I also realized that fascinating though the ex-Beatles’ input to my book would have been, it was not essential. The fact was that throughout their career, from scruffy obscurity to stupefying fame, they had only the haziest idea of what was happening to them or why. From the moment Brian Epstein started to manage them, he put them inside a protective bubble that afforded security greater than any band ever enjoyed, or ever will, but also kept them largely in ignorance of what was being done in their name. They had no idea how Epstein fiddled and finessed them into the British charts with the weakest of all their A-sides, “Love Me Do,” nor how, later, he finessed and fiddled them into top billing on the Ed Sullivan Show, on a night that changed the course of American culture. They had no idea about the millions that were lost through botched contracts for Beatles merchandising, nor about Epstein’s tortured private life on the wilder shores of the gay world. And after Epstein’s death, somehow that obscuring, anesthetizing bubble remained unbroken. Even John, with all his angry honesty, never got near to the bottom of his Beatles past. Paul preferred—and still prefers—the glossy showbiz version of myth.
Gaining access to the key background figures was no pushover either. All had been interviewed countless times already: It took the persuasiveness of a cold-calling double-glazing salesman on my part to convince them this book would be different and that I could prompt them to say anything new. I had illuminating talks with George Martin, the Beatles’ nonpareil record producer; with Bob Wooler, the Cavern Club disk jockey who gave them crucial early tips about stage presentation; with Pete Best, the drummer they brutally dumped on the threshold of their success. I drank tea with John’s aunt and childhood guardian, Mimi Smith, and Irish coffee with Michael McCartney, Paul’s younger brother. Brian Epstein’s mother, Queenie, and his brother, Clive, gave me their blessing, as did Millie Sutcliffe, mother of the gifted, tragic “fifth Beatle,” Stuart, and his sister, Pauline. I flew to New York to see Epstein’s former close friend Nat Weiss, and to Los Angeles to see his old lieutenant, and near clone, Peter Brown. I traveled to Hamburg to explore the dives and strip clubs where the Beatles cut their teeth as performers, and to track down Astrid Kirchherr, whose photographs gave them their most durable as well as classiest image.
I also unearthed dozens of minor players in the drama who had never been interviewed before, whose stories were still fresh and undistorted by repetition. There was Joe Flannery, the gently hilarious man who had provided Brian Epstein’s one and only happy, stable gay relationship. There was Nicky Byrne, the dapper Chelsea wheeler-dealer who had presided over the merchandising fiasco in America, and Byrne’s former business partner Lord Peregrine Eliot, heir to the Cornish earldom of St. Germans. There was “Lord Woodbine,” the calypso singer who had accompanied the Beatles on their first trip to Hamburg; Paddy Delaney, the guardsmanlike former doorman of the Cavern Club; Tommy Moore, who briefly became the Beatles’ drummer although old enough to be their father, but then decided he preferred his former job on a forklift truck. Time and again, my research took me back to Liverpool to stay at the Adelphi Hotel, then still glorious, writing up my notes in its Titanic-sized Palm Court, going to sleep at night under blankets bearing the insignia of the old London–Midland Railway. I grew to love the city: its sumptuous Victorian architecture, its scabrous, surreal humor. Listen to almost any Scouser [Liverpudlian] on the street and you understand all about the Beatles and why they captured the planet. Nowhere else can you be told, as a term of affection, that you are “as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.”
Writing a biography is impossible without obsession. And I became obsessed, talking about nothing but the Beatles, thinking about nothing but the Beatles, puzzling and worrying at night over tiny missing links in the narrative, developing one muscle in my brain to an inordinate degree while other muscles grew slack. Wasn’t it going the tiniest bit too far to list all the stallholders and amusements at Woolton church fete where Paul met John in 1957? Would anyone really care exactly how many steps led down from Mathew Street into the Cavern Club? F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comparison of writing with swimming underwater returned to me often in those days, as the seventies staggered toward their end. Like others of my generation I remembered how very different the last months of the previous decade had felt, how the joss-scented sunshine, with Abbey Road playing through every open window, had promised to go on and on forever. We hated to leave the sixties, but everyone seemed to want out of the seventies: to forget flares and platform heels, sideburns and socialism, and stride boldly into the new high-tech Tory utopia of the eighties promised by Margaret Thatcher.
