Shout! (4 page)

More than thirty years after their breakup, they dominate the headlines almost as much as in their mid-sixties high noon. Every month or so brings some page-leading fresh twist in the story—a distant cousin of John’s now claiming to have been his closest childhood confidant, a Hamburg matron alleging long-forgotten amours with Paul or George, a Sotheby’s auction of freshly unearthed memorabilia; a lost letter, a doodled lyric, a fragment of reel-to-reel tape. Books on the Beatles, ranging from muck-raking “revelations” to scholarly analyses, now run into the hundreds, and go on multiplying all the time. Their old recording studios on Abbey Road, north London, is a shrine rivaling Elvis
Presley’s Graceland, perennially setting some kind of record for how much mourning graffiti can be crammed onto a single wall. To feed this insatiable appetite I myself must have written the equivalent of another couple of biographies in newspaper and magazine articles, commentaries, reviews, reconstructions, and obituaries, and spoken at least a further one aloud in radio and television interviews. Like it or not, I am tagged as a Beatles “expert” for good and all. I have come to dread the light that springs into people’s eyes at parties when the only alternative to clamlike rudeness on my part is to admit I’ve written a book about the Beatles. I know that from here on I shall be allowed to talk about nothing else.

They are, after Winston Churchill, the twentieth century’s greatest standard-bearer for Britain. When we look back over that lowering and ugly hundred years, only two moments give rise to genuine collective national pride: the one in 1940 when we stood alone against Hitler, and the one in the barely formed sixties when four cheeky-faced boys from Liverpool recolonized the world in our name. At times, indeed, they seem to be all we have left as everything once valued about this country slides deeper into neglect and anarchy. Our streets may be overrun by muggers and carjackers, our public transportation a homicidal mess, our hospitals uncaring Third World slums, our schools devalued, our legal system a joke, our police force in retreat, our royal family in ruins. But nothing, it seems, can ever tarnish the glory that was John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

At the start of their career they were mocked for choosing a name that suggested an insect. Perhaps the ultimate sign of their fame is that now in the English language, wherever spoken, a small black creepy-crawlie is, by a long way, only the second image the word “beetle” calls to mind.

Their longevity testifies, of course, to the residual power of the generation that grew up with them: the Chelsea-booted boys and Bibafrocked girls who would one day metamorphose into presidents, prime ministers, captains of industry, television bosses, and newspaper editors. Virtually every Briton and American now in their fifties looks back to the same goldenly privileged mid-sixties youth and cherishes the same clutch of Lennon-McCartney songs, above all, as mementoes of that gorgeous time. Forty years on, shapeless, wrinkled, and balding though they may be, they still find it inconceivable that any other generation
could embody the state of being young more perfectly than themselves. Hence, the post-sixties culture that compels no one to yield to
anno Domini
, where even old-age pensioners can still cling to their bath-shrunk Levis and ponytails and miniskirts. To this worldwide realm of eternal teenagerdom, there is no more instantaneous passport than a Beatles tune.

Yet, immense though the nostalgia market is, it represents only a part of their global constituency. Billions adore them who had no share in their radiant heyday—who, in many cases, were not even born when they ceased to exist as a band. First-generation fans may well smile to recollect how furiously they rejected the pop idols of their own parents; how being a Beatles fan in the early days meant facing a constant barrage of adult disapproval and contempt. Back in the early sixties it would have been extraordinary for a young pop addict to share his or her grandparents’ fondness for some hit-maker of three decades before, like Harry Roy or Debroy Somers and the Savoy Orpheans. Yet today, grandparents and grandchildren listen to
Revolver
, say, or
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
with the same unreserved delight.

