Hunter Davies

This is hardly comprehensive, but it's a very essential read for any hardcore beatles fans (like myself). I will say most of its value comes from the fact that it was written before the Beatles had finished per se, right before it all went horribly wrong, so its a unique perspective. Most biographies after the fact muddy the water by treating the breakup as an inevitability so here its refreshing to see something with a completely different beatles "myth". Also the way John's marriage with Cynthia is described is...well, positive, which every sign after the fact indicated it not to be. I particularly enjoyed Davies' earnestness and transparency - at every stage it seems he was aware of his bias and present it forthright. It made it easier to make your own assumptions about things. As it stands its a bit of an authority of a book, where most of the facts come from and were originally presented (and which ones were later denied). Written pretty well.… (more)

John Lennon famously once described this authorised biography, first published in 1968, as a whitewash (except he used rather stronger language), and his view has been echoed by many others down the decades. The general consensus seems to be that it’s a sanitised portrait of the Beatles. It was amusing to read, in Davies’ introduction to the 1985 edition, that when he delivered the manuscript back in 1968, Lennon was at the front of the queue of those primed with buckets of whitewash (he claimed that Aunt Mimi was upset). In retrospect the book actually seems more remarkable for its candour than the odd white lie Davies was made to tell: the Beatles no longer take drugs, he informs us with a straight face, following a detailed account of their drug-taking. He wasn’t allowed to say that Brian Epstein was gay but found ways of making it perfectly clear anyway. The full story of the Beatles is here even if you have to read between the lines occasionally.

Davies was certainly granted a now unimaginable degree of access to the then most famous group in the world. He just seems to have breezed into Brian Epstein’s office, after meeting Paul a couple of times, and next thing he was virtually a fifth Beatle. He spent a lot of time with them and this gives the book some unique insights. There is a fly on the wall account of Lennon and McCartney writing A Little Help From My Friends, and the Beatles recording It’s Getting Better and Magical Mystery Tour. He interviewed all the surviving parents, and of course the inimitable Aunt Mimi, in the posh houses bought for them by their sons. He also interviewed Pete Best who, at the time, was slicing bread in a bakery in Liverpool for the princely sum of £18 a week. This is all evocative and poignant stuff.

This wasn’t the first book about the Beatles, but it was the first attempt to chronicle the band’s early history and family backgrounds, and Davies did a huge amount of primary research. The classic tropes of the Beatles saga (the Quarrymen, John meeting Paul at the Woolton fete, Hamburg, the Cavern, Brian Epstein, the sacking of Pete Best) are marshalled into place for the first time. If it now seems a tad over-familiar that’s mainly because its basic structure, and many of the stories, have been repeated in countless subsequent books. This is the foundation stone of Beatles scholarship or, if you prefer, mythmaking. Even Albert Goldman’s iconoclastic biography of Lennon was essentially an attempt to explode a myth first set in train by Davies.

The book ends with profiles of the individual Beatles as they were in 1968: the working-class heroes from Liverpool immured in their mansions in the South of England, increasingly isolated from the outside world and each other. They talk about themselves with striking openness, each of them a curious mixture of the naive and the knowing, the exceptional and the ordinary. The seeds of the breakup are evident in hindsight - Lennon and Harrison were clearly bored to death with the Beatles - but Davies is honest enough to admit that he didn’t see this at the time. Early ‘68 is not a bad point to end the story of the greatest group in the history of pop music: the Beatles in their post-Pepper pomp, just before it all fell apart.

By the way, John Lennon eventually apologised to Davies for his outburst. Quite right too. This is a warm and informative Beatles biography: a groundbreaking survey of their early history and frontline reports from history as it happened.… (more)