Midas Muddle

My thoughts on the Brian Epstein biopic

Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Brian Epstein in Midas Man Credit: Signature Entertainment

There never was nor could be another pop manager like Brian Epstein, the young record salesman from Liverpool who discovered the Beatles and with them changed the course of popular music and culture for ever.

Pop artists’ managers until then had been a nondescript bunch, known to the public if at all for ruthlessly exploiting and defrauding their naïve young proteges. Brian was of an utterly different stamp with his immaculate tailoring, ‘BBC’ accent and old-fashioned insistence on honouring agreements and giving value for money.

Now his monumentally successful but hauntingly sad life has inspired a biopic titled Midas Man – after the mythical king whose touch turned everything into gold – which this week began streaming on Amazon Prime.

Today, John  Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s childhood homes are National Trust shrines and John even has an airport named after him. But Brian’s memorials are few and hard-won. 

Only since 2012 has a blue plaque marked the location of his former office next to the London Palladium. And only in 2022 did Liverpool get around to raising a modest bronze statue in the city centre near the site of his family’s NEMS electrical and record store.

The reason for these long cold-shouldering years isn’t hard to fathom. For Brian was gay in an age when male homosexuality was a crime punished by imprisonment and especially perilous in a macho northern city like Liverpool 

As the elder son of conservative Jewish parents, he suffered additional shame and guilt, especially since his taste was for much younger men far below his intellectual level who were all the more fatally attractive if they were straight. 

He was therefore often reduced to cruising the city’s docklands after dark at constant risk from blackmail, roaming gangs dedicated to ‘queer-bashing’ and barely less vicious police entrapment.

Indeed, when he first saw the Beatles onstage at Liverpool’s  Cavern club – as it turned out, just a short walk from his family’s NEMS store – he fell headlong in love with John or, rather, with the tough street kid that the middle-class boy from suburban Woolton pretended to be.

As he rose higher in the entertainment world, he met many major figures with permanent, low-key gay relationships but he, alas, never found one.

Quite the reverse, the greater his professional success, the more reckless and joyless were his casual affairs and the more entrenched his delusion that the Beatles suspected nothing.

Although I never met Brian, I was granted lengthy interviews with his widowed mother, Queenie, and his younger brother, Clive, for my Beatles biography, Shout!, published in 1981.

His father, Queenie said, had never come to terms with his homosexuality but she’d received nothing but kindness from those she tactfully called ‘Brian’s people.’

This access to his family was invaluable to Shout! but now I feel is the time to give him a full biography in a more tolerant sexual climate where ‘queer’ is no longer a hate-word but a proud cultural label - and Brian’s many torments have made him something of a hero to the LGBTQ+ community.

I also have revelatory new material about his last unhappy days after the Beatles voted to give up touring and concentrate on making studio albums, beginning with their masterpiece, St. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

No longer having them to protect and pamper created a void that Brian’s by now numerous other artists could never fill. He developed an extreme gambling addiction, often losing thousands at baccarat in a single night at Mayfair’s plush Clermont Club, and became increasingly reliant on drugs and alcohol. 

During the August Bank Holiday weekend of 1967, the height of the so-called Summer of Love, he was found dead at his Belgravia home of a supposed barbiturates overdose, aged only 32. 

‘Then we’re fucked,’ John said on hearing the news – and he was right. 

Ahead for the Beatles lay two rudderless years, punctuated by flops rather than continuous hits, ending with their appointment of an out-and-out crook, Allen Klein, as their manager, and their inevitable breakup.

And among their employees, as disaster followed disaster, the same nostalgic words would often be heard: ‘Brian would never have let it happen.’

The new biopic, Midas Man, is not the first attempt to put this unique figure in pop history onto the big screen.  As a result of Shout!, I was myself commissioned to write scripts about him by two different producers. The first project soon fell by the wayside but the second seemed a certainty since it already had Jude Law attached to play Brian.

My script would necessarily have omitted the discovery I’d made while researching Shout!: that two suicide notes, possibly drafts for a single one, had been found at Brian’s bedside but never referred to at the inquest which concluded he’d died from accidental self-overdoses of barbiturates mixed with brandy.

When I mentioned this to Queenie and Clive Epstein they begged me not to make it public for in Judaism suicide is a sin. I can still hear their voices together on the telephone, saying ‘Please, Philip … please, Philip.’ They were good people who’d already suffered grievously, so I agreed 

Eventually, financing the film proved so difficult that Jude Law grew too old to play Brian, so it was abandoned. 

I thus felt a special interest in Midas Man, despite its misconceived title – for Brian’s golden touch tragically failed him in the end.

One must say at once that it has a brilliant performance by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Brian despite being dark and vulpine where his character was pale and mousy. Otherwise, the casting is gimmick-ridden to the point of absurdity.

American talk-show host Jay Leno plays Ed Sullivan, whose television variety show broadcast the Beatles to that 72 million in 1964. Which would be fine if only Leno could act. Suzy Eddie Izzard is Allan Williams, their shambolic first manager, who as far as I know, never favoured stockings and suspender-belts.

For anyone even glancingly familiar with their story, this will be a painful  watch. Unimportant minor characters, such as a Decca Records marketing man named Beecher Stevens, have cameo roles while a crucial one like Bill Harry, who first introduced Brian to Liverpool’s music scene, doesn’t appear at all.

For me, the most telling detail is a list of producers, executive producers and associate producers almost as numerous as the cast. They will doubtless all have been Beatles fans whose constant arguments over Fab Four trivia must account for the movie’s overall flat and filleted feel.

All biopics inevitably bend facts and reshape events, but this one simply leaves most of them out. Brian’s most epic moments with his Boys – the mayhem of Beatlemania, the furore over John’s ‘more popular than Jesus’ remark  - are just monologues to camera by Fortune-Lloyd with a background of news-footage. 

Brian’s covert sexual encounters are portrayed as brutal collisions that erupt suddenly out of nowhere with no attempt to show any human dimension. If I belonged to the LGBTQ+ community, this film would be top of my cancellation-list. 

As the Beatles, Jonah Lees’s John, Blake Richardson’s Paul, Leo Harvey- Elledge’s George and Campbell Wallace’s Ringo look their parts but are given little chance to sound like them. Since permission to use Lennon-McCartney songs has clearly been refused by the Beatles’ Apple corporation, they’re able to perform only one of the band’s cover-versions.

I was pining for more. A bit of Little Richard or Carl Perkins, costing a fraction of Jay Leno, would have blasted the whole thing awake. But my biggest issue was with the set designer, whose motto throughout seems to have been ‘Think small and shabby.’

The record-department that Brian ran before his Great Discovery was an expansive and impressive place where Liverpool teenagers could experience what he proudly advertised as ‘The Finest Record Collection In The North.’

In Midas Man it’s like someone’s small front room with a few album-covers randomly strewn about. 

Altogether it looks cheap. Something that could never be said of Brian Epstein.