Such was the negativity swirling around Shout, that I started its research in an embarrassed, underhand way. I’d say that the book was ‘about popular culture in the 1960s as exemplified by …’, then slur over ‘the Beatles’, before someone else could tell me I was wasting my time.
It was besides a horribly naked feeling to be without the power and glory of my regular employer, as I discovered when I phoned Richard Lester, the director of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!. ‘Mr Lester,’ I began, ‘I’m with The Sunday Times…’
‘My commiserations,’ he replied suavely.
After a couple of weeks of this, I began to think the naysayers might be right; there really was nothing new to say about the Beatles and my book would be of interest only to superannuated Sixties hippies. Then one day my Sunday Times colleague Magnus Linklater was giving me a lift somewhere with his seven year-old son, Saul, in the back of the car. As the engine idled in front of some lights. I picked up what Saul was singing, with a rather good imitation of John: ‘You say you wanna revo-lu-hu-hu-shuh-hun…’
Some consolation, too, was finding many of the book’s principal characters conveniently near at hand and willing to be interviewed. George Martin, the Beatles’ record producer, lived only a couple of streets away from me in Bayswater, west London. He had been a paragon of honesty, refusing to take advantage of John and Paul by adding his name to their songwriting credit, as was standard practice, content simply to shape and polish the rough diamonds of their genius.
Long-parted from the Parlophone label, which had grown fat on Beatles records while denying him a Christmas bonus, he was running his own hugely successful AIR studios. No more the dapper, BBC-accented figure Brian Epstein had compared to ‘a stern but fair-minded headmaster, Martin was now sideburned, tieless and even given to the occasional ‘fuck’.
It still troubled Martin that in his early days with the Beatles, he’d been ‘rather beastly to George’, paying little attention to him in the recording-studio and not noticing the slow-burning songwriting talent that would eventually match the best of Lennon and McCartney with Here Comes The Sun, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and his masterpiece, Something.
Bill Harry, John’s fellow student at Liverpool College of Art and founder of the seminal Mersey Beat newspaper, now a music PR, lived the same short distance from me in the opposite direction while Dick James, the former dance-band vocalist with the astounding luck to have been Lennon and McCartney’s song publisher, had his palatial offices just around the corner from the (now suspended) Sunday Times.
Mogul though James had become, he was still apt to break into song and, at my request warbled a few bars of his biggest hit, the theme from the children’s television Adventures of Robin Hood: Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen/Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men/Feared by the bad, loved by the good…
The Beatles’ foremost media advocates in the early 60s, Ray Coleman, the editor of Melody Maker, and the Evening Standard’s Maureen Cleave, were both still operating, though now as freelances. Ray Coleman recalled John’s chronic inability to remember song lyrics, and how Coleman used to write them on his own hand and hold it up for John as a prompt.
It was to Maureen Cleave that John opined the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’ with such cataclysmic results. The two were rumoured to have had an affair, but Cleave was far too straitlaced for any such thing; while for John, her real attraction was a prose style that reminded him of Just William’s creator, Richmal Crompton.
The Beatles’ first press officer, Tony Barrow, met me at the Waldorf hotel, bringing with him Helen Shapiro, the former schoolgirl chanteuse who’d headlined their British tour in early 1963 just before Beatlemania erupted. She remembered dodging her chauffeur-driven limo and chaperone to travel on the bus with them. ‘They spent a lot of time practising their autographs,’ she recalled. ‘They didn’t have any giveaway photos of themselves yet, so they’d write on mine.’
Through the good offices of Bill Harry, I travelled to Kent to see the mother of the shadowy fifth Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe, who put a brilliant career as a painter on hold to play bass guitar with the Beatles in Hamburg and tragically died there from a brain haemorrhage in 1962. I arrived at Millie Sutcliffe’s in the early evening and her disconcerting opening line was ‘For a moment I thought you were Stuart.’ She still pored over the X-rays of his skull and blamed the Beatles, and particularly John, for his death.
A seemingly fortunate connection was with a then-modest young man named Mark Lewisohn, lately anointed as ‘Beatle Brain of Britain.’ He worked in the BBC’s contracts department, where he’d come across one with Paul, long post-Beatles, for a fee of £6. ‘Big deal!’ pop’s future first billionaire had scrawled in the margin.
