JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE, RINGO AND ME
by Tony Barrow

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOURS My Life with the Beatles
by Tony Bramwell (with Rosemary Kingsland)

IN THE OPENING LINE OF John Lennon’s In My Life — his best song and vastly superior to the unctuous Imagine — he remarks wistfully that “there are places I’ll remember all my life”. Such powers of recall for events half a lifetime ago are invaluable for those who drive the lucrative turbine of the Beatle nostalgia industry.

The Beatles legend is potent. Ever-youthful and mop-topped in the golden spotlight are the Beatles themselves. Just to one side are those such as Brian Epstein whose lives were illuminated by the same light. Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, belongs to this category.

Backstage lurk figures such as Tony Barrow, a press officer for six heady years, and Tony Bramwell, a fixer for Epstein. As we approach the 25th anniversary of Lennon’s death, all have added to the clamour.

Nobody could begrudge Cynthia Lennon a little reflected fame and fortune. At the height of Beatlemania, while her husband was one of Britain’s most successful entertainers, she and his tiny son lived in a £5-a-week bedsit in Liverpool. Later, while he made empty public pronouncements about peace and love, privately he froze them out of his life. Cynthia has been portrayed, as she puts it, as a “dim little girlfriend in a headscarf” in the film Backbeat and many (Barrow and Blackwell included) have painted her as an amiable drudge, married in haste, and repented of at leisure.

Her book is hamstrung by two perfectly understandable but ultimately irreconcilable ambitions. She wants to preserve the ludicrous myth of “St John”, the global guru and messianic maverick, but is also keen to expose the boyfriend who punched her in the face, whose temper terrified both his sons, who went on holiday with his manager when his firstborn was three weeks old and whose idea of humour was to mock the disabled.

Invariably, the “painful childhood” and “deep insecurities” are trotted out as excuses. Returning from an early tour, he screams at Cynthia and doesn’t speak for two days because she has had a hairdo he doesn’t approve of. Somehow, this displays his “vulnerable and sensitive nature”. Similarly, John laughs when he hears that his friend Stu Sutcliffe is dead. Apparently, this is a strategy for coping with profound grief rather than what it might appear, nastiness.

There are tender teenage moments. “Almost as soon as we left the pub, John kissed me, a long, passionate, irresistible kiss. He whispered that his friend Stuart had a room we could go to . . . For me it was special, and I think it was equally special for John, whose tough guy demeanour melted away as we lay wrapped in each other’s arms, (saying) ‘Christ, Miss Powell, that was something else’.” But Lennon makes an unconvincing Mills and Boon hero. Cynthia alludes to romantic, and sadly lost, letters from the Hamburg tours. She claims that All My Loving may have been written in this frame of mind.

Possibly. But it was written by Paul McCartney.

This may sound like nit-picking but not if your book’s vaunted selling point is its “I was there” verité. The book is at its best when Cynthia recalls piquant domestic trivia such as that, in their early married life, the favourite home-cooked meal of Britain’s biggest rock star was a Vesta beef curry with sliced banana.

After Yoko One enters, at least one of the kid gloves comes off. Hanging out with the Maharishi in India, Lennon would secretly scuttle down to the Rishikesh post office each morning to pick up Yoko’s daily letter while maintaining to Cynthia that Ono meant nothing to him. This must be painful and it is brave and revealing of her to share it. Indeed, the most compelling part of John is Julian Lennon’s foreword , which seethes with compressed rage and defiant defence of his mother.

Tony Barrow says that his John, Paul, George, Ringo and Me is “the real story of the Beatles”. As he worked with them only from 1962-66, missing their crucial formative years and melancholic demise, this is some claim. Barrow was PR for Epstein’s NEMS empire rather than for the Beatles themselves. Thus he was stuck behind a desk fielding calls about Cilla Black while the Beatles made their landmark early trips to America. What he does know he chronicles in painstaking detail and a cheery, uncomplicated style; from the disastrous Manila visit of 1966 to the curious charabanc trip that became Magical Mystery Tour.

However, he never goes to a recording session, never visits a Beatle at home and always maintains a strict division between business and pleasure by not “turning on” with the boys. Doubtless this is very proper and professional but it makes for quite a dull “real story”.

Tony Bramwell is opinionated, bluff and way out of his depth on matters of cultural analysis. “In many ways, the Beatles were a metaphor for the 1960s,” he writes in a sentence that either means nothing or means something very bizarre. We are promised “fresh insights” and indeed, who knew that Paul McCartney had asked Dr Beeching, the railway axeman, to sort out Apple’s finances.

Bramwell has none of Cynthia Lennon’s diffidence about John or Yoko, apparently “a core of negativity who sucked the air out of every room she entered”.

The best Beatles books have been written, significantly, not by people married to or employed by them. Hunter Davies’s 1960s biography is still fresh. Many Years From Now by Barry Miles brings new life to the era via McCartney’s vivid recollections. Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head is magisterial and inspirational. By contrast, these supposedly intimate accounts feel bland and self-serving, less about the Beatles than about people now inescapably defined by them.

John
Hodder, £20; 352pp
£18 (free p&p)

John, Paul, George, Ringo and Me
Andre Deutsch, £16.99; 280pp
£15.29 (free p&p)

Magical Mystery Tours. My Life with the Beatles
Robson £14.99 448pp
£13.49 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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