#Pete Shotton

[beatlblog]

#it’s not your fault you’re good at everything#apart from acting#and counting (via @javelinbk)

#most annoying boy award#Pete we want the tea (via @beatledumpsterster)

#he got all the not-goods kicked out and brought in george#I feel bad for colin and pete though. ouch.#I always felt bad for shotton anyway since paul burst onto the scene & stole his best friend away into some weird soulmate trap for 23 years (via @majinmelmo)

#actually hilarious to me that pete thinks paul was the bad influence#bc in petes book he claims george thought pete would be a bad influence when he came to work for apple/john#but i generally think why was boss paul news to john and george in 69#what’s that drums tag ab how john suddenly realizes how annoying paul is in nyc bc yoko broke his spell#johns friends being like who the fuck does he think he is and john being like he’s alright#i will go with his mean tricks and then apologize for him#this is what we do (via @get-back-homeward)

#most annoying guy in liverpool gets more annoying (via @thestarsarecool)

#I just love Paul being like… on me and John are gonna wear jackets (via @sleeper9)

#Norman is a bit light on the details isn’t he the wanker (via @beatlepaul4ever)

#‘they could never make me hate you boss baby Paul’ - John Lennon (via @pauls1967moustache)

#paul and yoko should have been bitchy besties (via @cherubina)

#“john was the asshole while paul was diplomatic” they were both unbearable. pass it on.#what the hell did they do to pete for john to apologize...#it reminds me of that one story where pete was mad at john & john showed up in his bike with his head down (via @lonainfield)

#john you have to stop letting your girlfriends take over the band#why was that a pattern for you? (via @the-electric-monk)

#in interviews the quarrymen all have good and bad things to say about john paul george each other#colin is quite bitter about nigel walley’s nagging (via @torchlitinthedesert)

Shout!: The True Story of the Beatles (Philip Norman)

15-year-old Paul McCartney joining the Quarrymen and immediately bossing them all around will never not be my fave thing <3

[esherdemo]

John with Pete Shotton, 1967

[thewalrusispaul]

Brian being told that Ed Sullivan wants to speak with him and his childlike glee is maybe my favourite thing I‘ve read in Pete‘s book so far

(Extract from Pete Shotton‘s, John Lennon - In my Life)

[beatlesficrecs]

only a northern song

by @stonedlennon

Summary: AU. Paul works at a record shop, takes night classes to be a teacher, and has sworn off his childish dream of being a musician. John Lennon is a dock worker, poet, and disturber of the peace. In which the story had to be diverted before they could come together. Liverpool, 1963.

Why I like this fic: Even though this one is technically ‘incomplete’ (6/7), the current ending actually ends on great note and didn’t leave wanting. It’s a lovely. realistic AU with electric attraction between the two, and John encouraging Paul to find his own place in the world. It opened up a new type of world told through John as a dock worker, and Paul a teaching student, and  with beautiful, very sexy moments.

[randyscouse-git]

Aww :-(

“As our relationship came to resemple that of siamese twins, John renamed us “Shennon and Lotton”. This, I’m sure you’ll agree, constitued a definitive improvement from “Winnie and Snowball”; it also (though I could not know at the time) pointed a number of incipient traits of John’s character. For one thing, he could never, even then, leave a word alone. His spoonerisms of “Shotton” and “Lennon” foreshadowed his lifelong habit of linking his name to the people he felt closest to (the Lennon-McCartney collaboration and favoring “John Ono Lennon” over the detested “Winston”). Though I have yet to encounter a personality as strong and individualistic as John’s, he always had to have a partner. He never could abide the thought of getting stuck on his limb all by himself.”

— The Beatles, Lennon, and Me by Peter Shotton.

[ncwhereman]

Years later, after John composed the first of his truly poignant and heartfelt Beatles songs, "In My Life"—with its lines about "friends I still can recall/some are dead and some are living"—he revealed to me that the two people he had had uppermost in mind were myself and Stuart Sutcliffe. And then he stunned me with a statement that I'd never heard him address to anyone—least of all to another man. "You know, Pete," he said softly, "I do love you. But," he quickly added, "I loved Stuart as well."

