 Welcome to this evening's online event from the British Library, The Beatles in Time. I'm John Forza and I have the privilege of looking after the events program here at the library. So we're finally able to present tonight's conversation between Craig Brown and Richard Williams several months on from the original date last April. That event was due to happen on the 9th of April which would have been 50 years on from the moment normally considered to be the point when the Beatles at the height of their fame and their powers broke up. The British Library has a small but significant relationship with The Beatles. Our treasures gallery which is normally open every day and free to go into post a selection of original hand written notes by the band including the lyrics from Help and For Yesterday. These were given to the library and therefore the nation and you all by Beatles biographer Hunter Davis and now they are as popular in that gallery as the Magna Carta itself. Please do come and have a look once the building is open again. So Craig Brown speaking tonight he's elevated biographical writing to new heights and his latest book one two three four The Beatles in Time has been widely acclaimed and it's newly nominated for the prestigious Bailey Gifford Prize and that's not the least I think is it's found so much fascinating new information angles and ways to talk about the band who are possibly the most exhaustively covered already in world history. Copies of this book are available to purchase from the British Library online shop so simply click the books tab at the top of your screen at any time. Also at the top of the screen you'll select the option to support the work of the British Library or give your feedback on the event or find out more about today's speakers. We'd very much welcome your questions during the event and these can be submitted at any time using the form lower down the screen or put as many as possible across to our speakers during the event. Craig Brown will be talking tonight to Richard Williams who is a journalist and author who properly deserves the tag legendary both as a music writer and a sports writer. He was their writing for Melody Maker at the point The Beatles broke up and he went on to interview John Lennon or McCartney and George Martin so he knows the territory. His career spans the independent, the guardian, the timeout, Melody, the maker, Moja and so many more so you're in great hands so and now I will hand over to Richard and do enjoy the rest of your evening. Thank you. Thank you. Hello everybody and hello to Craig Brown who's been Britain's foremost newspaper humorist for the past 25 years and unquenchably prolific and infallibly brilliant parodist, satirist, book reviewer and restaurant critic. He is or was a contributor to The Mail on Sunday, The Times, The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday and Private Eye where he continues to ventriloquize and lampoon helpless but deserving celebrities on a fortnightly basis. Craig you were born in May 1957 just six weeks before the 16-year-old John Lennon and the 15-year-old Paul McCartney met at St Peter's Parish Church fate at Walton in Liverpool. You were five when Love Me Do came out. By the time you started big school they'd just broken up. How did the Beatles come into your life and what did they mean to you? I think my first memory of being close to the Beatles is when I must have been about 1964 I suppose Christmas or maybe Christmas 63 but my parents for Christmas gave my brothers and me Beatles wigs which were very I don't know if you ever wore one but they were very strong plastic. They were really unpleasant to wear, bit into your ears and but so yeah so I mean I must have known about the Beatles before that because I do remember grown-ups getting very cross about yeah yeah yeah about you know she loves you yeah yeah yeah which I then discovered that Paul McCartney's own father had got cross when Paul and John had written she loves you yeah yeah yeah he said can't you say yes yes yes but that seemed to be that seemed to shock grown-ups more than the length of their hair which has always gone on about yeah so then but I think I only really sort of engaged with them I always see sort of new the want to hold your hand and she loves you yeah yeah yeah but actually it was rather later and with Sergeant Pepper coming out and I remember my oldest brother saying this is the greatest record ever made and I thought that was a completely objective thing like the fastest runner in the world or something like that and I remember being really fascinated by that record and of course it was the only it was the first record which had all the lyrics on and so that meant you could read while it was playing and and then it had all the bits and pieces inside and that sort of gatefold with the pictures of them in their costumes and also all the people on the cover so there was sort of lots on offer for what would have been I suppose a 10 year old at that time and so then I really was keen on them and and got all their albums as they came out and all the singles and then only sort of later went back to kind of Revolver and the other albums and the and the early songs and so in some way yeah so I sort of came in mid-period I suppose and then went my way back and did they retain a kind of preeminence in your scale of things yes I think they do for most people especially people who kind of lived through them they they have this and that's really the reason I wanted to do them they have a kind of mesmeric quality which is I mean it which is slightly to do with ubiquity with pop you hear if you've heard hey Jude you know every year say 15 20 times a year just by chance for 50 years and you've heard it in all varieties of location then it's bound to sort of mean something to you no but you could say that there are quite a few pop songs but I think that the Beatles stood for something way beyond themselves and I think that's one of the reasons that people feel very possessive of their version of the Beatles and people still very feel very