From the Beatles to Beaconsfield: A love story with a Mersey beat

John E. Carter doesn’t need the Internet in order to figure out which day of the week March 21, 1961 fell on. It was a Tuesday. Tuesday nights were when John’s band, the Bluegenes (which later morphed into the Swinging Blue Jeans), brought on a special guest at the Cavern in Liverpool. That particular night, he was on stage, introducing a local group making its nighttime debut in the popular, perspiration-drenched cellar club. He did so reluctantly this time, and only at the insistence of club owner Ray McFall. “Our group didn’t want the Beatles on,” said John, 78, who played guitar with the Bluegenes, reminiscing at his home in Beaconsfield. “I’d seen the Beatles, and they were dirty. They were scruffy.” He had seen the not-yet-Fab Four play at a local church, St. Barnabas — where Paul McCartney had sung in the choir — and was put off by what he considered to be the group’s unprofessional attire, raw performance and rough demeanour.

After introducing the leather-clad quartet at the Cavern, John left the club for a pint. When he returned to resume his MCing duties, he was mildly shocked. “George Harrison had broken a string,” he remembered. “Breaking a string on stage — in Liverpool at that time — was a disaster. You’d try to get a new one on and everybody would start singing, ‘Why are we waiting?’ You’d get so flustered while you were trying to tune.” Harrison, however, was sitting at the front of the stage, bantering with his bandmates and the audience while he replaced the string, somehow getting everybody on his side. “I realized these guys really had something with their stage presence,” John said. “They kept the audience quiet while they made silly remarks, laughing and joking. Even the Bluegenes would never, ever get away with that.”