In the beginning…

From skiffle to shoegaze, all young musicians forming groups started out by learning to play their record collections. The Beatles were no exception. In fact, they were a perfect example, as shown by the very small number of handwritten set lists left from the earliest days of their performing career.

Such lists in an artist’s hand are among the most covetable items of rock memorabilia, particularly when produced by a bunch of schoolboys taking their first steps on the way to global fame. Not just the written record of a specific performance, these are a statement of where the artist’s development stood at that particular time, and of the decisions they were taking.

A Beatles set list is in a class of its own. To possess one is like owning Alf Ramsey’s scribbled team sheet for the 1966 World Cup final or Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography notes for the world premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913. Only 14 are known to exist, 10 of them in private hands – of which only eight were handwritten by an actual Beatle.

Two of these, dating from 1960 and 1963, are now offered at auction at Bonhams New York, and each with its own story to tell. Together they provide a powerful illustration of how the biggest pop group the world has ever known made the crucial progression from amateurs playing other people’s songs for the entertainment of local audiences, to the beginning of their existence as master songwriters by appointment to the entire world.

An important handwritten set list by Paul McCartney for the Majestic Ballroom gig, 17 April 1963, written on the back of a Parlophone Records publicity postcard Estimate: $150,000 - 250,000

The Majestic Ballroom in Luton

‘I Saw Her Standing There’: teenagers queuing for the Majestic Ballroom gig in 1963

An important handwritten set list by Paul McCartney for the Beatles’ residency at the Grosvenor Ballroom, Liscard, Wallasey, 1960 Estimate: $150,000 - 250,000

The Grosvenor Ballroom today

When John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney first got together as Liverpool schoolboys in 1958, they were inspired – like thousands of others – by the popularity of the skiffle boom, which required only the most rudimentary skills and equipment to go along with their youthful energy and enthusiasm. Calling themselves the Quarrymen (after Quarry Bank High School, attended by John), they borrowed their repertoire mostly from records by Lonnie Donegan, Britain’s number one skiffle ace. Soon they would have learnt that Donegan himself borrowed songs such as ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘Cumberland Gap’ and ‘Railroad Bill’, from American recordings by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie and others.

This rustic music, filled with echoes of a receding past, turned out to be merely a stepping stone to the future. Before long they would add songs from the rock ’n’ roll records that were forming a soundtrack for a new world of blue jeans, jukeboxes, milkshakes, chrome tail fins, ponytails, hamburgers and bubblegum. In the Britain of the late 1950s, this neon-lit dreamworld seemed far beyond the horizon. But one way to bring it closer was to copy its music. That, at least, was achievable.

To reflect the change, the Quarrymen were trying out new names. They spent a few months calling themselves Johnny and the Moondogs. But it didn’t stick, and they returned to its predecessor until, in the early weeks of 1960, Lennon and his friend Stuart Sutcliffe, a fellow student at Liverpool College of Art, started playing around with words.

Sutcliffe had joined the group even though he played no instrument. They needed a bass guitarist, preferably a good-looking one, and he was persuaded to buy an instrument with the £90 paid for one of his abstract paintings by the Liverpool-based football pools magnate and art collector John Moores. Using the name of the Crickets, Buddy Holly’s group, as their inspiration, Sutcliffe and Lennon came up with Beetles – or Beatals, or Silver Beatles, or Silver Beetles, which is what they were on 4 June 1960 when they played the first of 11 dates that summer at the Grosvenor Ballroom in Liscard, a district of Wallasey across the Mersey from their home city.

They were also experimenting with more glamorous individual identities. John and Stu were art students, Paul was finishing his A-levels, and George, having just left school, was an apprentice electrician and already chafing against the boredom. In letters to promoters, they referred to themselves as Johnny Guitar, Stuart de Staël (after Sutcliffe’s favourite painter), Paul Ramon and Carl Harrison. They had yet to find a permanent drummer. The unsuitable Tommy Moore, a 28-year-old factory worker, was replaced in mid-June by Norman Chapman, who was called up for National Service the following month, leaving them to play for a while with just guitars and bass to accompany the lead vocals, shared by John and Paul.

