Authorised biography of the beatles
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They all were.
What strikes one as interesting and relevant is not mentioned here: one easily forgets it today, but rock and roll was a phenomenon of the lower classes. Ringo spent most of his early years in the hospital; George looked like and for all intents and purposes was, a juvenile delinquent. It is rude, and its about time pop critics got hip to that.
The Beatles: The Authorised Biography
HUNTER DAVIES is the author of the only ever authorised biography of The Beatles, still in print in almost every country in the world.
DAVID BEDFORD is the author of two books about the beginnings and history of The Beatles in Liverpool. He assisted with the archive film and video research on The Beatles Anthology series. He has written or contributed to ten books about popular music, including four on The Beatles, and been a columnist for Record Collector magazine for 20 years.
Indeed, there is a prior question: does the Beatle ‘phenomenon’ entitles them to private lives at all?
This biography implies a dual answer: on the one hand, the answer is no, because here is a biography, promising revealing fact after fact and insight after penetrating insight and on the other, this book does not deliver fact after fact, but rather deliberately glosses over some of the most fascinating aspects of the Beatles.
They talk about themselves with striking openness, each of them a curious mixture of the naive and the knowing, the exceptional and the ordinary. In 2012 he edited The Lennon Letters, published in 20 different foreign countries, and in 2014 The Beatles Lyrics. Things have changed, But not that much.
Rock and roll is still very much a dirty, raunchy, too physical and unrefined music.
Quite right too. Rock and Roll is not polite. The full story of the Beatles is here even if you have to read between the lines occasionally.
Davies was certainly granted a now unimaginable degree of access to the then most famous group in the world. He interviewed all the surviving parents, and of course the inimitable Aunt Mimi, in the posh houses bought for them by their sons.
(As John says about accepting the MBE’s, “Then it all just seemed part of the game we’d agreed to play.”)
Yet with it, the book carries that incredible power of the Beatles.
KEITH BADMAN is an author, journalist and film and video archives researcher.
SPENCER LEIGH is the author of 25 books, most of them connected with The Beatles or popular music.
As a journalist, he has a column in the Sunday Times about money and in the New Statesman about football. As a journalist, he has a column in the Sunday Times about money and in the New Statesman about football. Plus forty other non-Beatly books, including novels, biographies, travel and children’s books.
And the Beatles were totally declasse. Where do we get off?
This biography is one place.
In general, the first half of the book is inordinately dull. He assisted with the archive film and video research on The Beatles Anthology series. If you were wandering around in Tibet with long hair, and some hermit crawled out of his cave for the first time in twenty years, he’d look up at your hair and say one word: “Beatle?”
With that in mind, considering the “authorized biography” of the Beatles, in fact, considering the whole question of the Beatles, is a little difficult.