban skies ..."
(1976 Kodachrome slide)

I quickly discovered Penny Lane. Our college, near Calderstones Park, was in an area of the city called Woolton. A half-hour walk north-west along Menlove Avenue would bring you to Penny Lane – which is the name not only of a half-mile stretch of road near the border between the districts of Allerton and Wavertree, but also a small shopping area, where several commercial arteries meet. Menlove Avenue turns into Allerton Road and, just after Allerton Road becomes Smithdown Road, you’re at the Penny Lane roundabout. We went down to Penny Lane from College occasionally to do some shopping – usually in small groups. But I also remember once being down there by myself to do some Christmas shopping for my family – along Allerton Road.

Friends at Cheswardine: Tony, Reamonn, David, Michael (1968)

Strangely – and disappointingly - I don’t have any photographs from this five-month stay at Woolton College, even though I have a few dozen pictures from the previous year in Shropshire. I had been given my first camera for Christmas, 1967 – a Kodak Brownie, a very basic point-and-shoot, plastic camera that took 127 sheet film. The negatives were slightly bigger than 35 mm film. I had taken a few rolls of photos that previous year in Shropshire – the 127 roll came in 12 and 24 shots. You had to be very selective when photographing events back then! But I had no shots at all of Woolton College in ’68-’69.

"... In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs, of every head he's had the pleasure to know ..."
(1976 Kodachrome slide)

When I came back to Liverpool for a visit in the summer of 1976, I had my beloved Nikkormat FTN camera with me. I was visiting my friend Michael, whose family lived just a few houses down from Woolton College, on Menlove Avenue. On this occasion – my second trip back there – I went down to Penny Lane with Michael to get some photographs, with those familiar Beatles’ lyrics stuck in my brain. Here are the shots I took there – Kodachrome 35 mm slides.

"... On the corner is a banker with a motorcar; the little children laugh at him behind his back ... "
(1976 Kodachrome slide)

Penny Lane - the Beatles’ song - was written by Paul McCartney in late 1967 and recorded at Abbey Road studios in London over eight sessions in December ’66 and January ’67. It was a response to John’s earlier recording, Strawberry Fields Forever, recorded in November and December of 1966. Both songs are tributes to Liverpool. Paul and John had been planning for over a year to compose matching songs about their home city. These were the first two tracks for the new album, Sgt. Pepper, which would emerge about six months later. Their record company, EMI/Parlophone, were anxious to get another single released in the meantime - so rather than record separate songs specifically for single release, the band agreed to put out these two early tracks together. The Beatles’ policy on singles was to keep them separate from albums. So these two superb tracks were not included on Sgt. Pepper. George Martin always regretted that. Nonetheless, that did result in giving us the very best single The Beatles ever released.

Paul’s song is a wry and nostalgic portrait of Penny Lane - a shopping district near his home in Allerton, and near John’s home in Woolton. Stand at the roundabout in Penny Lane and you can see all the details: the barber’s shop, the bank, the fire station, and the “shelter at the middle of the roundabout”. They shot a film to promote this single – as well as one for Strawberry Fields Forever, the flip side of this double A-sided single. Most of the street shots used in the Penny Lane film were actually shot in London – where most of the band now lived and worked. These films may be considered as two of the earliest “rock videos”. The Strawberry Fields Forever film is surreal and trippy. But, as usual, Paul’s contribution, Penny Lane, is sunny, upbeat, melodic and poppy. 

"... Behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout ... "  (1976 Kodachrome slide)

On the way back down the dual carriageway that is Menlove Avenue, Michael and I eventually turned east up Beaconsfield Road – just before reaching his parents’ place. On the northern side of the road there are several schools set back from the road – including S.F.X. (St. Francis Xavier), the Jesuit grammar school that Michael had once attended. But we weren`t visiting his former college. We stopped only about 100 metres up. 

Strawberry Field gate (1976 slide)

On the south side of the road (right-hand as you go up the hill) sat the entrance into the Strawberry Field Children’s Home. With my Nikkormat, I got a shot of the gates, and a shot looking down the driveway. Just two? Crazy! Those were analogue days. Expensive to buy those cartridges of 35 mm film and then have them developed as slide transparencies.