possessive of which Beatles is their favorite you know you know now people in the sixties and seventies still get quite het up about you know or whether the Beatles are better than the Rolling Stones that kind of thing you that they they become completely part of you are you prepared to commit yourself to a favorite people um yeah mine is Paul who is an unfashionable favorite Beatles I mean for a long time particularly after his death John seemed to be the sort of one you had to support because he seemed to be you know a rebel in the sort of rock and roll way and he was obviously more spiky and more difficult and people I think resented Paul because he was this sort of showman and seemed to be more keen with his sort of thumbs up thing and I'm getting on well with people and but I first I think he had an amazing melodic ability and lyrical ability actually where if you think of things like Chiefs leaving home and then the Rigby uh but also I sort of feel and you might be in a better position to judge having known them at the time but I feel that the Beatles would have broken up sooner but for Paul's drive and and ambition and I think it was the drive and ambition that the uh side of the fans resent and maybe that uh John resented but I think Paul was the disciplinarian early early on I think he he made sure John's tie was on straight before they went on stage that kind of thing but I I was I was a Lenin you know if you had to take sides I was the Lenin person always but it's been it's become much easier to admire McCartney I think as the years have gone by for the way he's conducted his life you know he stays below the radar when he wants to he's continued to make music he works hard at it and that's pretty admirable and if you um if you think how many people have gone off the rails with far less fame far less fortune far less adulation um and he didn't go off the rails and I and he still hasn't gone off the rails and he can he keeps plugging on uh making music and I think that's admirable yeah I want to ask you a bit about the structure of your book the subtitle of your last book the wonderful mom darling which was 99 glimpses of princess Margaret gives a clue to the way the new one is organized it's 150 vignettes or variations on the life of the beat of the Beatles and it allows you to go off in many different directions and creates a kind of mosaic of their existence from the big picture down to the tiniest and seemingly most trivial detail what's the authorial advantage of that way of working that way of constructing the book from your point of view well I think with um princess margo it was more obvious in that um one life fairly static life with a slightly downhill uh direction to her but you know she she stayed in one place she married once she never owned a house never moved house you know um uh and so it was a kind of voyage around her you didn't have to obey chronological rules and I I I found with most biographies which I've read a lot because I review a lot of biographies um I get kind of bored by the starting with the great great grandparents and moving on and then the birth and then you know childhood and there's something also unrealistic about it because if you think of your own life uh you know if you went on a walk this afternoon thinking about your own life you'd be thinking of things in the future you'd be thinking of things in the past you'd be thinking about the present and and it is a kind of it's a bit of a mess when you think about your own life it's certainly not chronological it's not or even logical and so I wanted to um suggest that something sort of closer to life as it's lived and with the Beatles it was slightly different in that because that they had this extraordinary story of kind of rags to riches story of coming from nowhere and then suddenly within a matter of years becoming the four most famous people in the world and so on you I had to convey that and so you have to have some kind of chronological background um but I also wanted to see it from lots of different angles from my angle you know so this bit of alter biography or from the fans angles or from the angles of these kind of people we'd walk on parts like Jimmy Nicholl who became a Beatle and Ringo was ill and was a Beatle for about 10 days and had the effect that that proximity to the Beatles had on the rest of those people's lives um so so it's this kind of jinx or as you say mosaic um sometimes you create counterfactuals um like what would have happened if paul had failed his if he'd passed his latin o level and had gone up a year and perhaps would never have met george or john um what would have happened if his parents haven't fallen into a deep conversation parents to be during an air raid in Liverpool or what would have happened if gerry and the pacemakers rather than the beatles had got lucky and become world dominators yes it's enormous fun but isn't there a suggestion in those that actually it was all a bit of a fluke um well in some ways I think maybe I shouldn't have done the gerry and the pacemaker's one it was too sort of jokey at the end the others uh it was you know it was a fluke it was a fluke that paul didn't get his right o levels and so stayed down a year and met george who was that bit younger than paul um george wouldn't have become a Beatle I think you can pretty safely say if that if paul had done better in his exam and so and of course paul yeah paul's parents the Liverpool being uh subject to an air raid that night meant that the two of them had so paul uh wouldn't have been born or he wouldn't have had to say mother and father um I mean these these are true and I think there is something I mean to say that uh the formation of the uh Beatles was random and a fluke doesn't take anything away from them it's just that that's the nature of of life and it's it's extraordinary that these I mean what are the chants of these four people in a you know northwestern city linking up and suddenly becoming the most famous people in the world and having this amazing effect on the the rest of the world uh you