Pete Shotton, Nicholas Schaffner, John Lennon: In My Life

[got-ticket-to-ride]

Around August 1961

"John and I did develop a special liking for two strippers who shared a flat conveniently located a few doors down from the Old Dutch Cafe. Pat and Jean were onetime models who had graduated to the stage of Merseyside's very first topless nightclub. They were tough and smart and didn't care what anybody thought of them and in those days their profession was deemed highly suspect by the more upstanding citizens of Liverpool. For that very reason, John treated Pat and Jean with as much respect as he was capable of bestowing on a mere female; he regarded them almost as kindred spirits fellow rebels.

Pat and Jean used to perform intimate strips for us in the privacy of their own home, getting John and me in a highly receptive mood for the wild scenes that invariably followed.

Despite these allurements my liaison with Jean got off to an unpromising start when my member stubbornly refused to rise to the occasion. Jean attempted to bolster my self-esteem by confiding that one of the Beatles (who shall remain nameless here!) had experienced similar difficulties on his first fling with her."

~Pete Shotton

George: "They were horrible girls, weren't they?"

Were John and Pete Best close enough for John to invite Pete Best on an orgy with Pat and Jean? (No.)

Pulling out the statistics on which Beatle could've had the difficulty.

John: X / George: X / Paul: O / Pete Best: X

[harrisonarchive]

A style selection, 1956-1969.

A continuation of sorts from this post.

“[George’s] idea, which he ordered [in Liverpool in the 1950s], was a four-button jacket with cloth-covered buttons. Two breast pockets which were slitted (jetted) and in the shape of a bird in flight, the two side pockets corresponded. The cuffs had to be folded back with a cloth-covered button. His trousers had no pleats in the front, not normal in those days, and he was by far the very first person to have two slits at the bottom side seam of the trouser and he wanted them folded back with cloth covered buttons to match the cuffs on his jacket. The workshop queried the order when they received thinking we had gone bonkers. George got his suit and was pleased with the outcome. Later lots of guys were walking about town with cut back cuffs and side seams on their trousers, but George was the first.” - Rollo Torpey, The Beatles and Me (2015)

“At Iris’s 14th birthday party, I remember George turned up in a brand-new, Italian-style stuff with covered buttons. He looked very grown-up.” - Violet Caldwell (mother of Iris, and Alan, a.k.a. Rory Storm), The Beatles Monthly September 1965

“[George’s mother Louise] took an unusually benign view of George’s luminous pink shirts, yellow waistcoat, and drainpipe trousers.” - Pete Shotton, The Beatles, Lennon, And Me (1984)

“Going in for flash clothes, or at least trying to be a bit different, as I hadn’t any money, was part of the rebelling. I never cared for authority. They can’t teach you experience; you’ve got to go through it, by trial and error.” - George Harrison, The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (1968)

“At the Institute, George was known from the beginning as a way-out dresser. Michael McCartney, Paul’s brother, was a year below him. He remembers George always having long hair — years before anybody else did. […] ‘George used to go to school with his school cap sitting high on top of his hair,‘ says Mrs. Harrison. ‘And very tight trousers. Unknown to me, he’d run them up on my machine to make them even tighter. I bought him a brand-new pair once and the first thing he did was tighten them. When his dad found out, he told him to unpick them at once. “I can’t, Dad,” he said. “I’ve cut the pieces off.”’” - The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (1968)

“I’d started to develop my own version of the school uniform. I had some cast-offs from my brother. One was a dog-toothed check-patterned sports coat, which I’d dyed black to use as my school blazer. The color hadn’t quite taken, so it still had a slight check design to it. I had a shirt I’d bought in Lime Street, that I thought was so cool. It was white with pleats down the front. and it had embroidery along the corners of the pleats. I had a waistcoat that John had given me, which he’d got from his ‘uncle’ Dykins (his mother’s boyfriend), Mr. Twitchy Dykins. It was like an evening-suit waistcoat — black, double-breasted, with lapels. The trousers John also gave me, soon after we first met — powder-blue drainpipes with turn-ups. I dyed them black as well. And I had black suede shoes from my brother. […] That outfit of mine was very risky, and it felt like all day, every day, for the last couple of years I was going to get busted. In those days we used Vaseline on our hair to get the rock n’ roll greased-back hairstyle. Also, you were supposed to wear a cap and a tie, and a badge on your blazer. I didn’t have my badge stitched on, I had it loose. It was held in place by a pen clipped over it in my top pocket, so I could remove it easily, and the tie.” - George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology (2000)