The original Strawberry Field house

Driveway into Strawberry Field Children's Home (1976 Kodachrome slide)

2003

Twenty-seven years later, I was back on a pilgrimage to Menlove Avenue – with two Michaels this time: the Michael who had grown up there; and another Michael, this one from Manchester, who was also a former-student at Woolton College. We stopped first at the former-home of Michael’s family. Then we crossed over to the other side of Menlove Avenue so that I could get a photo with the street name in it. This time I was using a point-and-shoot digital Olympus camera.

Michael B and Michael H on the corner of Menlove Avenue and Beaconsfield Road (2003)

During the 27-year gap since my previous visit to Woolton, I had read many, many books about the life and career of The Beatles – especially the fascinating accounts of their childhood development in Liverpool, and their emergence as a great performing band in Hamburg, Germany. I already knew all about Lennon’s Aunt Mimi and Uncle George. But I was shocked to discover that Mendips, the suburban home owned by Mimi and George Smith, was located at 251 Menlove Avenue – just 150 metres away – a couple of minutes walk – from where we had been at Woolton College.

But the College was now long-gone. Not just the college, the building, too, was gone. The teaching brothers had closed up both schools. Not enough boys interested any more. And they took over the running of S.F.X. on Beaconsfield Road from the Jesuits. Woolton College and The Gables were sold up and demolished to make way for a small housing estate on Calders Grove.

Now the Calders Grove housing estate - the former entry into Woolton College and The Gables (2003)

So we set off from the corner of Beaconsfield Road and Menlove Avenue towards Mendips. The giving of names to residential properties in England dates back centuries. Aristocrats and landed gentry liked to call their homes Castles, Halls, Manors, etc. – adding a first part to the name which referred to their family title, their location, or something particular to their ancestry: for example, Bedford House (Duke of …), Caernarfon Castle (in the town of …), Blenheim Palace (the battle of …). Street numbering was instituted in England by an act of Parliament in 1765. But people at all levels of society began to copy the ruling classes, and gave their homes names too. In the lower middle-class, especially, the practice revealed a sense of aspiration and need; and people started to use some rather pretentious appellations. For every Orchard House, there was a Chez Nous; for each Hillcrest, there was a Shangri-La. When Mary Elizabeth Stanley (John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi) married George Smith (Uncle George) in 1939, they moved to the semi-detached home at 251 Menlove Avenue. Mimi gave their home the name Mendips – evoking the picturesque rolling countryside around the Mendip Hills in north-east Somerset. [My parents did the same, by the way, giving the name Tamarisk to their small bungalow in Hythe – the tamarisk is a family of shrubs native to very dry regions of Eurasia and Africa.]

Me at the gate to Mendips - John Lennon's childhood home at 251 Menlove Avenue (2003)

John Lennon lived at 251 Menlove Avenue from 1946 until 1963, when – as a twenty-two year old – he moved down to London. Aunt Mimi lived at Mendips until the summer of 1965 [her husband George had died there in June, 1953]. Lennon bought her a bungalow at 126 Panorama Road in Poole, Dorset. It was called Sandbanks because it was located on the Sandbanks spit, which juts out into the entrance to Poole Harbour.

Mendips in 2003

Mendips continued life as a private residence until 2002, when it was put up for sale on the market. Yoko Ono bought the house for £150,000 and immediately donated it to the National Trust, with the understanding that they would restore the home to the way it would have looked in the 1950s. "When John's house came up for sale,” Yoko explained, “I wanted to preserve it for the people of Liverpool and for John Lennon and Beatles fans all over the world." 


The Trust opened the house to the general public on 27 March 2003. If it wasn’t for one of those familiar blue plaques attached to the front of the house, and a very modest sign on the left side of the front gate, which announces that this is a National Trust property, you would have no idea that this home was nothing more than a typical semi-detached house on a spacious middle-class boulevard in the city. And back in ’68-’69, the three of us had no idea that this had been John Lennon’s childhood home.

We got photographs of the house and various photos of individuals and groups posing in front of the gates. We didn’t go inside – it’s not allowed, unless you’ve paid for the official National Trust tour that brings you here by mini-van to Mendips, and then takes you on to Paul McCartney’s nearby childhood home on Forthlin Road in Allerton. Of which, there’ll be more later.

