Bits of Books - Books by Title
One Two Three Four
Craig Brown
More books on Music
June 1964 Beatles just about to start a tour of Australasia, Ringo hospitalised with tonsillitis. Frantic search for a replacement unearthed an obscure London drummer named Jimmie Nichol. He'd had an unlucky career - nearly got a break in 1960 when American star Eddie Cochrane took a shine to his group and offered to take them to America, but then was killed in a car crash.
For ten days Nichol was treated like a Beatle. Adulation, travel, lux living, money. Then Ringo arrived, and it all was taken away.
At first he was able to parlay his new name recognition into a record deal, but his recordings vanished without trace. He brooded forever - everything went downhill - marriages, career.
He basically never recovered from that 10 day stint.
(London Times)
Contrary to popular belief, lots of people have always hated the Beatles. “Musically they are a near disaster,” said Newsweek, calling their lyrics “a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments”. Their music was “vapid . . . twanging nonsense”, wrote the novelist Anthony Burgess. They were “not merely awful”, agreed the conservative writer William F Buckley, but “appallingly unmusical” and “dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art”.
But at least the Beatles weren’t as awful as their fans. “A mass masturbation orgy” of “squealing young maniacs”, wrote Noël Coward. With their “huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store make-up”, agreed the New Statesman’s Paul Johnson, they were a “bottomless chasm of vacuity”. The good news, said Johnson, was that “the boys and girls who will be the real leaders and creators of society tomorrow never go near a pop concert. They are, to put it simply, too busy.”
Craig Brown loves all this, which is one reason his book One Two Three Four is such a ridiculously enjoyable treat. There is, admittedly, no call for yet another Beatles book. The British Library catalogue lists some 732 Beatles titles; the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s definitive biography, All These Years, takes 960 pages just to get to 1962, when the band were still largely unknown. Yet Brown — best known for his spoof diaries in Private Eye — is such an infectiously jolly writer that you don’t even need to like the Beatles to enjoy his book. Over 150 short chapters, some barely a page or two, he roams apparently at random through their life and times, endlessly turning up bizarre coincidences and weird juxtapositions.
One moment The Daily Telegraph is comparing Beatlemania to the Nuremberg rallies, the next Billy Graham is watching television on the Sabbath for the first time to see what the youngsters are on about. In 1963 Field Marshal Montgomery says the Beatles should do National Service and get their hair cut. In 1964 he plans to invite them to his country house “to see what kind of fellas they are”. That same year President Sukarno bans Beatles hairstyles in Indonesia, but Earl Mountbatten of Burma buys a set of Beatles wigs for his grandchildren and wears one himself on Christmas Day. This is that sort of book.
Although Brown never pretends to match Lewisohn for minute detail, or Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head for scholarly musical analysis, he can be very wise. He notes, for example, how important it was that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had both lost their mothers in adolescence, which gave them not only an emotional bond, but also a kind of yearning ambition. He is clever on the way that Beatles anecdotes become distorted over time, laying out, Rashomon-style, the conflicting accounts of incidents such as Lennon’s infamous attack on the Cavern Club’s DJ Bob Wooler. We know it was at McCartney’s birthday party in June 1963, and that Wooler had teased Lennon about his relationship with his manager, Brian Epstein, who was gay. But did Lennon use his fists, a stick or even a shovel? Who knows? For Brown, tongue firmly in cheek, there is no better illustration of “the random, subjective nature of history”.
He is also brilliant on Ringo Starr, whom he sees as the band’s “Horatio figure, the Dr Watson, the Tommy Atkins . . . plodding, selfless, reliable”. In one acute passage he juxtaposes the reality of Ringo’s early life — desertion by his father, grinding poverty, long spells in hospital with peritonitis and tuberculosis — with his cheerful, phlegmatic refusal to feel sorry for himself. “I’ve had an easy life ... a good life. I wouldn’t change any of it,” the drummer told an interviewer in 1966. You can’t imagine Lennon saying anything like that.
Ringo reacted with similarly admirable stoicism when a group of anti-semites vowed to assassinate him in Montreal three years later. “The one major fault,” he said wryly, “is that I’m not Jewish.” All the same, he agreed to take the stage with a plain-clothes policeman sitting beside him. Many people would have been terrified, but Ringo enjoyed the absurdity of it all. “What is this guy going to do?” he wondered. “Is he going to catch the bullet?”
Despite Brown’s reputation as a supremely funny writer, One Two Three Four is often surprisingly poignant. Almost alone among Beatles books, it devotes considerable attention to the people damaged by the band’s success: the losers, the people left behind. The most obvious is their former drummer Pete Best, who saw his musical career dwindle to nothing, tried to kill himself in 1967 and eventually became a civil servant. Brown also tells the story of the teenage sensation Helen Shapiro, who headlined a tour with the Beatles in late 1962, only to find herself relegated to an also-ran. Then there is the drummer Jimmie Nicol, who replaced the sick Ringo on their Australian tour in 1964, only to be declared bankrupt a year later. When the tour was over, he said: “I began dying . . . No one wanted to know me any more. The future? Nothing. There’s nothing for me now.”
Brown even recounts the story of the comic duo Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall, whose debut on The Ed Sullivan Show was completely overshadowed by the Beatles’ first American TV appearance. Since the audience was there only to see the band, Charlie and Mitzi’s finely honed sketches were met with deafening silence. It was the biggest moment in their careers, but as they later admitted it was also the “worst three minutes” of their lives.
Some readers, I imagine, may not enjoy all Brown’s quirks. He loves to play with counterfactuals, kicking off with a scenario in which McCartney’s parents never got together, and later imagining an alternative reality in which Gerry and the Pacemakers became the defining band of the 1960s, Ringo managed a hairdressing chain and Yoko Ono married Gerry Marsden.
