The deepest pleasure afforded by The Beatles in Scotland — a handsome hardback custom-built for the Christmas stocking of every rock dad north of Berwick — is its depiction of a time when the Four were not yet so stratospherically and unreachably Fab. We know all too well the sorts of people by whom the Beatles were later surrounded — gurus, managers with grievances, flakes and acolytes, cocaine set serpents and, in the cases of John Lennon and George Harrison, fans with murder on their minds.

In the Transit van and guesthouse stage of their career, though, there was an altogether more seemly class of Beatle disciple. It is these people who are the stars of the many wonderful photographs and I-was-there accounts in Ken McNab’s book: the baffled Lord Provosts pushed in the band’s direction, the harassed policemen mentally calculating what Beatlemania is earning them in overtime, the adolescent offspring of Scottish theatre managers crammed into kilts to meet the singers off the telly, the beehived ravers who flirted their way by what passed for security in those far-off days.

Who knew what they were dealing with back then? Virtually nobody, least of all the Beatles themselves. Performing one-night stands in Elgin and Kirkcaldy, Aberdeen and Bridge of Allan they were merely one band among a multitude of touring beat groups, slightly superior to Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas but little more; unlikely candidates for cultural deification, certainly.

It’s this dimension that gives a heartbreaking, beautifully sad cast to much of this admirable book. Its characters had the briefest walk-on parts in the greatest secular nativity story known to humanity but couldn’t have appreciated the fact until much later. Their anecdotes, therefore, have the burnished, well-rehearsed sheen that comes from nearly 50 years of telling. How many howffs and saloons have been been warmed down the years by a ritualised recollection of the time, say, Brian Meechan of Dundee phoned Ringo Starr at his hotel in the city and got put straight through?

This book bursts with similar tales, all of them happy, hopeful and redolent of a barely recognisable era. They are underscored, however, by the same blue notes that made Hey Jude possibly the greatest record of all time, the haunting sense that none of this can ever happen again. It’s a book about youth as much as about the Beatles, youth at a time when society was relinquishing the keys to everything.

The book is based on the ingenious premise that the Beatles developed a strange and recurring affinity for Scotland, which does seem to be the case, it’s a catalogue and dissection of every last link they ever had with the country, from John Lennon’s childhood holidays in Durness to the Glaswegian who founded the firm that does security at Paul McCartney’s concerts; from the band’s dismal 1960 tour of the Highlands supporting Johnny Gentle, to the statue of his late wife that Paul McCartney has had erected in Campbeltown, to the fact that Abbey Road’s iconic sleeve was shot by the Scots snapper Iain MacMillan. It’s a treasury of pedantry and obsession. Reading it you feel compelled to applaud McNab, while trusting that you never undertake a long train journey with him.

But his book told me tales I’d never previously heard and showed me pictures I’d never seen, achievements Beatles obsessives despaired of savouring again long ago. Inevitably there are quibbles; there’s no mention of Jimmy Nicol, the Glaswegian drummer who deputised for a sick Ringo on a tour of Australia; the author and a photographer recall three Beatles taking a rowing boat onto Loch Earn when the accompanying snap shows all four in a motorboat. You do worry that the unreliable momentum of memory has shaped many of the stories here. Even so, it is forgivable. The Beatles ensured that nothing would ever be the same again; a crucial moment in the process of their doing so is frozen forever in this superb book.

The Beatles in Scotland by Ken McNab is published by Polygon, £20

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict
• Literary festivals: a survivor’s guide