Mendips was given to the National Trust by Yoko Ono in 2002 and opened as a museum in 2003

After visiting Mendips Michael H., Michael B.,  and I walked the short distance over to Strawberry Field. You go north-west on Menlove Avenue, and then east uphill on Beaconsfield Road for about 100 metres. The entrance to the Strawberry Field Children’s Home is on the right. The stone and cement gate-pillars are still there and there are some red, wrought iron gates. The original gates were removed in 2011 – fear of theft, perhaps – and replaced with replicas.

Me, Michael H and Michael B at the Strawberry Field gate (2003)
" ... Nothing is real; nothing to get hung about ... "

The former nineteenth-century house at Strawberry Field had been sold to the Salvation Army, and they had opened it as an institution for poor families in 1936. When Lennon was just a little nipper, Aunt Mimi used to taken him to the Home each summer, to attend the annual garden fete. 

" ... Living is easy with eyes closed ..." (2003)

When he was a bit older, John and his schoolmate chums used to explore the grounds around the place and find different ways to play there. The original house was eventually demolished and replaced by purpose-built family-units in the early 1970s. And those were closed in 2005. The site now hosts a church and prayer centre.

At the conclusion of our 2003 visit to Liverpool, Michael H, Michael B and I went into the City Centre to see Mathew Street. It lies between Temple Court and North John Street and is now famous as the small side-street that once housed The Cavern Club. This area of the city is now known as the Cavern Quarter. It used to be the centre of the wholesale trade in fruit and vegetables.

The Cavern had opened as a jazz club in 1957, modelled by its owner, Alan Sytner, on some jazz clubs he had seen operating in Parisian cellars. Sytner would not allow rock ‘n’ roll at The Cavern, but in August 1957 he gave Lennon’s skiffle band The Quarrymen the chance to play briefly between jazz sets. After Sytner sold the club to Ray McFall in 1959 the club slowly began to feature blues and rock bands. The Beatles made their first appearance at The Cavern on 9 February 1961. They played there 292 times between 1961 and 1963. 

A postcard of The Beatles I was given in The Cavern

The Cavern closed in early 1973 and was filled in during the construction of an underground rail loop for Merseyrail. Later it became part of an underground parking garage. In April 1984 Tommy Smith, a former player with Liverpool Football Club, bought the Cavern site and had a new club built that was designed to look as much like the original as possible. In 1991 Bill Heckle and Dave Jones took over ownership and have been managing the club ever since. It is a very busy performance space, but much of the traffic coming into the club are the daily hordes of tourists dropping in briefly to see what this famous club was all about.

Entrance to the rebuilt Cavern Club on Mathew Street (2003)

Just a few doors down from The Cavern Club is a pub called The Grapes. During breaks between their sets at the Cavern, The Beatles would often drop into The Grapes for a drink. The Cavern did not serve alcoholic drinks back in those days; for a pint, your choice was either The White Star – just around the corner in Rainford Gardens – or The Grapes, the only traditional pub on Mathew Street. It served primarily a teenage crowd, the clientele from the beat-club nearby, who were looking for something more than the fizzy pop and coffee they served in The Cavern.

Michael B and Michael H outside The Grapes pub on Mathew Street (2003)

Mathew Street is now a mecca of Beatles-themed and Beatles-related enterprises. There are statues displayed up on the outside of buildings. There are boutiques and music stores. And shops stuffed with Beatles memorabilia. Some of it is tacky, but what the hell! I dropped into one shop, on the corner of Mathew Street and North John Street, and bought a couple of Beatles mugs, and a set of Beatles buttons for my daughter, Gillian.

Statue of John Lennon on Mathew Street (2003)

Further down Mathew Street, closer to North John Street, there is a full-sized, bronze statue of John Lennon. It must have been photographed hundreds of thousands of times by now – many of the photographs like mine, with Lennon fans standing beside the three-dimensional image of their idol.

