After the set Wooler said, 'Come on, I'll take you to meet the lads.' It was so exciting. He grabbed us and we threaded through the audience backstage where George Harrison was standing in the corridor talking to a very good-looking blonde girl. He was wearing a fantastic black leather coat, and later walked out of the Cavern with her, already like a rock star. In the dressing room John Lennon and Paul McCartney were in their undies, getting changed. They were drying themselves with towels because they had just come offstage and were dripping with sweat. They were very handsome. Apart from our brothers, we'd never seen men in underpants before, so us four teenage girls just stood there staring at them. They were very down to earth, and Paul was particularly kind. 'Hiya girls, y'all right?' he said, while John sat there looking at us in a way that was direct and penetrating. Bob Wooler told them, "This is the Liverbirds, they're gonna be the first all-girl group." 'What a great idea,' said Paul, but Lennon was sarcastic. 'Girls don't play guitars,' he said. After we left the dressing room we huffed, 'The cheek of it! We're going to prove him wrong.' Years later we found out more about Lennon, that although he often made sardonic comments he was also sensitive and intelligent, an artist who regretted his disdainful treatment of women in his early career. 'We can't have a revolution that doesn't involve and liberate women. It's so subtle the way you're taught male superiority,' he said in 1971, in an interview with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn for the underground paper Red Mole. It's clear his feelings about women evolved, but we also wonder if what he said that day in the Cavern dressing room was meant to test us, provoke us into making a success of the band. If so, it certainly worked.
The Other Fab Four by Mary McGlory & Sylvia Saunders
