How Bond was definitely not the fifth Beatle
Love And Let Die
John Higgs
W&N £22
★★★★★
In one of the less creepy of the many scenes in which he’s ‘entertaining’ a lady in 1964’s Goldfinger, Sean Connery – as James Bond – rolls out of bed and heads to the fridge to recharge their glasses, explaining: ‘My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done, such as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s as bad as listening to The Beatles without earmuffs.’
Tone-deaf both literally and culturally, this clunking line exposes the yawning chasm between the world of The Beatles and Bond. In one sense, they are twins. The first Bond movie and the first Beatle single, Dr No and Love Me Do, were both issued on October 5, 1962, and from this remarkable coincidence, John Higgs weaves a daring, dazzlingly entertaining pop cultural critique.
Higgs’s contention is that though they are perhaps the biggest British cultural exports ever, each represents entirely different, even warring, aspects of the British psyche, society and masculinity. For Higgs, it’s a Freudian clash between Eros (love, co-operation, joy, The Beatles) and Thanatos (cruelty, aggression, death, Bond).
‘It is hard to imagine more perfect cultural expressions of those drives than James Bond films or The Beatles. Given the astonishing global success they would enjoy, this must surely be the most public struggle for the soul of a culture ever. Never before had one country’s psychic laundry been washed in front of an audience of the whole planet.’ If this makes Love And Let Die sound portentous, cerebral even, fear not. It’s smart and analytical, yes, but it’s also enormously good fun. There’s something provocative or revelatory on every page; Bond author Ian Fleming is in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn for a magazine piece just days before The Beatles arrive to play their infamous teenage residency there.
When Australian model George Lazenby (left) was being considered as the third Bond, the producers sent sex workers to his hotel to confirm he wasn’t gay.
Higgs is no respecter of orthodoxies or reputation. Fleming emerges as an unpleasant bigot whose success came largely thanks to the old boy network. The Beatles are, by contrast, workingclass autodidacts remaking a new world rather than reinforcing the status quo à la Bond.
Higgs notes how the Bond of the films, roguish and charming if prehistoric in outlook, is very far from the thuggish, repressed enforcer of the books. He gives short shrift to the once-dominant narrative, peddled largely by cloth-eared hacks at Rolling Stone, that Lennon was complex and authentic due to his half-baked philosophies while McCartney was a lightweight because of his huge talent, charm and popularity.
All of which were on display when, at 80, Macca triumphed on stage at Glastonbury this summer, playing his theme from Live And Let Die, The Beatles and Bond still presenting their very different versions of the English male to a still-enraptured world, licensed to both thrill and kill.