2012

The National Trust van that does The Beatles Childhood Homes Tour
(outside McCartney's former home on Forthlin Road)

I was back in Liverpool last summer (13 July, 2012) for a school reunion of former students of St. Edward’s College (in Shropshire) and Woolton College (on Menlove Avenue in Liverpool). In the early afternoon, I met up with Tony, Paul and Brian at the Jurys Inn Hotel, near Liverpool’s City Centre. The four of us had been in the same class for two years at the boarding school in Shropshire (1966-1968). We had signed up to do the Beatles’ Childhood Homes, the official tour offered by The National Trust – and the only way that you can get inside John Lennon’s former-home at 251 Menlove Avenue in Woolton and Paul McCartney’s former-home at 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton. The tours leave by mini-bus from either the Jurys Inn Hotel – which is beside the Albert Dock, in the city centre – or from Speke Hall, in south-east Liverpool.

John Lennon’s former home in Woolton

John Lennon in front of Mendips (251 Menlove Avenue)

For this latest visit I had a new camera, my Nikon D7000 – a huge advance in quality from the Olympus point-and-shoot camera I had in 2003. But in Liverpool, that day, it was overcast throughout, and it rained for most of the day. I’ve had to brighten up many of the shots using Photoshop.

Mendips in July 2012

There were fifteen of us on this National Trust trip. We piled into the mini-van and were soon on our way. Within a few minutes we were out of the city centre and heading for Woolton – a very straight forward route: Strand Street, Upper Parliament Street, and Smithdown Road. Soon enough we were heading through Penny Lane and then onto the Menlove Avenue dual carriageway.

Colin Hall - the tour guide at Mendips

We were met at the front of the house by Colin Hall, who lives in Mendips for seven months each year, serving as both the custodian of the property and as guide for every tour-group that comes through the place. On most days that means he hosts four groups – three leaving from Jurys Inn in the city centre, and the last one coming west from Speke Hall. Colin Hall lives at Mendips with his wife, Sylvia. Once the first group of the day arrives at 251 Menlove Avenue, Sylvia goes over to 20 Forthlin Road to prepare McCartney’s former-home for the day’s visitors – because she is the tour-guide there.

The first stop on the tour of Lennon’s former home is the kitchen. We got to it from the side of the house. Colin Hall brings all the groups in here first. As he explained, nearly all of Mimi’s visitors were required to come through the back – so as not to bring dirt and mud into the more formal area at the front of the house. We would be escorted through the front door and porch at the end of the tour.

The kitchen at Mendips

Mr. Hall began his tour of the house with an extended talk in the kitchen about the history of the house and the social conditions that Aunt Mimi, Uncle George and John Lennon lived through during the forties and fifties. This was a fascinating talk – Mr. Hall really knows his stuff. And I began to remember much of my own experience growing up in the late fifties and early sixties down in Hampshire. They have equipped the kitchen with authentic appliances. And the shelves are stocked with jars, bottles and packets familiar to that period. Aunt Mimi used to prepare John’s favourite meal here – egg and chips, and a large mug of tea. On the kitchen wall there is a framed copy of a poem John wrote for Mimi called “A house where there is love”.

John Lennon in the back garden at Mendips: Aunt Mimi and Uncle George

Mimi modernised the kitchen in the 1960s. She had a yellow, formica worktop put in by the window, and a sink with a double drain was installed. The National Trust has removed many of the later modernisations in Mendips – in order to return the house to its look in the ‘50s and early ‘60s.

The bathroom at Mendips

Unfortunately, photography is not allowed in either of the former-Beatles’ homes. I was anticipating this, but it was still a big disappointment. All of our cameras were collected and stored in a small cupboard under the stairs - to make absolutely sure that nobody violated the rule. So my own photos here are limited to the outside of the house; however, I did find some shots of the inside of both homes from articles posted to the ‘net by British newspapers and the BBC.

The side of the house at 251 Menlove Avenue leading to the back garden

Mendips was built in 1933. It’s a three-bedroom, semi-detached house located at 251 Menlove Avenue, near the corner with Vale Road, in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton. The residences down Menlove Avenue are detached and semi-detached houses - built with similar plans, although the builders offered opportunities to personalize each house by using various, optional trimmings. This would give the development a little bit of variety. Many of the windows at Mendips, for example, had art nouveau-styled stained glass features added, and an art deco fireplace in one of the rooms.

