The Beatles were barely adults when they had their first hit. When ‘Love Me Do’ hit the charts, John Lennon was 20, George Harrison was 19, Paul McCartney was a fresh 18-year-old, and Ringo Starr was, well, not in the band yet. But Lennon and McCartney had been a fearsome songwriting duo long before this moment, with some incredible tracks being penned before they could even legally drink.

When John Lennon and Paul McCartney met, the boys were still in school. Lennon was 16, and McCartney was 15, and while at first the former gave the latter grief for being younger, the two quickly bonded over their mutual love for music, rock and roll tastes and even deeper, personal things like the loss of both of their mothers. They were practically inseparable from the day they met, spending all their free time in one another’s kitchens, learning how to make music together. The Beatles’ tight musicality undeniably comes down to the simple fact that Lennon and McCartney figured out songwriting together, with their talent being inseparably linked from that day forward.

Eventually, some of those songs would make it out of their homes and onto the stage. As they became a fixture on the Liverpool live music scene before they were even known as The Beatles, their early tracks were given test runs in front of the local crowds at the Cavern Club. When they were eventually spotted by Brian Epstein, who offered to manage them and put them on track to get a record deal, some early tracks were put on tape and sent out into the world

However, some of their best stayed in the archive for quite some time. ‘One After 909’ is a perfect example, capturing the band’s early skiffle sound but with the forward-facing rock and roll energy they’d dominate later on. The track wouldn’t be properly recorded until 1969 and not released until 1970 on the band’s final album, Let It Be. However, the penman of the song was not the John Lennon singing on the album, but the musician as a boy of only 15 or 16.