Paperback Reader, yeah! yeah!yeah
What I learned from reading 12 books about The Beatles in 12 months.
In the year 2000 I moved departments at work. My co-workers asked what I would like as a leaving gift. I suggested the book of the The Beatles Anthology as it was getting loads of promotional coverage at the time as an ‘authorised’ multi-media event with albums and films by the surviving ‘threetles’. Twenty two years later, that book is the bane of my life. It’s just too big. No shelf can contain it. It’s one of those items that cannot find a place in my home.
Moving it around my room for the umpteenth time in January last year, I was struck by the number of books about The Beatles that I had in my collection that I had not read, or had the tell-tale sign of the receipt-bookmark about a third of the way through, where it had been abandoned. Their story is one of the greatest to ever be told. Over the course of 10 years they transformed themselves and popular culture in a way that has not been repeated. At the time that I was trying to force Anthology into another impossible space, I was gripped by Peter Jackson’s re-editing of the Let it Be sessions footage for Get Back (2021); revealing the band in a fresh, intimate way.
As the excellent Nothing is Real podcast says, we think we know The Beatles, but how much do we really know The Beatles? I was going to find out by reading 12 books about The Beatles in 12 months.
SWINGING
The project got off to an excellent start with One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in Time (2020) by Craig Brown as it provided a foundation for additional reading. Brown tackles the subject by zooming in on key points in the story in some detail. Often it is the ephemeral vignettes that are the most revealing. For example, John Lennon lost his temper at Bob Wooler at Paul McCartney’s 21st Birthday party on 18th June, 1963. Wooler had made insinuations about Lennon’s holiday with Brian Epstein. The severity of the attack varies, depending on different versions of the same story covered in interviews, and biographies by Hunter Davies (the only official biographer, 1968) and Phillip Norman, and related accounts from other attendees at the party. Brown lightly dissects the incident to demonstrate the difficulty of Beatle-ology: there are so many different accounts of the events surrounding the band, and the individuals in the band that it is hard to determine facts from the myth.
Brown’s book is filled with loads of entertaining details at the periphery of the story. It includes an account of his amusing trip to the Liverpool homes of Lennon and McCartney which are now in the care of The National Trust. They have been restored as a facsimile of what they would have been like in the late 1950s when they lived there. I was inspired to follow in his footsteps to discover the Mendips, Lennon’s childhood home where he lived with his formidable Aunt Mimi, and 20 Forthlin Road, McCartney’s home where you can almost hear them composing She Loves You… it’s so atmospheric. I didn’t realise at the time, I was on the same trip as You Tuber, Elliot Roberts.
I read revised versions of Davies and Norman’s Shout! The True Story of The Beatles (1981) as I was familiar the originals. Norman has done some back-peddling since the waspish first edition, but it still retains the unnecessary side-swipes at McCartney. If Get Back has taught us anything, McCartney was the powerhouse that kept things going on track, and his role as the convener-in-chief is apparent in Paul Du Noyer’s Conversations with McCartney (2015), a collection of interviews that build a picture of his life post-Beatles: with all the ups and downs along the way and his attitude towards the legacy of those ten years.
MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME
For contemporary accounts Love Me Do, The Beatles Progress (1964) by Michael Braun captures some of the vim they had back then, as it amplifies their cheekiness which everyone found endearing, but here it has a harder edge. Brian Epstein’s own memoir, A Cellarful of Noise (1964), reflects upon how he catapulted the unique charisma from its parochial roots to a wider audience. There’s a slightly aloof tone to his version of events, as his perspective is about the art of good-mannered band management. His old-school reserve is apparent on every page. The Velvet Mafia, The Gay Men who Ran the Swinging Sixties (2021) by Darryl W Bullock, provides more detail of the context that Epstein was working within. The London music scene was dominated by gay men who were incredibly powerful, yet their lifestyle was considered unlawful. They were writing the rules of modern entertainment management as they went along, while facing the lingering prejudices from an older age. The book concentrates on one of Epstein’s friends and mentors Larry Parnes “and pence” who was the original British pop-impresario who discovered Tommy Steele, Bobby Fury and Marty Wilde, among others.
The social background and the coalescing of political and cultural forces of the late 50s and early 60s produced The Beatles, as much as the Trans-Atlantic exchange of musical influences. To understand these factors you can do worse than reaching for Dominic Sandbook’s breezy, but engaging White Heat: A History of Britain in The Swinging Sixties (2006). Chapter 14 covers The Beatles specifically, but they harmonise the rest of the period. It was a time of faltering optimism amidst the harsh economic realties that the country faced.
However, if you really want to nail, with forensic certainty, the factors that shaped the emergence of The Beatles, then Mark Lewishon’s ‘partial’ Magnum Opus All These Years: The Beatles. Volume 1: Tune In (2013), which is a phenomenal social history. It’s not only fantastically researched it’s written with a vivid verve that paints a picture of those early years from 1845-1962. The formative heritage of their parents to the band’s beginnings, their move to Hamberg. The story ends at the precipice of global fame. I say ‘partial’ magnum opus as this is the first thousand pages of a trilogy.
AND IN THE END …
I was always more fascinated with the later music of The Beatles (the blue album). Their mature work appealed to me as it seemed exotic and intriguing. Perhaps thats why I found the Get Back so compelling: it challenged everything that I assumed. There’s a romance to the formation to the band, but ‘the end game’ when their identities have become more complex, there is drama. The perfect companion the Get Back film is And in the End: The Last Days of The Beatles (1919) by Ken McNab, which is ‘what happened next’ in 1969 and how the meeting with manager Alan Klein, mentioned by Lennon in the film, would predicate the ultimate end of the group. 1969 was an incredible year in the story and this book does a great job of trying to be even-handed in its assessment of what happened during this fractious period.
The end of The Beatles is only the beginning. If you want more details of how dozens of lawyers sent their children to Eton on the backs of legal battles, then Peter Doggett’s You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of The Beatles (2009) is a Kafkaesque loop of suing and counter-suing each other. Compelling, yet dispiriting reading.
THE LOVE YOU MAKE
Concurrent to reading about The Beatles, I listened to them too. I went systematically, track by track, listening carefully armed with my newly acquired knowledge from reading thousands of words about them. By my side is the ultimate companion, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles and The Sixties (1994) providing me insight for what to think while listening. Indispensable.
I got a great deal of enrichment re-listening to all of the albums. I never really listened to them closely before, as many of them are so familiar that we take them for granted. That said, I still feel that their status as a cultural phenomena is more interesting than the music. John Higg’s book Love and Let Die, is the only book I added to the collection during project as it published late in 2022. It starts with the synchronicity that Dr No, the first Bond film, was released on the same day as the first The Beatles’ single, Love, Love me do. He weaves together a tapestry of coincidences to try and work out the British psyche: the conflict between Love and Death, from that moment sixty years ago to the present day. Excellent.
The project is over and I still haven’t read Anthology; where can I put it?