“He was always a pretty snappy dresser, and he did always like that waistcoat look. And he used to wear a V-neck Fair Isle jumper. Sometimes he’d be a little too outrageous, like purple trousers with bright green, but it was fine. Everything seemed to be fine then.” - Pattie Boyd, interview for the British Beatles Fan Club

“The boys are wearing all sorts of fantastic clothes for their film and introduce a very new, unusual gimmick. If they’re wearing corduroy, for example, then they have corduroy boots to match. If they’re seen in velveteen suits, then they’re coupled with velveteen boots. George first thought of the idea two years ago, but when he put the idea to a local bootmaker, he told him it couldn’t be done. Well, that’s one cobbler that’s been proved wrong.” - The Beatles Monthly, June 1965 (x)

[ludmilachaibemachado]

Via Something About the Beatles’ Girls FB🌻🌻🌻

[tavolgisvist]

“I used to read ads for guitars in Reveille and just ache for one. Like everyone else, I used God for this one thing I wanted. 'Please God, give me a guitar.’ Elvis was bigger than religion in my life. We used to go to this boy’s house after school and listen to Elvis on 78s; we’d buy five Senior Service loose and some chips and go along. Then this boy said he’d got a new record. He’d been to Holland. This record was by somebody called Little Richard, who was bigger than Elvis. It was called Long Tall Sally. When I heard it, I couldn’t speak. You know how it is when you are torn. I didn’t want to leave Elvis. We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis.”

(Maureen Cleave, The Telegraph)

I was born on 29 September 1940, just days before JWL, at 69 Dovedale Road and lived there until I was 22 when I left Liverpool to live and work overseas. I never went back to live in UK. My house was at the other end of Dovedale Road from Dovedale Road School and from Penny Lane. I was near the Rose Lane end of Dovedale Road. I first met John when, after moving to live with his Aunt Mimi, he joined Dovedale Road Infants School aged 5. We were in the same class in primary and junior schools, both passed the 11 plus exam together and both went on together to Quarry Bank where I first met Pete Shotton. John and Pete were inseparable at QB and they with me and my friend Don Beattie made a frequent foursome. Don, Pete and I went on a Liverpool grammar schools exchange holiday to Amsterdam in April 1956 when we were all aged 15. John didn't come. We had a ball. I returned with Little Richard's record of ‘Long Tall Sally’ with ‘Slippin' an Slidin' on the B side. At that time we used to regularly break school rules and cycle to my house from QB on school days at lunch time. Just after the Amsterdam trip on one of those lunchtime sessions I played John the record having first got his attention by telling him the singer was better than Elvis Presley.  Well, it stopped John in his tracks and he was lost for words. This was so unusual we all remembered it and many years later after John's murder when Pete Shotton wrote his book he described this incident in detail as it was in every sense a critical moment in John's life. From that point music was going to be his life and it was.

(How I Turned John Lennon onto Rock 'n' Roll by Mike Hill for Mersey Beat)

"I never thought I'd ever meet Little Richard. He was my idol at school. The first song I ever sang in public was 'Long Tall Sally,' at a Butlins holiday camp talent competition! I love his voice and I always wanted to sing like him."

(Paul McCartney in The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, 2003).

