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Before The Beatles were a foursome, the band consisted of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best, and Stuart Sutcliffe. Before Ringo Starr joined the group, Sutcliffe quit, and they fired Best. Lennon was close friends with Sutcliffe, but he admitted that he could treat him poorly. He said that McCartney treated Sutcliffe worst of all.

Stuart Sutcliffe sits in a wooden chair. John Lennon wears a suit and stands in fron mof a blank wall.
Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon | Collect/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images; Cyrus Andrews/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Stuart Sutcliffe was a guitarist with The Beatles

Lennon and Sutcliffe met as students at the Liverpool College of Art. Sutcliffe was a talented painter who helped Lennon with his classes. In exchange, Lennon taught his friend about music. After selling a painting, Sutcliffe used his money to buy a guitar. He joined Lennon’s band with Harrison and McCartney.

Sutcliffe was an amateur player, but he helped the band obtain a second amplifier. He and Lennon also named the band. They wanted a pun that referenced the Beat Generation and Buddy Holly’s band The Crickets and landed on The Beatles. The name stuck with the band long after Sutcliffe exited the group. 

John Lennon said The Beatles could be mean to Stuart Sutcliffe

Lennon considered Sutcliffe a soul mate, but he tended to treat him poorly.

“He was a bit aggressive at first. If he found he could browbeat you then you were under his thumb,” a friend, Billy Harry, told The Guardian. “He used to treat Stuart [Sutcliffe] really badly at times, humiliate him in front of people.”

Lennon admitted to treating Sutcliffe poorly, though he said that the entire band did it too. According to him, McCartney treated Sutcliffe the worst.

“We were awful to him sometimes,” Lennon said, per The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “Especially Paul, always picking on him. I used to explain afterwards to him that we didn’t dislike him, really.”

Sutcliffe’s girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, recalled an onstage fight between McCartney and Sutcliffe. Though she couldn’t remember the exact cause, it had to do with something McCartney said to Sutcliffe about her.

John Lennon was devastated when Stuart Sutcliffe died

Sutcliffe ultimately left The Beatles, but not because he was the butt of his bandmates’ jokes. He wanted to pursue a career as a painter. In 1962, Sutcliffe died of a brain hemorrhage. Kirchherr broke the news to The Beatles and said that Lennon was most strongly affected when he heard.

“John went into hysterics,” Kirchherr said, per The New Yorker. “We couldn’t make out . . . whether he was laughing or crying because he did everything at once. I remember him sitting on a bench, huddled over, and he was shaking, rocking backward and forward.”

Lennon decorated his bedroom with photographs of Sutcliffe and paintings of his. According to Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, Lennon spoke of Sutcliffe often. She noted that “there was not a period in our lives” where Lennon didn’t discuss his friend. According to Ono, he thought that he and Sutcliffe were “soul mates.”

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