Secondary sources are comprehensively mined letters, public records and business documents have been found in places no one else ever thought to look friends, associates and acquaintances have been interviewed over what seems to be a quarter-century. The first edited-down volume, though, is largely a delight, and the story is told so definitively that, after this, that really should be it. I have been a Beatles obsessive since the age of seven, but even for people like me, this all sounds as if it might be a little unnecessary. This is the story told in Proustian detail: we will presumably at last know what Lennon actually shouts at the start of "It's All Too Much", the history of a company owned by Ringo Starr called Bricky Builders and the full life-story of McCartney's sheepdog Martha. Should you have £120 to spare, each book will also be published in an extended special edition which includes "hundreds of thousands of words of extra material, as well as many extra photographs". Two further volumes will appear, all under the umbrella title "All These Years". The product of at least eight years' writing and research, and full of information sourced even before that, it runs from the band members' family prehistories to the release of their first proper single in 1962.
Mark Lewisohn's new book Tune in is the best part of 1000 pages long. In an age as nostalgia-soaked as ours, and in the case of a group so dissected and deconstructed, the one really pertinent question remains: is there anything left to add? The story as told by the group themselves is collected in a misnamed, door-stopping oral history called Anthology in terms of prose style, the best all-purpose biography has long been Philip Norman's Shout!, first published in 1981. The books written about the Beatles cover every aspect of their story – and they keep coming, from unwieldy works of culture studies, to the drab memoirs of fans, aides and hangers-on. It's nothing important."īut it was, and still is – so much so that they are now surely the most analysed musicians in history. "People talk about it as if it was the end of the world," he said. When they went their separate ways at the end of the 1960s, John Lennon had stern words for anyone who thought their demise was tragic, or even significant. Paul McCartney still talks of them as "a good little band".
The Beatles themselves, in order to stay halfway sane, always denied that anything out-of-the-ordinary had gone on.
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