know it it's sort of billions billions times billion to one uh but somehow it happened um yeah do you have an explanation for them explanation for how the Beatles became the Beatles I think you could have I mean the the the key relationship in the Beatles is obviously uh john and paul uh and and the coming together of their entirely different characters and abilities sparked something extraordinary um and so I suppose you'd have to send the Beatles any explanation for the Beatles uh around those those two geniuses um uh and but then there are there are other bits and pieces like brian eppstein going down to the cavern that day you know brian eppstein wasn't a pop fan he he did run a record store but he his taste was classical and he just went into the cavern and was kind he said he was appalled by uh what he heard and saw the noise and then so larking around on stage uh but he also he noticed something and the fact that he noticed them and then kind of tidied them up which obviously john uh resented certainly resented in retrospect um but he made them it made it plausible for them to be loved by the world and loved by young girls and and kind of loved by their parents in a way as well uh and um and so I think brian eppstein is very necessary george martin who I didn't cover enough I think in the in the book is extremely necessary um but I think I think it'd be impossible to to give an overall explanation as to why they uh why what made them the the Beatles what made them so magical their career lasted such a short time in these seven years and there's a very powerful juxtaposition of photographs in your book one of them in 1964 when everything was still fresh and exhilarating and one from 1969 when they look as you write as though they've been crushed by the weight of the world's expectations did you ever get depressed while you were looking through the all the material about the breakup and watching them change in in that way um yes and I remember I'm a friend of uh ellena brawn uh who acted with them in help and was very fond of them and uh when she read the book she said oh it just made me so depressed which I hadn't thought I see it as quite a kind of feel good book in a way but she said that you know the filming of help was very happy at fair and everyone got on with the Beatles and it was a very happy kind of crew the actors and the film crew uh loved them but she hadn't realized at that point that the the weight as I was saying that you know the weight of expectation on them the weight of uh I mean she'd obviously knew the fans screaming and that kind of thing but just how much was expected of them uh by how many people uh and the pressure that I I suppose it it sort of it came about I suppose after brian eppstein died though that might have been coincidence but around that time uh I think things just did get too much then and of course they were um they were so young I mean that's what I you know because I always think of them as old and obviously they are older than me uh but you know the Beatles when they broke up uh I think all of them were under the age of 30 so you know they were kids and um and you know going back to what we were saying about Paul that it's amazing that they they survived at all really given the intensity of the experiences that they've been through in those seven years it must have been sort of the way they pioneered you know I mean acid and heroin and you know they had all the normal kind of drugs uh drug experiences but they you know they just came you know and everyone wanted to be their friend and everyone was using them I mean I have quite a lot of the sort of charlatans around them everyone wanted a bit of them um but I think they were you know they were strong characters and they did survive did you get a sense that so many things went wrong um apple you know the sort of apple experiment um with a shop and all kinds of things did you get the feeling that this all happened despite their best intentions that that their intentions were good at that at that time well I mean you'd probably uh know more about it than me because you were sort of there at that time but it seemed to me that um apple was founded with good intentions they wanted to give everyone a go I mean a kind of generous intentions that they wanted to make it easier for other people than it had been for them because you know they had though it was pretty swift their fame they'd they'd worked hard in Hamburg and in Liverpool and on tour and you know obscure places um and so I think it was generous but of course the minute they put an ad in the paper saying you know send in your tapes uh you know I think there was a whole rumored apple which just stuffed full of tapes which no one had the time to listen to and uh and then the clothes shop you know people felt they could just come and help themselves to clothes and it was all you know they weren't they weren't Brian Epstein they weren't businessmen and they didn't really want to be I mean Paul was a bit bothered by business but I think the other the other three weren't well even Brian wasn't that much of a businessman was he in the end which was probably a contributory factor yeah no and um and actually I think in right I think he seems to have been completely honest but um certainly with the uh the franchising in uh America particularly with probably with the Beatles wigs and things and he basically sold out for nothing people were making so much money but it had never happened before um a pop group being successful on that sale or even a pop star even with Elvis there hadn't been that much merchandising um and of course he was Brian who I always thought as a child was you know he was the sort of straight one with the suit and tie and looked sort of dull and business like but actually he was completely out of it a lot of the time um and suicidal and on took more drugs than any of them um did you did you meet Brian Epstein no never no um as I said the book comes at the story from all sorts of angles and there's one chapter where you talk about your father and your father-in-law