He has some hilarious passages on his expeditions to the Beatles’ childhood homes, with unflattering accounts of the unfriendly guides, and mockingly reproduces the National Trust exhibit captions: “Dustbin: Metalwork. Date 1940-1960.” Sometimes he lapses into Molesworthian comic memoir, telling us about his prep school in the 1960s: “Our new history master, Mr Wall, wore pink socks and had a slapdash, bohemian air about him, but he left under a cloud after dropping his trousers.”
He also has a fearless enthusiasm for digressions. No other Beatles writer, I imagine, would include a long passage about the treatment of aunts in Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, including the glorious scene in which William charges his friends tuppence each to see his snoring Aunt Emily under the sign “Fat Wild Woman Torkin Natif Langwidge”.
Some readers, as I say, will find all this annoying. Not me. Too many writers take the Beatles, and themselves, far too seriously. Brown does neither. No other writer would think to juxtapose the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts with the Beatles’ festive messages, or to investigate the fate of Lennon’s tooth, given to his Weybridge housekeeper in the mid-1960s and sold at auction to a Canadian dentist for £19,000 in 2011. But this is what makes Brown’s book sparkle. And at a time when, like everybody else, I was feeling not entirely thrilled about the news, I loved every word of it.
(London Times)
Contrary to popular belief, lots of people have always hated the Beatles. “Musically they are a near disaster,” said Newsweek, calling their lyrics “a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments”. Their music was “vapid . . . twanging nonsense”, wrote the novelist Anthony Burgess. They were “not merely awful”, agreed the conservative writer William F Buckley, but “appallingly unmusical” and “dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art”.
But at least the Beatles weren’t as awful as their fans. “A mass masturbation orgy” of “squealing young maniacs”, wrote Noël Coward. With their “huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store make-up”, agreed the New Statesman’s Paul Johnson, they were a “bottomless chasm of vacuity”. The good news, said Johnson, was that “the boys and girls who will be the real leaders and creators of society tomorrow never go near a pop concert. They are, to put it simply, too busy.”
Craig Brown loves all this, which is one reason his book One Two Three Four is such a ridiculously enjoyable treat. There is, admittedly, no call for yet another Beatles book. The British Library catalogue lists some 732 Beatles titles; the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s definitive biography, All These Years, takes 960 pages just to get to 1962, when the band were still largely unknown. Yet Brown — best known for his spoof diaries in Private Eye — is such an infectiously jolly writer that you don’t even need to like the Beatles to enjoy his book. Over 150 short chapters, some barely a page or two, he roams apparently at random through their life and times, endlessly turning up bizarre coincidences and weird juxtapositions.
One moment The Daily Telegraph is comparing Beatlemania to the Nuremberg rallies, the next Billy Graham is watching television on the Sabbath for the first time to see what the youngsters are on about. In 1963 Field Marshal Montgomery says the Beatles should do National Service and get their hair cut. In 1964 he plans to invite them to his country house “to see what kind of fellas they are”. That same year President Sukarno bans Beatles hairstyles in Indonesia, but Earl Mountbatten of Burma buys a set of Beatles wigs for his grandchildren and wears one himself on Christmas Day. This is that sort of book.
Although Brown never pretends to match Lewisohn for minute detail, or Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head for scholarly musical analysis, he can be very wise. He notes, for example, how important it was that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had both lost their mothers in adolescence, which gave them not only an emotional bond, but also a kind of yearning ambition. He is clever on the way that Beatles anecdotes become distorted over time, laying out, Rashomon-style, the conflicting accounts of incidents such as Lennon’s infamous attack on the Cavern Club’s DJ Bob Wooler. We know it was at McCartney’s birthday party in June 1963, and that Wooler had teased Lennon about his relationship with his manager, Brian Epstein, who was gay. But did Lennon use his fists, a stick or even a shovel? Who knows? For Brown, tongue firmly in cheek, there is no better illustration of “the random, subjective nature of history”.
He is also brilliant on Ringo Starr, whom he sees as the band’s “Horatio figure, the Dr Watson, the Tommy Atkins . . . plodding, selfless, reliable”. In one acute passage he juxtaposes the reality of Ringo’s early life — desertion by his father, grinding poverty, long spells in hospital with peritonitis and tuberculosis — with his cheerful, phlegmatic refusal to feel sorry for himself. “I’ve had an easy life ... a good life. I wouldn’t change any of it,” the drummer told an interviewer in 1966. You can’t imagine Lennon saying anything like that.
Ringo reacted with similarly admirable stoicism when a group of anti-semites vowed to assassinate him in Montreal three years later. “The one major fault,” he said wryly, “is that I’m not Jewish.” All the same, he agreed to take the stage with a plain-clothes policeman sitting beside him. Many people would have been terrified, but Ringo enjoyed the absurdity of it all. “What is this guy going to do?” he wondered. “Is he going to catch the bullet?”
Despite Brown’s reputation as a supremely funny writer, One Two Three Four is often surprisingly poignant. Almost alone among Beatles books, it devotes considerable attention to the people damaged by the band’s success: the losers, the people left behind. The most obvious is their former drummer Pete Best, who saw his musical career dwindle to nothing, tried to kill himself in 1967 and eventually became a civil servant. Brown also tells the story of the teenage sensation Helen Shapiro, who headlined a tour with the Beatles in late 1962, only to find herself relegated to an also-ran. Then there is the drummer Jimmie Nicol, who replaced the sick Ringo on their Australian tour in 1964, only to be declared bankrupt a year later. When the tour was over, he said: “I began dying . . . No one wanted to know me any more. The future? Nothing. There’s nothing for me now.”
Brown even recounts the story of the comic duo Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall, whose debut on The Ed Sullivan Show was completely overshadowed by the Beatles’ first American TV appearance. Since the audience was there only to see the band, Charlie and Mitzi’s finely honed sketches were met with deafening silence. It was the biggest moment in their careers, but as they later admitted it was also the “worst three minutes” of their lives.
