Backlisted - Books about The Beatles

Episode Date: August 19, 2019

Books about the Beatles are the subject of this special episode recorded at Cornwall's Port Eliot festival on July 27th 2019. Joining John and Andy for this celebration of all things fab are lifelong Beatles fans, journalists and authors David Hepworth and Mark Ellen. Titles discussed include '"Love Me Do!": The Beatles' Progress' by Michael Braun; 'The Beatles Anthology'; 'Revolution in the Head' by Ian MacDonald; 'Up Against It' by Joe Orton, and more.* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. ¶¶ Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in a sticky beer keller off the Reaper Barm in Hamburg. The sweat trickling down the insides of our stiff leather trousers. Our hearts full of anticipation about the exciting new beat combo from England

that are about to take the stage. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the website that brings readers and writers together. And I'm Andy Miller, I'm the author of Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today in some kind of, I don't know what we should say, backlisted plus heavy friends. That's the way they would have. That's the way they would have built it in the 70s. Are Mark Ellen and David Hepworth. For John and Paul to our George and Ringo.

OK. Yeah. All right, Aunty Flo. David Hepworth, ladies and gentlemen, pay very careful attention to what I'm about to say, was born on July 27th, 1950. But that's today! Yay!

Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear David. Happy birthday to you. Very good. I left my wife and children at home today just to get that, OK? According to David, this makes him 12 when the Beatles first came along and still an attractively boyish 19 when they broke up.

And that, as far as pop music is concerned, is the winning ticket in the lottery of life. It is. He began writing for the music papers in the 1970s. During the 80s and 90s, he was the editorial director of the publisher of magazines such as Smash Hits, Q, Mojo, while also presenting Whistle Test and, of course, Live Aid, where he was sworn at by Bob Geldof.

David, were you happy with how you were depicted in Queen's film Bohemian Rhapsody? I'm the only person in the UK who's not seen the film, so you can make of that what you will. A lot of people thought it was Timmy Mallard. Contact your lawyers would be... His best-selling books include 1971 Never a Dull Moment and a fabulous creation, How the LP Saved Our Lives.

Also here today, Mr Mark Ellen. Mark spent his teenage years sitting in fields at the feet of hairy rock voyagers such as Atomic Rooster and Wishbone Ash. And knew no better than to admire them. He was editor-in-chief at the publisher's EMAP, edited smash hits, Q, Select and The Word, worked for BBC Television and Radio and for VH1.

His very funny memoir, Rockstars Stole My Life, was published a few years ago and he now writes and he says witters about a range of stuff, but mainly music. And, John, what are we here to discuss today with these eminence grise? We are here to discuss today books by or about the Beatles. The way we approached this was to get everybody to select a book that they wanted to talk about. It may not be their favourite Beatles book, but it's a book that they can talk about. I am

going to talk about this tiny little pamphlet that I had the pleasure to be the UK publisher for back in 2000, The Beatles Anthology. Mark, what book will you be talking about? I'm going to be talking about Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald. Superb book that came out in 1994. Thoroughly recommend it. David, what book will you be talking about? I'm going to be talking about Love Me Do, The Beatles' Progress by Michael Braun, which was written in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania. And I should be talking a bit about Joe Orton's unproduced script that he wrote for The Beatles called Up Against It,

one of the foulest, and that was sent back to him not even with a note saying, thank you for your work. But before we do that that we were all slightly worried that I don't know if you can imagine a world without the Beatles in it but we were a bit worried that some of you might not have heard of the Beatles because we did a podcast here last year about the poet Philip Larkin and several members of the audience seemed not only never to have heard of Philip Larkin at a literary festival, but were really angry by what they were told.

There was a bloke sitting where you are, sir, who every time some poetry by Philip Larkin came over the PA, he just went, oh, tut, he just tutted. Fuck's sake. Anyway, we don't want to repeat that. So what I've done is I've prepared, with the help of Frank Sidebottom, Anyway, we don't want to repeat that. So what I've done is I've prepared with the help of Frank Sidebottom. How many people here have heard of Frank Sidebottom?

Great. So I've prepared just a minute's presentation. Okay. So Nick, when you're ready, roll the... We are the Beatles They're a four of us Direct from Liverpool We came here on the bus John, George, Paul and Ringo

John, George, Paul and Ringo That's his house John plays electric guitar Ringo has loads of freaks John plays a rubber guitar And Robert Gottlieb sings But then one day we broke up And all that God

Beat from the wind You know he did He really did Very good. That's good. The ground is now set. Yes. David, before I ask you about Love Me Do by Michael Braun,

what is it about the Beatles story that we loved telling and retelling and sitting around the campfire and telling again? I was thinking about this recently because I had to write a sleeve note for the 50th anniversary reissue of Abbey Road, inevitably. And I was thinking to myself, there's two remarkable things about the Beatles. One is the music and the other is the story. And the reason the story is such a powerful story is in popular music there are very few stories there are loads of careers there is no story of Bob Dylan there is no story of the Rolling Stones because it's still going on the Beatles had a start at this point and finished at this point and so it strikes me the defining characteristic of a story is it's got an ending. Yeah. And we can hold that idea in our heads,

the trajectory of what they did. You know, it was... And nowadays we're used to bands having careers that are kind of 30, 40, 50 years. What happened with The Beatles happened in a period of what? Eight years? Eight years, yeah. You know, it was absolutely all over.

So that, I think, is why it's so powerful, because it is a genuine story in a world full of CVs, which is effectively what you've got with most other things in popular music. The only other stories are things that ended sadly, like Buddy Holly. That's a story, because it's quite short. Elvis Presley maybe is just about a story.