John Lennon

Mimi and George Smith bought Mendips in 1942. In the thirties it became a common dream of working-class and lower middle-class families to live in a house like those in the Menlove Avenue development. Hundreds of thousands of houses, just like the ones on Menlove Avenue, were built throughout the 1930s on the edges of English towns and cities, creating middle-class suburbia.

The ground floor of Mimi and George’s house had a staircase and entrance hall that ran beside the front lounge, or “parlour”. The hall led back to a dining room, morning room, and kitchen. Upstairs, on the first floor, there were two large bedrooms and one small bedroom spread around the stairwell. At the back of the upper level were a bathroom and a separate toilet.

Bureau desk in the master bedroom at Mendips

 Yoko Ono bought Mendips in 2002 and donated it to The National Trust.
Here she visits the house after it has been made ready to receive visitors.

After the kitchen, the front lounge, or living room, is the most interesting room downstairs. The original Art Deco styled open fire was replaced, after John left Liverpool, by the tiled fireplace that had once been in the back dining room. Built-in bookshelves were added on either side of the fireplace. John was always writing poems and songs in this room. During the colder seasons the room would have been warm and cosy because of the fire. He would be working on something – often screwing it up in frustration and tossing it away. “You ought to pick these up, Mimi,” he would joke, “because I’m going to be famous one day, and they’ll be worth something.” How right he was! One of Mimi’s famous retorts to John, when she was annoyed with him wasting his time banging away on his instrument and working on songs: "The guitar's all very well, John – but  you'll never make a living out of it".

Lennon's teenage doodlings for The Daily Howl - his satire about school life

John Lennon's bed 

The small bedroom upstairs was John’s. When he was a young boy it was tidy – and dominated by a giant teddy bear. As he got older, it became more untidy. He told Mimi to stay out of the room – telling her that he would take care of it. It was his special place. Where he could retreat to and dream. “There’s a place,” he sang in one of his songs, “where I can go, when I feel low, when I feel blue.” This is where he read his favourite authors, like Richmal Crompton (the William stories) and Lewis Carol. And began his first attempts to write and sketch. A private place to think and dream. Posters of Elvis, Brigitte Bardot, Rita Hayworth, and others were pinned to the walls and ceiling. John would often sit in here for hours – happily daydreaming, or doing drawings with colouring pencils, or listening to his favourite BBC radio programs, like The Goon Show, which were piped into his room on an external speaker that was connected by wire to the family radio set up downstairs in the morning room.

John Lennon's small bedroom is at the front of the first floor (over the porch)

Colin Hall remembers the day Bob Dylan showed up, unannounced, on one of the tours. He recognised Dylan immediately, but noticed that none of the other people on that tour realised who they were with. Colin remembers the incredible moment it was when he stood inside John’s bedroom with Dylan sharing a few quiet words.

Me beside the front porch at Mendips 

At one time the National Trust only had ownership of Paul McCartney’s childhood home at 20 Forthlin Road. When the notion of getting Lennon’s home as well was muted, some of the Trust said that it would not be of as    much interest because Lennon didn’t write any songs at Mendips. While it is true that John and Paul did most of their early song writing collaborations at Paul’s house, they did practise and work on songs in Mimi’s house. When Mimi felt the “noise” was getting to be too much, she would banish the duo, with their guitars, to the front porch – which they didn’t mind because the acoustics in there added an impressive reverb to their playing and singing. This enclosed porch wasn’t an original feature of the house – George and Mimi had it built in 1952. John played in it often – using the £17 guitar that Mimi had bought for him.

Yoko Ono & Olivia Harrison (George's wife)

Paul remembered Mendips as being “posh”. Mimi treated him well, because he was clearly the politest and most personable of John’s young friends. But when they sensed that the music-making had outstayed its welcome, they would hop on their bikes and cycle over to Paul’s house nearby – which is where we were headed after a brief examination of the front porch and some final lingering moments in the front garden of Mendips.

Me, Paul, Brian & Tony (former boarding school mates 1965-1968)

Paul McCartney’s former home in Allerton

To get to the McCartney’s former home in Allerton – at 20 Forthlin Road – back in the mid-‘50s, you only had to walk about 150 metres south on Menlove Avenue and then cut west across the Allerton Park Golf Course until you reached Mather Avenue. Then it was about 100 metres north on Mather Avenue; and Forthlin Road was the first street left. By bicycle they probably would have gone north on Menlove Avenue and then pedalled west via Yewtree Road and Booker Avenue.