Some readers, I imagine, may not enjoy all Brown’s quirks. He loves to play with counterfactuals, kicking off with a scenario in which McCartney’s parents never got together, and later imagining an alternative reality in which Gerry and the Pacemakers became the defining band of the 1960s, Ringo managed a hairdressing chain and Yoko Ono married Gerry Marsden.
He has some hilarious passages on his expeditions to the Beatles’ childhood homes, with unflattering accounts of the unfriendly guides, and mockingly reproduces the National Trust exhibit captions: “Dustbin: Metalwork. Date 1940-1960.” Sometimes he lapses into Molesworthian comic memoir, telling us about his prep school in the 1960s: “Our new history master, Mr Wall, wore pink socks and had a slapdash, bohemian air about him, but he left under a cloud after dropping his trousers.”
He also has a fearless enthusiasm for digressions. No other Beatles writer, I imagine, would include a long passage about the treatment of aunts in Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, including the glorious scene in which William charges his friends tuppence each to see his snoring Aunt Emily under the sign “Fat Wild Woman Torkin Natif Langwidge”.
Some readers, as I say, will find all this annoying. Not me. Too many writers take the Beatles, and themselves, far too seriously. Brown does neither. No other writer would think to juxtapose the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts with the Beatles’ festive messages, or to investigate the fate of Lennon’s tooth, given to his Weybridge housekeeper in the mid-1960s and sold at auction to a Canadian dentist for £19,000 in 2011. But this is what makes Brown’s book sparkle. And at a time when, like everybody else, I was feeling not entirely thrilled about the news, I loved every word of it.
(Guardian)
Fifty years since their dissolution in April 1970 the Beatles live on. The band’s music, their significance and their individual personalities exert a hold on the cultural consciousness that seems to tighten as their heyday recedes. But is there anything new to say? Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, the latest to enter the crowded library of Beatles books, is not a biography so much as a group portrait in vignettes, a rearrangement of stories and legends whose trick is to make them gleam anew.
The subtitle, The Beatles in Time, marks out the book’s difference from the rest. Brown goes on Beatles jaunts around Liverpool and Hamburg, visits fan festivals, tests the strength of the industry that has agglomerated around them. So many of the clubs where they played are now lost or changed beyond recognition – “a memory of a memory” – and the fans who do the pilgrimages are simply chasing shadows.
Brown, the arch-satirist, is wry about the 1,000-plus Beatles tribute acts worldwide. At times, the slightly desperate nostalgia of International Beatle Week in Liverpool reminds him of his parents watching The Good Old Days in the 1970s, a collective delusion that the dead can be revived. But then he watches tribute band the Fab Four play She Loves You and he’s transported. A double fantasy is at work – “for as long as they play, we are all 50 years younger, gazing in wonder at the Beatles in their prime.”
The book is a social history as well as a musical one. Success came slowly at first, and then quickly, “as a landslide, flattening those ahead”. Cliff Richard, once the golden boy of British pop, sounds (even decades later) mightily miffed about the way the Beatles displaced him. Prime ministers were as susceptible as teenagers: Harold Wilson sought an audience with them and later arranged their MBEs.
In the US, their appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show had a seismic effect: it seemed nobody could talk about anything else. Some responded in bemusement. Cassius Clay, after a jokey photo session with “the boys”, asked a reporter: “Who were those little sissies?” The actor Eleanor Bron recalls girls screaming “like starlings” as the Beatles landed at Heathrow – “a high sighing hopeless poignant sound, unrequitable”. You can almost feel the 1960s bloom from monochrome into colour as the band plays irresistibly on.
Brown is an able memoirist, with an instinct for selection that quite eludes the Beatles’ most exhaustive chronicler, Mark Lewisohn, whose basic principle is to include everything he knows. One Two Three Four hasn’t the authority or the insight of Ian MacDonald’s sacred Revolution in the Head, and lacking an index it isn’t as useful as Philip Norman’s 1981 biography Shout! But it does an intriguing sideline in characters who were tangential to the Beatles’ story – such as Richard and Margaret Asher, who welcomed Paul as one of the family into their Wimpole Street home when he was going out with their daughter, Jane. Or the drummer Jimmie Nicol, a Beatle-surrogate for 10 days when Ringo had tonsilitis and whose life thereafter fell through the cracks. Or the sad figure of Eric Clague, former police constable, who discovered by chance that the woman he had accidentally run down and killed years before was Julia Lennon, John’s mum.
The Beatles in Washington DC, 1964. Photograph: Copyright Apple Corps
This is the strange paradox of the Beatles. Listening to the sound that John, Paul, George and Ringo created still plugs us right into the “happiness and exhilaration” that their producer, the gentlemanly George Martin, talked of. Reading about them, conversely, is quite a melancholy experience, because the end seems always in sight.
It’s noticeable in this book how, once they are famous, they become prey to the most outrageous hangers-on. This vulnerability is most evident in John, the prickliest of the four, and also the neediest. He was first seduced by Magic Alex, a Greek conman whom he appointed his guru and electronics expert. Then he and George fell under the spell of the Maharishi.
Finally, and fatefully, came Yoko Ono, who John initially assured his wife Cynthia was “crackers, just a weirdo artist who wants me to sponsor her”. Brown reserves a particular scorn for Yoko, not because she “broke up the Beatles” – that was inevitable – but because her narcissism egged Lennon on to painful extremes of silliness and self-importance.