Most potently of all, perhaps, the Beatles are the so-called “Swinging Sixties” incarnate. Britain has a long tradition of spinning history into fantasy worlds—theme parks of the mind, one might call them—from the knights and damsels of Henry V and the lute-playing buccaneers of Good Queen Bess through the posthorns and stagecoaches of Dickens to the Naughty Nineties, the Roaring Twenties, the “blitz spirit” of World War II. But none of these yearningly recollected, endlessly redramatized epochs even begins to compare with what came over stuffy, staid old London between 1964 and 1969. Although every last trace vanished decades ago, millions of foreign tourists annually still come seeking it. You can see them any day of the week, in their drab blue denim crocodiles, from France, Germany, Scandinavia, Japan—everywhere—picking over the souvenir rubbish that now swamps Carnaby Street, treading the no longer motley pavements of Chelsea and Knightsbridge, or lurching purposelessly amid the garbage and beggars of the modern West End.

Liverpool, which took so long to recognize its most priceless civic asset, now has a John Lennon Airport and a permanent exhibition,
The Beatles Story
, housed in the new Albert Dock development and attracting millions of visitors, that—along with Paul McCartney’s Liverpool
Institute for the Performing Arts—have set the seal on the city’s recent renaissance. Recent donations to
The Beatles Story
have included the orange-tinted glasses John Lennon wore when writing and first recording “Imagine,” now valued at one million pounds. Echoing Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
, there is also a giant replica of the glasses, their lenses showing images of John’s major creative influences, the Vietnam War, the peace movement, the “beautiful people” in robes and beads who are now grandparents and retirees.

Other vivid decades seemed grotesque and embarrassing to the ones immediately following. But the swinging Britain of the Beatles grows more modish the further it recedes into history. When Tony Blair brought the Labour Party back to power as New Labour in 1997, he was marketed as the figurehead of a youthful dynamism, creativity, and lightheartedness that evoked the mid-sixties in almost eerie detail. The jaded and broken-down nation Blair’s claque had inherited was rebranded overnight with the sixties-speak imprimatur of “Cool Britannia.” As in the days of his Old Labour predecessor Harold Wilson, 10 Downing Street thronged with pop stars, painters, designers, and couturiers, all eager to hobnob with a premier more hopelessly starstruck and camera-hungry even than the shameless Harold.

The concurrent “Britpop” movement consisted almost wholly of bands in Beatley haircuts playing Beatley songs with Beatley harmonies and enacting shadow plays from Beatles history, one quartet even being shown skipping over a zebra crossing like on the cover of the
Abbey Road
album. The supposed rivalry between the two leading Britpop bands, Oasis (working-class northern lads) and Blur (middle-class southern lads), was portrayed in exactly the same terms as that between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones thirty-odd years earlier. Psychedelic colors, microskirts, long-pointed shirt collars, Union Jack designs on tote bags… suddenly they were all in business again. Never had there been so virulent an outbreak of what psychologists have come to define as “nostalgia without memory.”

It is often said that “if you can remember the sixties, you can’t have been there.” But to the vast majority of the decade’s survivors whose brains were unaddled by pot or Scotch and coke, it never felt quite so dreamily enchanted as it is portrayed in retrospect. The age of so-called love and peace saw the world almost as rife as today with natural disaster
and human cruelty. As well as free rock festivals, kipper ties, fun furs, and white lipstick, it brought the Vietnam War, the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, cataclysmic race riots across America, famine in Bihar, and genocide in Biafra. Even as Britain “swung” with such apparent careless joy, it had to deal with horrors and tragedies like the Aberfan disaster, the Moors murders (to this day still unmatched for depraved child cruelty), and the opening shots of Northern Ireland’s later bloodbath. Being a sixties teenager had sunburst moments, certainly, but also involved long stretches of workaday dullness, unrelieved by modern diversions like mobile phones, text messaging, personal stereos, video games, or the Internet.

If we are honest we must accept the extent to which the heady new freedoms of youth in the sixties paved the way for the frightening, ungovernable world we see about us today. From the happy high of pot and pills and the cozy hallucinations of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
grew the drug menace that now saturates the most respectable, most rural communities, turns once bright and happy children into black-and-blue-punctured suicides, litters public thoroughfares and parks with the same foul stew of broken ampules and needles. From the sexual freedom granted to sixties boys and girls by the contraceptive pill came the long breakdown in the age-old, civilizing influence of the family, the freedom of sixties children’s children in their turn to thieve and vandalize without the slightest fear of parental retribution.