It's a bit too long. So that's my view. That's quite short. Elvis Presley maybe is just about a story. It's probably a bit too long. So that's my view. That's the answer. It's true, though. No one could accuse the Beatles of having gone on too long, could you? It's almost unique. Well, I think they were. I often say that the reason the Beatles are so good

is the reason that Fawlty Towers is so good. They stopped. They didn't hang around to sully their own reputation. You know, the Rolling Stones will be on stage tonight and I guarantee you nobody is shouting for anything from Steel Wheels. You know, they're shouting for Beggar's Banquet. You know what I mean? They should have stopped at that point. Can I just add one thing to that? I think one of the parts of the Beatles is that they're preserved forever, for eternity, in the idea of youth.

Yeah. You know, the eldest Beatle would have been how old? 28, 29, when the Beatles split up? I think George Harrison was only just 27 when it was all over. Yeah, that's right. And therefore their music, when you think of pictures of the Beatles,

they're forever captured as being young. I think that's a big part of it. It doesn't date. It seems to be youth. It's about exuberance, it's about optimism. It's about that eternal feeling that everything's possible, everything's colourful, everything's moving forward. And there was nothing, as you say, to kind of dampen that. That's the thing that struck me

looking at the Abbey Road cover. You know, it's four blokes in their late 20s leaving work for the last time, having done it. Yeah. The end. And this beautiful summer day. And that's a huge part of their appeal.

We're going to be recreating that as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously the story is really well mapped. There are books about every possible piece of Beatles kit where they played, you know. What was it like when that didn't exist? There wasn't the internet. There wasn't an industry of books.

I was talking about this yesterday. I was a schoolboy in Yorkshire in 1967, and the way you kept track of what was happening in records, new records, was you visited record shops You went as often as you possibly could and I used to go home pretty much every night via the same small record shop And on this occasion in June early June 1967 I went past this tiny record shop looked in the window and there was the first album by somebody called David Bowie who was never heard of again and

And you know the the Supremes thing, Rogers and Hart. And then this kind of strange acid blur. And I thought, what is that? Because you have to imagine there was a time when the Sgt Pepper imagery was not familiar to you. You'd never seen it before. Small children nowadays probably recognise it. You know, you got close to this

and you think, my God, that's the new record by the Beatles. I knew they had a new record coming. I think I was aware because they'd done an interview with Kenny Everett which had been on the radio the week before. They played some tracks from it. But as far as, you know, there was no

kind of radio hysteria. There was nobody saying the new Beatles record drops on Thursday or anything like that. In fact. There was simply none of that kind of thing. They weren't taking out huge great posters. You were saying that there'd been an article in one of the papers. Yeah, I used to read Record Mirror and the New Musical Express

and so forth. That was how you kept up with those things. And I remember a picture featuring one of them, I think probably a record mirror, which had the pictures of the Beatles in the studio with George Martin, probably one of them wearing a tank top very much like yours, Andy, and, you know, some of them wearing kind of capes and so forth. Yeah.

And the line, I never forgot this, underneath said, no, don't worry, EMI haven't let the gypsies into their studio. Those are the Beatles. Those are the Beatles making the, because their mustache is new and so forth, making their new record. And the other thing you used to get at the time was the record reviews in the music press, which were fantastically behind the beat.

Well, they were all track by track, weren't they? Yeah, and so you'd get the guy from the Melody Mayor, I can still remember, although I wouldn't have probably read it at the time because I was about 12 when it came out, and he would go through each track, and they thought the point of pop music then was to see how danceable it was. Can you take this home and dance to it?

Yeah, yeah. Girls, mostly. And I can still remember him talking about Lovely Rita, and he said it has a nice jog beat. Jog beat. And so he's gone through things. I got very confused by A Day In The Life. I thought that was quite hard to cut a rug to.

Yeah. You'd be sitting there dancing in your bedroom and think, what the hell is this, you know? So this wasn't a news, you know, the Beatles released a new album. It wouldn't have been as there would be today as a sort of, and in other news, the Beatles today released their fifth album. It was known to the Beatles fans. It didn't dominate the 9 o'clock news.

Well, speaking of Beatles fans, this is some Beatles fans interviewed in New York during the Beatles' first visit, which coincidentally is the subject covered by David's choice of book Love Me Do by Michael Braun. The Beatles are great, Harvey and recessive. Hey, the Beatles are great. Hey, the Beatles are great.

They're great. They're great. I love them. I don't care what anybody thinks. I love the Beatles for them, and I'll always love them. Even when I'm 105 and an old grandmother, I'll love them. And Paul McCartney, if you are listening, Adrienne from Brooklyn loves you with all her heart.

I love you, Paul, and please come to the window so I can just see you. I saw you smoking before. I kissed the limousine you looked at. But I love you and I want you, Paul. Please look at me. And Ringo, you can look at it too because I like you. In a sense, we are all Adrian from Brooklyn.

Yeah, yeah. I think it's probably worth bearing in mind that Adrienne from Brooklyn outside the Plaza Hotel in February 1964, at that point, probably had never seen them. Yeah. She had probably never seen them actually sing. Yeah. So let's assume that's before Ed Sullivan.

There's no videos. There's no way of knowing at all. You would have seen the odd picture in a magazine or something and you might have bought an LP. You wouldn't actually have seen them. So that thing, that whole passion was built on very little information at all. And also, Mark, we were talking about the idea of the Beatles as, because the Beatles are so, are seen as so part of the establishment now and so kind of sanded down and understood, the Beatles who arrive in america the beatles that are in this book that david's chosen they weren't like that you know the

shock of these working class kids with their ridiculous hair and their caveman be the hair press conference it's mentioned in that book, actually, where somebody gets up and asks the Beatles, what are they more scared of, the H-bomb or dandruff? We've got dandruff. We've got dandruff. It's probably the latter, actually, you know. So, David, tell us a bit. Well, this is a really interesting book, which this is a reissue from the mid-'90s, I think,

and I don't think it's in print at the moment. It is not. I'm sure it will be again at some point. And it's a unique document of the Beatles because, you know, it's the first one written about the Beatles before they were a phenomenon, before everybody understood what they were. You know, this was written at the time it was starting to happen.

