Best Friend Pete
Best Friend Pete
In this month’s newsletter, we get to know John’s best friend, and fellow Quarry Bank pupil, Peter Shotton.
But first some…
Beatley News Updates
The Savage Young Beatles
The reaction to the boys' gigs at the Penny Lane festival and at the Jacaranda Club at the conclusion of the recent International Beatles Week festivities in Liverpool have been fantastic, with numerous enthusiastic videos of the Jacandra set popping up on various social media sites. - Thanks to everyone who attended the gigs and helped spread the word about the band.
Throwing things back a couple of months, here’s The Savage Young Beatles performing at The Beatles Story museum during the Eurovision week held in Liverpool in May.
2024 Festivals
Discussions are already underway related to some Beatles festival-related appearances in 2024. Stay tuned for more on that as things get finalized.
Rock out to the new BTWB Playlist
If you enjoy the early rock-n-roll years and the music that inspired the Fab Four you can now enjoy a great selection of songs from the period on the new Before They Were Beatles playlist on Spotify - we even added a few more songs this month to reflect the tunes John and Pete would sing as schoolboys.
Podcast Updates
The Before They Were Beatles podcast - One year ago I posted a note about how delighted I was that the Before They Were Beatles podcast had hit the 10,000 download mark. Here we are one year later just having passed 68,000 downloads! It’s been an unbelievable year of Beatles-related activity, and I can't thank all the folks who have listened to my Fab Four related rambles enough.
Some unforeseen family events have slowed down the the research for our new upcoming series, The Forgotten Beatles - but it is on the way, it may just take a little longer than I originally anticipated.
For more information on what else I have going on with writing, podcasting, and general slice-of-life stuff, check out my regular FREE weekly CAN’T SEE THE FOREST newsletter -
And now on to the good stuff…
1956 - Pete Shotton
“I can barely remember a time when there was no John Lennon in my life,” so starts Pete Shotton’s book on his memories of John (1). The two grew up together in the suburb of Woolton, Liverpool. After John’s mother decided she couldn’t take care of her small son he was taken in by his Aunt Mimi and we went to live with her and her husband, George, at 251 Menlove Avenue in Woolton. Just around the corner, at 83 Vale Road lived another youngster the same age as John, one Peter Shotton.
At the age of six Shotton considered himself the leader of as he put it “a rowdy little gang of boys from the neighborhood,” that included two other boys from Vale Road, Ivan Vaughan and Nigel Whalley (2). But his leadership was soon challenged by the arrival of the boy from around the corner, John Winston Lennon.
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