#nerk twins

A very nerky Nerk Twin with his hot Nerk Twin boyfriend.

Asking for any and all content about the Nerk Twins and the Caversham hitchhiking trip that John & Paul took in 1960. Including fics that have been written in this setting.

23 April 1960

"The admission of Stuart into the band may have seemed a simple solution to an ongoing problem, but it also created a new tension. John didn't have a monopoly on jealousy. Paul could be jealous, too. Once it had been John and Pete Shotton, inseparable friends and partners, and, as Pete had noticed, John always needed a partner. Then Paul had replaced Pete, and Lennon and McCartney had been born. Over months that friendship had grown into something more than the swapping of chords and lyrics, and the high harmony that Paul would sing over John's lower voice. In fact that Easter of 1960 John and Paul would even sing as a duo, when they hitch-hiked to Caversham in the south of England where a friend was running a pub. For a week, John and Paul, who had to sleep together in the same single bed, would entertain the regulars under the name the Nerk Twins. They were best friends and there was a mutual admiration between the two. While John would always recognise Paul's greater gift for melody and musical craft – no matter what he might sometimes say years later – Paul admired John for his unalloyed bravery in speaking his mind, and his ability to summarise a thought in a single, often witty, line. There was more. When John had been living at Mendips, Paul would sometimes go over on his bicycle to find him at a typewriter in his bedroom composing a nonsense piece. Or, perhaps, it might have been a poem that John was writing – something that played with words and images in the style of Dylan Thomas by way of radio star Stanley Unwin, whose corruption of everyday English turned sentences into clever-sounding nonsense. John liked to call that style gobblede gook, a wartime word he'd picked up from the radio, when presenters poked fun at seemingly unintelligible official documents. Always a great talker, John loved words and slogans and enjoyed bending and reshaping their meanings. And Paul, who was studying English Literature at school, and seeing himself as a culture vulture, was impressed. At one point the two even started to write a play together, before quickly deciding that they didn’t know what to write about and that song lyrics were more their metier. So, with a friendship that was now based on more than music, it was inevitable that, with the introduction of Stuart to the group, Paul began to feel like an outsider. It was hardly Stu's fault that John had dragged him into the band. But feeling increasingly cast aside, the perfectionist in Paul couldn't help hearing the wrong notes the new bassist was playing. John would have heard those wrong notes too, but must have consoled himself with the thought that, given time, Stuart would improve. He would, but he would never be good enough. When the occasion demanded, however, John had an infinite capacity to deny the evidence of his own ears."