The subject of Craig Brown’s last unconventional biography, Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, has a walk-on part in his new one, One Two Three Four. She pops up on page 128, arriving at a Royal Command Performance only to realise that the waiting crowds are chanting not for her but for the Beatles. It is a defining moment in the Swinging Sixties.
Not surprisingly, given that the last book was a bestseller, the new one has the same quirky format, throwing in occasional lists, party invitations and diary entries. But this seems a more ambitious project; a kaleidoscope, no less, that attempts to reflect the colourful story of the biggest (and most documented) band in the world through a series of impressions, some written in the present tense, some the past.
Channelling the experimental approach of the Fab Four in their latter years, Brown favours tonal inconsistency: his book is frivolous and shallow one moment, poignant and deep the next, as when he relates how John Lennon and Paul McCartney had vague sexual fixations on their respective mothers, or when he tells the stories of those whose lives were inadvertently squashed by the Beatles juggernaut. The most haunting of these concerns Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers, the singing nun who was doing well in the charts up until the Beatles invasion of America in early 1964. Her life unravelled after that and she eventually killed herself.
Towards the end of the book Brown plays the record backwards, as it were, with a bit of reverse chronology that takes us forward to the beginning. He has some fun too with parallel lives, as with a brief “alternative history” in which Gerry and the Pacemakers are the ones who make it while the Beatles become a tribute act.
At one point, in a footnote, we leap from the Sixties to the present to note how in an interview with Emily Maitlis, Paul smiled as he recalled how cross John would get whenever a hotel lounge pianist played Yesterday for his benefit, thinking John had written it, when in fact Paul was the sole composer.
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The chapters come thin and fast, some 150 in total. Some of the most enjoyable are when Brown breaks the fourth wall and steps into the story himself, as he does when describing a guided Beatles tour he signed up for in Liverpool while researching the book. He turns his officious guide Sylvia into a comic character after he is busted for secretly recording her less than sparkling Beatles insights. He stands at the back of the tour group “slyly holding my phone at a casual angle so as not to excite her attention. It made me feel on edge as though I was pocketing household products within spitting distance of a store detective.”
Also in this miscellany are news cuttings, charts and transcripts from interviews, with one short chapter chronicling the number of reporters who thought they were being original when they asked the band in 1963 and 1964 when the bubble was going to burst. Then there are the fan letters. My favourite was: “Dear Beatles, please call me on the telephone. My number is 629-7834. If my mother answers, hang up. She is not much of a Beatle fan. With love from Maxine M, Cleveland, Ohio.”
Most of the female fans were besotted with Paul and therefore hated his girlfriend Jane Asher, or “the creepy freckle-faced bow wow, Jane Asher”, as one diarist put it. The young Ruby Wax, we learn, used to lick her Beatles posters every night before going to bed.
Brown delights in such vignettes. Trivia too. When the Beatles crossed the Atlantic, he tells us, they were followed by half a ton of Beatles wigs and 24,000 rolls of Beatles wallpaper.
Perhaps a little frustratingly for the author, given that he is known for his parodies in Private Eye, John Lennon’s formidable Aunt Mimi proves to be beyond parody, even for him. He therefore plays it straight as he reveals that when she saw the cover for John and Yoko’s 1968 Two Virgins album, which featured the couple naked, she said: “It would have been all right, John, but you’re both so ugly. Why don’t you get somebody attractive on the cover if you’ve got to have someone completely naked?”
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Inevitably, given that there have been several hundred books written about the Beatles — a few authoritative, most terrible — many of the stories in this one will be familiar to “Beatleologists”, as Beatles nerds, a notoriously argumentative bunch, grandly style themselves, but Brown retells the anecdotes well, with literary swagger and brio.
He also gives a pre-emptive shot across the bows to pedants and nit-pickers when he describes the time in 1963 when John Lennon beat someone up for implying he was gay. He gives different versions of the same story from previous biographies. Some claimed that John went berserk with his fists, others claimed there was a stick or a shovel involved. The biographers cannot even agree on the extent of the injuries, which range from a broken nose, to a cracked collarbone and three broken ribs. His point is that memory is subjective and that the Beatles have travelled so far into national myth and folklore even the band members themselves can no longer be sure what happened. All you are left with are glimpses of the truth.
That said, I did spot one tiny glitch, more a typo than anything: In 1969, when Abbey Road was released, a rumour started that McCartney had been killed in a traffic accident three years earlier and replaced by an impostor. One of the examples that Brown cites of the “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory is that the impostor “Paul” is pictured on the Abbey Road cover “with a cigarette in his left hand, but the real Paul was right-handed”. It’s the other way around. Nerd alert!
My only slight criticism of this book is that the author could have been kinder to Ringo, who too often is presented as a joke figure, a foil to the brilliance of the other three Beatles. His contribution to the band has been much reassessed in recent years, to the point where he is now seen not only as a highly innovative drummer, but also, perhaps, the glue that held the band together.
At one point Brown describes the poster that came with the White Album as “scrappy and mesmerising” and that is what this book is too, as it captures the spirit of the band in a series of snapshots. As a fan of Craig Brown’s writing, as well as of the Beatles’ music, I was trying to manage my expectations of One Two Three Four. I need not have worried. It is not only as affectionately teasing as you would hope, but also as fascinating and funny.
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I particularly like his deadpan description of the countercultural in-crowd who turned up for the recording of All You Need Is Love: “Many members of the audience stare into space, looking either bored or cool: in those days, it was hard to tell the difference.”
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown, Fourth Estate, 656pp; £20, ebook £9.99
The Beatles in numbers
● The number of steps down to the Cavern Club: 18
● The number of annual visitors to the house in Liverpool where John Lennon grew up: 12,000
● The number of weeks Please Please Me stayed at number one: 30
● The number of singles the Beatles had in the Billboard Hot 100 for the week of April 4 1964: 12, including the top 5. Two songs about the Beatles also made the Hot 100 that week: We Love You Beatles by the Carefrees and A Letter to the Beatles by the Four Preps
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● The age Paul McCartney was when his accountant told him he had become a millionaire: 23
Prices made at auction for Beatles relics
● For a set of four tiny squares of white bedlinen, each square measuring half a centimetre by half a centimetre, cut from sheets slept in by the Beatles when they stayed at the Whittier Hotel in Detroit on the night of September 6 1964: £596
● For Paul McCartney’s English literature schoolbook: £48,000
● For a single brick from the demolished Cavern Club (one of 5,000 that were salvaged): £896
● For Paul McCartney’s autograph (a record for a living person): £2,950
● For one of John Lennon’s teeth: £19,000
