The Beatles - Tune In

The Beatles – All These Years

Volume 1: Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

When I heard that Mark Lewisohn was writing a book about The Beatles, I was immediately keen to know the details. Since the band split there have been dozens of attempts to describe just what happened between 1962 and 1970, and all have been disappointing. Different authors, journalists and historians have encountered unwillingness on the part of the participants, lack of access to information, or have just been sloppy with the facts. There is a whole industry in Beatles Myths that people are happy to recycle, few of which are based in fact.

What Lewisohn has done is to return to as many original documents and eyewitnesses as possible, and he has not been scared to be as comprehensive as he can be. The resulting book is volume one of a proposed three-volume opus, and tells the story only as far as 31^st December 1962. It is eight hundred and forty pages long, not including footnotes and references.

It is a startling work of scholarship.

It is also timely, as fifty years and more have now passed since the events he is describing. For all of my childhood I thought of The Beatles as a band that had only recently split, and it is quite a shock to actually do the mental arithmetic and to realise that it is now a long time ago. Part of this deception is reinforced by the Just For Men still used by some ex-Beatles. The surviving Beatles and the widows of the others are now old people, and their story needs to be told. It seems unlikely that McCartney or Starr will now spend the time doing it themselves. McCartney, I think, is happy to have some episodes of his long career remain ambiguous. Ringo probably isn’t bothered. The time is right for Mark Lewisohn to step up and fill in the gaps. If he lives long enough to complete his magnum opus, I think that in future years it will become known as definitive.

The story of The Beatles does not begin in 1962 when Ringo joined the band. It does not even begin with the meeting of John and Paul at Woolton Village Fair, or the birth of the oldest Beatle (Ringo) on 7^th July 1940. Lewisohn begins his framing of the events in 1829, with the birth of James Lennon somewhere in Ireland, probably in County Down.

There is a whole chapter of careful explanation as to how the families of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starr and Best arrived in Liverpool.

This may seem like overkill, but there is a reason for taking the long view. It emerges that three of The Beatles (Ringo being the exception) have deep roots in Ireland, and proposes that their links to the spirit of their home city run very deeply indeed. As a port it is a well-spun theory that much of the wit and wisdom of Liverpool is the result of the great mix of immigrants, especially from Scotland and Ireland, and this is thoroughly un-picked by Lewisohn. He considers the old theories and searches for evidence to support them. He even makes reference to the cultural heritage of all the early Beatles, and assesses if common history had a role to play in uniting them (and excluding Pete Best) so conclusively. Where he finds no evidence to support the old ideas, he is not scared to say so.

The emergence of The Beatles as a world-changing cultural phenomenon is linked to two cities. Lewisohn is precise and careful in his description of the events of the five tours of duty to Hamburg. He has done his research well and understands what a place Hamburg must have been in 1961. He does not shrink from the seedier aspects of the time that the young men spent there. A theory central to the Hamburg story is that the massive amount of stage time accumulated was a major part in the subsequent success. Lewisohn is mathematical in his approach and the number-crunching seems to bear out his ideas.

As well as volume one being the story of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison; there is great emphasis on Pete Best, Stuart Sutcliffe and Brian Epstein. If there is a criticism of Lewisohn’s writing it is that the tragedy of Sutcliffe’s life is explored in a scientific way. There is space and a need to consider in more depth the emotional fall-out that his passing caused among his young friends. For the most part he tells the story of these three men with care and attention to all sides. By presenting all the facts, if somewhat dispassionately, he gives the reader the opportunity to decide who was really to blame in the turbulence from which John, Paul George and Ringo neatly emerged.

So volume one is all about back-story, and it is quite a story. It may be too long for most readers – even some ardent fans of The Boys may wilt under the sheer size of this work – but it is necessary, fascinating and vital. John invited Paul, who invited George, who after a long time then invited Ringo. The eight hundred and forty pages that describe these simple links in a chain are quite an event in music and biography.

My mouth is watering for volume two. Lewisohn proposes that it will include the years 1963 until 1966 or 67. I cannot wait.