You know, because every other Beatles book from kind of Brian Epstein's Cellar Full of Noise, which is whatever, 1965-66 onwards is quite clear that they are an absolutely extraordinary phenomenon when this guy Michael Braun who was an American newspaper guy based in the UK decided to write about them he just kind of went along with you know with their on the ride with them through the height of Beatlemania he's with them in England he on the ride with them through the height of Beatlemania. He's with them in England. He goes to Paris with them where they're here for the first time

that they're number one in the States. And then he goes to New York with them when they have their triumphant arrival. So it's, you know, it's a fascinating portrait of that incredibly frenetic period at the beginning of it. But do you want me to read a bit of it please that would be great and uh this is where he first meets them actually in cambridge because so he knows about them but he goes along he gets to go backstage the police on emergency duty

outside the abc cinema in cambridge were rapidly becoming agitated great swarms of duffel-coated adolescents kept rushing to the doors of the cinema to ask a question and then returned sighing to the queue that stretched for half a mile down Regent Street. A large number of the crowd did not have tickets for the show. What they were hoping for was a glimpse of the chief performers arriving at the theatre. They were disappointed.

Four hours before the curtain was scheduled to rise, the Cambridge police had driven to a pre-arranged rendezvous a mile from town and the Beatles had arrived at the theatre in the back of a police van. Inside the circle lobby of the cinema, they were now meeting the press. This pre-show conference had become obligatory since the Palladium siege had made them big news. Each of the four was surrounded by his own little cluster of reporters and photographers. On the walls, large photos of players looked benignly down.

On the table to the side, a bar had been set up that prominently featured Pepsi-Cola and a selection of whiskeys. What will your film be about, asked a reporter of the Beatle I recognised as Paul McCartney. Sort of a fantasy-type thing? Well, yeah, replied Mr McCartney, who was wearing, as are his three colleagues, a grey suit with a white button-down shirt and a black tie.

As he talks, I notice that his features, which photograph so delicately, seem much harder in person. In another corner, John Lennon is sipping a Coke, which he keeps replenishing with scotch. How long do you think the group will last, somebody asks. About five years. Will the group stay together? years. Will the group stay together? Don't know, said Mr. Lennon, and pours another scotch into the coke. On the side of the room, Ringo Starr is huddled on the sofa talking with two girls from a woman's magazine. George Harrison is standing at the bar refilling his glass. The manager of the cinema walks over to the assistant manager, turns towards the bar, and pointing at George, asks, the assistant manager turns towards the bar and pointing at George asks which one is he backstage at the ABC cinema all the performers including the Beatles were crowded into one large

dressing room a few of them play cards and upturned suitcases others are tuning the guitars Paul McCartney walks in and out among the groups is Is everybody having a good time, he asks. John Lennon in a black polo-neck sweater is walking around shouting, all visitors ashore, please. The ship is leaving, all ashore. Someone comes over and shows Lennon and McCartney a picture of them smiling. Lot of teeth in that picture, says Paul.

We like to get our teeth into things, says John. Very good. Very good. Very good. Excellent. So, you know, what strikes me reading it again is, you know, it's a unique document of that time when it was just happening and it wasn't clear that it had happened. I get the feeling this book was not

much read at the time. I was not aware of it really until years later because it was rather frowned on because they swear a few times in it. There's an amazing bit here. Dan Schreiber, our former guest Dan Schreiber, tweeted this bit and he said this book was published in 1964. I'm gonna just, it's only a couple of lines but you think whoa but you're gonna read out yeah john said that they have been told that girls masturbate when they are on stage we're still at the masturbating stage ourselves i mean i like paul mccartney but it's a lot too much information though isn't it do you were you shocked when you... I'm really shocked. I couldn't believe it.

I was going to mention that later. I just couldn't believe that they put that in there. And what is the energy, Mark, that comes from the Beatles in this book, do you think? Well, I think the most exciting thing is that the journalist travels with them inside the bubble of the Beatles. I mean, just to give you an idea of how this works today,

I went on a trip about four years ago, same sort of thing, really, on an aeroplane around the world with Rihanna. A whole lot, a load of press people were meant to be following Rihanna, you know. What actually happened in reality is we were put in cattle class. Rihanna was up the front sharp end in her fantastic bunker. And she was brought out about twice during the entire week for the most brilliantly stage managed, controlled exposure to the press. Dressed a certain way, saying a certain thing, doing a certain thing. That's all the access you've got. What's interesting about this is this is not somebody interviewing the Beatles and basing everything on the idea of what they say and their coaches. It's probably

what they said to the person before and will say to the person after that. It's about somebody simply observing what the Beatles do. And the beatles pretty much 24 hours a day are surrounded by people you cannot believe in the bit when they go to the georges shank hotel and john and paul said they've got to go and write a song the access was extraordinary i mean yeah the press were given incredible access access you wouldn't have now don't you well it was assumed that an awful lot a certain amount of what happened they wouldn't report on. Yeah. Because they would not go that far.

They wouldn't quote Rock's pop stars swearing. That was what was unusual about that. But I think this point about observing them is really important, and it's something I've come to think about an awful lot more. Can I give a brief detour? I interviewed Bob Dylan. I had, can I, a brief detour. I interviewed Bob Dylan. I had a harrowing experience interviewing Bob Dylan in 1986 and the bank stage

in Madison Square Garden. Can I just say, when he turns to the press office at one point, he says, how's it going? And he says, I don't know, he keeps asking me all these questions. That's my point. Because we all laughed and then I went away and thought about it ever since I thought, he's got a perfectly fair point. What am I asking him questions for?