Ironically, the cusp of the eighties brought the strongest ever speculation about a Beatles reunion. In Kampuchea, formerly Cambodia, millions of refugees were fleeing the war between the country’s Vietnamese invaders and Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge. Over Christmas 1979, it was announced that Paul McCartney would headline a series of concerts at London’s Hammersmith Odeon cinema to aid the Red Cross and UNICEF relief effort. When George and Ringo indicated willingness to join Paul onstage, feverish excitement broke out in newsrooms across the hemispheres. But John in New York quickly stamped on any idea that he might complete the reincarnation. Even a personal plea from the United Nations’ secretary-general, Kurt Waldheim, could not move him. “We [the Beatles] gave everything for ten years,” he said. “We gave ourselves. If we played now, anyway, we’d only be four rusty old men.”
A few months later a song came on the radio that sounded vaguely like John—and was John, though you had to listen twice to recognize the voice, purged of anger and wrapped in a relaxed early-sixties-ish, Motown-ish beat. And soon afterward, there he was in the flesh, neither ill nor bald, revealing how he had decided to opt out of the rat race and had spent the past five years as Yoko’s “househusband,” caring for their new son, Sean. Despite the New Man aura, here was the old John, as dry, droll, and helplessly honest as ever. Here he was describing how a sudden urge to create music again had sent him back into the studio to make Double Fantasy, an album with Yoko, celebrating their later life together; here he was being photographed with her in the nudity that had seemed grotesque ten years earlier, but now seemed only natural and rather touching. Here he was age forty, seemingly reborn and “starting over” as the song said, celebrating the first step into middle age, the end of the seventies, the joys of parenthood, the rediscovery of his art, and the continuing freshness and interest of a love affair that, against the whole world’s wishes, seemed to have lasted.
I delivered my manuscript to my British publisher in late November 1980, with a warning that there might be more to come. With John so accessible and talkative again, I had high hopes of persuading him to see me before the book went to press. That hope disappeared with a phone call from a friend in New York in the early hours of December 8.
The scale of the grief after John’s murder was—and remains—something unique in modern times. Unlike the mourning for John F. Kennedy seventeen years earlier, it was not confined largely to the victim’s own homeland. Unlike that for Diana, Princess of Wales, seventeen years later, it had no taint of hype or media manipulation; no sense, as in the Diana aftermath, that people were reacting in a distorted, even dysfunctional way. It was an utterly spontaneous and genuine outpouring of misery across continents by those who felt they had lost an intimate, inspirational friend. I particularly remember the broken voice of a young New Yorker during the candlelit vigil outside the Dakota: “I can’t believe John’s dead… he kept me from dying so many times…” In a supreme irony that the old truant, rebel, and blasphemer would have appreciated, he had become an instant twentieth-century saint.
Millions of fans were now forced to accept, as they never quite had in the preceding nine years, that the Beatles’ career really was now over. The result was a refocus on an oeuvre that had for so long been taken for granted: a new, objective appreciation of its energy and variety, its poetry and humor, its astounding seven-leagu
e leaps from aural primitive painting to Michelangelo masterpiece.
All this, of course, was an outcome I had never dreamed of when I began my book against such heavy discouragement two years earlier. Immediately after December 8, my concerns were the anesthetizing ones of journalism: I had to write a five-thousand-word tribute to John for the front of the Sunday Times Review section as well as advise on a rushed memorial issue of its magazine. I filed my five thousand words in the since outmoded Fleet Street manner, dictating it into the telephone as a copy taker at the office typed it. Not until the very end did full comprehension strike me: This was the boy whose life I had lived vicariously from Menlove Avenue and Quarry Bank High School to the London Palladium, Ed Sullivan, Shea Stadium, Savile Row, and Central Park West. My final half-dozen words of dictation were checked by an involuntary sob.
