ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE: THE END OF THE BEATLES – An Oral History By Those Who Were There by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines

NDAs – non disclosure agreements – were invented during the 1980s to protect trade secrets, principally in the mushrooming tech industry, but it wasn’t until quite a bit later that celebrities from all walks of life saw them as a means of preventing dirty laundry from being washed in public. Nowadays, if you get a job working for a family like, say, the Beckhams or the Osbournes, it’s a pound to penny you’ll be asked to sign one for neither David nor Victoria nor Ozzy nor Sharon want anyone to know what really goes on behind closed doors. 

        They certainly weren’t an issue when Apple insider Peter Brown got together with author Steven Gaines to write The Love You Make, their best-selling 1983 biography of The Beatles. It followed close on the heels of Shout!, Philip Norman’s breakthrough book on the group, thus losing some of its shock value, at least in the UK, and while Norman’s book was marginally more literate, Brown and Gaines’ book was more eye-opening. Both books opened the floodgates to other revealing biographies of rock stars and probably motivated some to consult their lawyers about NDAs. 

This new book by Gaines and Brown is a selection of faithfully transcribed interviews with three of the Beatles and over thirty others who were close to them, from the beginning to the end, and while the lion’s share of the questions and answers deal with the group’s demise, herein lie many tales not told before, almost all of them revealing, though some are questionable and others conflicting. Recollections of events vary and memories fade but many interviewees confirm the generally accepted notion that The Beatles lost their way after the death of manager Brian Epstein. Reading between the lines, however, the book goes further, suggesting that this event was crucial to everything that followed, as responsible for their ceasing collective endeavour as the arrival of Yoko or Linda or Allen Klein, or Paul’s need to dominate, or John’s lethargy, or George’s frustration, or any other of the innumerable factors that observers have claimed laid them to rest. Who knows how history might have been reversed had Epstein survived the accidental overdose that killed in him in August 1967?

Gaines and Brown were certainly industrious in their research for The Love You Make, and they somehow managed to snag Paul, George and Ringo, all of whom knew the interviews were to form part of a book. It seems from the transcripts that they conducted many of the interviews together, with Gaines asking most of the questions and Brown nudging things along with a comment here and there that could only have come from an insider. 

        There are heroes and villains among the interviewees, and more fun is to be had with the latter. Alexis ‘Magic Alex’ Mardas, a conman who snared John, comes across as not just dislikeable but dishonest to boot, Klein was “a bully and all-round shifty character… he even looked like a crook, sloppy and fat,” according to Brown – and a lengthy interview with him does little to dispel this portrait – while Vic Lewis, who promoted Beatles tours abroad, was more concerned about getting his share of the box-office than the hostility The Beatles faced on their calamitous visit to Manila. “Did you get the money?” Lewis repeatedly asked a clearly traumatised Epstein as their plane took off. “Vic Lewis leaned over me and tried to slap Brian in the face,” writes Brown. “I grabbed him away and forced him down the aisle.” 

There are some unlikely heroes, Epstein’s long serving and ill-served assistant Alistair Taylor, Apple records boss Ron Kass and poor, innocent Cynthia Powell, among them. As for the other wives, Maureen Starkey, Mrs Ringo, seems bemused by everything that happened while Pattie, sweet as she is, comes over as rather naïve. Linda is absent, as is Jane Asher, Paul’s sweetheart during the frantic years, nowadays the only Beatle insider never to have uttered a word about what it was like or how she felt to be at the centre of the tornado. 

        Those willing to comment suggest Epstein’s troubled sexuality was at the heart of his neurosis, not to mention his lingering guilt at allowing millions of dollars in merchandising income to slip through his fingers. There are several illuminating accounts of the trouble in Manila, George’s being the best, but his interview dwells a bit too much on his inner light. Paul is lucid, if a trifle calculating, while Ringo comes over as the matter-of-fact, cuddly Beatle that we always knew him to be. “[We were] still the best band there ever was,” he concludes. 

Nevertheless, we can be thankful that NDAs weren’t commonplace at the time Gaines and Brown embarked on The Love You Make. If they had it wouldn’t have been written, and neither would this illuminating follow-up. The 340-page book is an easy read, illustrated with eight pages of pictures from Brown’s archives but is not without the odd error.