What secrets is he going to tell me? What do you really want to do with rock stars? You want to watch them. You want to be close to them. You want to see how they interact with each other. And that's what's really good about that book. It's a really good portrait of how they function as this group of people who are under immense pressure

but can still rely on each other and kind of loved each other but were also not above being disrespectful to each other. They had a unique dynamic that no group had had before. Going back to your original point, David, one of the things that I think about why this story, it becomes the archetype, doesn't it? They kind of set the archetype for the band, the kind of how four people can create incredible,

probably the most concentrated period of creativity of any band. Yeah. And how the closeness begins to fall apart, they break up, musical differences, you know, wives and girlfriends. But it's almost like it's like a sort of Arthurian myth cycle about fame and the effects of fame and ridiculous fame. There's no other band that can really do anything

without reference back to the Beatles. I often think the Beatles, a wonderful group though they are, were not a benign influence at all. Because the Beatles made everybody think they could write their own songs. Yes. And we all have the scars to prove that they couldn't. You know, there are very few groups that can write their own songs. They can do it.

Sgt Pepper's a good example. Everyone thought, we'd better do a Sgt Pepper. We could do it. The result of that was Their Satanic Majesty's Request. I love that record. You've got the tank top. Fair enough. Mark, you were saying about the way the Beatles are portrayed in Love Me Too. They're in the first flush of fame.

They're being written about. They've got ways of dealing with the press. When you were editor of Q, you commissioned the late and great Tom Hibbert to run a feature called Who the Hell... Oh, yeah, Who the Hell... Was it Ringo Starr, that one? Yes. It was amazingly funny that Tom, presumably under the guise of a normal interview,

would go in and just ask them straight questions. Wouldn't even ask questions. Often he just had a siege tactic where he'd go in and say, so, you're number one. And then he'd... As if... And what does that matter? And the person would be so kind of freaked out, they would just start tumbling and stuff out. So you heard how sweet Ringo sounded, right, in 1964.

30 years later, Mark sends Tom Hibbert to interview Ringo about the release of his new record. Ringo takes this opportunity to tell me what a great musician he is and how his new LP is really jolly good and everything until I interrupt to suggest that however good his new LP is, it can hardly hope to top Abbey Road, can it? That's low, isn't it?

It's a low shot. It's a low shot. That really is. I'm just going to read Ringo's answer. So I'll start in the voice and then when it goes, I'll go, what? As an album? My album can't beat the Abbey Road album as an album. That, in a nutshell, is what I was driving at.

Well, the so-called B-side of Abbey Road is one of my favourite sides, the one with bathroom window and polythene pan, but just by chance I was re-listening to Sgt Pepper the other day, and that's a fine album too. In fact, it's a bloody marvellous album. It's a bloody fine album, and the White Album was great because we were like a band. And the first album took 12 hours to put down. So that was an achievement. So I don't know what you're talking about. That was 30 years ago, man. I'm still making records. And you can hear that I'm a great musician on the new record, Time Takes Time,

if you can ever be bothered to listen to it this is an actual bloody legend in front of you i'm not expecting you to comb the bloody legend's hair but if you could mention the new lp that would be great does he say peace and love peace and love? Peace and love. Peace and love with peace and love. So on Backlisted, to borrow a Danny Bakerism, we have the show's only Beatles record, which was a big hit with listeners when we played it back in episode nine or something. So we're going to listen to that now. I'm going to ask you, Beatles quiz,

which writer and famous toff is singing this version of Maxwell's Silver Hammer. Oh, no. Oh, oh, oh Maxwell Edison Majoring in medicine Called her on the phone The phone

Can I take you out to the pictures, Joe? Oh, oh, oh As she's getting ready to go A noise comes at the door Bang, bang, Maxwell Silverhammer Came down upon her head Bang, bang, Maxwell Silverhammer Made sure that she was dead.

Incredibly, you can get that for free now. Go on. So does anybody know who that was? I don't know. Anyone? Boris Johnson, did someone say? It wasn't Boris Johnson. Who?

Barbara Cartland. It wasn't Boris Johnson. Who? Barbara Cartland. It wasn't Barbara Cartland. It was... Peter Cook. It was Jessica Mitford. Oh! Right! In her role as lead singer of Decker and the Decktones.

Oh, right. And that allows me to segue appallingly into your choice of book, John. So you've chosen the Beatles' anthology by The Beatles. Tell us why. Well, I had to choose it because I published it back in 2000. And the act of publishing it was a feat. I mean, a remarkable thing. This is The Beatles in their own words. It is as close as you will ever get to The Beatles' own autobiography. John was obviously dead,

but all the interviews that went into it were new interviews with the three surviving Beatles and they cleverly put together quotes from John from interviews that he'd taken with Rolling Stone in particular over the years. It is also the most luscious visual history of the Beatles from their early style through to the psychedelics to the end. So it's them telling their own story. So if the Beatles are a kind of mythological cult, this is kind of like the Ur text. I don't think it's the best book on the Beatles for obvious reasons, but it is a very, very good book on the Beatles. It's a sort of definitive book on the Beatles.

It's also a spectacularly beautiful physical object. It's not, as some people have noted, a book to read in bed. It is a book to have open reverentially on your coffee table and to go through, as I had to go through, having signed an NDA and locked into a room in Frankfurt to see the page proofs. The book came, it's the work of three men, essentially. Derek Taylor, the Beatles publicist, Brian Roilands who runs an

amazing or ran an amazing publishing company called Genesis that were known for doing high-end books and a genius called David Costa who as well as being one of the best designers of books in the world he is a former guitarist in a band called Trees who some of you might remember. The Garden of Jane Delaney. Yes. So this was the team that the eminence grise of Apple, Apple Core, not the computer company, Neil Aspinall, who some of you will know started as the Beatles' roadie, but was there right the way through the whole of the Beatles' career. And after the Beatles split up in 1970, he ran Apple. He ran the Beatles' legacy on their behalf.

