The greatest Beatles album you have ever READ! CRAIG BROWN’s fresh take on the Fab Four

Hard to believe, but next month sees the 50th anniversary of the day The Beatles broke up. 

The four of them had been together for under eight years, Ringo having joined John, Paul and George in the summer of 1962. 

Yet as President Obama noted when presenting Sir Paul McCartney with an award at the White House, in that short time they had ‘changed the way that we listened to music, thought about music, and performed music, forever’. 

Even Her Majesty the Queen — hardly your typical fan — said in a speech on the occasion of her golden wedding anniversary: ‘What a remarkable 50 years they have been for the world… Think what we would have missed if we had never heard The Beatles.’ 

It is hard to believe but next month sees the 50th anniversary of the day The Beatles (pictured in 1965) broke up

From the moment they became famous, they were pursued by reporters asking them what they were going to do when the bubble burst. Ringo Starr, in many ways the most pragmatic of the four, thought he would operate a chain of hair salons in the North East. 

Yet the Beatle bubble never burst; even after they broke up, it just kept getting bigger and bigger. I close my new book about The Beatles with a prediction made by the philosopher and politician Bryan Magee, back in 1967. 

‘Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be an unthinkingly accepted part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?’ he asked. 

It’s hard to think of a more off-target prediction. In 2020, there can scarcely be a person on the planet who would not have a Beatles song in their head. 

There are more than 1,000 Beatles tribute bands in the world today, and many of them — The Tefeatles from Guatemala, Rubber Soul from Brazil, Abbey Road from Spain — have been together longer than The Beatles. 

Britain’s Bootleg Beatles and Australia’s Beatnix have both been going for 40 years, or five times as long as The Beatles. And their influence extends well beyond music. Would our clothes, our hair, our way of life be the same had they not existed? 

President Putin told Paul McCartney that hearing The Beatles as a boy growing up in the Soviet Union was like ‘a gulp of freedom’. 

His predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev, went even further: ‘I believe the music of The Beatles taught the young people of the Soviet Union that there is another life.’ 

Pictured: John Lennon with Yoko Ono in 1968

Pictured: John Lennon with Yoko Ono in 1968

Other groups had a front man; your favourite was pre-selected for you. No one would ever pick Hank Marvin over Cliff Richard, say, or Mike Smith over Dave Clark. But with The Beatles there was a choice, so you had to pick a favourite, and the one you picked said a lot about who you were. 

For their American fan Carolyn See, there was, ‘Paul, for those who preferred androgynous beauty; John, for those who prized intellect and wit; George because he possessed that ineffable something we would later recognize as spiritual life; and Ringo, patron saint of mess-ups the world over.’

Linda Grant favoured Ringo ‘for reasons that are beyond me’. There was, she recalls, ‘a real goody-two-shoes at school who liked Paul. George seemed a bit nothing. John seemed off-limits, too intimidating’. 

Ringo was the Beatle for girls who lacked ambition. Picking him as your favourite suggested a touch of realism. It went without saying that the others were already taken, but you might just stand an outside chance with the drummer. Helen Shapiro was only 16 but already a major star when The Beatles toured as one of her supporting acts at the start of 1963. 

John’s aunt met Yoko and thought: ‘God, what is that?’ 

Soon after embarking on his relationship with Yoko Ono, John Lennon took her to meet Aunt Mimi in Poole. 

It was never going to be the easiest of introductions. Mimi told James Montgomery about the encounter. 

‘He came in all bright and breezy — typical John — and she followed behind. I took one look at her and thought, “My God, what is that?” 

‘Well, I didn’t like the look of her right from the start. She had long, black hair, all over the place, and she was small. She looked just like a dwarf to me. I told John what I felt while she was outside, looking across the bay. I said to him, “Who’s the poisoned dwarf, John?” 

‘Well, I didn’t know what it was all about. I wondered who it was. And he said, “It’s Yoko.” I didn’t think anything of it, you know. But I did say, “What do you do for a living?” She said, “I’m an artist.” I said, “That’s very funny, I’ve never heard of you!” While John was in the loo, Aunt Mimi informed Yoko that she had always brought him up to have good manners, and that was why he would always stand up when a woman came into the room. 

‘On his return, she warned him of what happened to the Duke of Windsor. The Duke had been remarkably popular, she said, but the public had gone off him when he married Mrs Simpson. “He lost his popularity, and John, you’d better know that.” Mimi remembered John brushing her lecture away. 

‘He laughed it off, but he knew I didn’t like her and he knew I was a good judge of character. I couldn’t see what he saw in her and I thought it was wrong and nothing good would come of it.’ 

Like any other girl, she had her favourite. ‘John was married but nobody knew about it at the time so, along with a few thousand other girls, I had a crush on him… George was the most serious. 

‘He would occasionally talk about what he was going to do when he was rich, and try to pick my brains about the financial side of things. I couldn’t have been a lot of help. I still wasn’t interested in the money. Paul remained the spokesman. Ringo was the quiet one.’ 

Pattie Boyd first met the Beatles after being chosen to act as one of the schoolgirls in A Hard Day’s Night. 

‘On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing. Paul was cute, and George, with velvet-brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I’d ever seen.’ 

Unlike millions of other fans, Pattie was able to take her choice a stage further. Reader, she married him. There was a Beatle to suit every taste. As a fan, you expressed yourself by picking one over the others. 

Each personified a different element: John fire, Paul water, George air, Ringo earth. Even their friends liked to paint them in primary colours, with sharply contrasting characters, like one of those jokes about the Englishman, the Welshman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. 

Carolyn See noted how, in A Hard Day’s Night, they enacted their given personas: ‘Winsome Paul, witty John, thoughtful George, goofy Ringo.’ 

