All you need is the music – not more rehashed Beatles tittle-tattle

If every book about The Beatles was laid end-to-end it would stretch from the Parnell Monument, at the north end of Dublin’s O’Connell Street, and reach to the Fusiliers’ Arch at St Stephen’s Green.

Put another way, the pulp devoted to Fab Four biographies, grubby tell-alls, quack musicology and specious academic guff has consumed countless acres of good Scandi spruce.

To be honest, neither of those analogies has been empirically road-tested, but you get the idea. Basically, enough already. By conservative estimates, there are well over 2,000 Beatles books out there. Which means it has all been said. Over and over.

But then paper never refused ink and publishers rarely turn their backs on a soft buck.

The latest Beatles tome is called, with impressive originality, All You Need is Love.

It concentrates, for the most part, on the end of the dream as the 1960s gave way to the ’70s, just as the greatest band of all time (well, they were) atomised.

It’s basically leftovers from The Love You Make by the same writers, Peter Brown and Stephen Gaines, that was published in 1983.

That book threw up a few juicy controversies and it flew off the shelves like chocolate on Easter Saturday.

The two shockers that travelled furthest were the claims John Lennon and manager Brian Epstein had a sexual relationship back in the Twist and Shout days and that Ringo Starr’s drumming was swapped out in the studio with Paul McCartney filling in.

While that book was made up of recollections of those who were there (or thereabouts), these particular accusations were never made on the record.

Mostly, this new publication seems to be a recycled, repurposed and jaded echo of what we have heard so many times before.

Yoko Ono, the femme fatale Beatles fans still love to hate, is portrayed, of course, as the virus that eventually killed the band.

But that was more than 50 years ago. They’d have long split up now, anyway.

Even if death hadn’t robbed us of Lennon and George Harrison, you’d like to think the band wouldn’t have turned into a septuagenarian circus act like The Rolling Stones, gyrating to grandparents in soulless football stadiums.

Even when Peter Jackson’s six-part epic The Beatles: Get Back premiered on Disney+ two years ago, I found myself conflicted. I took a peep and, while brilliantly crafted from the out-takes of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970’s film Let it Be, I soon realised I was less interested in all this minutiae and paraphernalia than in the most precious thing of all – the music.

For me, Rubber Soul, released just as they were emerging from their boyband phase in 1965, is as perfect a pop album as you will ever hear.

It’s a breath-taking collection of two-minute classics, the best of them from Lennon at the peak of his extraordinary powers.

We don’t need another Beatles book, but you can never get enough of those tunes.

The world never will.