The Nerk Twins live: Fox And Hounds, Caversham

This date saw the first of two dates by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, performing as the Nerk Twins at the Fox and Hounds pub in Caversham, Berkshire.

The pub was owned by McCartney’s cousin Bett Robbins and her husband Mike, who had previously worked as Butlins Redcoats. Lennon and McCartney visited them for a week during the Easter holidays, worked behind the bar and performed twice over the weekend.

That spring of 1960, John and I went down to a pub in Reading, The Fox And Hound, run by my cousin Betty Robbins and her husband. We worked behind the bar. It was a lovely experience that came from John and I just hitching off down there. At the end of the week we played in the pub as The Nerk Twins. We even made our own posters.

The pair performed on acoustic guitars and sang without microphones. They opened with ‘The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise’, a song best known to them by the 1953 Les Paul and Mary Ford version. The rest of their set was mainly made of rock ‘n’ roll and country and western songs.

Betty’s husband turned me on to showbusiness in a big way, and the talk we had with him about how we should do the show was very formative. He’d been an entertainments manager hosting talent contests at Butlins, and been on radio. He asked what we were going to open with, and we said ‘Be Bop A Lula’. He told us: ‘No good. You need to open with something fast and instrumental. This is a pub, a Saturday night, what else have you got?’ We said, ‘Well, we do ‘The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise’.’ I played the melody and John did the rhythm. He said, ‘Perfect, start with that, then do ‘Be Bop A Lula’.’ He was good like that, and I would remember his advice years later when we were organising our shows.