um your father had a bit of a standoff with John and Yoko in a suffered pub in 1969 and you quote your father-in-law the telegraph journalist Colin Welsh writing that in the Beatles world certain boring virtues were completely missing all the military and marital virtues all fidelity restraint thrift sobriety taste and discipline all the virtues associated with work with the painful acquisition of knowledge skill and qualifications all these give place to a decadent self-expression in which nothing is expressed because nothing has been cultivated to be expressed did he have a point um well uh Colin was an amazing man I mean he was guilty of most of the those vices himself but because he was guilty of them he he really admired he was basically a bohemian but he really you know he drank too much he had affairs etc um but he he didn't he didn't approve of that he wanted to be like a proper daily telegraph reader uh you know upright and respectable I think he I think he had I can see what he means about the music I mean I think there's a bit further on from that where he takes the music more serious he he thought that uh with classical music you um you sort of earn the enjoyment you know it's it's harder and so you have to try harder and then and so you dig deeper and he so I think his argument not particularly or solely with the Beatles with pop music it was it was too easy too instant it was kind of instant gratification and I can see that I mean uh Glenn Gould who's a kind of probably a trendier figure than either my father or my father and all you know the Canadian sort of slightly jazzy um uh pianist but who did Bach and all the classical and he he had real um musical dislike of the Beatles he thought he preferred their very very simple stuff like she loves you he thought everything else was uh was just pretension thrown a thrown against this this simplicity and I think I I mean I I wanted to give voice to these as I was saying it was this kind of voyage around the Beatles and I wanted to see them from other angles including other angles that I uh might disagree with myself I also think there is something interesting about the uh my father's born in 1920 so he's 20 years older than John which now seems nothing but of course when he was 20 uh he was a Normandy and so was Colin actually uh and and so you can see why they would resent youngsters age 20 just having the kind of time of their lives and also I'm not just having the time of their lives but seeming to um to resent the older generation so you know I I think those are interesting points of view I don't particularly share them one of the splendid games you play in the book is to juxtapose the Christmas messages of the Queen and the Beatles who of course sent people may remember this they send every Christmas to members of their fan club a little seven-inch flexi disc with a message that they especially recorded um which grew weirder and weirder as the years went by from I guess 63 or 4 to 68 probably um and you you compare uh the Queen's Christmas message in 1968 with its criticism of materialism um which to the Beatles message and you say in the Queen's message sounds very much like a draft for John Lennon's Imagine and one of the most entertaining elements of the book whether one agrees with it or or not is the score new poor on Yoko Ono and all her works uh the other week on the 80th anniversary of uh Lennon's birth uh the Times columnist Melanie Phillips suggested that Imagine which was probably inspired by Yoko's thinking was pretty much responsible for the downfall of western civilization uh do you have any time for that view no no I don't I mean Melanie Phillips almost I I hate having knee jerk responses so I I'm not I'd guess that I disagreed with her on everything and if she started agreeing with me I'd have to uh move uh stealthily away from that viewpoint um uh though I'm glad you um you liked the uh the comparison of the Queen's messages because actually in some ways the Queen was doing you know her messages are for love and peace and understanding um uh well on the Yoko issue I mean I imagine isn't my favorite song but I've got nothing against it I think it's um uh you know it's it that's a bit easy the message um and Yoko uh I I've always thought of her as a kind of comical figure so I hope um you know it's slightly sour my view of her but I hope it's um funny as well I actually it's the only area of the book where the um publishers lawyers told me to turn it down on um I think I used the word plagiarism at some point and that I had to change it but I mean I think certainly as an artist uh and and as a musician uh you can certainly um see her antecedents as it as it were do you see any redeeming feature in her at all um well I quite like the kind of just keeping on keeping on keeping on uh any other redeeming no I mean I think I think there's quite a lot of features against her I do think that she she that John had a tendency towards self-pity uh which she encouraged and he had a sense of humor which she discouraged and he began to see all the things which he had he'd rather rejoice all the nonsense that he'd rather rejoiced in in the lyrics and like an iron the walrus and thing I think she in some way convinced him that it was serious or or at least solemn she made him solemn in her way and I think imagine is is solemn and I think um pop is best when it's not solemn and I think you you seem to react very positively to John's enjoyment of Edward Lear and the goons and the sort of surrealist side of of his early humor yes I think he he did have this uh love of the sound of words and and I mean like uh Lewis Carroll you know you you lots of puns you know the um realizing that a word can uh sound the same actually in a way Yoko should have uh responded to that because I think um I don't speak Japanese myself but I think it's particularly pun laden language um because they have fewer syllables or something like um and uh yes and I loved I loved that early John which came from you know he was doing it as a schoolboy in his schoolboy magazines and