View of 20 Forthlin Road from inside the van - it was raining steadily now

Sylvia Hall, the guide at 20 Forthlin Rd.

As I mentioned earlier, the tour of the former McCartney home was conducted by Sylvia Hall, the wife of Colin Hall, who guides the tours around Lennon’s home on Menlove Avenue. Colin and Sylvia Hall live for seven months of the year at Mendips. Sylvia comes over to Forthlin Road in the late morning to prepare for that day’s visitors. On the day we were in Liverpool (13 July 2012), it rained pretty much for the whole day. Not so bad when we were inside at the two Beatles’ homes, but a drag when we were walking around Liverpool city centre. The rule about no photographs inside Lennon’s home also applied here at Forthlin Road. We had to put all our cameras on a table under the staircase. So the only photos which are mine here are the ones taken outside the front of the house. There are pictures here taken by Mike McCartney, Paul’s brother. And I found some photographs that show scenes inside the home.

The McCartneys moved into the house at 20 Forthlin Road in 1955. When Paul’s parents, James (“Jim”) McCartney and Mary Mohin, got married they lived further north, closer to the city centre. After the war they planned to seek a better standard of living by moving into one of the new council estates. Liverpool had been very heavily bombed during the war and two-thirds of the city’s residential housing had been destroyed. Much of the population moved from inner-city tenements to suburbs being developed on the outskirts of the city. Jim and Mary McCartney chose Speke, which was 9 miles south from their former home.  Eventually Mary became keen to find a nicer council estate closer to the city. In 1955 they found what they were looking for, and moved into Allerton, four miles north of Speke.

View looking east from McCartney's house towards Mather Avenue

20 Forthlin Road was part of the Mather Avenue estate – a development of some 330 houses built by the council between 1949 and 1952 on land bought from the Police Training College. The McCartney home was a two-storey, mid-terrace house. It was built by Costains for £1,369 9s 1d, from a 1947 design by the Liverpudlian architect Sir Lancelot Keay.

The kitchen at 20 Forthlin Road - restored to its '50s look

It was quite a simple design. To the left of the entrance hall, you walked into the living room (or “parlour”). From there double doors led into the dining room at the back. And that room connected to the kitchen and then the hall. Paul liked the straightforward, cozy set-up so much that he copied it when he came to design his own home later in life.

Lennon pouring a cuppa at 20 Forthlin Road, photo by Dezo Hoffman

Upstairs at Forthlin Road, there are three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a separate indoor toilet. Their house at Speke didn’t have an indoor “loo”. Their new situation seemed quite luxurious – no more freezing cold toilet seat in the outhouse on a frigid winter morning!

Another special feature of their house – for that time – was a telephone. It was necessary because of Mary’s job; she worked as a midwife and health visitor, so she needed the telephone to be called in during emergencies. And, like many other Britons, the McCartneys bought a new TV in 1953, in order to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

Living Room at McCartney's home - Paul and John used to practise near the fire, in front of the armchair

When they first moved in the living room walls were painted cream-white. They almost immediately decorated the walls with wallpaper. Paul, and his brother Mike, chose the patterns – strangely, a different pattern for each wall!

Jim McCartney's upright in the living room

The McCartney home was a musical place. In the corner of the living room is an upright piano, which Jim would play. He bought it from Harry Epstein at NEMS on Walton Street in the city. NEMS stood for North End Music Store. And Harry Epstein was the father of Brian – The Beatles future manager. Jim McCartney was a former musician, and in the 20s had led his own group – the Jim Mac Band. When Jim recognised that Paul had musical talent, he sent his son to take piano lessons. Paul quickly rebelled against the formality of the sessions – preferring to pick out tunes by himself, in the privacy of his own living room.


 

  

Paul McCartney's bedroom

Paul’s father also rigged up extension cables and headphones for his two sons so they could listen to Radio Luxembourg in the evening, in order to hear the latest R&B and rock ‘n’ roll records coming out of the U.S. He ran wire from the radio set in the living room to their bedrooms. Paul and Mike would listen to the likes of Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino.