Shout! was published in Britain in April 1981, and in the United States a couple of months later. It became a best seller in both countries and was translated into a variety of languages, including Estonian. While I was in New York doing promotion Yoko saw me talking about John on the Good Morning America program and invited me to visit her at the Dakota. So I did get there after all, albeit five months too late. My conversation with Yoko became an epilogue to the mass market paperback edition of Shout! It included many surprising sidelights on the Lennons’ relationship, and also her observation—made sadly rather than with any bitterness or malice—that “John used to say no one ever hurt him the way Paul hurt him.”
When Paul read the quote in the British press he took the unusual step of bypassing his usual PR screen and telephoning me personally at my London flat (having presumably obtained my number from the PR man who, some months earlier, bade me “Fuck off”). Unfortunately, I was out when he phoned, and he left no number for me to call him back. I never did find out what he’d wanted, whether to argue with Yoko’s assertion or, more likely, to give me an earful for repeating it.
So that was that, I thought: I’d “done” the Beatles and proved my point that for a biographer the most banally obvious ideas are generally the best ones. Again I put my notes into storage and made plans to move on to other things.
Since 1981, I have written three other music biographies (of the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Buddy Holly), two works of fiction, an autobiography, and television and stage drama as well as journalism on subjects ranging from Tony Blair’s government to World War II. But, try as I might, there has been no moving on from the Beatles.
More than thirty years after their breakup, they dominate the headlines almost as much as in their mid-sixties high noon. Every month or so brings some page-leading fresh twist in the story—a distant cousin of John’s now claiming to have been his closest childhood confidant, a Hamburg matron alleging long-forgotten amours with Paul or George, a Sotheby’s auction of freshly unearthed memorabilia; a lost letter, a doodled lyric, a fragment of reel-to-reel tape. Books on the Beatles, ranging from muck-raking “revelations” to scholarly analyses, now run into the hundreds, and go on multiplying all the time. Their old recording studios on Abbey Road, north London, is a shrine rivaling Elvis Presley’s Graceland, perennially setting some kind of record for how much mourning graffiti can be crammed onto a single wall. To feed this insatiable appetite I myself must have written the equivalent of another couple of biographies in newspaper and magazine articles, commentaries, reviews, reconstructions, and obituaries, and spoken at least a further one aloud in radio and television interviews. Like it or not, I am tagged as a Beatles “expert” for good and all. I have come to dread the light that springs into people’s eyes at parties when the only alternative to clamlike rudeness on my part is to admit I’ve written a book about the Beatles. I know that from here on I shall be allowed to talk about nothing else.
They are, after Winston Churchill, the twentieth century’s greatest standard-bearer for Britain. When we look back over that lowering and ugly hundred years, only two moments give rise to genuine collective national pride: the one in 1940 when we stood alone against Hitler, and the one in the barely formed sixties when four cheeky-faced boys from Liverpool recolonized the world in our name. At times, indeed, they seem to be all we have left as everything once valued about this country slides deeper into neglect and anarchy. Our streets may be overrun by muggers and carjackers, our public transportation a homicidal mess, our hospitals uncaring Third World slums, our schools devalued, our legal system a joke, our police force in retreat, our royal family in ruins. But nothing, it seems, can ever tarnish the glory that was John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
At the start of their career they were mocked for choosing a name that suggested an insect. Perhaps the ultimate sign of their fame is that now in the English language, wherever spoken, a small black creepy-crawlie is, by a long way, only the second image the word “beetle” calls to mind.