things lots of jokes and puns and he just he loved the goons and and he had sort of real knowledge of them and appreciation of them and I think um I think something was lost when it when he started to go po-faced it's a very interesting section of the book the the Lennon pun chapter because it appears to his lover puns appears to say something deeper about his character yes um I yeah I think I sort of I I mean it was in ways the chapter I was most pleased with but and one of the reasons I was most pleased with is because it's hard to reduce to um to my inart inarticulate uh chat but I did think I think there is something kind of slightly schizophrenic about a pun in that it it's looking both ways and I think you uh you might be able to relate it back to um uh his his relationship with his mother which was uh she was well first she wasn't uh there most of the time she was he was with Mimi uh and also she was rather kind of flirtatious and um and sort of sexual in a way that mothers generally aren't with their sons and then suddenly she she um uh was run over and died and so I think there was there was a lot of kind of muddle there in John and uh and in some way the the nonsense was was a reflection of the muddle but it was also an escape from the muddle I think you make the point very eloquently that John and Paul were in some sense drawn together by the loss of their mothers and that they they used it as a as a as a as a weapon in a way sometimes when people said to them oh you both lost your mothers and they kind of put on this rather sorrow exaggeratedly sorrowful air and taking the piss out of people really in in in a in a rather dark way yes and I I guess they they uh they did it when they were together but not when they were alone they they they it was sort of in a way them against the world like I think there was a an emotional commitment there they they wouldn't have expressed it I don't suppose and of course they both reacted to the the deaths of their mothers and very differently uh Paul because he was uh very close to his mother and his mother was close to him it was very um warm um family uh in some though he was younger than Jim was uh he was he was less affected by it I mean less broken by it and John was obviously much more broken by the death of his mother could I just remind people watching and listening that if if they would like to ask Craig questions then please um put them in the uh the bit of the the form below at the bottom of your screen um be happy to take those there are lots of cherishable moments in the book um some quite glancing encounters between the Beatles and other people I'm thinking of when they met Malcolm Muggeridge in Hamburg very very early on um when Muggeridge was there was he doing a TV program or something like that no I think he was Muggeridge had this amazing ability which is uh you know going back to whether things are fluke or not but throughout his career he was always in the right place at the right time and he wasn't making it up you know and so you know he knew Philby the time and that kind of thing um and he he was uh yeah he was in Hamburg walking along thought he thought he was on some job or other um thought he'd go into this club there was there were the Beatles playing you know with Pete Best rather than Ringo and of course I think he was probably the first famous person they'd ever met apart from a few um singers um and so they were very excited to meet Malcolm Muggeridge but it's in Malcolm Muggeridge's diaries uh which are rather forgotten book these days but um yeah so that was the first of these odd meetings but you know by sort of by the end of another sort of 12 years they virtually met every famous person in the world or every dignitary everyone was fighting to uh to meet them what amused me was that they recognized Muggeridge because they'd seen him on the telly yeah he didn't recognize them because they weren't famous in yeah he said they were like cherubs he thought they looked like they looked like cherubs which might be overdoing it uh and their encounters with people who weren't famous at the time are amusing too I like very much the fact that when they played their last concert on the roof of the applehead quarters in Savile Row in 1969 that one of the policemen who went up to the roof to try and get them to stop uh was it was a trainee police constable called Ken Worf who later turned up in another incarnation I think yes he was then um Lady Dyes I don't know what he did for Lady Dyes was for principle private sector or something like that yeah yeah protection officer or something I think he wasn't protected well perhaps he was protection I thought he'd moved from the police but yeah you might be yes you know you're showing up in the crown yeah when you when you unearth those connections and fans who bumped into them at various times what's your favorite one of those um well I I like the ones with I think the old guard I mean including Elvis as the old guard but also Frank Sinatra Noel Coward uh them coming to terms Marlene Dietrich uh when they you know you can see how shocking the Beatles the the amazing success of the Beatles must been to them all because you know Noel Coward who came from a kind of similar background certainly to John it's kind of uh lower middle class uh background and he'd spend all his life trying to be you know posh and clipped uh in order to be successful and there suddenly you have these boys who are just being themselves and talking in proper you know live a puddle in voices and not bothering to change themselves and then as he would see it certainly in those like she loves you yeah yeah yeah that would have appalled him and and I so I like I like dealing with all uh with all those the people who were shocked including I suppose my father and uh father in law you know on a different sphere but also I like the sort of randomers like um the uh policeman Eric Clegg who uh who killed John's mother he was off-duty policeman uh going too fast and then this awful story uh he uh he was put on trial or was at the coroner's court