It is of course the classic period of the Beatles I like best and am most concerned with here. I never did become as fascinated by all the later legal arguments or the rows between them at the time of their breakup.
I also find my eyes glazing over when the experts start going on about the various versions of albums, about the bootlegs, the minutiae of each recording session, where they were each day, if not each minute, of every year. I leave that to the modern Beatles Brains. They know so much.
The books about them in the future will grow much fatter, in multiple volumes, as authors go down even more side alleyways, telling us all about the lives of minor characters, giving us exhaustive details of minor events.
I am of course impressed and pleased by their diligence, especially by the work and research of Mark Lewisohn, and by the fact that people who never met the Beatles, or saw them play live, should be keeping up the research, the interest, the passion, ensuring that the flag is being carried and will in turn be handed over to the generations to come.
It’s the music that matters most, of course. The Beatles gave us 150 songs that will remain for ever, as long as the world has the breath to hum the tunes.
This is the book that tried to cover that period, when they were at their most productive. But first, let’s go back to how I came to write the book in the very first place…
The Beatle I first met was Paul in September 1966. It was a great year, 1966. In July, England won the World Cup at Wembley, England’s first-ever world success. I sold the film rights of my first novel, which had come out the previous year, to United Artists, and I was commissioned by BBC TV to write a Wednesday play. In October 1966 there was the world premiere of Georgy Girl, a film written by my wife, from her own novel. It was annus mirabilis in the Davies household.
My full time job was as a journalist on The Sunday Times of London, where I was writing the Atticus column. I had been on the staff since 1960, though for the first three years I had beavered away without once getting my name in the paper. It is hard to believe it now, but in those days, bylines were infrequent and The Sunday Times was a very traditional newspaper. Atticus, the newspaper’s gossip column, had always been equally old fashioned, devoting itself to news about bishops, gentlemen’s clubs, ambassadors. As a working-class lad from the North, who had grown up in a council house, gone to the local grammar school and then a provincial university, I didn’t have the background, the accent nor the interests of the accepted Atticus columnists. They had tended to be old Etonians, Oxbridge types, who actually did know bishops and went to the best clubs. Some had also been very distinguished — Ian Fleming had only recently given up Atticus (in 1959) and before him previous incumbents had included writers like Sir Sacheverell Sitwell.
But a funny thing happened to British life in the mid 1960s. Not just on the Atticus column, but out in the world at large, traditional roles and rules were being upset. My interests, when I took over the column, were in novelists from the North, Cockney photographers, jumped — up fashion designers, loudmouthed young businessmen. I did it partly to annoy, as I knew that the old guard on the paper hated such people, but mainly because I was fascinated by their success.
We all laughed and scoffed when Time magazine in New York came out with the idea of Swinging London and sent over battalions of writers and photographers to report and analyse all the exciting things supposedly happening here. Looking back, there was a sort of explosion in London in the 1960s. Now that we see how life can be so dire and desperate for so many, what happened in the 1960s was exciting and revolutionary for young people. The Beatles, of course (you thought I’d never get to them), were a vital element in this overthrowing of old values and accepted manners.
I didn’t take much notice of ‘Love Me Do’ when it came out, thinking here was a one-off group, who showed no signs of being able to develop, and when I first heard John copying the Americans and screaming ‘Twist and Shout’ it gave me a headache. But I loved ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, and from then on could not wait for their next record. I went to one of the concerts — I think it was at Finsbury Park in London — which was fascinating, but the girls’ screaming annoyed me. I wanted to hear them properly, not be deafened by adolescent shop girls and hairdressers.
I identified completely with their background and attitudes. My home town is Carlisle, further up the northwest coast from Liverpool, where we consider ourselves real Northerners and Liverpool might as well be on the Mediterranean. Although I was four years older than John, I felt his contemporary, as he, Paul and George had gone to the same type of school as me.
Until the Beatles, nobody had sung songs for me, songs that had a connection with my life, from their own experience, about my experience. I had enjoyed but despised the American-style pap we had all been brought up on, with middle-aged men in shiny suits saying we were a very wonderful audience, and they sure were glad to be here, before singing another sloppy ballad with banal words. All the same, I can still remember all the words of at least three Guy Mitchell songs.
Despite the Beatles’ enormous popularity, there were still, in the mid 1960s, many people who said their success was basically a matter of fashion. The clothes, the hair, the accent, the irreverence, the humour, that was what made people like them, not their music. It was all publicity and promotion. A new group would soon displace them.
In August 1966, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ came out (the B side of ‘Yellow Submarine’), and that seemed to me to prove that they could write real lyrics. The music, once again, was a development, using classical instruments and harmonies.
I went to see Paul at his house in Cavendish Avenue, St John’s Wood. It was pure self-indulgence. I wanted to meet him, but I also wanted to hear the background to ‘Eleanor Rigby’. I presumed he had written it, as it was his voice singing, though in those days they were simply Lennon — McCartney songs and no one bothered to separate them. I had never read any interview in which they had been asked seriously about how they composed. The popular newspapers were obsessed by the money and the crowd mania, while the fan mags wanted to know their favourite colour and favourite film stars.
I planned to reproduce all the words of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, to let the ignorant see how good they were, admire the imagery, feel the quality, but my superiors on the newspaper were against it. They didn’t want so much space wasted on humdrum pop songs. So, what I said was that no pop song at present had better words or music.
The interview was revealing, so I thought, though reading it now, Paul does come out a bit self-satisfied, while at the same time appearing to be self-aware and even self-deflating. Has he really changed all that much? In it he used the word ‘stoned’. Until then, in normal English usage, it referred to drink, not drugs, which was how I took it at the time.
I think I got on well with him. We talked about the background to many of their other songs, though I had no room to write about them. It struck me afterwards that there was so much I didn’t know about them or their work, and that everybody had been asking the same old questions about their fame and success, and wondering when the bubble would burst.
There were only two books I could find on the Beatles, both unsatisfactory. There had been a fan club book, a short paperback, called The True Story of the Beatles, which came out in 1964, produced by the people who did Beatles Monthly. There was also a book by a young American, Michael Braun, called Love Me Do, which was much better, but limited, based on conversations with them on tour. This also had come out in 1964. They had developed so much since, but nobody had looked at their whole career, or spent time talking to them properly, or their friends and relations, or even tried to investigate what had happened in Hamburg, let alone their school days.