Amazing, I think, human being. I mean, incredibly smart. He was kind of like Yoda. You'd go and sit and talk to Neil, and he would listen and not say anything and then tell you in about the sentence what you said was complete bullshit. I mean, we did a huge marketing plan for the book,

and he just threw it in the bin in front of me. We're the Beatles, John. We always go to number one. And I said, well, yeah, well, I mean, sure. It's the Beatles. Fine. Yes, you always go to number one. But we've got to sell this book. You know, I've spent quite a lot of money buying it. So we need to, we're going to serialize the book, John, in 80 different publications. And I said, what do you mean? He said, we're going to give exclusives to 80 different publications. And I said, well, that's going to work. I said, they're all going to go mental. You know, everybody's going to go absolutely mental. You know, they'll ask their money back. That's the clever thing. We're not going to ask for any money. We're literally going to give the book away. So we did. That's what we did.

We gave the Sunday Times, the Observer, every single newspaper, Hotel and Caterers Weekly, there's a story about them crashing the man, there's food magazines, 80 publications, on the day of publication, got their amazing exclusive for the first time. They went absolutely fucking furious. But there was nothing they could do because there was no money to be paid.

They just were given it, they ran it. The book went to number one. It stayed at number one. It was £35. In 2000, it was £35. It went on to sell half a million copies. It went to number one. We won Illustrated Book of the Year.

Hey, let's pick this up again shortly. That's the business side to it. What's really interesting about it is it's what do you do, as Neil used to say, what do you do if you've got the biggest brand in the world, but you can't do anything with it? You know, so when the Stones need to do something, they just tour and they make a lot of money. But he said, I haven't had a band since 1970. And he pointed out that he said to get any decisions made, he said, I've got to have Paul's people. He said, I've got to have, he said, I've got to have George's people. I've got to have Paul's people. He said, I've got to have George's people. I've got to whoever the hell Ringo thinks he is that week, his people.

And he said, I've got fucking Yoko Ono. Boo! So he said, it's my life. I know your life is difficult, John, but believe me, it's not as difficult as my life. So the book could have been, it could have been bland, it could have been obvious, but in fact, it's an extraordinary thing. It's, as I say, and I think just for the visuals alone,

I'm reading one little passage, but what I like about it is the intimate, the holiday snaps, the sense of the particularly, it's particularly good on the early years where the Beatles were dealing with fame. There's an amazing story about there's a warehouse. They have to hire a warehouse to put in George's 21st birthday presents. I mean, you know, George Harrison died.

Those presents are still somewhere. They never got opened. There were hundreds of thousands of presents that were sent in, millions probably, from all over the world. Nobody had seen fame on this scale before. Nobody lived through it. Elvis to an extent, but this was global in a way

that had never been witnessed before. And they toured. They did 1,400 live gigs. The other thing I like about the book is you get Mal Evans, the driver, you get Neil's voice. It's not just the Beatles' voice. And here's a little bit of Neil, which I think just puts into perspective why they were extraordinary. Neil, no band today would come off a long US tour at the end of September,

go into the studio and start a new album, still writing songs, then go on a UK tour, finish the album in five weeks, still touring, and have the album in time out for Christmas. But that's what the Beatles did at the end of 1964. A lot of it was down to naivety, thinking that this was the way things were done. If the record company needs another album, you go and make one. Nowadays, if a band had as much success as the Beatles had by the end of 1964, they'd start making demands. If you look at the work schedule in late 1963 and right through 1964, you'll see it really was incredible. On top of the tours and the records and the film, they did a Christmas show, and all the TV shows, Top of the Pops, Thank You, Lucky Stars, Around the Beatles, 37 shows,

and all the BBC radio shows, 22. It was nonstop. Brian was beginning to plan quite far ahead. At Christmas 1964, he would be planning for the Tour of America of 65, trying to get a script together for help, and he would be planning for the tour of america 65 trying to get a script together for help and he would have been planning whatever other tours they were doing somebody would suggest can we have a holiday as well brian while all this was going on you just don't work like that now as no nobody works no no when you're doing a thing like that

with the artist there's traditionally a kind of tension between you and the artist. There's always something you want in there that they don't want in there. Did you have that? I don't think there was any controversy really about it. I think that the John stuff had gone through Yoko a lot. They did nothing to promote it. I mean, there was no Beatle involvement at all. Probably around about this time when we did a programme for Paul McCartney at Kew. We did. And I had a meeting with McCartney and I said,

do you keep anything? Do you keep stuff? He said, oh yeah, it's in an archive. You can go and look at it. And so I was given access to this place in the East End in Hackney, I think it was. Most of which was given over to Charles Saatchi's art collection.

And the rest of it was Paul McCartney's collection, which had the keys to the city of every city in the United States. You know what I mean? Millions of gold discs and early letters from his bank manager in Liverpool pointing out that the money from EMI, like £40, had come in. Don't spend it all at once because there might not be any more and there was his sergeant pepper jacket was there all kept this quite a long time ago which

must have been added to enormously I mean there was some plan David Costa really wanted to do all the memorabilia that I mean there's a lot of this sort of photo got drafted into the book and you're talking about the Abbey Road it's one of my favourite pages in the book it's just them before during and after the Abbey Road shoot and there's a sort of a sadness creeps into the imagery that that you know the very early kind of happy shots have replaced more and more by sort of four men obviously not getting on it's so that's a great photo as well with them all. I want to segue into Mark's book next but why i'm interested a bit in about the anthology now the whole project the the the records the dvds the tv series the this book it seems in retrospect they are very of the 1990s that the beatles have this very particular

resurgence in the mid 90s partly partly perhaps generational it's partly because of the beatles it's partly because of brit Beatles it's partly because of Brit pop which as John Harris says in his book if you want to understand one of the reasons why Brit pop happened it's because everyone who was born in the late 60s grew up with the 60s myth and wanted their own 60s yeah and there you have each generation gets the Beatles it deserves, right? You know which group I mean. But also, the book you've chosen, Mark, Ian Macdonald's Revolution in the Head, that was published at the same kind of time. And that seemed to me one of those lucky publishing moments that the right book hit the right audience at the right time. Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, it came out in 1994.

