‘It will change the way we think about their story’: mythical archive of ‘first Beatles historian’ comes to light
Behind every creative genius, there often stands a cast of supporting players. “I don’t care if you’re Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce, or Steve Jobs,” says writer Kenneth Womack. “Nobody does it alone.” He should know, having spent the last three years delving into the story of Mal Evans, an assistant to the Beatles, whose protean job description encompassed roadie, bodyguard, teamaker and procurer of marijuana.
When Evans first laid eyes on the Beatles at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, something changed inside him. “He became intoxicated,” Womack puts it. Within a year, he was moonlighting as the club’s bouncer. The year after, he quit his respectable day job to drive the group on tour across the country. And, when Beatlemania sent them around the world, Evans followed, carrying the guitars and amplifiers.
After the Beatles quit touring, Evans found his way into the music. He banged a tambourine on Strawberry Fields Forever, rang the alarm clock on A Day in the Life and threw in a lyric for Here, There and Everywhere. But when the band split, and Evans’ own ambitions as a songwriter and producer faltered, he sank into despair. It ended in his mysterious death, aged 40, shot by police officers in Los Angeles at his home after he confronted them with an air rifle.
But almost 50 years on, and as the Beatles return with their “final” song, Evans’ story continues to hold a mythic status among fans, largely due to rumours of a lost archive of band ephemera Evans amassed during his years with the Fab Four. Its legend is so pervasive that a 2004 hoax pinpointing it to an Australian flea market made headlines around the world. But now, it turns out that the mythic archive is real. And Womack has been given full access.
“When the materials arrived at my home in New Jersey [from Evans’s family], I was blown away,” Womack says. “Mal kept magnificent materials. He would collect lyrics, he would pick up receipts – anything that was left behind. He was sort of the first Beatles historian.”
With these materials, Womack has written the first full-length biography of Evans, published this month. Next year, he will release a second volume, providing an unexpurgated look at the archive to “allow Beatles fans to study the materials themselves, and make connections that may have eluded us all”.
The centrepiece is Evans’ diary, which he kept throughout his tenure with the band, complemented by an unpublished memoir he was working on at the time of his death. For historians like Womack, these materials are invaluable. “Mal’s diary helps us pinpoint many aspects of the timeline,” he says. “So it’s going to change the way Beatles scholars think about their story.”
Despite its value to historians, the diary itself is often quite mundane. On his first official day in the Beatles’ employ, Evans simply writes: “Start work with Beatles at Blackpool. Picked lads up at airport at 1.30am. They went home by hire car. Neil [Aspinall] and I by van. Bed by 3.30am.” It’s hardly great literature, but there’s a power in its mundanity. It removes the cloud of mythology that often shrouds the Beatles’ story and reminds us that their superstardom was by no means predestined.
In the memoir, Evans is more open about his relationships with the band members. He was close to Paul McCartney, moving into his home and hanging out in his music room while songs were composed. “We were to spend many pleasant evenings in that little room at the top of his house,” he writes. His relationship with John Lennon was quite different. “John was always the hardest to talk to,” he writes. “I always thought that when John stopped insulting me, we had fallen out as friends.”
What these materials reveal most, however, is the character of Evans himself. He has often been diminished by Beatles fans to a lovable oaf figure, lurking loyally in the background with a guitar pick or pot of tea at the ready. But he was more complex and conflicted than that.
“Mal, in his private thoughts, clearly yearned to be a star,” Womack notes. Indeed, his archive is full of reminiscences of the celebrity lifestyle he enjoyed in the Beatles’ entourage. In his memoir, he describes being “so knocked out” when McCartney puts him on the phone with Elvis Presley. In a letter to his wife, Lily, he gushes about a visit to Burt Lancaster’s mansion: “George, Ringo, and myself went in for a swim, and Burt lent me his own personal swimming trunks. You can imagine how thrilled I feel.”
These letters home were infrequent – to live out his celebrity fantasy life, Evans neglected his competing responsibilities to Lily and his two children. He missed the birth of his daughter, was constantly unfaithful and eventually abandoned his family entirely. In the diary, he chastises himself. “Lil, why don’t I ring you?” he writes. “[I] keep making excuses to myself as to why I shouldn’t. I think I’m frightened you will shout at me.” But his guilt never changed his behaviour.
This seems a central reason why the mythic archive has remained hidden for so long. Though the materials were misplaced for some years (languishing in a publishing house basement), they have now been with the Evans family for decades. This darker side to the story may have kept the family from making them public. “There’d been a lot of pain in their lives the last couple of years with Mal,” Womack says. “It makes perfect sense that the family needed to sit on it for a while.”
It is Evans’ son, Gary, who has spearheaded this project to finally release the materials. “I personally always wanted my dad’s book or a book about my dad to be published,” he says. Now seems a particularly apt moment, in the wake of the 2021 Get Back docuseries, which featured Evans so prominently. “As a tribute to my dad, Peter Jackson called the software that was used on the Get Back documentary MAL,” Gary notes with pride.
Certainly, it seems that Evans’ role in the Beatles’ story can now be better appreciated – not just as someone who was there, but as someone who directly enabled the band’s creativity to flourish. Womack is unequivocal on this point, explaining that creativity is always “a social production”. Sometimes that can mean a direct collaboration or influence between artists. But it can also include the unglamourous work, like trekking across London to fetch a guitar, that gives an artist the time and space to focus fully on their creative endeavours.
In this way, Womack’s book is a celebration not just of Evans, but of all the unsung supporting characters who make creative life possible. However, it also serves as a warning on the temptations of fame. “What the diaries reveal is a kind of cautionary tale about what happens when you have full access to the object of your dreams,” Womack says. As Evans himself wondered in a poem from the archive: “Have I destroyed my happiness / Cutting down my family tree?”
Evans’s wife and children certainly paid a price for his pursuit of fame. But Gary remains proud of his father’s work. “From my earliest memories, the Beatles were always there,” he reflects. “To me, it just seemed to be him and his mates.” So, when asked what he would like his father’s legacy to be, Gary’s answer is simple. He only hopes that Beatles fans and the world can finally see “that he was their greatest friend”.
• Living the Beatles Legend: The Story of Mal Evans by Kenneth Womack is published 14 November by Mudlark