but was sort of let off but had to leave the police and he then became a postman and I discovered that he'd one of his jobs as a postman a few years later uh was to deliver the Beatles fan mail to Paul McCartney's father's house you know he was on his round so every day he'd be lugging these great sacks of mail to the McCartney and dreading uh that the McCartneys would realize that it was uh him who'd who'd killed uh John's mother so there are these odd uh coincidences of people both obscure people and famous people on the Beatles anyone who's ever done jury service or done a bit of court reporting knows that every road accident with multiple witnesses always throws up conflicting evidence no two people ever appear to have seen exactly the same thing and when you get to the stories of Lenin's alleged assault on the Cavendish jockey Bob Wooler at Paul's 21st birthday party in 1963 or the possibility of John's sexual encounter with Brian Epstein you solve that by printing all the different accounts do you absolve yourself from all responsibility for settling on one version um well I think uh I knew you've done more books than I have but um all the books you read about about anyone they all have different accounts even I've just been reading um Cliff Richard's new autobiography and a number of places it differs from his previous autobiography which was written in 2008 so Cliff disagrees with himself you know quite definite things he says one point he says his father beat him once with a ruler and in the new version it's three times with a cane I mean Cliff is an honest person as far as I know uh but these are just you know your memory plays tricks even when you're trying to make it um obey you um and obviously as a biographer you can't just go through every sentence saying well actually there are all these alternatives um because it would be just tedious so I did it twice just to show the complications of you know with John and Bob Willough John beat up this uh disc jockey because the disc jockey suggested he'd had a uh gay romance with Brian Epstein in Spain um and I don't know 12 accounts all of people at the party um entirely different about and some biographers later and so forth but all entirely different about the uh the injuries I mean some had him almost dying and in hospital others saying it was a few bruises and they're going so you can't um you can't tell what's true I mean so as a rule and I did this with the uh Princess Margaret book and the book before which is about 101 different meetings between people I just went for what I saw as the most likely rather than the most sort of anecdotal although um because that's all you can do and I think you kind of get a feel for what's likely and what's unlikely but but no one I think you couldn't even write a sentence like the cats out on the mat with without being you know unsure uh was it the cats mat you know I don't know um whether two mats or that kind of thing the bibliography in the book shows how many other books you read about the Beatles in order to produce your own and I was amused given that you read recently about Princess Margaret by your remark that the memoirs of former Beatles office staff share this strange quality of divine omniscience with the memoirs of royal housekeepers and aides what makes them like that um well I yes that well they want to I mean actually I'm very much for uh especially the royal family I'm very much for reading the memoirs of the staff because you know they're usually really poo pooed and people say oh this disgraceful betrayal and then they try and say it's both a betrayal and made up and I I feel a lot of those um servants memoirs of the royal family I mean going back to Queen Victoria's day uh they read true and you know but obviously then you get into Paul Burrell thing of of writing your second or third book about the same subject and then you can see people straying into into fantasy I suppose I've meant with the um with the office stuff I suppose they then they become too uh prioritorial and so they they think they know what each beetle was thinking at any one time and they do also uh they seem to recall things with them over amazing over accuracy and that you'll have old streams of dialogue which they obviously didn't write down at the time it's composed later uh presumably with the help of a ghost writer but but by and large I wouldn't decry uh I mean one of the best books I think about the Beatles is um Pete Shotton's book about uh Pete Shotton was John's best friend of the school and then and throughout the rest of his library um and I think that gives you amazing feel for John as a schoolboy or Cynthia Lennon's books are good um uh yeah so there's so there's lots to be gained from those bystander accounts let's have a couple of questions David says you haven't mentioned Ringo much if at all um how does he fit into the reputation and memory of the band well actually quite a lot of I haven't mentioned him today at all I don't think but um but some people thought I mentioned him too much in the book because he's a kind of perfect kind of Dr. Watson figure in the in the story you know he's the sort of he's the uh slightly dull no nonsense one but his dullness is is uh is also honesty sometimes um and he could be very funny uh and he was slightly older than them slightly more experienced I mean they were very very pleased to get Ringo he was a bigger star than they were when they uh got him um and and of course he he had a slightly stuff and nonsense uh attitude to the to the sort of psychedelia and the marisi and uh he was less easily fooled I suppose um and people I mean you know much more about uh the actual actual music um than I do but people say that because he was a left-handed drummer that actually his his drummer his drumming was not just kind of steady but it was also um it was very interesting he made things interesting and I have seen accounts I think it was a count by by um the engineer of saying that when the Beatles in the studios particularly in our Ringo would drum slightly differently and then some things