BOOK OF THE DAY: BRIAN BOYDreviews You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatlesby Peter Doggett, The Bodley Head, 400pp, £18.99
WHEN THE Beatles came to a fractious end at the end of 1969, it was also in many ways the end of the 1960s. The four men from Liverpool who shook the musical world were the embodiment of that era’s cheeky iconoclasm and had succeeded in reshaping the cultural landscape. Just as the decade that had promised so much quickly deteriorated into assassinations of the most talented (JFK, Martin Luther King) and murky far-off wars (Vietnam), so did the Beatles move from being fresh-faced popsters to hassled and venomous businessmen who had no real idea of their worth or legacy or how to deal with either.
Peter Doggett’s valiant attempt to get behind the myth of Beatlemania and their iconic status to focus instead on the acrimony that led to their break-up and still continues to this day begins in 1967. At this stage, the band have stopped touring and are nursing plans for their own solo careers. Grudges are harboured, perceived slights left to fester and their once unbreakable personal and musical bond is replaced by hostility and paranoia.
Having once been royally ripped off by a merchandising deal in the early 1960s (they lost out on an estimated $100 million), they rashly decided to set up their company, Apple Corps, as a vanity project cum tax-minimising affair. Apple was a mess; staffed by utopian hippies and milked dry by freeloaders, it precipitated the band’s bitter split. Doggett is excellent in sketching portraits of the four main players: nice-guy Paul McCartney sulks and retreats when things aren’t going his way; the arty and mercurial John Lennon displays moments of sheer spite. Ringo Starr and George Harrison increasingly begrudge their marginalised status – the former hits the bottle; the latter delves deep into eastern mysticism.
A chorus of managers (either wanted or unwanted depending on which Beatle is talking), lawyers and accountants flit in and out of the action as battle-lines are drawn and insults traded between Lennon and McCartney through the pages of the music press.
Such was the mess of their split and the shambles that Apple Corps had become that the dissolution of the partnership only took effect in 1975. At this stage all four band members had healthy solo careers and there were even vague talks about a reunion but the wounds that had opened during the break-up hadn’t even begun to heal.
John Lennon’s murder in 1980 seems to change everyone’s focus. With a Beatles reunion now firmly ruled out, the three surviving members slowly softened towards each other but in the background legal differences rumbled on and when they are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame in 1988, everyone turns up except for McCartney who mentions “continuing business differences” and how he would feel “like a complete hypocrite waving and smiling with them [Starr and Harrison] at a fake reunion”.
The three of them were eventually reunited in 1994 to compile the Anthologyseries but even that soon became strained. And the tensions are still there: because of the way Apple Corps was set up each of the four directors, who are now McCartney, Starr, Olivia Harrison (George's widow) and Yoko Ono, has a veto so coming to any binding decision becomes a convoluted affair.
What Doggett has achieved is a laying bare of the darker consequences of enormous fame and wealth. Yes, there is the glory and the place in musical history but there’s also the concomitant pressure of how to deal with the myth and the legacy – while trying to keep four very different voices in harmony.
With the recent release of all their CDs in a shiny new remastered form alongside the Rock Band music video game, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was indeed a magical mystery tour for all involved but this book ably and memorably tells you otherwise.
Brian Boyd is a music journalist