The saddest irony was that the Beatles once did have someone to take care of them. The Hamlet’s Ghost of this book is Brian Epstein, whose story Brown plots in reverse – from the eclipse of his lonely suicide to the bright-eyed overtures as manager and impresario. It makes a poignant epilogue. Of course that story is nothing without the Beatles’ talent, but here is the reminder of how Epstein discovered it, packaged it, and sold it. Had he not taken himself down the steps of the Cavern Club one lunchtime in November 1961, the world might never have heard of the Beatles. As Lennon once admitted: “Brian … made it all seem real. We were in a daydream ’til he came along … We stopped chomping at cheese rolls and jam butties onstage.”
(Guardian 2)
In the build-up to the general election of 1987, Margaret Thatcher agreed to an interview with Smash Hits, the now defunct fortnightly pop magazine that had an estimated readership of 3.3 million. By way of attempting to avoid disaster, a prime ministerial aide called Christine Wall wrote her a briefing note that now reads as if it were intended for a visiting extra-terrestrial.
The most surreal passage was about the Beatles. “Probably the two most famous BEATLES songs amongst many hits are YESTERDAY which has been recorded by hundreds of people including FRANK SINATRA AND ELVIS PRESLEY,” Wall wrote, “and ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE which was performed live in front of 640,000,000 people on TV in 1968.” The latter dateline was wrong – the event in question actually happened in 1967. And on the day of the interview, it was clear that Wall’s brief and inaccurate summary had failed to sink in: before it ended and she got back to privatising everything, Thatcher had managed to credit the Beatles with recording the Tornados’ 1962 hit “Telstar”.
To reduce anyone’s biography to a single sentence is clearly silly, but in the case of John, Paul, George and Ringo, it was cosmically absurd. Very few other people have packed so much into eight years in the public eye, nor managed to channel so many social and cultural changes. Three years on from on from his 2017 book Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, it is this surfeit of material that allows Craig Brown to once again subvert the conventions of biography, and tackle his latest subject via 150 self-contained chapters that range from single anecdotes, to compact essays, to lists. In doing so, he prises the basic story away from its standard telling, and delights in a motley supporting cast united by their brushes with Beatledom – from Thatcher, Kenneth Williams and the playwright Joe Orton, to the German communist Walter Ulbricht.
Paul McCartney and Jane Asher at a film premiere in 1967. Photograph: AP
Most of what is here is sourced from other books, and much of it feels familiar. But when Brown alights on less well-trodden material, his panache as a writer and understanding of the Beatles’ significance rarely let him down. A key theme is the disorientation they caused among an older establishment, both in the UK and the US, and how wrong a lot of people were. Noël Coward thought them “totally devoid of talent”; the conservative writer William F Buckley Jr reckoned they were “so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music”. The journalist Malcolm Muggeridge chanced on the nascent Beatles in Hamburg in June 1961, when they were the leather-clad nightly attraction at the Top Ten Club. He described “ageless children, sexes indistinguishable, tight-trousered, stamping about”, and a group with “weird feminine faces ... bashing their instruments, and emitting nerveless sounds into microphones”. As a summary of the early Beatles’ magic, that actually isn’t bad.
If the material here about the Beatles’ collision with the old and staid is full of insight and humour, the chapters that deal with well-known stories do not fare quite as well. In the absence of any new insights, there is probably no need for anyone ever to return to the occasion in 1964 when the Beatles met Bob Dylan in New York and he introduced them to marijuana, nor the famous evening in 1965 when they spent time with Elvis Presley. That said, even if some of the best stretches of the book fall short of being revelatory, they are often so well told that they acquire a new freshness. For example, most students of Beatles history know that Paul McCartney lived for a time with the family of his girlfriend Jane Asher in Marylebone, and was thereby immersed in the world of the progressive London middle class. But what is new is Brown’s own observation: “If I could be any Beatle, at any time, I would be Paul in his Wimpole Street years, living with Jane, cosseted by her family, blessed by luck, happy with life … and with wonderful songs flowing, as if by magic, from my brain and out through the piano.”
As those words suggest, Brown is a fan, who empathises with the other fans whose love for the Beatles forms a neat counterpoint to his stories about the hostility and bafflement from an older generation. One such fan was Maxine, who lived in Cleveland, Ohio, and whose words appear in a brief selection of letters. “Dear Beatles, Please call me on the telephone.” she wrote. “My # is 629-7834. If my mother answers, hang up. She is not much of a Beatle fan.”
(Esquire)
“When we talk about The Beatles,” writes Craig Brown, “we talk about ourselves.” For an international phenomenon, The Beatles were peculiarly, cussedly English. The most significant band in the history of pop, they are key figures in the past half-century of our nation’s public life, as well as in the dream lives of its citizens. The Beatles entered our bloodstreams, collective and individual, and they pulsate in them still. They were modernists, agents of change, forging the future, and they were preservationists, forever harking back to the past, real and imagined, England’s and their own.
Their most forward-and-at-the-same-time-backward-looking album was Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in 1967. It was, writes Brown, “an exercise in playing about with the past.” Readers of Brown’s might understand why this would appeal particularly to him, as a writer determined to make sense of British popular history, or at least to explore it, by reinventing the method of its delivery.
Parodist, critic, author of the peerless Private Eye “Diary”, Brown is also a Beatlemaniac. For those of us who are fans of his stuff, as well as devotees of The Fab Four, the news last year that He was working on a new book about Them sounded like a celestial combination of writer and subject. The result is the terrific One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time.
Brown’s previous book, the cunningly structured Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, was what he called an “exploded biography”. It was a demolition of the form, abandoning traditional narrative biography, with its slow and steady slog through the past, for a cut-and-paste approach, gathering discreet shards and fragments of history — anecdotes, lists, photographs, snatches of dialogue, contemporary reports, interviews — and assembling them into a collage of memories and weird connections and jokes and sardonic footnotes. The accretion of detail built to a portrait more revealing, certainly in terms of contemporary atmosphere — the temperature of the times — than that typically offered by traditional biography. Funnier, too.
