Neil is a bachelor and lives in a large luxury flat in a new block of flats in Sloane Street, opposite the Carlton Towers Hotel. He spends some of his spare time painting, a hobby he shares with the Beatles. He has a piano in his flat, though he can’t play, with a piano exercise book opened at the second lesson.
For a long time, Neil was slightly underused — after all, he has more O levels than the rest of them put together — just because the Beatles valued him so much at what he was doing already. But since 1968 he has been director of Apple Corps, the central organization run by the Beatles, which looks after all their Apple branches. He has a large plush office in Wigmore Street where he sits in executive style.
Mal, who is married with two children, shared Neil’s flat for a long time when they first all moved to London, commuting to Liverpool when possible. In 1967 he bought a house in Sunbury and moved in with his family. He chose the house to be within reasonable distance of the homes of John, Ringo and George. He has also now got an executive position — as manager of Apple Records.
What Mal and Neil have never been able to understand is the marvellous image the Beatles have always had. ‘It wasn’t really Brian’s doing,’ says Neil. ‘He did make them smarter, put them in suits and got organized. But they’ve always come across as being so good and kind and nice, when they’re not particularly, not more than other people. I think people wanted them to be like that. Fans made up the image for themselves. I don’t know why. That’s just what the fans wanted.
‘They’re now appearing to the public more like they really were before Brian came along, all individuals, doing and saying what they like.
‘The public still think they’re as nice, but perhaps they’re a bit “eccentric” now, that’s all. It’s strange, isn’t it, how people take to an image.’
‘I’m always being asked which Beatle I like best,’ says Mal. ‘I usually say whichever one has just been nice to me.’
30 the beatles and their music
It’s all been a continual development. Now and again they appeared to be marking time, but not for long, then they were off and away again. They are always too bored by what they have just done ever to consider repeating it, however successful.
But with each new step they’ve laced the progressive with the traditional, like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’, or ‘I Am The Walrus’ and ‘Hello, Goodbye’.
There are lots of recognizable steps, if you like looking for recognizable steps. The first rock and roll stage was finished around the spring of 1964, after ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. The end of the simple beat-group line-up came in August 1965, with ‘Yesterday’ and the introduction of new instruments. The really serious experimentation started in August 1966, with the last track on Revolver, and was continued in Sergeant Pepper.
Even apparent anomalies can be explained, like ‘All You Need Is Love’. This came out in mid-1967 and seemed to fit more into the 1963–4 period. But it wasn’t, because it was satirical, poking fun at themselves, which is a stage they didn’t reach in their music till 1967. ‘Lady Madonna’, in early 1968, wasn’t really a throwback to 1963 but mock-rock.
But trying to explain it all, slicing it up into nice pieces, is for the musicologists. It’s not just Mr Mann of the London Times who’s gone to town on each stage in their career. Serious American musical criticism of the Beatles could fill a book, and probably has done.
The simplest way to look at how they make their music, rather than trying to analyse it, is to split it into the touring days and the post-touring days.
John and Paul had had over six years together, writing and playing their music, by the time they started seriously recording in 1962. In those pre-1962 years they wrote hundreds of songs, most of them now forgotten or lost. Paul still has an exercise book full of them, but they don’t show much. The words are of the simple ‘Love Me Do’, ‘You Know I Love You’ pattern. For the music, all they wrote was a few Do Ray Mes. Only they could work out at the time how the tune was supposed to go. They’ve forgotten now.
It was more vanity, or frustrated professionalism on Paul’s part, that made them write down all their ‘Lennon-McCartney originals’. They knew them all anyway, with playing them hundreds of times in the Cavern.
Once ‘Love Me Do’ — a very old one, from the Quarrymen skiffle days — was recorded, they could have used up their old songs, but they didn’t. They’d done so many already that it was comparatively easy for them to think up new ones for their next records.
They were composed, in those days, by Paul and John playing together on their guitars, just to see what came, either in hotels or on the road. ‘She Loves You’ was written on a coach in Yorkshire. They each tried out their own chords and own bits and pieces, following their own thoughts, until they liked something the other was doing. They then joined in, pushing it forward, then back for the other to have a go.
They deny today that they were deliberately concentrating on simple emotive words like ‘I’ and ‘Me’ and ‘You’. That was just how it happened. They think the words of ‘Love Me Do’ are just as philosophical or poetic as, say, ‘Eleanor Rigby’.
But their songs were simpler in those days. The Beatles were simpler lads, writing songs to play to screaming fans on one-night stands and wanting a simple and immediate reaction.
The songs were written, worked out and perfected on tour. By the time they got into the recording studio they knew them backwards.
‘We were held back in our development,’ says George, ‘by having to go on stage all the time and do it, with the same old guitars, drums and bass. We just had to stick to the basic instruments.
‘For a long time we didn’t know what else you could do. We were just lads down from the North being allowed to make music in the big EMI studios. It was all done very quickly, in one go, on one track, as “Love Me Do” was. We used to do “Love Me Do” better on stage than we did on the record.’
Their first LP, Please Please Me, took just one day to record and cost £400. Sergeant Pepper took four months and cost £25,000.
Today, now that they have stopped touring, their recording sessions are long and highly complicated.
‘Now that we only play in the studios, and not anywhere else,’ says George, ‘we haven’t got a clue about what we’re going to do. We have to start from scratch, thrashing it out in the studio, doing it the hard way. If Paul has written a song, he comes into the studio with it in his head. It’s very hard for him to give it to us and for us to get it. When we suggest something, it might not be what he wants because he hasn’t got it in his head. So it takes a long time. Nobody knows what the tunes sound like till we’ve recorded them, then listened to them afterwards,’
Nobody knows either how tunes come into their heads in the first place. They don’t know, or can’t remember, how and why they did something. Cross-examining them, unless it is very recent, is impossible, because it’s all gone. The only way is to be there, except that with this method you still can’t see into their heads, but only what is coming out.
’A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS’
In March 1967 they were getting towards the end of the Sergeant Pepper album. They were halfway through a song for Ringo, a Ringo sort of song, which they’d begun the day before.