ONE TWO THREE FOUR - THE BEATLES IN TIME BY CRAIG BROWN
This book is a wayward romp through the lives and times of the Beatles. In its telling the author recognizes how surprisingly central they are to the lives of us all, how Beatles songs have tracked us. For those who lived through their early years they formed a parallel-enhanced dramatized existence. People remember the first time they heard ‘Hey Jude’ (written by Paul to console John’s 5 year old son when he left for Yoko Ono – it was ’Hey Jules originally). Boys and girls fell in love to the Beatles, and children (ten year old Craig Brown, in the straitened loneliness of his Catholic prep school was one) puzzled over the lyrics (‘Do what in the road’ little Craig wondered) and as the years went on a Curia of quasi-theological expert fans pored over the meaning of every word in their songs. In this free-spirited book, the author matches whimsy with the kind of intense immersion in the minutiae of the Beatles’ world, to produce a compelling read. It’s not as if there aren’t already hundreds of books about them. The closing bibliography boggled the mind – mostly at the depth of research. But like the coruscating ‘Ma’am Darling – 99 glimpses of Princess Margaret’, this book, wider deeper more daring and infinitely more detailed, brings investigation to imaginative lives, always probing the question ‘What was it about the Beatles that made them?’
In one short year, the Beatles’ fortunes ‘ramped up’ from bottom-of-the bill obscurity to the kind of fame never seen in the world before. They switched from struggling support act into headliners so potent that tickets for shows were sold out in seconds .The wealthy and powerful wheedled their way inside concerts and the stars of the day, Helen Shapiro, Joe Brown spiraled from adulation to annihilation in weeks.
The chronology of fame is astonishing. No one was too grand to resist. The Queen, doubtless slightly mystified about why she was doing it, pinned on their unexpectedly –awarded CBEs with puzzled grace.
‘The Queen asked John, “Have you been working hard recently?” Like many of her subjects when confronted by Her Majesty, John went blank. ‘I couldn’t think what we’ve been doing, so I said, “No, we’ve been having a holiday,” when actually we’ve been recording.’ She then asked them all, ‘Have you been together long?’ Ringo replied, ‘Yes, many years. Forty years.’ And together, Ringo and Paul chorused: ‘We’ve been together now for forty years and it don’t seem a day too much.’ (They were singing the words of the old musical hall number ‘My Dear Old Dutch’ AG)
According to Ringo, at this moment a ‘strange, quizzical look’ came over Her Majesty’s face.
‘Did you start it all?’ she continued.
‘No, they did,’ replied Ringo. ‘I joined last. I’m the little fellow.’
‘It’s a pleasure giving it to you,’ she said.
But that’s what she said to everybody,’ George told the press conference afterwards.”
Craig Brown’s book is not a conventional autobiography, more snatches and scenes and offbeat perceptions of the Fab Four’s personalities and adventures. And he is Clouseau-like in his research into the bye- roads of characters like Pete Best, the Lost Beatle and their substitute drummer in Australia, Jimmie Nicol whose fame was so brief he declared bankrupcy the year after the tour.. Some of the chapters are just a page long. Some consist of lists of characters, others hinge on parties attended. It’s compulsive reading – but ration yourself to savour the crowded stories and quirky observations of this master of comedy material. There are so many.
The Beatles’ stunning success was a mystery in its time. No one could afford not to have view. It brought out the waspish in the worst of their critics. Noel Coward was especially vile and vituperative about them, a painfully patronizing pose that did not stop him going around to their hotel after they’d done a particularly exhausting concert to demand to meet them. The exhausted band were played out but Paul McCartney , courteous as ever, went down to the lobby to say hello.
Some of the criticism was clearly resentment. ‘All of London was in their thrall. And if you didn’t know Popes John or Paul, or at least drop their names in conversation, you might as well take the next train back to the provinces, over and out. Keith Richards said it best in Life: ‘The Beatles are all over the place like a fucking bag of fleas.’
Craig Brown puts himself firmly into this quirky forensically researched narrative of the Beatles phenomenon. And rightly. The Beatles story is the story of our time whether you were a grandee of the Arts or a schoolboy like him at the time. The clash of cultures is clear now but in its time the raucous, joyous, thrilling arrival of the Beatles on the scene (the screaming fans, the adulation) landed on a post-war traditional society whose sexy icon was then Cliff Richard. Craig Brown remaembers,
“I myself greatly enjoyed Cliff Richard’s performance as Buttons in Cinderella at the London Palladium in 1966, with Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd as the Ugly Sisters, Tudor Davies as Dandini, and Jack Douglas as Baron Hardup. The Brokers’ Men were played by the Shadows.The specialty act was a baby elephant called ‘The Adorable Tonya’
The Times they were certainly a’changin’ and with them morals and manners suddenly consigned to a bygone age. Craig Brown touches on one encounter in the entrance of the White Lion hotel in Lavenham. His father was leaving and John Lennon and Yoko Ono were trying to get in through the door. They were there for the shooting of another avant-garde film, Craig Brown’s father just for the shooting. The author reflects on the clash of worlds. His father was a veteran of the Normandy landings the blood and the bodies and the horror evoked in a shocking passage. My own father, ‘five years under canvas’ in the North African campaign, survivor of Anzio and Salerno was of the same generation. Of the Lavenham hotel stand-off , Craig Brown’s father reported later, “ I stood my ground”. I bet he did.