Lennon and McCartney had written their first songs as individuals in 1957; their first attempts at collaboration came the following year, but even by the summer of 1960, only one original composition appears on the list of 25 tunes for the Grosvenor Ballroom residency written in the very neat hand of the 17-year-old Paul. The others are drawn from the repertoires of the American artists they worshipped, including Elvis Presley (‘That’s Alright Mama’), Eddie Cochran (‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So’), Ray Charles (‘What’d I Say’, rendered by Paul as ‘What Did I Say?’), Buddy Holly (‘Words of Love’), Chuck Berry (‘Little Queenie’), Jerry Lee Lewis (‘Whole Lotta Shakin’’), Fats Domino (‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ and ‘Whole Lotta Loving’), the Everly Brothers (‘Cathy’s Clown’), and the more obscure Jodimars (‘Clarabella’).

Paul divides this pool of material into a basic 13 songs, plus six described as being “with John”, five “possibles” and one “for John to try”. Asterisks are added to ten, indicating “ones which aren’t done every week”. He gives the title of their sole original composition as ‘One After 9.09’ rather than ‘One After 909’, which is how it appeared when they eventually recorded it for the Let It Be album in 1970, making it clearer that the reference was to the time of the train on which the object of the singer’s affections would arrive. And he adds a short list which forms an aide-memoire to himself: “Words Strings Plec[trum]”.

This is the earliest known documentation of the group’s full repertoire, to be performed in a venue notorious for outbreaks of violence among the young patrons at its weekly Big Beat Nights. At least the mayhem prepared the Beatles for the volatile audiences they would encounter in Hamburg a few weeks later.

By the spring of 1963, they were the nation’s new darlings. McCartney had switched to bass guitar when Sutcliffe left after 18 months as a Beatle, and they had found a satisfactory drummer, one Ringo Starr, in time for their first recording session. ‘Love Me Do’ had nibbled at the Top 20 and its successor, ‘Please Please Me’, had made it to No.2. On 17 April, after finishing a 21-date tour supporting the American singers Tommy Roe and Chris Montez, they were booked to play at the Majestic Ballroom in Luton. Their third single, ‘From Me to You’, had just been released and was about to become their first UK No.1. Two nights earlier, they had been at the Riverside Dancing Club, Tenbury Wells; a day later, they would be on stage at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC’s Swinging Sound ’63 concert.

The Beatles’ early line-up, who performed in Hamburg in 1960

Silver before gold: poster for the Grosvenor gig, where the then ‘Silver Beetles’ performed

The Beatles performing in 1963

McCartney scrawled the running order for the Luton gig on the back of an EMI promotional postcard. The set began with ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, the lead-off track from their album, and ended with their latest hit. In between came two numbers by the R&B singer Arthur

Alexander, ‘A Shot of Rhythm and Blues’ and ‘Anna’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, James Ray’s R&B waltz ‘If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody’, a rockedup version of ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, written by Stephen Foster almost exactly 100 years earlier, and two more of their own songs, ‘Thank You Girl’ and ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’, both familiar from their album. The raucous encore was ‘Long Tall Sally’.

Later that night, in answer to a request from their driver on behalf of his daughter, Paul fished out the postcard, wrote “Lots of love to LORRAINE from THE BEATLES” on the other side, added his autograph, and got the other three to do likewise. It’s certainly not hard to imagine Lorraine’s face the next morning.

Former editor of Melody Maker, Richard Williams is an award-winning writer about music and sport

List and shout

Mark Lewisohn, the acknowledged world authority on the Beatles, sets the scene:

How important and rare are handwritten documents from the Beatles?

The Beatles played something like 1,400 live shows and only a tiny fraction of those have a set list that has survived. The list from 1960 is the earliest-ever written documentation of what they played on stage. As it’s written beautifully in Paul McCartney’s hand, it really is a special piece.

Describe what a performance by the Beatles in 1960 would be like.

They had only just become the Beatles when this set list was written, but they’d been together since 1957 under various names. At the time of this show, they were just kids with no money, and so their equipment was raw, the performance was raw and you wouldn’t really recognise their sound from what it became when they started making records. In 1960, they were either a four-piece or a five-piece. If they were a four, they were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Stuart Sutcliffe. Sometimes they would add a drummer, Tommy Moore, but often it was Paul with the sticks. He would try to sing while drumming with a microphone tied to broomstick wedged between his thighs.

How often were the band performing at this point? And where did they rank in the local pecking order?

This 1960 show was at the Grosvenor Ballroom in Wallasey, the other side of the River Mersey. At this point, the Beatles hadn’t even played in Liverpool, so they weren’t in the pecking order at all. A couple of months later, they went to Germany, which made all the difference. But at the time of this show, the Beatles were only just starting to gig regularly. This piece of paper happens to survive from that period.