One Two Three Four, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary, on 10 April, of the break-up of The Beatles, is an exploded biography of the band. It is a critical appreciation, a personal history, a miscellany, a work of scholarship and speculation, and a tribute. It contains knockabout first-person reporting from Liverpool and Hamburg, as well as frequent authorial interruptions for personal anecdotes: trips to the panto, boarding school memories. Multiple conflicting accounts of a single incident — a punch-up at a party, say — illustrate “the random, subjective nature of history, a form predicated on objectivity but reliant on shifting sands of memory,” and make explicit Brown’s critique of straight biography.
“In an earthquake,” Brown quotes Paul McCartney as saying, “you get many different versions of what happened by all the people that saw it. And they’re all true.”
There is no shortage of eccentric books about The Beatles. The canonical ones — Ian MacDonald’s ecstatic Revolution in the Head, Mark Lewisohn’s epic work-in-progress, All These Years — are, if anything, even madder than fan fiction, testaments as much to their authors’ completist obsessions as to the band’s undeniable greatness. One Two Three Four is no less serious in intent, but far less po-faced.
Brown hits all the beats you might expect from a Beatles biography, from jagged first stabs through the swelling roar of the Beatles’ imperial phase to the sour diminuendo of the band’s dissolution. But he places at least as much emphasis on what may seem inessential, tangential, ephemeral, as he does on the big stuff.
So, there are walk-ons for Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali and Mick Jagger and the rest of the Sixties crowd. Familiar names from the story are sketched: Pete Best, replaced by Ringo just weeks before The Beatles made it big; Stu Sutcliffe, the Beatle who stayed in Germany, and died; the brilliant Brian Epstein; John’s imperious Aunt Mimi. Less predictable appearances are made by Malcolm Muggeridge — he met the pre-fame Beatles in Hamburg and recorded, in his diary, “their faces like Renaissance carvings of saints or Blessed Virgins”, which doesn’t quite chime with other reports from the Reeperbahn — and Peter Stringfellow, who managed to stretch to £85 to book the band for The Black Cat Club, Sheffield.
Brown finds time to consider the ragtag cranks and crooks who jumped on The Beatles bandwagon. We meet “New Jersey bruiser” Allen Klein, a man described as “having the charm of a broken lavatory seat”, as well as “needy” drugs squad detective Norman “Nobby” Pilcher, “a bumbling avenging angel”. We say hello-goodbye to the preposterous “Magic” Alex, “for whom no job was ever too large to be started or too small to leave unfinished”. We hear the sad story of The Singing Nun, and the heartbreaking tale of Jimmie Nicol, “too forgotten a figure even to feature in roundups of forgotten figures”. Nicol was the Beatles’ tour drummer for 13 life-ruining days, while Ringo was indisposed.
We enjoy the spectacular folly that was The Beatles’ business, Apple Corp. “The weirdness was not controlled at the start,” lamented Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor, before noting, sagely, that, “You can’t control weirdness, anyway; weirdness is weirdness.”
Brown glories in the absurdist details. George’s description of acquiring a taste for the finer things as “branch[ing]out into the avocado scene.” Ringo’s explanation for the failure of his building company: “No one wanted to buy the houses we put up.” Animals frontman Eric Burdon’s eye-opening explanation of how he came to be — or so he claimed — the Egg Man in “I am the Walrus” (chapter 105, I’m not quoting it here). John’s absentee father coming to a fancy-dress party in costume as “My Old Man’s a Dustman”, in clothes he had bought from a real dustman for £5, earlier in the day. “He literally reeked of garbage,” remembers a guest. John’s reason for funding Yoko Ono’s exhibitions at the Lisson Gallery: “With women like that you have to pay them off, or they never stop pestering you.”
It will come as no surprise to readers of Private Eye that Brown has great sport with Ono especially, counterpointing her gnomic recent Twitter posts with the songs of Shirley Temple, whom she apparently once impersonated as a child, and imagining her “poetry” as if it had been rewritten by Ringo. (“Ringo” means “Apple” in Japanese, says Brown.) One suspects that an exploded biography of Ono alone — a solo Ono — might be a profitable next volume for Brown. The unsparing depiction of John and Yoko’s self-serving social activism is pretty devastating.
There’s also some astute writing about academia’s doomed attempts to parse the lyrics of the band’s greatest songs. “Lyrics removed from music,” explains Brown, “are like fish removed from water.” Take that, Christopher Ricks. Nowhere can the difference between the reverent US and the irreverent UK music press — such as they were — be better illustrated than in their respective reactions to Lennon’s nightmarish “Revolution 9”, from The White Album. Take your pick from “an aural litmus of unfocused paranoia” (Rolling Stone) or “a pretentious piece of old codswallop” (New Musical Express).
By quoting liberally from the testimony of those who were teenagers as the time — the young Bruce Springsteen, the young Tom Petty, the young Chrissie Hynde — Brown gets at the extraordinary, life-changing effect The Beatles had, an effect unprecedented and unrepeatable, at least by a pop group. (Other messiahs are available.) Older establishment figures were bowled over, too. Poor Leonard Bernstein was reduced to Jabberwocky gibberish, hymning “the frabjous falsetto shriek-cum-croon, the ineluctable beat, the flawless intonation”, and on and on and on.
Not everyone was so fawning. Here’s Kingsley Amis, writing to Philip Larkin on 19 April 1969: “Oh fuck The Beatles. I’d like to push my bum into John L’s face for 48 hours or so, as a protest against all the war and violence in the world.” The splenetic Anthony Burgess was infuriated by the “twanging nonsense” of The Beatles’ music.
A chapter is devoted to letters from fans, such as this one:
Dear Beatles,
I told my mother I can’t imagine a world without The Beatles, and she said she could easily.
