Here is the song with which Paul McCartney joined the Quarrymen

John Lennon (1940) was older, but Paul McCartney (1942), when the two met as teenagers in 1957, he was more talented on guitar. It was this talent that earned him Lennon’s respect and a place in his skiffle group, the Quarrymen. And, as McCartney revealed in a 1999 interview, it was all due to one song.

The fateful meeting, which would give birth to one of the most famous and acclaimed artistic couples ever in pop music, took place on 6 July 1957 at the St Peter’s Church Hall party in Woolton, the Liverpool suburb where Lennon lived with his aunt Mimi. McCartney attended the event invited by his friend Ivan Vaughan, who in turn was a friend of Lennon.

“He was in one of the little skiffle groups,” McCartney told British TV host Michael Parkinson in a 1999 interview for his BBC talk show. “Ivan said to me: “You should come to this thing. You know, there’s this band that plays and my friend John is in it.”

The Quarrymen were a ragtag band made up of Lennon and a group of musician friends from Quarry Bank High School. McCartney and Vaughan arrived in time to attend the band’s afternoon concert and see Lennon singing “Come Go With Me” of the Of the Vikings. Lennon didn’t know the words and improvised them, which McCartney found funny and impressive.

“It looked like John had something,” he told Parkinson. “What happened was that they did the first set and took a break, which was then followed by the evening set. So the break was an opportunity for the band to get drunk.”

When Vaughan took McCartney to meet the band, Lennon had had a few beers, he recalls. When Vaughan explained that McCartney played guitar, Lennon asked him to play.

“One of them lent me his guitar and I had to turn it right, because I’m left-handed,” he said. “They didn’t let me change the strings. But because I had a partner who had a right-handed guitar, I had learned to play backwards. So it was a bit impressive.”

“But – continues Pul – unlike them I also knew the words to a song that everyone loved. This – he concludes – was enough to get me in”.

The song was “Twenty Flight Rock” Of Eddie Cochran. Cochran and his band had performed the song in the 1956 musical comedy “The Girl Can’t Help It” (in Italy “Ganster seeks wife”), which also saw the participation of McCartney’s favorites, Fats Domino, Little Richard And Gene Vincent. But it was Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” that captured the hearts of young guitarists with its insistent riff and Cochran’s distinctive voice.

Despite the song’s popularity, there was a good reason why Lennon and his band didn’t know the lyrics: the song hadn’t yet been released, not even in America. Cochran recorded it for release after the film, in May and August 1957, but it was not released until the following November. And it wasn’t even released as a single in the UK.

McCartney, after seeing the film, went to the local record store to order Cochran’s record, only to find that it was not available. So how did he know the text?

Simple: the former Beatles was a big fan of “The Girl Can’t Help It” and had seen it several times during its seven-week run at the Scala Cinema on Lime Street in Liverpool.

“We idolized these people – he says, referring to the protagonists of the film – and we always thought they were treated poorly, until “The Girl Can’t Help It”,” he declared in the book Anthology of the Beatles.

The film was so important to him that on September 18, 1968, the Beatles took a break from recording “Birthday” for the White Album to go to McCartney’s house to see the film’s television premiere.

Cochran, in particular, had a particular fascination with music-loving teenagers. He was only 19 at the time, not much older than Lennon or McCartney, and played a gorgeous Gretsch 6120 hollowbody electric guitar. And, as McCartney explains to Parkinson’s audience, it was his “Twenty Flight Rock” that brought him and John Lennon together, laying the foundations for the creation of the Beatles.