would fall into place so I think he's not to be underestimated either no I think he was a very unorthodox and original drummer and I can't imagine anyone uh any other drummer at the time who would have played the way he did on to get to ride or rain or uh several other tracks from that time which were very influential and it made them sound even more different than than they already were so I think he was he was really significant um Pauline asks what do you think of the Paul is dead theory well there's probably an overlong uh chapter about that because in a way it like a lot of things in the book it's it's sort of irrelevant to the the basic story um but I I do find all conspiracy theories uh funny and that one was particularly funny and also of course kind of convincing you know in the way that conspiracy theories are I I list about you know 30 reasons why Paul is definitely dead it's still going on and there are still people writing books saying and I heard someone on the radio the other day uh saying well definitely you know Paul the person who's pretending to be Paul is actually you know five inches taller or something you know if people say a very very definitely um but um yeah if uh if you're interested then yeah I think that the book certainly delivers on the um on the the Paul is dead conspiracy theory a question from Mike Wood Lenin is deified is that because he died young or more due to the cult of personality he developed in his lifetime what if he'd lived on and Paul had been the one who was murdered um that's interesting I mean uh I think I mean just before in the years before he died say that you know three or four years before he died his career had slightly gone into the doldrums he's obviously kind of big bigger but you know he hadn't recorded for a long time things he had recorded hadn't been that interesting with elephants memory and and so uh yes certainly uh immediately in 1980 you know it did change the way people saw him and of course incredibly poignant and it was a time you could suddenly assess uh his particular genius and I think um Paul suffered as a result people said oh you know Paul's not just a lie but he was nowhere near as good as John and all that kind of thing um if Paul had died I mean it's you know it's very interesting I suppose the same would have happened uh really that people would have he would have come people would have thought oh well Paul was the talented one John was the less talented one and uh yes and and of course you know everything everything is seen as potential after if someone's died everything is the unplayed records the unwritten books um and so uh so you know it's it's some ways it's a gift to uh reputation and an early death um in a you know grotesque way uh a question from Helen what was your most surprising discovery during your research um I I kept uh I kept being surprised by their youth which I sort of touched on before but I I kept thinking you know uh god George was only 17 when he went to Hamburg I mean you know uh uh and um you know his by time of his 21st birthday he was uh one of the foremost people famous people in the world and uh and and just how how much uh lay on their shoulders and so I think that I mean you'd thought that's hardly a discovery because obviously everyone knows their ages but you know as you get older they they get younger bizarrely because you know I just think of myself age 23 and whether I you know I wouldn't be able to do anything hardly um do up my own shoes um uh the what the other discoveries I liked this one um I discovered there's a uh John Lennon's tooth this also shows I mean by and large I keep to the I cut off in 1970 however John Lennon gave his tooth in the mid 60s he'd had a tooth out gave it to his uh housekeeper whose whose daughter was a great Beatles fan so the daughter kept the tooth and then a few years ago she uh put it up for auction and it sold for something like 20 000 pounds to a Canadian dentist who said that he was that he was going to take it around and infuse dental students in Toronto uh it bring it out at his lectures and that was but then it emerged in fact uh he was going to he had a plan to get the DNA off the tooth and put advertisements in the papers for anyone who thought that they might be the child of John Lennon and then they could together sue the Lennon-Ono estate uh and so there are these yeah so there are these little discoveries I made of these randomers so even 50 years later people are still uh you know working out ways of making money off the Beatles yeah Paula asks what's your all-time favorite Beatles song and then she well poor whether whether she just wants a Paul song or perhaps you nominated Paul's song and a song irrespective of Matt um well actually it is a Paul song and uh you know it's it's uh an obvious one rather than you know a little part of me wants to say something like baby I'm a baby you're a rich man um but it's not I just have a sort of I remember sort of discovering it it was a B-side of and it you know it has a sort of bizarre quality for me however um my actual favorite is Hey Jude I mean which I especially when I was writing the book but since since writing it you know I was playing it almost manically and I think um it has some extraordinary quality above and beyond itself uh and uh and it's probably a good you know particularly for this kind of time it's a it's a song about consolation um and uh yeah so the these uh this uh tricky tricky year I think it's particularly appropriate so and that's a Paul song though of course slightly he wrote it with uh John in mind or it was Julian then in mind yeah and in fact John thought that it was John being slightly solipsistic thought it was about him rather than um uh rather than about his son uh question from Martina do you think Friar Park will ever be open to the public as a museum of some sort um well I'm afraid that's beyond my level of expertise um the I do have uh in the book uh two trips I made to um John and Paul's houses in Liverpool which are owned and run by the National Trust uh I had Stike Contraton