\u201cDoes anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be an unthinkingly accepted part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?\u201d So thundered Bryan Magee in a review of Fiddler On The Roof<\/i> for The Listener <\/i>in February 1967. Well, Magee lived a long life, only dying last year at the age of 89, and surely came to realise that whatever anyone believed back in the winter before the Summer of Love, endure the Beatles most certainly have.<\/p>\n
Half a century since their break-up, the Fab Four grimly reaped to the tiresome two, the Beatles go on. Documentaries and dramas continue to be made, interviews are bigged-up, and last year, as so often, the Beatles made the top 10. In their early days of struggle and strife, John Lennon would ask his band mates where they were going. \u201cTo the toppermost of the poppermost\u201d, they\u2019d howl in unison. The Beatles got there, and stayed there. A few years ago, a discoloured and cavitied tooth once resident in Lennon\u2019s mouth went for \u00a319,000 at auction.<\/p>\n
Teeth turn up a lot in Craig Brown\u2019s One Two Three Four<\/i>. Fans had a thing for the Fabs\u2019 gnashers. A girl told Paul she loved his \u201cpearly white teeth\u201d. Another told Ringo he had \u201cthe nicest smile of all the Beatles\u201d before asking \u201care those your real teeth?\u201d Indeed they were, as Elvis Presley couldn\u2019t help noticing. The Beatles grew up worshipping \u201cthe King\u201d, but the day they finally met their idol it was he that was gobsmacked: \u201cThey got all that money,\u201d Elvis harangued his hairstylist, Larry Geller. \u201cWhy don\u2019t they get their teeth fixed?\u201d<\/p>\n
Actually, at least one of them had. A few months earlier, George Harrison, whose choppers were, Brown says, particularly \u201cuneven and rickety\u201d, had endured hour upon hour of painful work at John Riley\u2019s Harley Street dental clinic. So long did the work go on that Harrison and Riley struck up a friendship. Hence the Bayswater dinner party at which Riley\u2014the son of \u201can upstanding south London police constable\u201d\u2014spiked the coffee and introduced the Harrisons and the Lennons to LSD. \u201cThe walls moved,\u201d Brown quotes John\u2019s first wife Cynthia, \u201cthe plants talked, other people looked like ghouls and time stood still.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brown\u2019s book is not that far-out, although next to your traditional life and times it\u2019s pretty avant-garde. It owes more to the twisted perspectives of cubism and the fractured narratives of Dada than it does to the linear structure of conventional biography. Like Ma\u2019am Darling<\/i>, Brown\u2019s 2017 life of Princess Margaret, it is a mash-up of letters and diary entries, newspaper clippings and memoir asides. There are even a few mocked-up party invitations, as well as some of the delicious parodies with which Brown beguiles readers of Private Eye<\/i>.<\/p>\n
In a note on his sources, Brown suggests that the general standard of his Beatles book is \u201cmuch higher in terms of style and honesty than those . . . about my last subject\u201d. I dare say he\u2019s right, though One Two Three Four<\/i> has no pretences to being definitive. Brown pretty much takes it for granted that we know the Beatles\u2019 story and that he need not bother us with details. Fair enough, though minor characters do have a habit of shimmering into the action unannounced. The cops make a drugs raid on the day of \u201cPaul and Linda\u2019s wedding\u201d, although, a footnote aside, this is the first we\u2019ve heard of Linda Eastman. As for the incident that happened \u201cwhen Julian was three weeks old\u201d: oughtn\u2019t we to have been introduced to the Lennons\u2019 first child beforehand?<\/p>\n
Then again, one of Brown\u2019s main themes is the sheer contingency of life and, therefore, biography. Early on in the book, he tells how the young McCartney was bright enough to take his Spanish and Latin O-levels a year early. At which point the text splits into two columns. In one of them, McCartney aces his exams and heads on up to the Lower Sixth with his then best friend Ian James. In the other, McCartney fails Latin, is held back a year and . . . pals up with the younger George Harrison.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere Brown devotes a chapter to the vexed question of just what happened in the Cavern Club on the night that the MC, Bob Wooler, taunted Lennon about his having recently shared a hotel room with the Beatles\u2019 homosexual manager, Brian Epstein. After several pages of trying to work out who did what to whom, Brown resorts to a three-column table of the various descriptions of Lennon\u2019s assault on Wooler. The weapons used range from fists, through a big stick, and on to a shovel, while the injuries sustained include bruised ribs, a cracked collarbone, and a broken nose. Which account to believe? Brown throws up his hands: \u201cNo other event in the lives of the Beatles,\u201d he writes, \u201cillustrates more clearly the random, subjective nature of history.\u201d<\/p>\n
But what of the random, subjective nature of taste? Love the Beatles though Brown does, he never seeks to bat away the Magee line with which his book ends. So how good were they? Were they, as Leonard Bernstein argued, \u201cSchubert-like [in their] flow of musical invention\u201d? Were they, as the Sunday Times<\/i> critic Richard Buckle claimed, \u201cthe greatest composers since Beethoven\u201d? Did \u201cStrawberry Fields Forever\u201d deserve the great Mahlerian Deryck Cooke\u2019s praise for the way its \u201cflat seventh [is] harmonised by the minor seventh on the dominant\u201d? Did the \u201cflat submediant key switches [and] autocratic but not by any means ungrammatical attitude to tonality\u201d of \u201cThis Boy\u201d really merit the attention of The Times<\/i>\u2019s William Mann?<\/p>\n
Certainly the Beatles have lasted better than anyone but their most devoted fans would have predicted. Then again, Magee\u2019s dismissal of the band was accompanied by his confident claim that \u201cthe songs of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, still live\u2014not merely live but thrive\u201d. I yield to no one in my love of the Great American Songbook, but does it really thrive today? Brown\u2019s subtitle is The Beatles in Time<\/i>, though just in time might have been nearer the mark. With the baby-boomers dying off, it\u2019s a nice question how long the Fab Four have left. As George Harrison\u2014far and away the most distinguished songwriter of the post-Beatles\u2019 solo years\u2014sang, \u201cAll things must pass\u201d.<\/p>\n
\n
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
\n<\/b>By Craig Brown
\n<\/i>Fourth Estate, 402pp, \u00a320<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Half a century since their break-up, the Fab Four grimly reaped to the tiresome two, the Beatles go on. Documentaries and dramas continue to be made, interviews are bigged-up, and last year, as so often, the Beatles made the top 10”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6851,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[652],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9575,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/9575"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}