Loyal forever,
Lillie K,
Another chapter records America’s Billboard Hot 100 singles chart from the week of 4 April 1964. The Beatles have the top five spots plus seven more. Still another reprints a guest list, published in 1966 in Queen magazine, from the opening night of Sibylla’s discotheque in Swallow Street, Mayfair. Lots of hip counterculture stars, a few louche aristos, and Nigel Dempster.
A chapter is devoted to misheard lyrics: “And when I get home to you, I find a broken canoe.” Brown considers the pathology behind Lennon’s compulsive punning, and how it informed what Bruce Springsteen has called, quite reasonably, “the worst and most glorious band name in all rock ’n’ roll.”
There are many such cherishable asides. I enjoyed Pattie Boyd’s take on Haight-Ashbury, hippy ground zero, during the Summer of Love, 1967: “Horrible — full of ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains.” Which makes her sound more like Princess Margaret than a groovy Sixties swinger, and earns her bonus points for hypocrisy, given she was herself tripping on acid at the time.
There is lots of stuff on teeth, including the following truism: “No one wants a groovy dentist.” There is still more on hair. We learn that at Christmas 1964, when he was seven, Brown was given a Beatles wig by his parents. We learn, too, that 20,000 Beatles wigs were being sold each day at that time, in New York alone. And that Earl Mountbatten of Burma spent Christmas Day prancing about Broadlands, his Hampshire home, wearing an imitation mop-top on his head.
One reading of the Princess Margaret book is as a psychodrama about the toxic effects, on a person constitutionally ill-equipped to deal with them, of unearned privilege and prestige. The Beatles book might be seen as a similar take on the effects on a parade of characters, the four principals and those who came into their orbit, of a global fame and corresponding hysteria that even the Queen’s sister would struggle to recognise. It was John Updike, a Beatles fan, who remarked that celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. “Weirdland,” is Ringo Starr’s term for the world that the mega-famous inhabit, where even members of their close families treat them like royalty.
One Two Three Four notes the corrosive toll, physical and psychological, that fame took on the four boys from Liverpool, perhaps especially on John, always the most caustic and ill at ease, increasingly the most difficult. The others coped in their own ways. George sought enlightenment, and escape, in Eastern spirituality. Ringo dealt with fame with, for the most part, self-deprecating good humour, not always succeeding in covering up the mixed blessing of being seen as the least talented of the four. Paul seemed to have the least complicated relationship with his success. Others — notably Brian Epstein — didn’t cope. In August 1967, the “Beatle-making Prince of Pop” took an overdose of sleeping pills and died in his bed. He was 32.
Like Ma’am Darling, and like life itself, One Two Three Four is a tragicomedy. Both dark and sunny, like a Lennon/McCartney song. From Chapter 11: “In 1964, John Lennon advised the Beatles’ press officer, Derek Taylor, against eating the cheese sandwiches at Speke Airport. He had once been employed at Speke as a packer, he told him, and he used to spit in them.
“In spring 2002, Speke Airport was renamed Liverpool John Lennon Airport…”
(Hotpress)
Even if you don’t think The Beatles were the greatest band of all time – I don’t, but I know I’m wrong – you can’t help but be familiar with their story. It’s an endlessly fascinating tale, helped by its impossible brevity – seven years separate the release of Please Please Me from that of Let It Be. Let’s think about that for a second, that’s the same amount of time that passed between the last two Strokes and Pearl Jam albums. Will anyone be writing and reviewing books about them fifty years after their gone? How about this? Ringo Starr, the oldest Beatle, was still a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday when they broke up. It’s genuinely staggering. As the English critic David Hepworth once commented, if anything, The Beatles are underrated.
I, like many other fans, have, at this stage, read far more than my share of books about them. I can safely say I know their histories better than I know those of my father or my mother. Despite the fact that my Ma and Da, as far as I know, never had a hit single, that’s still odd, but it illustrates how the stories and the myths of The Beatles has permeated our collective consciousness. Bearing that in mind, why the hell would we need another book about them? Surely it’s all been said? What about Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles: All These Years? The first volume, Tune In, of a proposed trilogy, runs to over 1,700 pages and it only takes us to 1962. I mean, Jaysus.
With all that in mind, if you’re going to trot these well-trodden tales out again, you’d best have a good way with a story and something at least kind of new to add. Luckily for us, Craig Brown, in One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, has both. Brown is a satirist, perhaps best known for his work in thorn-in-the-side-of-the-prominent British magazine, Private Eye, and though his great love of The Beatles is evident throughout, he’s not afraid to poke fun at them either.
His approach is a series of short chapters which augment episodes known to even the most lackadaisical of Beatle admirers with the stories we may have missed. Here’s just a few examples. Did you know McCartney nearly jacked the whole thing in after returning from Hamburg in December 1960? He got a job with the cable-winding firm of Massey & Coggins and was making £7.10s a week. How about the time Lennon tried to open the emergency door on a plane flying at 22,000 feet when they discovered one of the engines was on fire? Ola Na Tungee as the original lyrics for ‘Eleanor Rigby’? Bobby Hart writing ‘Last Train To Clarksville’ as a direct result of mishearing the words of ‘Paperback Writer’? Lennon reviewing The Goon Show Scripts for the New York Times? McCartney proving what a good egg(man) he is in the village of Harrold? Richard Branson’s flexi-disc? What’s that I hear you scoff? “I knew all those, you dilettante!” Well, if you did, may I suggest that it might be time to leave the house.