It was in the living room at 20 Forthlin Road that Paul and John would sit with their guitars and forge their song-writing partnership. Paul’s father was now a widower – his wife Mary had died quite suddenly in late 1956 of breast cancer, only a year after they’d moved to Allerton. Jim was left to bring up two sons on £8 per week. So the house was empty every weekday after Jim had gone off to work. Because of that, Paul and John would skip school – they called it “sagging off”. Paul was attending grammar school at the Liverpool Institute, in the city; and John had started at the Liverpool College of Art.

Paul & John writing songs in the living room at Forthlin Road - photo by Mike McCartney

The two aspiring songwriters would work in the living room for two or three hours in the afternoon. They would sit opposite each other, slumped over their guitars, as they tried to read the words and chords of the song they had written into an exercise book that lay on the floor beneath them. Paul had “borrowed” the note book from the Liverpool Institute. Each song copied into the book came under the headline “A Lennon-McCartney Original”. Their unwritten rule was this – if they didn’t remember, on the next day, much of the song that they had been working on during their previous session, they would discard it and begin another. Two early Beatles’ songs that were written in this living room were “Love Me Do” and “I Saw Her Standing There”. “Love Me Do” became their first single, released in October 1962.

Another view of John & Paul practising at Forthlin Road - by Mike McCartney

The kitchen door at 20 Forthlin Road leads into a back garden, which still contains the original coal shed and outdoor toilet. Paul remembers sitting on the roof of the shed in order to watch the annual show at the Police Training College, in the large field next to their terrace. Jim was a keen gardener and planted shrubs and flower beds.

The back of 20 Forthlin Road - photo by Joe "Pepperland"

Mike McCartney, Paul’s younger brother, developed into a keen and talented photographer. He was essentially self-taught; and some of his experiments involved shots of his brother and his musician friends. Many of these photos were posed, or taken candidly, in the back garden.

A moody, experimental shot of brother Paul by Mike McCartney

Paul carrying Mike's drum set out of the front door at Forthlin Road - photo by Mike McCartney

On the walls throughout the house, there are large, framed copies of many of Mike McCartney’s best photographs taken inside and outside the home. That is certainly a legitimate reason for the no-photography rule in this location. Those pictures are a highlight of the tour here – seeing the young Beatles playing together, or just fooling around.

A young Paul with his very first guitar (Zenith)  - photo by Mike McCartney (ca. early 1956)

Eventually the hordes of fans who regularly began visiting the street became too much for Paul’s father. So Paul bought a large Edwardian house for Jim – located in Heswall on the south-west side of the Wirral. The house at 20 Forthlin Road passed into the possession of the Jones family, who lived there for 30 years. In 1981 they bought it from the Liverpool council under Margaret Thatcher’s “right-to-buy” scheme. The house continued to be a place of pilgrimage for ardent Beatles’ fans. Mrs. Jones used to give a snippet of the old net curtains the McCartney’s had used to visiting fans.

Tour introduction by guide Sylvia Hall

In 1995 the house came up for sale. John Birt, then the Director-General of the BBC, and a contemporary of The Beatles, found out about it, and approached The National Trust, suggesting they ought to acquire the house and turn it into a Beatles museum. The Trust agreed and bought the property that same year. With the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Trust “renovated” the house – which meant removing all the changes and modernisations that had occurred since the early ‘60s. And, in addition to the Mike McCartney photographs, the home features many items of Beatles memorabilia loaned by Beatles’ biographer Hunter Davies.

A rare early colour photo of George, John & Paul by Mike McCartney

Me, Tony and Brian outside the front door at 20 Forthlin Road

So that’s it for the two former childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. But we’re not quite done yet! We’re going to go down to the city centre. My schoolmate Paul gave us a tour there, including, of course, a stroll down Mathew Street. The National Trust van took everyone back to the Jurys Inn, near the Albert Dock. From there we walked over in the rain towards Mathew Street.

Stanley Street, Mathew Street and Strawberry Field Again! (2012)

Eleanor Rigby statue on Stanley Street

Well here I am again – back in Liverpool city centre. But this is something new. This statue was sculpted by Tommy Steele and donated to the city as a tribute to The Beatles. It was cast in 1982. The plaque says that the statue is dedicated to “all the lonely people”. Located on Stanley Street.