Then I broke my arm and had to go into hospital. Who knows what might have happened if I hadn’t broken that arm? We could have taken “We are Siamese if you please” to the top of the pops and become the Elderly Brothers. But Paul and George had already gone a long way together at that time. Actually, viewers, I shared the limelight with Paul on what might be described as his first public stage appearance – certainly on any stage outside the school theatre. When I was well enough to leave hospital, Dad brought Paul and me down to a holiday camp at Wales for a break. Our cousin Mike happened to be producer of the camp talent show and gave us our big chance. Mike thought Paul a rave mimic – although this made him a minority in the family. The rest of them thought that we were simply crackers. I think the only joke they ever laughed at was Paul’s Irish joke. This is about the two Irishmen who came out of a pub just as an aeroplane was flying past. Mick says: “Begorra, Pat, I’d hate to be up in that plane,” and Pat replies: “Oi, Mick, but I’d hate to be up there without it!” And the only reason they laughed at that was because of Paul’s cod Irish accent. Bet you didn’t know that, brother! Anyway, cousin Mike had this idea that Paul was really good. “Why don’t you do your Little Richard piece?” he suggested. Paul’s face was a book study. “Oo-er,” he said doubtfully. “Do you really think so?” “You’d be great, real great,” cousin Mike told him. “I’d be too nervous,” said Paul. In fact he was shaking like Patrick Kerr’s left leg when we finally got him as far as the wings in the theatre. And even then we had to give him a push before we could get him out on stage. But when he found himself standing in the spotlight – without quite knowing how he had got there, may I say – he did his little turn successfully. The applause was just about to die away when the compere turned the spotlight to where I was standing in the wings and called upon me to join Paul in a duet. We must have looked a couple of junior-sized Laurel and Hardys – Paul chubby and all owl-faced, me skinny, pale as powder, and with my arm still in a sling. Anyway we sang “Bye-Bye Love” together and were rewarded with a bar of chocolate each. Talk about the big time!

(Mike McCartney, August 21, 1965, Portrait of Paul for Woman Magazine)

Early on, I’d sung ‘Long Tall Sally’ at an end-of-term party. You could bring your guitar into school on the last day. We had a history teacher named Walter Edge, though we called him ‘Cliff’ Edge because we thought hat was really funny. He was one of our favourite teachers. I got to stand up on the desk in front of all my mates in the class and sing ‘Long Tall Sally’ with my guitar because he let us.

(Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, 2021)

[mydaroga]

John Lennon and Pete Shotton were

so inseparable that some called them LennonShotton or Shennon and Lotton. (John in turn often called Shotton ‘Penis’, because he was long and thin and his initials were PS.) As Pete reflects, John needed to be in a partnership: ‘He always had to have a support. He would never have gone and performed on his own. He always had to have a sidekick.’

Mark Lewisohn, Tune In

[muzaktomyears]

(...) John continued to believe that Brian was dead only in the physical sense, and that it might still be possible to commune with his spirit. To this end, he actually hired a professional medium to preside over a session at Kenwood. I happened to be visiting with John a few hours prior to the event, and was so fascinated when he told me about it that I begged him to let me attend. "No, Pete, sorry," John replied. "This has got to be just the four of us." To the best of my recollection, this was the only occasion on which I'd ever been excluded from any of the group's activities, though of course I realized at once that it would have indeed been inappropriate for anyone but the four Beatles to take part. Even so, I could hardly wait to ring John the following day. "How did it go?" I demanded breathlessly. "Oh, it was just a load of bullshit," he said. "The medium started putting on a weird voice, pretending it was Brian speaking to us through him. But none of it made any sense, and when we tried to ask Brian questions, he didn't know anything about anything. It was all just a complete waste of time."

John Lennon: In My Life, Pete Shotton and Nicholas Schaffner (1983)

[saint-mona]

Picked up this out-of -print gem 💎 today...

[ceofjohnlennon]

From left to right: Pete Shotton, Bil Turner, John Lennon and Len Garry, presumably between 1956~1957. ㅡ From the book "John Lennon In My Life" by Pete Shotton.

[dateinthelife]

3 May 1968

While Cynthia is on holiday in Greece, John Lennon invites his childhood friend Pete Shotton over to Kenwood for moral support before calling a woman.

[paulsbrokenaglass-beatles]

Breaks my heart to read about John's struggles with his self-image and weight, and anecdotes like this really reveal a lot about why his self-image deteriorated so badly

His tastes in food ran to such basic English staples as eggs, steaks, bacon, chips, and bread and butter--along with vast quantities of exotic American breakfast cereals like Frosties (Frosted Flakes) and Sugar Pops. By the end of 1965, a distinct pot belly had begun to materialize on John's formerly slender frame. One afternoon, I happened to take an important call from television's David Frost when John was in the shower, and burst into the bathroom to give him the message. I'm not sure which of us was the more startled: John, who, characteristically, jumped a mile at the unexpected intrusion--or I, who hadn't seen him with his clothes off for some time. "What the hell," I demanded, "is that you've got hanging round your waist?" "It's getting terrible, isn't it?" he conceded. "I'd better do something about it, before I turn into a real Fattie Arbuckle!"

Pete Shotton, John Lennon: In My Life