All the major incidents are covered – Brian Epstein visits The Cavern, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ goes to number one in America, Beatlemania, Sgt. Pepper (Mal Evans, salt and pepper on a plane from Nairobi, there’s no way you knew that one), and the unmitigated disaster of Apple (rotten to the) Corps, which Brown details with relish. As the cast of charlatans and chicaners grow, Brown gets the knives out, taking the legs out from under the Maharishi, The Fool, the ridiculous Magic Alex, and, of course, Yoko Ono. While Ono now has her share of admirers and apologists, Brown is having none of it, calling out her total and utter bullshit, whether it be the conceptual ‘art’ or her truly execrable poetry – he hardly mentions her music, a mercy to us all – and even her continued contributions to human wisdom on Twitter. The chapter that deals exclusively with her artistic endeavours will have you laughing out loud, and confirm, if confirmation were needed, that she remains the chancer’s chancer. On a more serious note, the interview between New York Times war correspondent Gloria Emerson and John & Yoko about bagism and the bed-ins, conducted as war raged in Vietnam, exposes those “concepts” as the pure nonsense that they surely were.
(TLS)
Craig Brown’s kaleidoscopic meditation Ma’am Darling: 99 glimpses of Princess Margaret won praise and prizes. Its marriage of tired subject and novel approach – deftly juxtaposed “glimpses” made up of facts, news items, existing eyewitness accounts, pastiche and flights of fancy, all in correct chronology – caused some to wonder whether Brown had reinvented biography entirely and others to marvel that there was finally a royal biography of any description they could stomach between seasons of The Crown. The portrait was sympathetic yet unsparing, and even as the book distanced itself from the competition with some modest existential self-analysis, it swelled the canon. Perhaps those ninety-nine glimpses added up to a hundredth that summed up Margaret perfectly.
Brown – who has always enjoyed poking fun at popular culture in his Private Eye diaries – is most comfortable with the “private” writings, the journals and letters of his victims and heroes, and these have been the primary source material for his three more ambitious recent volumes, which also include One on One, an ingeniously constructed chain of celebrity meetings (some so unlikely as to seem like parody), and now One Two Three Four, which gives the Beatles the royal treatment.
The Beatles merit an extra fifty-one glimpses – there are four of them after all – but the book’s British title lacks mention of the snapshot technique (emphasized in America, where the book is retitled 150 Glimpses of the Beatles). The short form is Brown’s strong suit so these post-biographies (or postcard biographies: chapters are divided into even smaller fragments) are mosaics, like a portrait made up of many photos, similar to Rob Sheffield’s valuable recent contribution, Dreaming the Beatles. It is as though the world has tacitly agreed that the big biographers weren’t getting us anywhere, when we know all the facts and few new ones are emerging.
Brown’s method is such that, amid endless research, he doesn’t have to do any of his own interviews, though he did roll up for a few magical mystery Beatles heritage tours to Liverpool and Hamburg, amusingly recounted here. All his information was sitting waiting for him in the local library – or perhaps even chez Brown: it’s the apotheosis of collage, lifted and shaped from the sifted accounts of a thousand fifth Beatles and moptop coleopterists.
The benefits of the approach are manifold: the short attention span is rewarded and much of the boring stuff may be omitted. Brown has the licence to introduce characters at will, then forget them once they’ve served the moment. He doesn’t, for example, have to delineate the disastrous complexities of the Beatles’ finances, he can just tell you amusing horror stories about their second manager, Allen Klein. This approach makes room for fascinating chapters on, for example, the otherwise forgotten (and often misspelt) Jimmie Nicol, the drummer who filled in for a sick Ringo for ten days at the height of Beatlemania (spoiler: it ruined his life); and another on the intellectual welcome Paul enjoyed from Jane Asher’s family. There is a diversion into the Beatles’ long history with puns, from their name (“the worst and most glorious band name in all of rock’n’roll history”, as Bruce Springsteen noted) through Rubber Soul, Revolver and beyond; and another on the troubling and unexpected reappearance of John’s father, Fred. Brown’s light shines brightest at the edge of the torch’s beam. And that’s fine: we know what’s in the central glare.
Fascinating connections are made in the game of consequences in which Brown specializes. Eric Clague, Paul McCartney’s postman, bringing those comically huge sacks of fan mail, is the very same man who previously killed Julia, Lennon’s mother, in a car accident. This is Brown at his best. The facts were out there – an interview Clague gave to the Sunday Mirror when he was unmasked in 1988 – but Brown has pulled focus on them. Other chapters segue into each other in seemingly natural but brilliantly contrived ways, reminiscent of One on One: a nearly fatal plane ride takes them to Elvis, who insults their teeth, which leads to a greater discussion of dentistry, and the subsequent auction of one of John’s molars. Later, their celebrity dentist introduces them to psychedelia when he doses them with LSD. Elsewhere, new light is thrown from unlikely perspectives, often the unintended casualties: the very moment of their catapulting into fame is told by the singer Helen Shapiro, who endures a reversal of fortune on the very same tour, dropping down the bill as the Beatles rise. We experience the Ed Sullivan Show triumph through the eyes of the comedy duo McCall and Brill, whose act bombs disastrously right before the Beatles’ climactic appearance.
Though each Beatle is smartly characterized – stubborn George “possessed that ineffable something we would later recognize as spiritual life”; Ringo was the Beatle “for girls who lacked ambition” – the book is primarily a study of John and Paul, and as such the last quarter of the book becomes largely a study of John and Yoko. Yoko, a sitting duck for satire, gets a lot of ink as Brown resorts to cruel and very funny parody: Yoko’s “Carry a bag of peas. Leave a pea wherever you go” becomes “Carry a bag of peas. Pour it into boiling water. Leave for two minutes. Drain and serve”. His exposé, or retelling, of her pursuit of John, “her little black clad figure rearing up out of the fog at any time, day or night”, is eye-opening. Linda McCartney, less obvious news, is barely mentioned.