Silence and stillness

I work in education. Over the last fifteen years I have had the good fortune to work with some very interesting colleagues. I have also taught a lot of amazing children.
A dominating idea in education in the UK is that if there is a classroom full of children and if there is silence, then it follows that the behaviour must be good. Good children are quiet children. I have lost count of the number of times I have noticed a colleague pleading with a group of children to be quiet, and wondered why he or she was asking. Do we need silence in a corridor, or is it just an assumption that the rule must be upheld because our Victorian predecessors insisted on it?
I have been thinking about the lives of some of the children from the school in which I work. Some are ignored or shouted at in the family home, and coming to school is a welcome relief. When they do arrive, they spend a whole day being shouted at to make them silent. Is it any wonder they find the experience of school gruelling?
There is a time for silence in a school. In a religious setting it is important in order to show reverence. In an examination setting it is important so that communication between candidates is prevented. And how those in power love to examine our children. However, I see very little benefit to children in insisting on silence for vast chunks of their school days in every other situation.
The thing that I think many people with whom I work have missed is that stillness is more important than silence. Children live hyper-charged lives and are bombarded with stimulation from a bewildering range of sources. The stimulation usually takes the form of information in one form or another. They are also stimulated by ever-more refined foods that are doing amazing things to their young brains.
I think stillness is important because for some children moments of stillness in school may be their only experience of it. I fear for over-loaded brains, and think providing an opportunity for resting those brains is overlooked.
Our Secretary of State for Education, Mr Gove, is driving rapid change and doing a fabulous job in dragging British Schools into the Nineteenth Century. Such a revolutionary idea as allowing children to rest and have some stillness is absolutely against what he stands for, as it does not help in the process of producing good, compliant little robots to feed into the government's industrial machine.
Stillness in schools allows children to piece together and make sense of various madnesses to which they are exposed.
It also works for adults.
My resolution for the New Year is going to say 'Be quiet' less, and 'Be still' more.

What do I really know?

I had a very enjoyable evening with friends on Saturday night, which consisted of an anticipated film on a gigantic television the size of a small cinema screen, red wine, and with me dozing off halfway through. Sleeping in company is a faux pas, I know, but it was more to do with the week I had than the quality of the film. My wife assured me that all of it was good, even the parts that I missed.

My host is a very knowledgeable film and television enthusiast, and the conversation during the evening roamed over wide, open acres of what for me is unexplored celluloid. I am not embarrassed to admit that vast amounts of what most people regard as essential film are unknown to me. I have never seen a Woody Allen film. When talk turns to his films I nod sagely and hope that no specifics are mentioned. I have seen about ten minutes of one Hitchcock film and thought it was dreadful. I am ignorant.

Even my television knowledge has shrunk to pathetic little nuggets of information since the dawn of the new century. I watch ‘Pointless’, and some live sport… and that’s about it. I apologise. If you want to assemble at the coffee machine and talk about last night’s televisual excitements, I am certainly not your man.

What I found impressive on Saturday evening, though, was not the sheer number of hours that my friends and my wife have clocked up in front of flickering screens, but the knowledge that they have assimilated in the process. My learnèd friend has accumulated a sound knowledge of the geography of Vietnam from Kubrick, and how American hospitals work after decades of ER, and inter-war society from Downton Abbey.

I have been thinking about the nature of this knowledge, and how it has largely been acquired through entertainment media, and if that actually matters in our current situation. I used to be quite prickly about this and have a sort of league table of knowledge in my head. Facts gleaned from the tabloids were to be ignored. Facts from the telly were to be sniffed at. Facts from films might merit the raising of an eyebrow. Real facts, however, came from books.

Real facts can be relied upon because they have come from the heads of long-dead writers like Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and DH Lawrence.

I have realised that I may need to revise my prejudices. The world changes so quickly that the life and experiences of even the most gifted and perceptive of writers from the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century are as remote to us as the Middle Ages were to them. How can any writer of one hundred and fifty years ago have written anything that is relevant today?