From the great discovery of sixties youth through the example of the Beatles—that, with a bit of cheek, you could get away with anything—evolved the whole ghastly panoply of modern contempt for convention and self-restraint that encompasses urban terrorism at one extreme and supermarket “shopping cart rage” at the other. Just as John Lennon realized he could get away with teasing his blue-blooded audience at the 1963 Royal Command performance, so the IRA realized they could get away with blowing up innocent women and children; so successive governments realized they could get away with allowing the national infrastructure to fall into decay; so the police found they could get away with abandoning whole communities; so hospitals found they could get away with ceasing to accord patients basic human dignity; so the legions of murderers, child molesters, muggers, and celebrity stalkers found they could become ever more arrogantly audacious in their predatory activities;
so egotism, viciousness, and disregard for others grew to the point where bin Laden and his fanatics found they could get away with the vileness of September 11, 2001. If you seek to pinpoint the exact place in the twentieth century where civilization ceased moving steadily forward and began taking quantum leaps backward, there can be no other culprit but the sixties.

Yet, at the same time, one cannot gainsay the decade’s many positive, if illusory and short-lived, qualities: its vigor and optimism; its belief that idealism could move the grimmest, rockiest old mountains; its abounding creativity; its ready assimilation of the wildest originality and eccentricity; its childlike sense of discovering the whole world anew. Such are the echoes that sixties nostalgics, with or without memory, seek most avidly and find most abundantly in the music of the Beatles.

Weary though I may be of discussing the subject, heartsick as I am at the prospect of writing anything further about it (including this prologue), I cannot pretend that my interest has waned over two decades. For this is the greatest show business story ever told; one whose fascination only deepens as our collective obsession with the joys and horrors of celebrity grows. As a moral tale it is both utterly emblematic (be careful what you wish for lest your wish come true) and utterly unique. If it were presented as fiction, with its web of extraordinary accidents, conjunctions, and coincidences, no one would believe it. A modern Dickens or Tolstoy would be needed to create such a cast of characters, such a cavalcade of mold-shattering events, such a shading of comedy into tragedy, such a sweeping panorama of social evolution and transformation—though not even Dickens or Tolstoy had the nerve to make any of their heroes actually change the world.

From the moment the Beatles realized they need not fear being overtaken by Dave Clark and the “Tottenham Sound” there has been no dispute about their being the greatest pop act of all time. No matter how pop’s sound and look may develop, or regress, they remain the ideal, the exemplar, the summit to which all performers aspire, whether male or female, singular or plural; their name the ultimate turn-on in the language of promotion, huckstering, and hype. There is not a single hopefully seminal attraction of the past three decades, from seventies glamand snob-rockers, through punk, disco, and new romantics, to today’s zombie-strutting boy- and girl- and boy-girl “bands,” whose keepers have not staked their claim to greatness by announcing they have sold
more singles or more albums than the Beatles, played to larger combined audiences than the Beatles, had more consecutive hits than the Beatles, stormed the charts more quickly than the Beatles, been mobbed at airports more hysterically than the Beatles, generated more obsessive media coverage than the Beatles. Perhaps the only group to have approached the worldwide stir they created were the Spice Girls in the middle and late nineties. The highest accolade Ginger, Scary, Posh, and Sporty received, or desired, was to be called “female Beatles.”

The truth is that in purely statistical terms many later performers can legitimately make one or another of these claims. The Beatles, after all, rose to fame in a music industry as different from the modern one as the Stone Age from
Star Wars
. Plenty of other acts have shifted more product, counted more heads on their tours, and certainly earned more money than the Beatles did. Plenty have mimicked their milestone moments—like U2’s simulation of their Apple rooftop concert. But none has ever been or could ever hope to be so much loved. Love was what took them to their unbeatable heights but also destroyed them; the terrible, mindless love that ultimately enwrapped them squeezed the vitality from them, like a giant boa constrictor. That is the power, above all, that endures in those recordings from long-ago Abbey Road in long-ago London. Play any Beatles song (except maybe “Revolution No. 9”) to any group of toddlers in any country and of whatever culture: They will instantly love it.