What gets a little lost in all this is the music or at least its making. Perhaps the book’s potential readership welcomes this, preferring to experience the Beatles in their cultural context of Malcolm Muggeridge, Kenneth Williams, Peter Stringfellow and Beryl Bainbridge; a band can suffocate under a pile of studio timesheets detailing 102 takes of “Not Guilty”. Brown is not particularly at home in the recording studio (unless it doubles as a society event, such as “All You Need Is Love” with a multiplicity of egos to corral) and at times the book seems more like a study in cultural reception, featuring the familiar letter-writers and diary-keepers – Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess: none of them huge fans – and even the occasional musician. Sometimes the clearer glimpse is of the writer than the Beatles.
Some of the material has the air of a re-run: Princess Margaret only met the Beatles a few times, so those stories grace both books; Noël Coward met them once (“bad mannered little shits”) and that encounter is in the middle of One on One, after their encounter with Elvis, here also retold. A mildly interesting technique previously employed for a chapter of Ma’am Darling, concerning words introduced into the language in the year of their subjects’ birth, is here reprised not once but twice. Humour often comes to the rescue however, as when Margaret Thatcher claims to the Smash Hits interviewer that her favourite Beatles song is “Telstar” (by The Tornados).
Standards drop as the book glimpses on: Geoff Emerick points out that “the general response wasn’t so much outrage as dismay” twice in four sentences and Ringo’s characteristically droll “we were working class, and in Liverpool when your dad left you suddenly became lower working class” haunts us a hundred pages later. Brown’s Bob Dylan facts are dicey: there isn’t an album called “Long Train Coming”, nor is there any longer a diner called Zimmy’s in Hibbing, MN. A late fantasy chapter – in which Gerry and the Pacemakers, rather than forgotten casualties the Beatles, are the most successful pop group of the era – feels forced. Much Beatles comedy pales since the Rutles’ All You Need Is Cash, in which Neil Innes and Eric Idle nailed it: in Brown’s fantasia, Beatleless Ringo is the manager of “a successful chain of hair salons through the north-east” just as his fictional counterpart, the Rutles’ drummer Barry Wom, became “a hairdresser in the Reading area, with two fully equipped salons of his own”.
If Ma’am Darling was a royal biography for those who didn’t want to read one, then this intermittently brilliant commonplace book will certainly succeed on that same level for people exhibiting only the mildest symptoms of Beatlemania.
(Standard)
In this enthralling, impressionistic biography, Craig Brown examines the immense cultural impact of the Beatles 50 years on from their split. Rather than a linear retelling, he reflects and refracts the sometimes disputed legend of the Fab Four through external characters and incidental details, “what if” chapters and personal reminiscences. This method worked a treat in his book on Princess Margaret, Ma’am Darling, and it works even better here because the material is so much richer.
The basic facts alone are mind-boggling. The Beatles story began when John Lennon and Paul McCartney met at a church fête in Liverpool in 1957, but the alchemical combination of John, Paul, George Harrison and Ringo Starr functioned for only eight years from 1962 before combusting. They began 1963 playing small venues and supporting Helen Shapiro on tour and ended it with a residency at the Astoria and their own Christmas message to the nation.
By the following April, they had cracked America, occupying the top five slots of the Billboard 100 chart, plus five other positions (there were also two songs about them by other artists in there). Paul McCartney learned he was a millionaire at 23, while living with his then-girlfriend Jane Asher’s family in Wimpole Street. George Harrison was 27 when the group fell apart. Their youth and humble beginnings make their artistic achievements more extraordinary and their later haplessness — the spectacular mismanagement of their company Apple, the belief in shamans and charlatans — more understandable.
It is Brown’s feeling for the revolutionary time and his beady eye for the quirks of the story that make the material sing. Former Field Marshal Montgomery mentioned the Beatles’ haircuts in the House of Lords in 1964. The group got stoned with Bob Dylan, who then delighted in pushing them over like a row of dominoes. Elvis showed them their first TV remote control and later denounced them to Richard Nixon. Jeffrey Archer, who inveigled them into a charity scheme as a student, was “the kind of bloke who’d bottle your piss and sell it” according to Ringo.
Cynthia Lennon, Yoko Ono, Pattie Boyd and Jane Asher are subsidiary players: Maureen Starkey and Linda Eastman mentioned only in passing. Alongside the usual candidates for “fifth Beatle” — manager Brian Epstein, producer George Martin, original drummer Pete Best — Brown devotes space to background figures like Eric Clague, the postman who ran over and killed Lennon’s mother, Julia, and Jimmie Nicol, who briefly stood in on drums in 1964 while Ringo had his tonsils out. He records the galvanising impact the group had on Bruce Springsteen, Chrissie Hynde and, horrifically, Charles Manson. And on J R R Tolkien, whose dislike of their sound led him to veto their planned 1968 film of The Lord of the Rings, with Paul as Frodo and John as Gollum.
Was any group so fetishised, from the screams of Beatlemania to the ridiculous rumours of Paul’s death to the memorabilia market that sprang up after their split? One of John’s teeth sold for £19,000 in 2011 to a dentist who hoped to identify the DNA of illegitimate Beatle offspring. In contemporary chapters, Brown attends fussy fan tours of Liverpool and listens to British, Norwegian and Hungarian tribute bands — some of whom have been together far longer than the actual Beatles — at conventions.
Born in 1957, Brown grew up on the group and devotes most of his musical analysis to later opuses like A Day in the Life, Hey Jude and All You Need is Love. While he clearly admires John Lennon’s punning, absurdist wit, he paints him as a bully and a coward, and lampoons Yoko. Paul is thoughtful, Ringo likeable and normal with his “bus driver’s face”. Under George’s spiritual questing lies steel: it is he who expels the Hell’s Angels who, along with a family of hippies and a host of grifters and hangers-on, occupied the Apple offices.
A late chapter imagining the Beatles’ story swapped with that of Merseybeat also-rans Gerry and the Pacemakers, and another that tracks back from Epstein’s suicide to his discovery of the band, are the weakest. Otherwise, this kaleidoscopic work makes the familiar story of the world’s most famous band zing with freshness.
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