The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
When the Beatles went to weirdland
From John’s tooth to Ringo’s baked beans – the oddness of the Fab Four phenomenon is revealed in the tiniest details
One of the many astonishing things about the Beatles is how quickly they became famous. At the start of l963 they were playing to 200 people at the Two Red Shoes Ballroom in Elgin, Scotland; by September they were playing the Royal Albert Hall; by Christmas they were top of the singles and albums charts, and their first US No1 soon followed. At first they loved it – “We felt like f------ gods!” said Paul McCartney – but soon disillusionment set in. Ringo Starr was shocked to find that even his own family treated him differently. When he spilt some tea in his saucer at his auntie’s house, the family all rushed about, saying,
“He can’t have that! We have to tidy up!” and he realised sadly that, “I’d grown up and lived with these people and now I found myself in weirdland… [but] I couldn’t stand up and say ‘Treat me like you used to’ because that would be acting big-time.” He tried to reconcile Liverpool and weirdland when he took a suitcase of baked beans with him to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India, but even that seemed a touch big-time.
The Beatles’ sharp ascent dethroned many established performers. Cliff Richard had been churning out top 10 hits since l958, and in March l963 his Summer
Holiday beat Please Please Me to the top of the charts. But by Christmas he was languishing at No8. Even with all his Christian forgiveness, he still revealed a certain bitterness in a l992 interview: “It was hurtful to be overlooked so dramatically by the media. But I still sold records by the million, so what the heck? And look at me now. The Beatles don’t exist any more…” He also added, weirdly, that he was the rebellious one because: “The Beatles were accepted by royalty, they were accepted by all the high society. The Shadows and I never were. So we had one up on them.”
The Beatles were indeed accepted by royalty. At her golden wedding, the Queen said: “Think what we would have missed if we had never heard the Beatles.” And back in the USSR, Vladimir Putin recalled that hearing the Beatles as a boy was “like a gulp of freedom”. Even Philip Larkin was apt to play Yesterday obsessively, much to the disgust of his friend Kingsley Amis. But not everyone was impressed. When the Beatles posed with Cassius Clay, the future Muhammad Ali, he asked: “Who are these little sissies?”
hree years ago, Craig Brown invented a brilliant new form of biography with his Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. It made one realise how plodding most biographies are, in their dutiful trudge through parentage, childhood, youth, before they get to the exciting stuff. Brown just skipped about, retailing sightings of Princess Margaret by other people, which made her seem far more interesting than she’d ever seemed before. He uses the same technique in his new book – One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time – but with the Beatles he has set himself a much harder task. Nobody was ever that obsessed with Princess Margaret, whereas there are Beatles fans who know every detail of their lives, and can argue for weeks about what time they stepped on to the zebra crossing on Abbey Road – which incidentally is now Grade II listed. We know it was August 8 1969, but was it 10am or 11.35am? Brown found that, even after reading about the Beatles non-stop for a year, he was still a novice by the standards of the fans he met in Liverpool during Beatles Week. And trying to remember all the differing line-ups of the Quarrymen was “as difficult as the Schleswig-Holstein Question”.
Brown seems fond of Ringo – “a workhorse among prize ponies” – less keen on John Lennon and positively venomous towards Yoko Ono. He quotes someone who knew Ono in her early days on the New York art scene as saying: “I thought she was a hustler, not an artist.” But perhaps that was what appealed to Lennon – she was fearless, whereas he, according to Nicky Haslam, who knew him well, was “a wuss”. And Ono was always coming up with these weird ideas – “bag-ins” and posing naked on the cover of Two Virgins. She boasted: “Now we are married, we are more famous than the Burtons”
– ignoring the fact that Lennon was more famous than the Burtons long before he met her. Now 87, Ono still tweets most days to her 4.78 million followers with maxims such as “Carry a bag of peas. Leave a pea wherever you go.” In February 2019, she asked her followers to “give us some advice that will make our lives heal and shine.” They responded enthusiastically, but not always in the terms she was expecting – “Put a splash of fizzy water in your Yorkshire pudding batter.” And “Avoid Tesco Value rice crispies. They’re really horrible.”
The West End Central police sergeant who took complaints about the Beatles playing on the roof of Apple Corps’ headquarters in January l969, opined that “any group of musicians that is forced to play on the roof of their office has got no future”. And in a way, he was right – that was the last time they played together. Lennon told McCartney, “I want a divorce”, and McCartney made it official in April l970. It was the end of their joint career, but by no means the end of their fame.
Brown lists astonishing prices for Beatles memorabilia at auction – a brick from the Cavern Club for £896; four tiny squares of bed linen cut from hotel sheets the Beatles slept on in Detroit for £595; a lock of Lennon’s hair for £35,000. But oddest of all was the case of Lennon’s tooth. Dr Michael Zuk, a Canadian dentist, paid £19,000 for it at auction, saying he would exhibit it in his surgery. But actually he had a Cunning Plan. He was going to extract the DNA then advertise for people who thought they could be Lennon’s illegitimate children (he figured there should be several of them) and, when he found a DNA match, encourage them to make a claim against the Lennon estate. He, of course, would take a finder’s fee. But it seems he never found anyone, or at any rate we know of none.
Brown ends with a delicious quote from Bryan Magee, the philosopher and politician, written in l967: “Does anyone seriously believe that the
Beatles’ music will be an unthinkingly accepted part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?” To which the obvious answer is, “yeah, yeah, yeah”. And Craig Brown has found a vastly entertaining way of celebrating it.
Yoko Ono still tweets daily maxims: ‘Carry a bag of peas. Leave a pea wherever you go’
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown (Fourth Estate,£18.99)