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Pete Shotton, businessman and friend of John Lennon – obituary
Pete Shotton, who has died aged 75, was John Lennon’s closest boyhood friend, fellow partner in crime at Quarry Bank High School, Liverpool, and an original member of the Quarrymen, the early Lennon band which, through a process of osmosis, became the Beatles; he remained a close friend of Lennon’s throughout the years of Beatlemania and stayed in touch until Lennon’s murder in New York in 1980.
In 1956 – when Lennon, who had just bought his first guitar and inspired by Lonnie Donegan, suggested to Shotton that they should form a skiffle band “for a laugh” – the two boys had already been best friends for more than decade and were so inseparable that they became known as “Shennon and Lotton” or “Lotton and Shennon”.
Rod Davis, another ex-Quarryman, recalled them as “the school thugs, dragging on a cigarette they’d got behind their backs or running into Marks & Spencer and shouting ‘Woolworths!’”. Both had started in the “A” stream but by the age of 15 they were in the bottom class.
“I thought he was kidding when he asked me (to be in the band),” Shotton recalled. “I told him that I hadn’t inherited a musical gene in my entire body. But he told me to get a washboard and we’d give it a try.”
The pair invited other classmates to join – no experience or talent required. Eric Griffiths joined as a guitarist; Rod Davis was enlisted to strum banjo; Len Garry thumped the tea chest bass; and Colin Hanton was the drummer. Lennon came up with the band’s name from a line in their school song: “Quarry Men, old before our birth.”
The Quarrymen played at local halls, fetes, weddings and parties, but their partnership did not last. On July 6 1957 they were performing at the St Peter’s church fete in Woolton, when a young guitarist called Paul McCartney wandered in.
Intrigued by Lennon’s gift for ad-libbing his own lyrics, McCartney sought an introduction and was soon showing off his own talent as a guitarist with his showpiece Twenty Flight Rock. McCartney was invited to join the band, replacing the banjoist Davis.
By now skiffle was being displaced by rock and roll, and other members of the original band soon began to drift off. Shotton had never liked playing in the Quarrymen and had been searching for an excuse to leave.
“I hated it, that silly washboard,” he recalled. “I never had any desire to be a musician [but] I was afraid to tell John that I wanted to leave because I thought he’d be heartbroken. We were so close.
“Eventually I said, ‘John, I can’t handle it. I want out of the group.’ Even though I caught him by surprise, and this shows how quickly he could think, he had the perfect answer. He picked up my washboard and smashed it over my head. He said, ‘Well, that solves that, doesn’t it, Pete?’ We were laughing so hard that tears were coming down our faces.”
Garry left in 1958 when he came down with meningitis and Griffiths packed it in the same year when a young guitarist called George Harrison joined the Quarrymen. Hanton left in early 1959 after a row. The following year the band became the Beatles.
Of the original Quarrymen only Shotton stayed in the Beatles camp, remaining close to Lennon until his move to New York with Yoko Ono, often visiting him at his home in Weybridge and attending Beatles recording sessions. After Lennon’s death he co-wrote John Lennon: In My Life (1983), in which he revealed that he had played a minor role in the creation of some Beatles songs, including the nonsense lyrics of I am the Walrus (1967) which Lennon wrote after receiving a fan letter from a pupil at Quarry Bank who revealed that his English master had been getting the class to analyse the symbolism of Beatles lyrics.
Amused by the absurdity, Lennon threw the most ludicrous images he could think of into a new song. “ ‘Semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower,’ John intoned, writing it down with considerable relish,” Shotton recalled. “He turned to me, smiling. ‘Let (them) work THAT one out’.” The lines “Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye” were inspired by Shotton’s recollection of a particularly revolting playground nursery rhyme they used to sing together.
Apart from Lennon, Shotton was the only original Quarryman to strike it rich, albeit with help from his old friend. After the Beatles became successful, Lennon lent him money to buy a supermarket on Hayling Island, and later appointed him manager of the short-lived Apple boutique in London. In 1983 Shotton founded the Fatty Arbuckle’s chain of restaurants which he built up to some 40 outlets, before selling it in the early 2000s for several million pounds.
Peter Shotton was born on August 4 1941 and became friends with John Lennon, who lived round the corner in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton, aged six. Shotton’s mother Bess and Lennon’s Aunt Mimi disapproved of the friendship – with good reason. Quarry Bank’s punishment book records their being disciplined for such offences as “insolence”, “throwing blackboard duster out of the window”, “cutting class” and “gambling on school field during house match”.
While Lennon went to art school, Shotton trained to be a police cadet, but things did not work out, and by 1964 when Lennon helped him buy the Hayling Island supermarket, he was in dire financial straits and prepared to try anything.
Shotton remained close to Lennon, latterly as his personal assistant, until Yoko Ono came on the scene and he resigned. “Yoko was soon treating me like a servant to order about,” he recalled. After Lennon moved to New York he saw him once more on a visit to America in 1976. Four years later he heard the news of Lennon’s murder.
In 1997 the surviving original Quarrymen reunited to perform at the 40th anniversary celebrations of the performance at which Lennon and McCartney met for the first time. The band went on to perform in many countries and release four albums, though Shotton retired due to ill health in 2000.
Pete Shotton is survived by a son and a stepson.
Pete Shotton, born August 4 1941, died March 24 2017