Even grouches will enjoy Fab Four biography
Some good news for these dark times: Craig Brown’s biography One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time (Fourth Estate) is out this week and by all accounts is a great cheerful beast that provides a kaleidoscopic overview of the life and times of the group — and, as all the reviews have happily informed us, you don’t even have to like their music to enjoy the book.
As Brown points out, there were many who didn’t think much of the Beatles. Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, described their music as “vapid … twanging nonsense”. The conservative commentator William F Buckley Jr claimed they were “not merely awful” but “appallingly unmusical” and “dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art”. Newsweek, similarly tin-eared, declared, “Musically, they are a near disaster … [and their lyrics] a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments”.
And there was plenty of bile reserved for Fab Four fans as well. Noel Coward described them as a “mass masturbation orgy” of “squealing young maniacs”. The intellectual Paul Johnson, writing in the New Statesman, took issue with their “huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store make-up” and said they were “a bottomless chasm of vacuity”, adding that “the boys and girls who will be the real leaders and creators of society tomorrow never go near a pop concert. They are, to put it simply, too busy.”
Brown loves all this reactionary fuming and fogeyism, and lays it on thick here — which is why his Beatles book is quite unlike any other. And there are a lot of those. In his glowing London Sunday Times review of One Two Three Four, historian Dominic Sandbrook notes that the British Library Catalogue lists 732 titles.
Brown’s book, Sandbrook writes, lacks the minutiae of Mark Lewisohn’s mammoth trilogy All These Years (Little Brown). The first volume, Tune In, ran to 960-odd pages and only takes the story to 1962. (There’s no word yet when the second and third volumes will appear.) Brown also eschews the sort of scholarly musical analysis of the sort that made Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (Vintage) such an indispensable work.
But, as Brown explained in an interview with The Observer, he finds “exhaustive biographies, which is most of them, boring. They recount details of no interest. My system is to cut those boring bits out. Dogged chronology is untrue to life, too. If you’re thinking about your life, past, present and future all merge together, so I try to reflect that.”
Brown had been researching a book on the Thames, he said, when he mentioned to his publisher that he was thinking of a Beatles book along the lines of his 2017 best-seller, Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret (Fourth Estate). “He e-mailed me the next day to ask if I’d be able to get it out by April 10 2020 because that’s the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ break-up. So I shelved the Thames one to do this.”
The Guardian published extracts from One Two Three Four on Saturday, and if they offer any indication of what the rest of the book is like, we can be grateful that we must wait for the river book. One anecdote I particularly enjoyed was Ringo Starr’s response to reports that an anti-Semitic group in Canada had threatened to assassinate him. “The one major fault,” he said, “is that I’m not Jewish.”
Incidentally, Brown, who has been writing Private Eye’s diaries for 31 years now, was asked if it was difficult to satirise leaders such as Donald Trump and whether the world was getting beyond parody. “If you were living through the reign of Henry VIII or Hitler’s rise to power,” he said, “you might be justified in saying, but I’m not sure it’s true now. There’ sa rather good recent book by Andrew Gimson [Gimson’s Presidents: Brief Lives from Washington to Trump (Vintage)] … and it shows that some have been Trump’s equal in their revoltingness and absurdity.”