Paul and Brian pose in the rain

This is one of those statues that just invites people to pose and be photographed. The juxtaposition of cold, hard bronze and colourful, animated people makes for an interesting combination.

The Grapes  pub on Mathew Street

The Grapes Pub on Mathew Street. Close by the Cavern Club. The Beatles often popped over here for a drink in between sets. Grapes in the rain.

The Cavern Club - a museum and a performance space

The rebuilt and restored Cavern Club on Mathew Street. It is a combination of Beatles museum and performance space. It’s mostly Beatles music during the day, when most of the Beatles’ fans/tourists drop by for a short visit. There are lots of posters and memorabilia displayed on the walls and in secure cabinets.

John Lennon statue on the Hard Day's Night Hotel

Just around the corner from Mathew Street, on North John Street, look up. There are individual statues of the four Beatles adorning the upper level of the Hard Day’s Night Hotel, a Beatles-themed four-star hotel. We stopped in there for lunch. Some wonderful posters and art-work all over the walls here. Good to get out of the rain for a while and enjoy a bite to eat and a pint.

Me and John again. This statue is on Mathew Street. I’m rather wet here. “When the rain comes,” John famously sang, “they run and hide their heads, they might as well be dead, when the rain comes …”. But not us. We kept strolling around despite the weather.

Strawberry Field gates

The next morning, shortly before heading east out of Liverpool towards the Yorkshire Dales, Tony and I stopped on our way down Beaconsfield Road for five minutes – we had been staying at St. Francis Xavier College – to get some pictures of the gates at Strawberry Field. The original wrought-iron gates have been replaced – fear of theft, perhaps – by replicas. 

Let me take you down, ‘cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields

Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever.

John wrote Strawberry Fields Forever in September, 1966 when he was doing on-location filming in Almeria, Spain for Richard Lester’s anti-war film How I Won the War. John started wearing “granny glasses” during the filming. He had brought with him an acoustic guitar. He wrote this song, in between takes, as he was portraying a character in the film called Musketeer Gripweed. The song, despite the Liverpool reference, is really all about his LSD experiences. It’s a lyric full of self-doubt, questioning, and problems of identity.

Yoko and Sean at Strawberry Field gates

Ostensibly focused around memories of his childhood exploration of the Strawberry Field grounds near Mendips, this song is really about the disorienting effects of Lennon’s constant use of LSD. What is real? What is the dream? Who am I? And where do I fit in?

Always – no, sometimes – think it's me,
But, you know, I know when it's a dream;
I think, er, no, I mean, er, yes, but it's all wrong,
That is, I think I disagree.

Strawberry Field gates (replicas)

Strawberry Fields Forever  took an unprecedented fifty-five hours of studio time to produce. The first version was primarily a band performance, featuring Paul on mellotron. Lennon then asked George Martin, their producer, to write an orchestrated version, which he did – an orchestration dominated by a trumpet trio and a cello quartet. Lennon then famously asked Martin to combine the two versions – starting with the band for the first minute of the track, and then blending in the orchestrated parts for the rest of the track. It was a difficult thing to do technically, but Martin pulled it off. The result is one of the band’s greatest achievements.

Me at Strawberry Field gates

Living is easy with eyes closed,
Misunderstanding all you see;
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out,
It doesn't matter much to me.

The former entrance to The Gables and Woolton College - now a housing estate

And then back to where it all started. We went a short distance down Menlove Avenue and parked the car near where Woolton College used to be. We got out and walked over to the place where The Gables used to be – St. Joseph’s Prep School. And where they built beside it Woolton College. It lasted less than ten years as a school – and then the building was demolished. The Gables was demolished, too. Both gone. My time on Menlove Avenue back in 1968-1969 was so short. But the impact was tremendous.

There are places I remember  all my life, though some have changed,

Some forever not for better, some have gone and some remain;
All these places had their moments, with lovers and friends, I still can recall,

Some are dead and some are living – in my life I've loved them all.

Resources: Mendips,  a National Trust pamphlet prepared  by Oliver Garnett (2003); and 20 Forthlin Road, a National Trust pamphlet prepared by Oliver Garnett (1998)