And I think it really struck me, Ian Macdonald was an enemy writer and a kind of scholar and a musician, actually. Incredibly interesting and original guy. His idea was that up till then, you know, most of what we knew about The Beatles was biography. It was about people looking at their, you know, their cultural relevance and their social impact, what they did in their lives. And he thought that what needed to be addressed was the fundamental foundation of the entire Beatles empire upon which it's all built, which is, of course, the astonishing level of ambition, of experiment, of invention that went into their music. The book is entirely about the music. It's about the 188 songs that they released,

and it looks at them in the order in which they're recorded in a self-contained item. So you look at each song, you look at the influence on that song, where the lyric idea came from, where the chord structures came from, who the main composer was, how that song evolved in the studio, the sound effects that were dumped onto it. I think it changes the way you look at that music. How many people in the audience have read Revolution in the Head? It's amazing. Quite a few. Would we say it's an amazing book?

Yeah. I think it's an incredible book. It is. Paul McCartney, not a big fan. No, McCartney's not a big fan. No. So what he tells you, I'm just going to read a bit in a second. What he tells you is, again, just extraordinary details.

He gets across the extra mile that the Beatles went to, musically, lyrically, the amount of thought and effort, which is what makes it so enduring. He talks at one point about the Beatles are two contradicting things at once, a unique mixture of comfortingly safe and exhilaratingly strange, which is a brilliant idea. It gets across their accessibility and their reassuring nature and their commercial nature, and also what makes them enduring. You want to go back. And this is a really good example. Here he is talking about Iron the Walrus. He said, at home in Weybridge around this time, Lennon was prodding about on his piano when he heard the droning two-note siren of police car in the distance. Whether or not as a symbol of mean-spirited authority, he instantly absorbed a semitonal seesaw into an obsessive musical structure

built around a perpetually ascending, descending M.C. Escher staircase of all the natural major chords. It's a brilliant idea, the M.C. Escher staircase. The most unorthodox and totally ambiguous sequence he ever devised. The words took longer to come, arriving over several acid-heightened weekends and passing through a number of phases. According to Lennon's friend Pete Shotton, the original inspiration was from a boy at their old school quarry bank describing how his English

class was analysing the Beatles' lyrics, a fact which Lennon found hilarious. His teachers at quarry bank, particularly his English teachers, had always dismissed him as a talentless disruptor, a rejection which left deep scars. But reminiscing, he and Shotten recalled a typical playground nonsense chant, yellow matter custard, green slop pie, all mixed together with a dead dog's eye. And yet as the lyric progressed, it grew more pointed, rising above the level of schoolboy nose thumb to embrace his festering resentment of the British establishment as a whole. Gradually turning into an angry sequel to the darkly melancholic Strawberry Fields Forever, I Am the Walrus became its author's ultimate

anti-institutional rant, a damn you England tirade with blasts that blast education, art, culture, law, order, class, religion and even sense itself. The hurt teenager's revenge on his expert, techspert schoolmasters, I'm crying, brawnens into a surreal onslaught on a straight society in general, an anti-litany of smiling pigs in a stye, city policemen in a row, corporation vans,

and the guardians of conventional morality beating up a fellow psychedelic rebel, the opium-addicted surrealist Edgar Allan Poe. A trace of the more peaceably philosophical Lennon remains in the song's opening line, but the rest is pure invective. And I think that's fantastic. Now, you could ask, you could say, you could say he's reading too much into it. It's meant to be kind of, you know, it's meant to be kind of just nonsense lyric. But the idea that that is what it could possibly have meant, and that's what Lennon put into it it I think is absolutely astonishing and the other thing the book mentions throughout is this level of of coalition of cooperation yeah

of the way they work which I think is so fantastic there is no back line in the Beatles you know it's John Paul George and Ringo so I mean the Rolling Stones that people are thinking who are those two guys at the back and are they as important as the one the ones at the front everybody appreciates when the Beatles wrote a song it was what each of them brought to that song that made it so important. And it was the record, not the song. It's the record. People say they're great songwriters.

Of course they're great songwriters. But what makes the Beatles' record so fantastic is the Beatles. It's the combination of their harmonies. This is the fallacy of yesterday, the Richard Curtis film. Yeah. The idea that if the world had forgotten the Beatles,

but we had all their songs written down, we could somehow conjure up the Beatles. Yeah. The idea that if the world had forgotten the Beatles, but we had all their songs written down, we could somehow conjure up the Beatles. No. What made the Beatles magical was the Beatles. Yeah. Those four personalities. You know, the genius of the Beatles is as much in twist and shout as it is in I Am the Walrus.

I was once in Abbey Road and George Martin played me just the bass and drum tracks to Something and Come Together in separation, in isolation. And they're absolutely phenomenal. And these were by two people who were not contributors to writing the song. They're simply helping arrange it. Without those elements, you cannot imagine it.

One thing worth adding about the Ian Macdonald book is he is almost unique in kind of Beatles scholars in that he's equally respectful of the early stuff as he is of the strange psychedelic stuff. I just want to raise the point. One of the things I think is so great about Revolution in the Head, and it really needles people, Revolution in the Head. It's one of the things I like about it.

It's like a really well-sequenced record. It's sort of an accident of the format that Ian has different voices to discuss different records and how he feels about them. And one of the things that, for instance, I think Paul McCartney didn't like about this book is when Ian thought something was crap, he said it was crap, right? So he's just written so eloquently about I Am The Walrus, So he's just written so eloquently about I Am The Walrus. Yeah. Entry one, two, three across the universe. Oh, yes.