Lewisohn had calculated that John’s first meeting with Paul at a church garden fete hadn’t been in July 1956 (as the authorised biography had it), but a year later — a discovery which, to hardcore Beatlemaniacs, ranked with penicillin or Tutankhamun’s tomb. He introduced me to the underground world of Beatle bootlegs, which had a fascinating story of their own to tell, and agreed to act as Shout’s researcher-cum-factchecker.
I went to Poole in Dorset to talk to Mimi Smith, the aunt who brought up John in such middle-class gentility that the self-styled ‘working class hero’ had to learn to speak with a Liverpool accent once the Beatles were up and galloping. On the wall of Mimi’s spotless harbourside living-room hung the plaque her nephew had given her, engraved with the words she’d so often used in urging him to forget rock ‘n’ roll and take his schoolwork seriously: ‘The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living at it.’
I interviewed the producer of A Hard Day’s Night, Walter Shenson, an Anglophile American who saw clearer than any Brit what to do onscreen with (as he memorably phrased it), ‘the clever one, the cute one, the quiet one and the adorable runt of the litter.’
He recalled his surprise during the negotiations with Brian Epstein that the manager of so massive an act should be such a pushover. ‘Bud Ornstein [UK head of United Artists] and I agreed to offer Brian and the Beatles 25 percent of the picture. So we asked Brian, “Mr Epstein, what would you consider a fair percentage?” Brian thought for a minute then he said “I couldn’t accept anything less than seven and a half percent.”’
In north Wales, I met Cynthia Lennon, the teenage sweetheart John had dumped, along with their small son, Julian, to take up with Yoko – ‘poor Cyn’, in Aunt Mimi’s not overly compassionate words. Far from munificently provided for, she lived in a draughty old house with her third husband — a television engineer also named John — and had just completed a memoir amazingly without bitterness, ending with the I Ching’s final commandment: ‘No blame’. Her one small revenge was writing it on the portable typewriter Yoko had given Julian.
I went to Sudbury in Suffolk to talk to Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ quirky press officer who’d arranged my extraordinary access to the their Apple house in 1969, not for anything I’d written about ‘the Fabs’, as he called them, but for my recent Sunday Times profile of the strong man Charles Atlas. Despite years in the Fabs’ employ and top music industry jobs afterwards (most recently Head of Special Projects for WEA Records), he’d ended up with few financial resources and was living in an old mill-house bought for him by George.
I felt some awkwardness, having caricatured Taylor in a short story titled Fun House, based on Apple and the press office where he’d held court to relays of journalists, prodigally dispensing Scotch and Coke, Benson & Hedges Gold cigarettes and spliffs almost the size of yellow submarines. But he thought it a huge joke and insisted on my calling him his fictive name, ‘Rodney.’
Like some legendary Oxbridge dons — Maurice Bowra the great example – he was hilarious, wicked and indiscreet in such an oblique, stream-of-consciousness-y way that afterwards one scarcely remembered a word of what he’d said. He apologised for not giving me much I could use and, by way of atonement, picked me some daffodils from his garden.
My research didn’t hit genuine new territory until I went to Liverpool, the two-hour rail journey from London that seems to pass through solid rock before terminating at Lime Street station. Its penultimate stop is a lonely windswept platform marked Edge Hill. If ever a Beatle was describing some alfresco lovemaking ending (as it usually did) in coitus interruptus, he’d say ‘I got off at Edge Hill.’
‘The Pool’ by then was only a shadow of the stately Victorian metropolis the Beatles had known as children. Its transatlantic luxury liner traffic had long since disappeared and shipbuilding on the River Mersey shrunk almost to nothing. An extreme left City Council, dominated by Derek Hatton’s ‘Militant Tendency’ cabal had plunged it into such debt that ordinary hardworking people felt personally responsible and lived in terror of losing their homes.
But as yet the city had done almost nothing to capitalise on its four most famous sons. Their legendary subterranean venue the Cavern club had been filled in in 1974 to make way for a car park. All that marked the spot in cobbled Mathew Street was the rather melancholy bas-relief by local sculptor Arthur Dooley, commemorating ‘Four Lads Who Shook The World.’
I expected to ‘do’ Liverpool in a single visit but was to find myself drawn back there again and again and going still deeper into a Beatles story that had never been told before.
‘The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living at it.’ One of the many priceless gems in this backstory to Shout!