‘During this same period,the Beatles were recording ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’.
Everyone was trying to figure (sometimes literally) a way to appreciate the unstoppable phenomenon rolling out before them.
‘Deryck Cooke attempted to convey the full majesty of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ by elevating it to a branch of Higher Mathematics: ‘It has a first nine-bar section divided into one-and-a half, two, two, one-and-a-half and two, the penultimate bar being in 6/8 instead of 4/4, quaver equaling quaver. After a delaying six-beat
And others tried to grin and bear it.’
“‘I don’t think the Beatles are by any means a wholly bad influence,’ said Benjamin Britten, retreating into litotes for an interview with Radio Finland in 1965. ‘I think they’re charming creatures. I don’t happen to like their music very much, but that’s just me. I think it’s very natural that light music should exist; but if a person likes the Beatles, it doesn’t by any means preclude their love of Beethoven. Everything I read about the Beatles gives me great pleasure .I also think they’re frightfully funny.’
In America composer Aaron Copeland approved of them ‘though in a slightly mystified kind of way’.
In between all the speculation, the Beatles continued their crazy chaotic course through British – and then American – society. A Cambridge visit from the Fab Four was very much par for the rocky course of their near -hysterical progress. They played the Cambridge Regal on 26 November 1963 accompanied by an American reporter,
‘”At that same venue the previous March the group had supported ‘America’s Exciting’ Chris Montez And ‘America’s Fabulous’ Tommy Roe. But now it was they who were being supported by others. Fans had been queuing in the streets outside the Regal since 10.30 a.m. By 6 p.m. the line was already half a mile long. Hours before the show, the Beatles had met the police at an agreed spot a mile away, to be smuggled into the theatre in the back of a police van’.
Sometimes alarming, often threatening, always exhausting the Beatles tours made topline news and their celebrity, their wit and their fun caught fire as they appeared at every concert who could wheedle a booking.
Craig Brown is sanguine about all this. He examines it from every angle, psychological, sexual, hysterical, sociological. The book is as much an account of the Beatles’ rise as, the story of society - one which still held to the values of yesteryear, one that welcomed the change that the Beatles -unconsciously but potently- represented.
The book is meticulous and all the better for it.
It opens with visits to the absurdly over-hyped National Trust properties now devoted to a recreation of the Beatles’ early homes and more amusingly every article of clothing, mug, shaver, coal scuttle that any of them might have used. The Guides are hilariously hostile to anyone taking notes and Craig’s cautious passage through their officious spiel is a hugely amusing read. Just as I thought he had been just too mean in disparaging a down-at-heel band of old chaps having a go at a Beatles tribute in a broken down hall, he switched the tone
‘The wonder of a tribute in a seedy club stiff with septuagenarians is initially depressing - but turns magic when they start to play’. This is the phenomenon he links to the Beatles themselves, a winning streak he discerns through the cacophony and chaos of all the razzmatazz surrounding their appearance – the kind of warm welcome comfort they somehow generated,
‘And with the Fab Four, there is another illusion at work, equally convincing, equally transient: for as long as they play, we are all fine’.
Craig Brown has somehow caught, defined and redacted the quintessence of the Beatles. ‘Eventually it became taken for granted that they were single-handedly breaking Britain’s class system without the benefit of an education or family background.’
'James Morris educated at Lancing and Christchurch college Oxford had the same insights even at the time, he perceived their attitude to class was a liberation, an ‘absolute aloofness to old prejudices and preconceptions, their brand of festive iconoclasm’. Their glory lay in their detachment from Britain’s imperial grandeur. They are New Men, ‘the British emancipated at last from the White Man’s burden’. Morris proclaimed ‘an inescapable sense of holiday in England today – a springy, frothy sense of release.’
What an accolade. As this never- uncritical yet ultra- perceptive biographer realizes, the core of their appeal. was magical. Craig Brown told me when I asked him what the key was to their immense universal success, “ The way they approached people was so direct, not deferential and certainly not resentful, as equals.”
And for me the most moving parts of the book were the careful examination of the lads’ backgrounds. They were from very ordinary homes with no special advantage Ringo was the father –deprived child of poverty that spend years in hospital with a series of serious illnesses. Craig Brown clearly admires his jaunty spirit, his resilience and his humour but as Paul noted ‘we were all working class but if your ad left you were lower working class. ‘Paul and George had a more supportive family background but never privileged. After the debacle of the their first Hamburg foray – the descriptions of which are so shockingly graphic it’s worth the price of the book to read them alone – Paul’s father insisted he start in a winding shop and he looked set fair for, at best, a managerial position in the electrical world. Intriguingly the others felt John’s later persona, as the horny-handed son of toil was surprising. ‘”To us, John was upper class … It’s ironic, he was always very “Fuck you!” and he wrote the song “Working Class Hero” – in fact, he wasn’t at all working class.”
