John Lowe (musician)
English pianist (1942–2024)

John Charles "Duff" Lowe (13 April 1942 – 22 February 2024) was an English pianist. In the late 1950s, he played piano for the Quarrymen, the group who would evolve into the Beatles.
Early career
Known to his friends as "Duff", Lowe had known Paul McCartney since 1953, and was invited to play piano with The Quarrymen by McCartney in February 1958.
He was in The Quarrymen for two years, and was there when the band recorded a couple of songs for a vanity disc at Percy Phillips' home studio in Liverpool. The two tracks cut that day were "That'll Be the Day" and "In Spite of All the Danger". Lowe maintained possession of the tracks and, in 1981, sold the recordings to Paul McCartney. Their estimated value was around £12,000. McCartney had the record remastered and the songs appear on the Beatles' Anthology 1 album.
Later career
In 1994, John Lowe played again with the Quarrymen for the album Open for Engagements. Of the 1994 lineup, only Rod Davis (guitar) and Lowe (piano) had played for the Quarrymen in the 1950s.
“John Lowe (musician)” enters the record as english pianist (1942–2024). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Lowe and musician can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Lowe (musician)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.