Mr Moonlight

A big announcement and a sneak preview...

I hope you’ll forgive my recent neglect of Read Me Do: I’ve been seeing my new biography of Brian Epstein, Mr Moonlight, through to publication. It’s published in the US by De Capo Press (16 June) in the UK by Simon & Schuster (18 June) and you can pre-order it here.

In the meantime, here’s a sneak preview…

---

Brian’s Boys

There never was nor could be another pop manager like Brian Samuel Epstein, the young record-retailer from Liverpool with the uncertain smile who spun what has truly been called ‘the 20^th century’s greatest romance.’

Partly this is because there never could be other clients quite like the Beatles. When Brian took them on in 1962, his much-derided aim was to make them ‘bigger than Elvis Presley’, at that time the supreme pop superstar. It proved an uncharacterstic understatement: after only two years in his hands, they’d be bigger than any earthly instrument could measure.

Pop artists’ managers in Britain thus far had been a seedy bunch known to the public, if at all, for their ruthless exploitation and defrauding of their naïve young charges. Brian was of an utterly different stamp with his educated accent, punctilious good manners and belief in honouring agreements and giving value for money.

His achievement in a profession of which he had no previous experience, and for which no rulebook existed, remains jaw-dropping. A devout classical music fan, he was nonetheless solely responsible for a new genre of pop that was to change its course, and Britain’s international image, for ever – yet, disgracefully, earn him no public honour nor even thanks.

After the Beatles, he signed up enough further young Liverpool talent to constitute a ‘Mersey Sound’ and elevate him, aged 29, from manager into mogul: Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer, Cilla Black, the Fourmost. At the Mersey Sound’s high-water mark, 1963-64, there was seldom a week without one or more of his discoveries in the UK singles or album charts.

British pop during the classbound early 60s had been overwhelmingly blue collar, its name still besmirched by the antisocial behaviour its rowdier parent, rock ‘n’ roll, had visited on the mid-50s. Without adulterating the Beatles’ sound or their personalities in the slightest, Brian gave them an air of refinement they would keep even after prematurely losing him.

The cover of their debut album, Please Please Me, showed four hard-boiled Scousers whom the camera didn’t much love grinning down from an anonymous balcony; on that of their second, With The Beatles, eight months later they’d become polo-necked, subtly-lit and solemn like art students or denizens of the Parisian Left Bank. From then on, middle-and upper-class teenagers, the aristocracy, finally even royalty could be Beatlemaniacs too.

But to Brian the Beatles were always more than just a licence to print money; they were the children a homosexual man in the 1960s otherwise couldn’t hope for. Though less than six years older than Ringo, the eldest, he always referred to them collectively as ‘the boys’.

To them he was ‘Eppy’, a very Liverpool subversion of his executive airs (at times varied by crushing cruelty on John’s part.) But their belief and trust in him were almost child-like; from first to last, they would sign any piece of paper he put in front of them without reading it.

His peak as what nowadays would be called an influencer came in February 1964 when he took them to America to play to a nationwide television audience of 73 million. In that moment a decade whose youthful creativity thus far had mainly been about cinema, the theatre and art, finally began to ‘swing.’

The numerous British bands fashioned in the Beatles’ image (i.e. the bespoke-suited, pixie-booted look decreed by Brian) poured across the Atlantic after them, a literal invasion that wiped out the whole existing generation of American popsters at a plectrum-stroke. Young musicians from coast to coast discarded their crewcuts and Bermuda shorts to form foursomes with Beatle fringes and Beatle suits, singing tough-tender Beatle harmonies in faux-Liverpudlian accents. Without ever knowing it, all of them, too, were Brian’s boys.

His vision was not all-encompassing. The master-plan for the Beatles that he drew up initially took no account of John and Paul’s prolific songwriting genius – the sphere in which they were always bigger than Elvis – nor the speed at which it evolved from the simple crayoning of ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘She Loves You’ to masterpieces in oils like ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘A Day In The Life.’

Indeed, in that later period he became semi-detached from their music, leaving their inspirational producer, George Martin, to oversee its creative quantum leaps. Rather, he focused on what he felt an almost sacred duty to supply their every need, gratify their slightest whims and otherwise maintain the invisible shield with which he prevented their terrifying fame from tearing them to pieces.

The pity was, he could never construct a similar shield around himself. For even at his golden zenith he had to endure the antisemitism that was then commonplace, sometimes naked but more often the stealthy British variety unnoticeable to anyone but the victim.

And until the last weeks of his short life, he was forced to live outside the law in a lingering Dark Age where consensual sex between men, however private, was deemed ‘an act of gross indecency’ and punished by indecently long prison-sentences with a maximum of life.

The neutral term ‘gay’ had yet to come into general use. Most Britons employed the taunts of the homophobe: ‘pouf,’ ‘nonce,’ ‘pansy,’ ‘arse-bandit,’ ‘shirt-lifter,’ but none so ubiquitous and venomous as ‘queer’, both as noun and adjective. Brian would have been amazed to see today’s LGBTQ community embrace the adjective as a proud cultural and artistic validation.

Him it condemned to a furtive parallel existence, racked by the dual guilt of betraying his old-school Jewish parents, as he saw it, and offending against the religion that always meant much to him. Adding immeasurably to that burden, a streak of masochism in an otherwise gentle and sensitive nature made him seek out younger straight men, usually in public spaces after dark, courting arrest, humiliation, robbery, beatings-up and blackmail.

John’s way of repudiating a middle-class suburban background was to pretend to be just the kind of street-corner hoodlum Brian found most fatally attractive. It was what had first drawn him to the Beatles and his obsession with John never went away, like scar-tissue that could bleed afresh at any moment.

As he rose higher in the entertainment business, he met many major figures with discreet permanent gay relationships but, aside from a short-lived one during his teens, Brian was never so fortunate: the greater his success, the more reckless and joyless were his casual affairs and more entrenched his delusion that his precious boys knew nothing about them.

Few 21^st century Beatles fans appreciate how short was their time together at the top - barely six years. By two-thirds of the way through, they’d very obviously stopped being boys in any eyes but Brian’s.

In August 1967, his management contract with them was about to expire and, he believed, would not be renewed. He put on a brave show of acceptance that sooner or later they were bound to fly the steel-reinforced nest he had built for them.

When he died, mysteriously and alone, aged only 32 and at the height of the so-called Summer of Love, they had seemingly declared their independence by adopting a very different mentor, the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

‘Then we’re fucked,’ John said when told the news – and they were.

Mr Moonlight is available in the UK from 18 June - pre-order it here. Thank you, as ever, for your support!