Author interview: When something about brand Beatles strikes a chord

There are very few biographies of The Beatles, Patrick Humphries' 'With the Beatles' covers their career in three parts, 1940-1963, 1964-1970, and 1970 to the present day

Patrick Humphries with his Sgt Peppers LP. He interviewed three of The Beatles in person, but unfortunately not John Lennon.

• With the Beatles 
• Patrick Humphries 
• Great Northern Books, €23.85 

There are currently over 2,000 books about The Beatles in print. So why read this hefty 430pp hardback? Mainly because it is by one of the best London-based rock music writers, who has been a fan since the very start of The Beatles story.

Patrick Humphries, now 72, has been described as “one of the all-time great biographers of rock music”, having published full-length books on the lives of musicians as various as Nick Drake, the Rolling Stones, Lonnie Donegan, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, and Elton John.

He has lived in southeast London all his life and is just old enough to have bought The Beatles’ LPs as they came out. He still has his original Beatles Fan Club membership card.

Patrick is also a film buff, with a special interest in classic films, which widens his frame of reference. He is also a Dylanologist — an expert on Bob Dylan. 

His writing is characterised by a dry sense of humour and his awareness of the wider social changes that accompanied the parallel rise of the teenager and rock and roll.

I caught up with Patrick in Liverpool where With the Beatles was launched at International Beatleweek 2024. 

He looked back with typical bemusement at his 40-year-plus career: “It’s hard to believe I was once ‘a hip young gunslinger’, the phrase used by the New Musical Express in 1976 to recruit new writers like Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, and, er, me.”

For several years Patrick had been toying with the idea of a book about The Beatles, but couldn’t find a hook: 

Then a friend reminded me that I am the last of the generation of journalists to have interviewed The Beatles in person — Paul McCartney about a dozen times, George, and Ringo.

The only one he missed was John Lennon. “Ray Coleman, the editor of  Melody Maker, and later Lennon’s biographer, had promised to introduce us. 

John planned to come to London in 1981, ‘to see if anyone remembers me’, as he said, but alas, it was not to be.” 

He was shot dead in New York in December, 1980.

Patrick had kept the transcripts of those Beatle interviews, and also owns 120 books about The Beatles and two bulging filing cabinets of cuttings. 

Then along came lockdown, giving him the time needed to put it all together, bringing an end to four years of intermittent work.

I asked Patrick how it differs from the thousands of other Beatle books. 

“If you look closely at what’s out there, there are very few biographies.

“There are books about their clothes, their instruments, their philosophies, books about individual songs or LPs or films, books by their chauffeur, their roadie, their hairdresser, and photographer, but none about that extraordinary career arc: From ‘Love Me Do’ to ‘Strawberry Fields’ in four years.”

Patrick singles out Paul (Ross O’Carroll Kelly) Howard’s substantial 2016 biography of Tara Browne, I Read the News Today, Oh Boy, as an example of how far a Beatle obsession can go. 

Browne, younger brother of Garech Browne, of the Guinness family, is famous to Beatle fans as the man who “blew his mind out in a car” on the Sgt Pepper LP’s monumental song, ‘A Day in the Life’.

The Beatles in 1963: George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and John Lennon. File picture: Apple Corps Ltd

Most other books end in 1970, when the group split up, but the story didn’t end then, Patrick explains: “I have a special interest in the Beatle ‘brand’, and how it has kept going all these years.”

The book is divided into three parts, 1940-1963, 1964-1970, and 1970 to the present day. 

The year 1940 marks the birth of Ringo, the oldest Beatle, and 1963 was the year of the Beatles’ breakthrough in Britain and Europe. 

The madness that was Beatlemania in the US happened in 1964, and in 1970 the open-air rooftop gig in Savile Row above their company’s offices marked the end of the group’s existence as The Beatles.

Thanks largely to Paul McCartney, the only one who took an active interest in their business affairs, the ‘Beatle brand’, their backlist, and their legacy of films and recording sessions, were kept under tight control. This phenomenon is covered in forensic detail in Part Three.

No matter how often you read an account of the early days of The Beatles, it exerts its own spell. 

It is quite simply a great story: Four ordinary boys, born during or just after the Second World War, growing up in war-ravaged Liverpool, bunking off school and living mainly on egg and chips, are united by the craze for skiffle and/or guitar playing, graduating from local gigs to a residency in Hamburg, making little money, but happy to avoid having a “real job”. 

Playing in Hamburg’s red light district

They learnt their trade during the long hours playing in Hamburg’s red light district and were taken up and promoted by a slightly older man, Brian Epstein, eventually landing a London recording contract and heading, in no time at all it seems, for the big time.

It’s always cheering to read about “the innocence, fun, and optimism of those early years”, as Patrick calls it. 

Their songs’ portrait of suburban Liverpool in the 1950s chimes with the memories of those who grew up in remarkably similar suburbs elsewhere — the mundane made universal, ‘under a blue suburban sky’.

Their conquest of America, with its unprecedented crowds of screaming teenagers, is the stuff of dreams. 

When the ‘four mopheads’, as they were called, bantered with the assembled journalists on arrival in New York, everyone was totally charmed by their natural good humour and high spirits — though Elvis was puzzled by their bad teeth and asked a friend after meeting them, 'why, with all that money, they didn’t get their teeth fixed?'.

For the next three years the screaming at their concerts, from boys as well as girls, was so loud, they couldn’t hear themselves play. 

At the height of their fame, John, when asked by a journalist to “give us a quick word”, replied “Velocity”.

Patrick writes with the enthusiasm of a fan, but is acutely aware of having to maintain a professional front when working. 

He is good on the artificiality of the “celebrity interview’, when journalists queue up for their allotted few minutes with the star, hoping somehow to stand out from the crowd and make a real connection, while all the star wants is to promote their latest venture. 

He has met many celebrities, but none came near to overwhelming his professionalism like The Beatles: “… it is when you are in the presence of a Beatle that the hair on the back of you neck does a tango and the heart starts pumping just that little bit faster”.

I found Patrick’s detailed account of the early days, when it took 13 hours in an unheated coach to drive from Liverpool to London, and 30 hours to drive to Hamburg in an unheated van, the best part of the book. 

This is the era in which the word “grotty” was coined to cover many things, from the bedbugs in their Hamburg digs to the smell of disinfectant and drains in the Cavern night club.

Patrick has always felt that The Beatles’ origins in drab post-war England were overlooked: “It’s a cliché, but it’s true — the 20th century was black and white until the mid-60s when suddenly everything turned into technicolour.”