Enter, stage left, the howls of protest from lovers of The Great Novels. The Great Novels, they say, are full of observations about human relationships, and these never change.

That may be the case. If it is, then surely every kind of fiction that attempts to dissect the mysteries of life is just as important, and just as good at educating us. The knowledge we need to survive and become rounded individuals can come from Ally McBeal or Jane Austen. Del Boy or Dickens. Woody Allen or Turgenev. Does it matter where we learn our life lessons?

What that got me thinking about is how close to reality we currently are, how close we were in the past, and when the last time was that people were genuinely linked to the world around them by direct experience. I’d like to suggest that human beings living in Western Europe now can live and thrive without actually having to actually experience anything real, other than the supermarket. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I am saying that it is an amazing and interesting thing, and something we don’t think about too much. Do we actually need to go out and experience anything, given the vast accumulated wisdom of one hundred and twenty years of cinema (or eighty of you just count from the talkies) and sixty years of television?

When was the last time we were properly connected to the world around us, before the links became tenuous? Perhaps a hundred years ago. In the UK then, people washed their own clothes with their hands, and cooked their own food, and acquired knowledge of how things worked by talking to the people around them. If you wanted to know what the King sounded like, you had to go to the palace, wait outside, and hope he shouted at you. If you wanted a fried egg, you started at the hen coop and not the supermarket aisle.

The conclusion that I have come to is that I need to be less snooty about the things that I know. Unless I have come by an interesting thing by actual observation, and not through the wonder of Stephen Fry, I cannot be judgemental about where other people get their facts from. The world is a very, very complicated place. Much of the important stuff we really need to think about can be explored on E4 rather than Penguin Classics.

What do I really know?

'Human Traces' by Sebastian Faulks

I read 'Birdsong' by Sebastian Faulks when it was published, and it was a life-changing book. I had never read a modern novel before that was so meticulously researched that it seemed to have been contemporaneous with the era in which it was set, which was the First World War.
I was so in awe of Faulks' skill that I shied away from his later books as I did not want to break the magic. Just like we have favourite albums, a favourite novel can be a bit of an elephant in the room. I was scared to read anything new by Faulks in case it somehow tarnished the magic of 'Birdsong'.
This summer I decided that an acceptable length of time had passed (nearly twenty years, I note with alarm) that I could read some of his more ambitious recent books. I had read 'The Fatal Englishman' last summer. I first read 'A Week In December' It was OK - a bit to much of a gimmick, and the characters who were spot on for 2009 have already dated because the world moves on so quickly.
'Human Traces' has sat on my bookshelf in hardback since I bought it in 2005, tempting me to launch into it. It is 600 pages long, so I had the excuse that a short holiday was not long enough to read it completely.
I started it at the start of September and it took me a month to read. It will take a lot longer to sink into my bones.
What Sebastian Faulks has done, in a very long and rich book, is to examine the meaning of families. The plot, which centres on the life stories of two aspiring 'alien doctors' (psychiatrists), is incidental. I thought I was reading a great double-life story. The twist comes in the final quarter of the book when it becomes clear that what the author is actually doing is showing how strong the power of human love can be. The central relationship is one of mother to son, and the bitter, devastating grief of loss.
It is a book for parents to read. Had I read it in my twenties before I became a father, I doubt if it would have had such a profound effect on me.
For all the parents out there: can you remember how your world-view changed forever when you first held your child? In this book, right at the end, Faulks encapsulates that feeling.
It is devastating and brilliant.

End of year meditation

When the sun has set on another year, what good have you done?

How much stuff have you bought?

How many satisfactory experiences have you acquired?

How much time have you wasted on your self?

How many processed meals have you eaten?

For how many days did you put off That Thing?

How many people have you excluded because they complicate things for you?

What percentage of your wages have you wasted on things that don't make you happy? 

  +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

How many people have you helped?

How many people have you inspired?

How many people have you healed?

Have you persuaded anyone to be less destructive?

Have you made anyone think in a more responsible way?

How many new ideas have you had?

How much love have you shared?