When Left Became Right | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Some of you will be left-handed, just like two members of the Beatles.

Those of you old enough to have been around when the Beatles exploded on to the scene will be aware that lefties were sometimes persuaded, cajoled, encouraged and even bullied into being right-handed – Ringo being a case in point.

I was lucky and so was Paul. We were ‘forgiven’ for being left-handed although society never went out of its way to accommodate us and people like us.

I used to spend time with friends in guitar shops in my teenage years, but while they could try out almost anything that they wanted, I was left to ask the man behind the counter: ‘do you have any left-handed guitars in stock- anything at all?’

If I was lucky, there would be one left-handed guitar in the shop out of hundreds, but praise to Fender here – this company looked after lefties more than any other. I’m told that Gibson has actually stopped making guitars for lefties, which is extremely depressing if true.

I ended up trying out right-handed guitars, and while I could do the fingering for many chords upside-down, the situation was far from satisfactory. To this day, I have never played a left-handed bass guitar because I never found a shop that had one in stock. I’ve tried a good few regular ones but not the real deal – a genuine leftie bass. 

Back in the day, aspiring guitarists would buy books that displayed chord fingering, but instead of saying ‘fret-hand’ they would say ‘left hand’, and instead of saying ‘picking-hand’ they would say ‘right hand’. Lefties quickly got used to this but it was still annoying.

When I was at primary (junior) school, my mum promised me I could have long hair if I tried out for violin class, so I gave it a go. I lasted five minutes and was sent packing. When I tried to play the thing left-handed, I was immediately dismissed. Let’s face it, how often do you see a leftie in an orchestra? 

If you are left-handed, you learn what it’s like to be part of a minority. You just don’t fit in. You have to innovate more than most but I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t want to change it. We lefties like being different, even if the right-handed world demands that we ‘conform’ or pretends that we don’t exist.

The fact that the Beatles had an obvious leftie in Paul McCartney was enormously satisfying because it told the right-handed community that lefties were their equals – and it needed to be told. Later on, Jimi Hendrix would also play a part in highlighting left-handedness. With those two icons being left-handed, corrie-fisted types had a couple of real heavyweights demonstrating that the sinistral breed had as much legitimacy as everyone else.

It’s still a right-handed world but it’s cool now to be a leftie instead of queer, and that’s progress.