JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE, RINGO AND ME: The Real Beatles Story
by Tony Barrow
Deutsch £16.99 pp256

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOURS: My Life with the Beatles
by Tony Bramwell
Robson £14.99 pp440

The further we get from the Beatles, the bigger they become — in importance, influence and as a subject for research. A Beatles fair is held every week somewhere in the world, the price of Beatles memorabilia doubles every decade. At present, two authors are busy hacking away down the Beatles mine, having got million-pound-plus advances to turn over the same old soil.

Yet the bigger the Beatles become, the smaller are the fragments unearthed. Almost everybody remotely connected to the band, from tea boys to chauffeurs, has now given us their memoirs. I can think of only two people with a real story to tell who have so far held back.

Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, whom he met at art school in Liverpool, was at least there, but she has written her life story before (A Twist of Lennon, in 1978). She was married then to a bloke called Twist, gerrit, one of three subsequent marriages. I enjoyed it at the time, found it touching.

In that book, she described in detail how she met John, the marriage, even the arrival of Yoko. She has also given interviews and helped on other books over the years. So what else has she got to reveal? Nothing that’s new about the Beatles themselves, their career or music, not even about John’s music, yet she must have been around when he was composing. Did he tell her nothing? Was she not interested?

But oh boy, she has a great deal to unload about her own feelings, which are eerily, creepily fascinating. And also about what has happened to her since 1978.

This time, I learnt that she had, in fact, slept with her first boyfriend, aged 17. Fast going for an apparently well-brought-up girl in 1956 from “over the water” in Cheshire. He talked her into it, of course, as men do, the brutes. She admits she was frumpish, in twinset and pearls, when she first met John. Her hairstyle was dated, but that wasn’t really her fault, so she says. Her mum’s friend, a hairdresser, did it, but made her look middle aged. Cynthia, even early on, appears by her own account to have been a bit of a doormat, later a victim.

I didn’t know that John once beat her up, outside some ladies’ lavatories. In the first book, his worst was “unreasonable rages” and lashing out “verbally and physically”. She became pregnant for the simple reason that neither had ever used contraception. After the birth of their son, John went off on hols with Brian Epstein. Cyn strongly denies that John was in any way homosexual, and asserts that nothing happened between them.

John himself told me he did have a one-night stand with Epstein, as a laugh, to see what it was like, but suggested it was no more than mutual masturbation. He could, of course, have been lying.

She has some new stories about John’s Aunt Mimi, who brought him up. In one of them, John throws a chicken at his aunt, which will appear in all Beatles books from now on. Mimi is long dead, as is John, so their stories can’t be denied. There is also nobody alive to refute her story that Maureen, Ringo’s first wife, had an affair with George Harrison after Ringo left her. That was new to me. Also that Maureen, when Ringo went, got on a motorbike and drove into a brick wall.

But Yoko is alive, and litigious, so Cyn has been brave to take her on, revealing her true feelings about the woman in “determined pursuit” of her husband. In the first book, she didn’t blame Yoko at all. She doesn’t now change the general picture that most Beatles fans already have — of Yoko as a scheming hussy — but she has a long list of petty meannesses and slights, all of which ring true and hurtful. Many concern money. At their divorce, John was worth about £1m, but Cyn accepted £100,000 to get it over quickly, instead of fighting for half his fortune, as well she might have done.

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