Their longevity testifies, of course, to the residual power of the generation that grew up with them: the Chelsea-booted boys and Bibafrocked girls who would one day metamorphose into presidents, prime ministers, captains of industry, television bosses, and newspaper editors. Virtually every Briton and American now in their fifties looks back to the same goldenly privileged mid-sixties youth and cherishes the same clutch of Lennon-McCartney songs, above all, as mementoes of that gorgeous time. Forty years on, shapeless, wrinkled, and balding though they may be, they still find it inconceivable that any other generation could embody the state of being young more perfectly than themselves. Hence, the post-sixties culture that compels no one to yield to anno Domini, where even old-age pensioners can still cling to their bath-shrunk Levis and ponytails and miniskirts. To this worldwide realm of eternal teenagerdom, there is no more instantaneous passport than a Beatles tune.
Yet, immense though the nostalgia market is, it represents only a part of their global constituency. Billions adore them who had no share in their radiant heyday—who, in many cases, were not even born when they ceased to exist as a band. First-generation fans may well smile to recollect how furiously they rejected the pop idols of their own parents; how being a Beatles fan in the early days meant facing a constant barrage of adult disapproval and contempt. Back in the early sixties it would have been extraordinary for a young pop addict to share his or her grandparents’ fondness for some hit-maker of three decades before, like Harry Roy or Debroy Somers and the Savoy Orpheans. Yet today, grandparents and grandchildren listen to Revolver, say, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with the same unreserved delight.
Most potently of all, perhaps, the Beatles are the so-called “Swinging Sixties” incarnate. Britain has a long tradition of spinning history into fantasy worlds—theme parks of the mind, one might call them—from the knights and damsels of Henry V and the lute-playing buccaneers of Good Queen Bess through the posthorns and stagecoaches of Dickens to the Naughty Nineties, the Roaring Twenties, the “blitz spirit” of World War II. But none of these yearningly recollected, endlessly redramatized epochs even begins to compare with what came over stuffy, staid old London between 1964 and 1969. Although every last trace vanished decades ago, millions of foreign tourists annually still come seeking it. You can see them any day of the week, in their drab blue denim crocodiles, from France, Germany, Scandinavia, Japan—everywhere—picking over the souvenir rubbish that now swamps Carnaby Street, treading the no longer motley pavements of Chelsea and Knightsbridge, or lurching purposelessly amid the garbage and beggars of the modern West End.
Liverpool, which took so long to recognize its most priceless civic asset, now has a John Lennon Airport and a permanent exhibition, The Beatles Story, housed in the new Albert Dock development and attracting millions of visitors, that—along with Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts—have set the seal on the city’s recent renaissance. Recent donations to The Beatles Story have included the orange-tinted glasses John Lennon wore when writing and first recording “Imagine,” now valued at one million pounds. Echoing Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gats
by, there is also a giant replica of the glasses, their lenses showing images of John’s major creative influences, the Vietnam War, the peace movement, the “beautiful people” in robes and beads who are now grandparents and retirees.
Other vivid decades seemed grotesque and embarrassing to the ones immediately following. But the swinging Britain of the Beatles grows more modish the further it recedes into history. When Tony Blair brought the Labour Party back to power as New Labour in 1997, he was marketed as the figurehead of a youthful dynamism, creativity, and lightheartedness that evoked the mid-sixties in almost eerie detail. The jaded and broken-down nation Blair’s claque had inherited was rebranded overnight with the sixties-speak imprimatur of “Cool Britannia.” As in the days of his Old Labour predecessor Harold Wilson, 10 Downing Street thronged with pop stars, painters, designers, and couturiers, all eager to hobnob with a premier more hopelessly starstruck and camera-hungry even than the shameless Harold.
The concurrent “Britpop” movement consisted almost wholly of bands in Beatley haircuts playing Beatley songs with Beatley harmonies and enacting shadow plays from Beatles history, one quartet even being shown skipping over a zebra crossing like on the cover of the Abbey Road album. The supposed rivalry between the two leading Britpop bands, Oasis (working-class northern lads) and Blur (middle-class southern lads), was portrayed in exactly the same terms as that between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones thirty-odd years earlier. Psychedelic colors, microskirts, long-pointed shirt collars, Union Jack designs on tote bags… suddenly they were all in business again. Never had there been so virulent an outbreak of what psychologists have come to define as “nostalgia without memory.”