The actor Victor Spinetti once told this story about them. While filming Help! in Salzburg, he caught flu and was confined to bed. 

‘The Beatles came to my hotel room to visit. The first to arrive was George Harrison. He knocked, came in and said, “I’ve come to plump your pillows. Whenever anyone’s ill in bed they have to have their pillows plumped.” He then plumped my pillows and left. 

‘John Lennon came in next and marched up and down barking, “Sieg heil, Schweinhund! The doctors are here. They’re coming to experiment upon you. Sieg heil! Heil Hitler!” And he left. 

‘Ringo then came in, sat down by the bed, picked up the hotel menu and read out loud, as if to a child, “Once upon a time there were three bears. Mummy bear. Daddy bear and Baby bear.” Then he left. 

‘Paul opened the door an inch, asked, “Is it catching?” “Yes,” I said, on which he shut the door and I never saw him again.’ Paul was being the pragmatist as usual. He knew that if he or the others had caught flu, there’d be no filming. 

Working alongside Brian Epstein, Alistair Taylor observed the various ways they dealt with their earnings. 

‘Every month, Brian would issue each of the boys with their financial statements, all neatly and accurately itemised, and sealed in a white manila envelope.

 ‘They reacted very different. John would instantly crumple it up and stuff it in his pocket. George might have a look. Ringo certainly couldn’t understand it and didn’t waste any time trying. 

‘Paul was the one who opened it carefully and would sit in the corner of the office for hours going meticulously through it.’ 

Of course, The Beatles revolved around the contrasting characters of Paul and John. Their recording engineer Geoff Emerick watched the two of them at work. 

‘They couldn’t have been two more different people. Paul was meticulous and organised, he always carried a notebook around with him, in which he methodically wrote down lyrics and chord changes in his neat handwriting. 

‘In contrast, John seemed to live in chaos: he was constantly searching for scraps of paper that he’d hurriedly scribbled ideas on. 

‘Paul was a natural communicator; John couldn’t articulate his ideas well. Paul was the diplomat; John was the agitator. Paul was soft-spoken and almost unfailingly polite; John could be a right loudmouth and quite rude. 

‘Paul was willing to put in long hours to get a part right; John was impatient, always ready to move on to the next thing. Paul usually knew exactly what he wanted and would often take offence at criticism; John was much more thick-skinned and was open to hearing what others had to say.’ 

John was brittle, demanding and caustic; Paul emollient, engaging, agreeable. But there were those who detected something singleminded, perhaps even self-serving, beneath Paul’s charm. 

Tony Barrow, who worked as The Beatles’ press officer, felt: ‘John made the most noise, especially with Brian Epstein. But it was Paul who let John do the heavy lifting when there was a dispute with Brian. Then Paul would finish the persuasion.

‘John would make Brian cry at times, but Paul, more of a politician, would use a quiet influence to get his way.’ 

Paul was baby-faced, meticulous, perky, diplomatic, energetic, tuneful, ingratiating, optimistic, outgoing, cheery, sentimental, solicitous. John was angular, slapdash, maudlin, difficult, lazy, dissonant, edgy, sardonic, pessimistic, solipsistic, sulky, cool, brutal. 

Paul considered himself loveable; John believed himself unlovable. The peculiar power of The Beatles’ music, its magic and its beauty, lies in the intermingling of these opposites. 

Other groups were raucous or reflective, progressive or traditional, solemn or upbeat, folksy or sexy or aggressive. But when you hear a Beatles album, you feel that all human life is there. 

As John saw it, when they were composing together, Paul ‘provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for sadness, the discords, a certain bluesy edge’. 

It was this finely balanced pushme/pull-you tension that made their greatest music so expressive, capable of being both universal and particular at one and the same time. 

Even as teenagers, they approached their songwriting with a sense of purpose. Paul would bunk off school, and John would join him in the McCartney house in Forthlin Road. Paul would open his school note – book, with its blue lines on white paper, and write, ‘Another LennonMcCartney original’ on the next page. 

Then the two of them would get straight down to composing another song. Looking back, Paul struggled to recall a fruitless afternoon. ‘We never had a dry session . .. In all the years, we never walked away from a session saying, “F*** it, we can’t write one”.’ 

Sometimes, their contributions to the same song were so keenly differentiated that they seemed to be playing up to their caricatures. Paul comes up with ‘We can work it out’ and John immediately undercuts it — ‘Life is very short’. Paul sings ‘It’s getting better’ and John butts in with, ‘Can’t get much worse’. 

In A Day In The Life, it is John, compulsive reader of newspapers, who just has to laugh at the man who’s blown his mind out in a car, while it is the happy-go-lucky Paul who wakes up, gets out of bed, drags a comb across his head. 

Many of their songs have bright melodies but dark lyrics, or dark melodies but bright lyrics. The words of Help!, Run For Your Life, Misery and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer are all about depression and psychosis, but they are set to jaunty tunes. 

Deprived of this tug-of-war between the two competing partners, their solo songs often lack that dimension of otherness, with John falling back on self-pity and Paul giving in to whimsy. As time went by, their collaboration dwindled, and they composed more and more of their songs separately. 

But they remained driven by a shared sense of competition; each sought the other’s approval. ‘It was an ideal match,’ wrote the critic Ian MacDonald. 

‘They laughed at the same things, thought at the same speed, respected each other’s talent, and knew that their unspoken urge to best and surprise each other was crucial to the continuing vitality of their music.’ 

One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles In Time by Craig Brown will be published by HarperCollins on April 2 at £20. © 2020 Craig Brown. To order a copy for £16 (p&p free, 20 per cent discount) go to mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155. Offer valid until April 5, 2020. 

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