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here are few things as frustrating as squandering an opportunity; whether it be letting those old McDonalds vouchers run past their expiry date or forgetting to buy a lottery ticket the night your numbers come up. Or leaving your friend John Lennon’s band to become a policeman. This is the unenviable choice that Peter Shotton, John Lennon’s best friend and early bandmate made in 1957, leaving Lennon’s band The Quarrymen only five years before they were catapulted to superstardom on The Ed Sullivan Show. Admittedly, Shotton’s musical prowess left much to be desired; his instrument of choice was an old washboard, which he rubbed a stick along to make an unpleasant percussive noise. John Lennon took his decision to leave the band with characteristic tolerance and good grace, smashing Shotton’s washboard over his head on his birthday. Even more unfortunate was Pete Best, who was ditched as drummer for the Beatles for Ringo Starr, allegedly because he was too handsome. After their performances in Hamburg, girls would swarm round Best, ignoring John, Paul and George. This fired up a whole host of late-adolescent hormonal tensions, and Best was jibbed from the band for Ringo once they got back to England. He did still have time to indulge in arson with the other Beatles, nailing a condom to their landlord’s door and setting it on fire. John Lennon also urinated out of a window onto a passing nun. Not strictly related, but disturbing nonetheless.
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More tragic was the case of Stuart Sutcliffe, another friend of John Lennon’s who is credited with helping come up with the name “Beatles”. He also accompanied The Beatles to Hamburg, fell in love, and left the band. After featuring in an article for the tabloid newspaper The People (headline: “The Beatnik Horror”), he died of a brain haemorrhage in 1962. But what of them now? Conspiracy theories abound, with Stuart Sutcliffe’s sister continuing to insist that Sutcliffe was romantically involved with Lennon, and that his death was brought about after a lovers’ tiff between the two, in which John kicked Stuart in the head. Pete Best went on to join an unsuccessful band called Lee Curtis and the All Stars, married the woman working behind the biscuit counter at Woolworths, featured in a Carlsberg advert (“Probably the Pete Best lager in the world”) and recorded a long and bitter interview on The David Letterman Show. Peter Shotton’s case is more surreal. He ended up becoming a general skivvy for John Lennon in his later years, leaving his family at short notice to keep John company, taking John’s wife to the cinema and essentially being an abused and neglected dogsbody. John at least bought him a Supermarket in Hampshir, and he later started ‘Fatty Arbuckle’ restaurant chain. Perhaps this unfortunate trio had the last laugh. Actually, they definitely didn’t. But at least Peter Shotton got a supermarket out of it.
ALEX HACILLO