One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, by Craig Brown
LEWIS JONES
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time By Craig Brown 4th Estate £18.99
There have been any number of books about the Beatles, but none as original and funny as Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four.
Published to mark the 50th anniversary of their break-up, it embraces what he calls ‘the random, subjective nature of history, a form predicated on objectivity but reliant on the shifting sands of memory’, and deploys the ‘exploded biography’ technique he invented for Ma’am Darling, his book about Princess Margaret.
In 150 chapters, hopping about in time and space, he gleefully mixes contemporary reports and anecdotal reminiscences, biography and autobiography (recalling, for instance, as many oldies will, the painful plastic Beatles wig he was given as a child), criticism, beguiling trivia and parody.
Some of the story is familiar, some of it less so. Brown manfully tackles the band’s early history, which strikes him as ‘as demanding as the Wars of the Roses, or the Schleswig-holstein question’, from the members’ beginnings in the summer of 1956, as the Quarrymen, through their various incarnations as Johnny and the Moondogs, the Beatals, the Nerk Twins, the Silver Beetles, the Silver Beats, the Beetles and Long John and the Silver Beatles, during which there were ‘at least nine’ changes of personnel until, in August 1960, they at last settled on the Beatles.
On Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, where they lodged in spectacular squalor and gorged on sex and drugs, their name was pronounced ‘Peadles’, which is German slang for ‘little willies’: ‘Oh, zee Peadles! Ha ha ha!’
John Lennon distinguished himself in various ways, not least by mooning the audience halfway through a song. ‘Unversed in Liverpudlian manners,’ Brown remarks, ‘the Germans applaud politely.’
Soon after their return to Britain, the drummer Pete Best was sacked – some said because the others were jealous of his good looks – and replaced by Ringo Starr, with his ‘bus-driver’s face’.
Rather than the sweet and beautiful Paul, the rebellious and witty John, the shy and spiritual George, it is Ringo who most appeals to Brown’s comic eye. For all his working-class pretensions, compared with the others ‘John was Lord Snooty’, from a posh district of Liverpool, while Ringo was the real thing, from a rough part of the Dingle. ‘We were working class,’ Ringo explained, ‘and in Liverpool when your dad left,’ as his did when he was three, ‘you suddenly became lower working class.’
What he lacked in talent and charisma, he made up for in ordinariness. Ringo was ‘a workhorse among prize ponies’, and the only Beatle who ‘could be described as a bloke’. Apparently, when ‘the indomitable Japanese artist’ Yoko Ono visited the Beatles’ office in 1966, looking for John, she found him absent, but Ringo was there; so she aimed herself at him instead. Unable to understand a word she was saying, he fled.
‘Who knows?’ Brown speculates, ‘If she had spoken more clearly, and on more down-to-earth issues, we might now be talking of Ringo and Yoko… His influence might have been felt in her poetry, too: “Sit at the dock. Watch the seagulls dance. If they come near your chips, give them a good whack.” ’ In similar vein, he delights in mishearings of their lyrics: ‘There, beneath the goose and bourbon skies’; ‘But if you go carrying picture of German cows’.
He has great fun with the many charlatans and chancers who latched on to them, such as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (that ‘leathery old guru with his easy promises of levitation’), Allen Klein, who succeeded poor Brian Epstein as their manager and had ‘the charm of a broken lavatory seat’, and Jeffrey Archer, whom Ringo summed up as ‘the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it’.
With a masterly lightness of touch, Brown considers every conceivable aspect of the Beatles, such as the tribute acts, currently numbering more than a thousand around the world, and the mad prices fetched by memorabilia – a 1964 notice announcing that a lounge at Liverpool Airport would be closed for a press conference, signed by the group, sold for £31,250.
At one point, he remarks that ‘when you hear a Beatles album, you feel that all human life is there’. The same may be said of this endlessly entertaining book.