SURVIVING THE BEATLES
When I set out to chronicle the decay and dubious afterlife of that most treasured of British institutions, the Beatles, I knew that toes were going to be squashed and hearts broken. Their break-up had been so shocking, so public and (at times) so squalid that it was almost impossible to avoid taking sides.
By the time that Paul McCartney took his former colleagues to court in 1971, you either opted for the none-too-silent majority of Lennon, Harrison and Starkey, who blamed McCartney for the divide; or you embraced the man who had kept the Beatles together through sheer willpower, and was now being pilloried for his doomed devotion to the cause.
My sympathies, in 1971, were wholeheartedly with the three-against-one. They were radical, righteous, impassioned; McCartney was petty, conservative, bland. (Not that I stopped buying his records.) In fact, I was simply echoing what John Lennon was proclaiming to the press. When I began writing You Never Give Me Your Money nearly 40 years later, I knew too much to trust Lennon’s bluster. I could sense the airless prison in which McCartney had been trapped; I could feel his pain and share his frustration. But likewise I could understand why the others had found it impossible to continue working alongside him.
I wasn’t prepared to hold one man to account for four men’s mistakes. Neither could I prefer the safe option of blaming outsiders, whether they were wives or businessmen. No, in this account everyone would have to take responsibility for his own actions – something that they had all signally failed to do in real-time.
As my narrative unfolded, I often wanted to intervene. I would walk away from the computer in mid-sentence, shouting at one participant or another to grow up – begging McCartney not to respond like a wounded child to Lennon’s latest assault, or Harrison not to let the quarrels of 1965 wreck a reunion thirty years later. Throughout I struggled to maintain my neutrality – with the result that nobody emerged from the story with their reputation fully intact.
Whether I succeeded in keeping my balance is for others to decide. A debate has raged in the blogosphere, with some readers convinced that I was pursuing a secret agenda to laud Lennon and demean McCartney, and others believing exactly the opposite. A few doubted whether I was really a Beatles fan, not realising that only a fan could have cared enough to relate this dramatic and often painful tale from beginning to end.
After everything, I still love the Beatles, as musicians and as men – for their imperfections as well as their genius. They were human, just like you and me; sometimes they messed up their lives, like we all do; but they left the world with a legacy that seems likely to stand as the 20th century’s most enduring cultural monument. They also illustrated a timely maxim for this celebrity-drenched age. “Fame”, as the poet Allen Ginsberg once told me, “is a curse, with no redeeming features.”
Peter Doggett, author of You Never Give Me Your Money