Yeah. After the aggressive sarcasm of I Am The Walrus, it's sad to find Lennon, some months and several hundred acid trips later, chanting this plaintively babyish incantation. While a beetle, Lennon was rarely boring, but he made an unwanted exception with this track and that's across the universe yeah one of the things that's really puzzling about the book and

McCartney's reaction to it Paul comes out of the book if anything better than Lennon I think yes there are some taste moments Maxwell Silverhammer being one of them but I think he's incredibly fair to the talents of McCartney. I mean, I think he says, you know, at numerous points that John Lennon's post Beatles output didn't measure up to much. That sense of Lennon being the leader of the band and Paul taking over and the, you know, the final released album, the Abbey Road and the Long Medley, that sense, he captures that brilliant MacDonald, I think, better than anybody, the inner drama of what's going on.

Have any of you read Barry Miles's authorised biography of McCartney many years from now? Yes, I have, yes. A mate of mine read that and said, in the ultimate review of that book, I spent the whole book going, it's all right, mate, relax, you're Paul McCartney. Yeah.

It spends the whole book going, well, I mate relax you're paul mccartney yeah yeah well it ends the whole book going well i think this one was you know 60 me let me tell you that neil aspinall we're about to win the illustrated book of the year and i'm favor of brought out a book called blackbird favor poetry book blackbird by paul mccartney which is a couple of shit poems and then beatles lyrics so now i said neil, what's Paul up to? And he just took a long time. He said, who wrote the Beatles songs, John? And I said, well, Lennon and McCartney.

There's another long pause. And I said, what? You mean, oh, he's only put the lyrics in that he actually wrote. I said, but we all know that. You really mean that it's still that important? He actually will publish a volume of poetry that people know, I wrote this one. And he just looked at me and said, welcome to my world. Well, there was a time when he was trying to get into McCartney Levin, wasn't it? He

was trying to change it. And then spent the whole time going, what? What? Couldn't understand why people were going, well, leave it. Leave it all. I love that business, though, about Neil Aspinall, about the courtiers of the Beatles. I think they're so interesting. These people who dedicated their lives to trying to keep the peace. Because you dealt with Derek Taylor, the great kind of PR.

Amazing. Derek Taylor, the person who wrote the fantastic work, which we probably don't have time to discuss, he called us Time Goes By, wonderfully erodiced. One of the great ones. I think that is my favourite Beatles book. It's a fantastic book. And he sort of sounds a bit like James Mason.

And I was doing the Q Magazine had an annual awards show, which I think it still does. And I was trying to get the Beatles back together. Let's aim high. Let's aim high. George, Ringo and Paul are going to come to this event. I spent four months, I have every single document from my conversations with Derek. And at the very end of it, it was brilliant. He said, I recorded this answer phone message. It

was so funny. I'd never met him during this time. And he said, he talked for about two minutes, you know, could tell he'd had large gin and tonic. And he said um dear boy i have so enjoyed our uh communications but i i feel i must convey to you that george rather detests show business he would prefer to stay at home and there's no way that i can get him to attend your illustrious event or or get him on the end of any other kind of technological device like some sort of satellite link, in order to participate. But I have so enjoyed this, and I hope we do meet when this whole bloody war is over. I thought, that is fantastic.

It's a great name for a book, When This Bloody War Is Over. He's a marvellous man. These people, you know, who have just dealt with him for 50 years. There's a lovely story in the anthology where he's auditioning for the job as the Beatles' bassist and he writes a press release in the voice of George Harrison about George's dad stays in Liverpool and continues to drive. My dad stayed in Liverpool, the big green jobs.

And then Harrison really interrogates him and says, what's a big green job? And he said, a bus. He said, I've never heard anybody call a bus a big green job i was just you know i was and he basically admits that he made it up and he said you got the job next time you write a story i'll sit down and write it with you yeah leave the scouts so i'm going to talk just a little bit about my choice which was uh i wanted to throw a slightly a piece of slightly disruptive energy in and i wanted to try and capture that feeling of horror

that parents felt when the Beatles came about because I do feel it's a great shame that all the anarchy that the Beatles represented and the change and the energy and the energy of youth that we've talked about has turned into Richard Curtis's film Yesterday. It has been completely sanded down and we can only find traces of it now in that butterfly.

Wow. That's the sort of thing that George Harrison would go, I felt, you know, John was with us. So Up Against It was written by the playwright Joe Orton. He was commissioned to write this script to be filmed for the Beatles. The Beatles rejected it. It was going to be their film after Help. And Richard Lester decided he would film it instead with another group.

He loved it so much. He had a meeting lined up with Joe Orton. And on the morning that Orton was supposed to go and meet with Dick Lester, he was killed by his lover Kenneth Halliwell. And so Up Against It was never produced but then in 1997 it was turned into a radio play starring amongst others Douglas Hodge and Damon Albarn. And I'm just going to play you a minute of that, and you might be able to hear both some very typical Joe Orton work and also why the Beatles were not comfortable with it. Come in.

They're holding a memorial service for the woman who threw herself overboard last night for love of me. We shan't be interrupted. We shouldn't be doing this. Think of my husband. I don't find his image in the least bit stimulating. I'd rather feel you all over. Could you get your hand off me? All you do, things inside me, Rowena,

spring, spring, valves gush, half-cocks go off full-cock. I shall ring for a steward. So you want a threesome? I'll take my shirt off. What are those scars on your back? Are they the marks of the lash? No, I've been wearing an over-tight string vest.

You want me to totally or absolutely nude? We cannot go on like this. It's wrong and we should be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves. I thought you were the most advanced woman in the world. What's that got to do with it? I thought you modern birds lived for this kind of thing. I'm afraid you're quite wrong. Get out of my cabin or I shall call my husband.