‘The Beatles’ remarks the author ‘sent the class thing sky-high; they laughed it out of existence and, I think, introduced a tone of equality more successfully than any other single factor I know.’
Was it this profound change of attitude the Beatles wrought, breezily unconscious of its impact, at the heart of suspicion of them in some very élite circles? Craig Brown quotes the slights they suffered at a British Embassy party when they visited Nassau and the outraged comments of a woman, who witnessed it,
‘“The ‘swells of the island’ were ‘unable to contain neither their curiosity nor their middle-aged spleen at seeing these four “uneducated”, “lower-class” youngsters (products of the Welfare State) succeed. Who knows what maneuvers they must have gone through for the privilege of being able to assemble at this scandal of a dinner given in honor of these mere boys, just so that they could turn their noses up at them?”
And he quotes a character from Iris Murdoch character in A Word Child ‘Here at any rate class no longer existed,’ he reflects. ‘The Beatles, like Empedocles, had thrown all things about.”
Yet the freshness and joy in one another’s company began to fade as the material success burgeoned.
Some of it had been really fun. John and Cynthia bought a grand house in South West London they called Kenwood, a very long way in all senses from Mendips, John’s Liverpool home. From the outset problems began to brew between residents and staff
‘The never-ending episodes of pilferage and squabbling upstairs and downstairs gave Kenwood something of a psychedelic Swinging Sixties Downton Abbey feel. In a later episode, Cynthia was informed by a nosy neighbour that John’s smelly, chain-smoking chauffeur Jock was living in the back of the Rolls-Royce.”
Down the road in St George’s Close a sunnier atmosphere settled at Ringo’s pad, “Ringo installed his own pub, the Flying Cow, in the front was a psychedelic light show. He relished playing mine host from behind the bar, pulling the beer taps and pressing the buttons on the fully operational till. The Flying Cow also boasted a dartboard, and a pool table specially flown over from America’
But from the rocking and rolling originality of their flamboyant, dazzling appearance on the scene, the book tells the extraordinary descent into chaos and confusion. It is entertaining but appalling. After Brian Epstein’s death the Beatles were like orphans and they knew themselves that things would begin to crumble. Money leaked from their original Apple Label balance sheets, aided by some ‘business men’ who are now household names – alongside Magic George a Greek trickster who claimed to do everything but knew nothing, were the minor manipulators like Jeffrey Archer and later Richard Branson. The Maharishi (remember him?) brought spiritual calm in a six-week retreat in India but they all fell out and the Beatles rejected the guru, manipulated by conman Magic George. But then gangs of freeloading hippies and aggressive Hells Angels invaded their lives, relationships broke up and eventually so did the Beatles, haunted in the last months by the ghastly specter of Yoko, whom all but John loathed.
Finally, in this brilliant analysis of the internal dynamics of the Beatles, this funny but essentially compassionate author remarks. “The careful selection of impressions of their personalities never bettered than by Brian Epstein their tortured tragic manager who found in them a kind of salvation, writing
‘They’ve got this astonishing naturalness, this freedom from unnaturalness. In private they are unspoiled, unaffected, sincere themselves all the time, and to everybody, regardless everything about the Beatles was right for me. Their kind of attitude to life, the attitude that comes out in their music and their rhythm and their lyrics, and their humor, and their personal way of behaving – it was all just what I wanted. They represented the direct, unselfconscious, good-natured, uninhibited human relationships which I hadn’t found and had wanted and felt deprived of.”
So sad that when the Beatles began to find their own legs, Brian Epstein lost his reason to live
'The further they travelled, the more they looked back' reflects the author'. They were Pied Pipers, leading their generation in a conga along untrodden paths; but they were also the little boys at the end of the line, filled with longing for the world they had left behind”
His conclusion has all the wonderful resonance of the end of The Great Gatsby or the final words of Le Grand Meaulnes
In the style of One Two Three Four – The Beatles in Time here’s some surprising ( to me) snippets from the book.
Let it Be was written about Paul’s mother who died when he was 14 years old. It was one of her peacekeeping sayings in the family.
Paul and Jane Asher lived together in her family house in Wimpole Street for three years, where Paul became part of her very cultivated, cultured family – and loved it.
Left-handed Ringo, as well as spending long years in hospital, was forced too write right-handedly – yet this did give him his unique drumming style which tribute bands found hard to copy.
‘Michelle’ was a song Paul was working on but got stuck on a rhyme. Jan Vaughn, a French teacher, suggested ‘ Ma belle” and when Paul riposted ‘ these are words that go together well’ she translated them for him.
George was a junior at Paul’s school and became an unlikely younger friend, known as ‘Little George’. His mastery of the guitar meant John and Paul hired him spontaneously for a gig
John’s early house was called Mendips and overlooked a golf course.
‘Jealous Guy’ was a re-make of a vacuous song composed in the Maharishi phase.
Yoko Ono is worth 600 million dollars.