with the curators and so um I mean if it was open I mean I think find those two houses the houses they were brought up in Liverpool kind of moving in fact you know and I think it's very good the National Trust took them on however it's they're moving because of the the smallness and the you know just you you see what the Beatles came from but I think with Friar Park there would be nothing I think they were selling about uh three years ago they were selling the gates or something like that but there's basically nothing left so I think it would be bogus and so if the National Trust took it over they would then try and recreate you know the curtain so I don't know and so it would be it would be artificial but I'm afraid I can't tell you whether it'll be open or not a big question from Sophie could it ever happen again a band as significant as the Beatles? Well it'd be interesting to know what you think of this but uh I'd say it couldn't because the world media has just got so out of control and there are so many different places to hear though at that time there was only kind of two television stations one pop music program you know there was just one charts that now there's so such infinite variety everyone can pursue their own specialization but I think it would be very hard for a band to to grab so many people's attention. I also slightly suspect that I've got no proof of this that they were at the end of the kind of pioneering days of rock music that it was still kind of being people were still seeing new horizons in in pop and I suspect that with just the with the variety of chords and notes maybe things have come to a creative end now you can even do interests and things by combining stuff or that sort of thing but I suspect that this might just be you know a side of growing old I I sort of think that the the interesting work in pop might might have already been done what do you think Richard? I think history repeats itself but I think it never repeats itself in exactly the same form so I think something similar could happen but it won't be the same because the ingredients and the foundations can't be the same but I see no reason why something musical couldn't some musical force couldn't have a similar effect sometime in the future but I can't imagine what on earth it might be. A question from Alistair Foster is there anything left to be written about the beat loss? I like the way Craig compares and contrasts the different myths and tales from various sources writers and interviews. Well I'd say that I mean there's basically in my book there's not a huge amount that's original it hasn't been you know covered elsewhere there's not it's a bit like you know King Henry VIII or something that you know you're not going to discover a seventh wife who had done likely but I think there's always ways of looking at the Beatles I mean everyone has their own way of looking at the Beatles so there could be an infinite number of books to be written about the Beatles this is my book and I hope I've done it in a way which suggests that there was a reason to write it but it wasn't just kind of active a kind of copycat act but I think anyone you know who can write could write and had some kind of interest in them enthusiasm for them or hatred of them could write their own book about the Beatles I did I certainly I could I could have written the same length book and my book's quite long it's a 600 something pages I could have written the same length using entirely different stories you know I there's just I mean especially with John I mean in you see I mean when you interviewed him in sort of 1969 kind of area even though he was pretty kind of strung out on drugs and everything I mean almost every day you could turn into a book I mean he was amazingly energetic I mean probably nothing else he wrote these very very long letters and and plenty of letters you know he was sort of and you can't believe that he was he should have been you know just lying in a sleeping bag or you know doing his bag is him all the day but he was giving interviews he was creating stuff he was being outrageous he was being funny he was you know ringing Aunt Mimi and I think you you could make a book about you could pick any day of those sort of 13 years of the Beatles and and make a book out of them. I will say that I suppose I've read my fair share of Beatles books in my time but I found many new things in your book or many new juxtapositions or things that made me think made me laugh and at the end made me feel very moved particularly in the final sequence where you do a very daring thing of reversing the story of Brian Epstein so you begin with his funeral and end with him walking down the steps into the cabin to discover the Beatles which is I thought an extraordinary thing to do that you bring off brilliantly. Yes I just I sort of thought of it there's a very good book called Stuart a Life Backward it's about a tramp which does the same thing does his life and reverse but I think with with the first chapter is the same as the last in my book and it's Brian going down the steps of the cabin and for Brian those sort of 17 steps I think it's 17 down the cabin was both the beginning of everything and for Brian Epstein in a funny way the end of everything at the same time that he became the most successful manager in the world he had this thing that he completely adored the Beatles everything had gone right he'd managed everything you know exactly you know nothing was left to chance really with him and yet he hadn't got any kind of happiness or contentment and was just sort of paranoid most of the time and so yeah so that was one of the reasons for doing it in reverse. Well it's one of the many brilliant things about your book and we've run out of time I'm afraid so thank you Craig thank you to the British Library for setting up this event and thank you to the audience for listening and for the questions if you want to buy the book there you can click on a link to the British Library bookshop I think and so with that thank you and good night. Thanks Richard.