Come out, you fuck! I know you're in there! Too late. He knows we're in here. Round of applause. Come on, that's never been applauded before. Round of applause. Come on, that's never been applauded before.

Yeah. Brilliant. And I just wanted to bring a bit of dark, Orton energy to the party to disrupt the heteronormative discussion of the blokeishness of the Beatles. This is a thing that's been foisted on them, belatedly, right? Like, blokes like us, in fact,

as we catalogue all the guitars they played and we want to know every bass squeak that happened. Actually, we have to remember what the Beatles represented, as you said, Mark, is youth, youth. They were against the establishment. And Orton has the great good luck to die before he gets old.

So he always, he's that permanent figure. I'll just read you from his scurrilous diaries, his first meeting with the Beatles. I arrived in Belgravia at 10 minutes to eight. I rang the bell and an old man entered. He seemed surprised to see me. Is this Brian Epstein's house, I said. Yes, sir, he said, and led the way to the hall. I suddenly realised that the man was a butler. I'd never seen one before. He took me into a room and said in a loud voice, Mr. Autumn. Everybody looked up and stood to their feet. I was introduced to one or two people and Paul McCartney. He was just as the photographs, only he'd grown a moustache. His hair was shorter too. He was playing the latest Beatles record,

Penny Lane. I like it very much. Then he played the other side, Strawberry Fields Forever. I didn't like this as much. The only thing I get from the theatre, Paul M said, is a sore arse. He said Luke was the only player he hadn't wanted to leave before the end. I'd have liked a bit more, he said. We talked of the theatre. I said that compared with the pop scene, the theatre was square. The theatre started going downhill when Queen Victoria knighted

Henry Irving, I said. Too fucking respectable. We talked of drugs, of LSD. The drug, not the money, I said. After a while, I came over tired and decided to go home. And then they talk about the bread, and that's it. I'm sort of, I think if you love Orton and you love the Beatles, you know, the idea of the what ifs, the what ifs, what if they had made this film, this sexually explicit, disruptive, dark thing where there weren't even parts for four of them. Orton had only written three because he couldn't be bothered to give anything to Ringo. It's true, it's true, unfortunate but true. It sort of has an appeal, you know, that was adapted for this stage musical by Ed Barton, is that right? Ed Ball, Ed Ball of the Times. It was adapted by Ed Ball of the Times and Todd Rundgren wrote an off-Broadway musical, it's two

hours long and shit. I listened to the whole thing before coming into this to see if I could find a clip to you. But have any of you... It's fine to say no. Have any of you read this? I haven't read it. John Lahr wrote an introduction to it. Yeah.

Reissue it. Alton is quoted as saying that he'd been speaking to Epstein and Epstein said it's fine as long as it's not got anything kind of controversial in it. And Alton doesn't tell him that he's been speaking to Epstein and Epstein said it's fine as long as it's not got anything kind of controversial in it. And Orton doesn't tell him that he's got four murders, two rapes or whatever. He just assumes that when it gets there, it'll pass somehow.

You know, he was riding his luck. But also the idea of Orton as a, you know, like the Beatles, well, we should think of them in the same bracket. Even if they couldn't work together, you know they were young and they are sexy and they are only interested in the things in which they are interested in, right? And they're going to make you interested in them.

That's one of the great 60s things. You join our party or don't bother. We don't care. I think Nick Cohen says this in his wonderful book, What Bop Blue Bop, you know, we are self-contained. We are the Beatles. our party or don't bother we don't care i think nick cohen says this in his wonderful book what bop blue bop you know we are self-contained we are the beatles we don't need anybody at all i read one little bit from ringo's just i just from it's one of my favorite little bits from towards the end of the the anthology just said they became the closest friends i ever had i was an only child and

suddenly i felt as though i'd got three brothers we really looked out for each other and we had many laughs together. In the old days, we'd have the hugest hotel suites, the whole floor of a hotel, and the four of us would end up in the bathroom just to be with each other because there were always pressures. Someone always wanted something, an interview, a hello, an autograph to be seen with us, to speak to my dog, whatever. We took care of each other and we were the only ones who had that experience

of being beetles. No one else knew what that's like. Even today when the three of us get together, Paul, George, Paul and George are the only two who look at me like I am, not with the view, he's that and a beetle. Everyone else does that. Even our friends do that. There's always that underlying current. In the way that the astronauts who went to the moon shared that unique experience together, it's absolutely true of the Beatles. We three are now the only people who can sit and understand each other and understand it. It's good isn't it? They're great. So, unlike the Beatles themselves, we must bring this madness to an end without acrimony, lawsuits, a national outpouring of grief

and, for fuck's sake, ebony and ivory. Thanks to David and Mark, to our very own George Martin, Nicky Birch and to Unbound for booking us in Hamburg and thank you for the audience for making this a very special occasion. You can download all 99, the magic number for any Beatles podcast, 99 of our shows, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at batlisted.fm.

We're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter, Facebook or Boundless. I'd like to say three more things and then we'll wrap up. The first thing is I'm playing a gig at the 100 Club on Monday the 23rd of September where me and a band of like-minded idiots will be playing Abbey Road in its entirety from beginning to end. Woo! And... Bang, Yeah. And...

Bang, bang. And we are doing it for the National Literacy Trust. We've already raised a couple of grand and we're hoping to hit five grand because that's what it's all about, helping people read, not gratifying my ego. No way, no way. Our next episode of Bat List is our 100th.

John, who is our guest? Sir Philip Pullman. So we're very excited. So we went up to Oxford last week and we spoke with Philip Pullman for about an hour and a half about Robert Burton's... 1,400-page masterpiece from 1621. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Because it's Backlisted.

But we still managed to play that version of Maxwell's Silver Hammer. No, we didn't. Don't worry. And finally, I think we'd like to thank David, thank Mark. Thank you. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call lot listed

which is andy me and nicky talking about the books music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight