BOOKS
THERE is no shortage of books about The Beatles. When Stuart Maconie tells Hunter Davies (the group’s official biographer) that he is writing another, Davies replies with faint encouragement: “Oh you absolutely should. There hasn’t been one for a good half hour.” With A Little Help From Their Friends is an act of curation, similar in tone to Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four. It assumes knowledge and is light on musicology. The key is the book’s subtitle: “The Beatles changed the world. But who changed theirs?”
Can you tell the story of The Beatles without reference to The Beatles? Not really, and that’s not Maconie’s game. By focusing on the group’s external contacts, he – as did Brown – rescues The Beatles from over-familiarity, placing them in a context where success wasn’t inevitable. Maconie also had the good fortune, at the age of four, to see The Beatles at the ABC in Wigan, and having scoured photographs believes he has located himself: “Little and confused me on my mum’s knee, her almost hypnotic gaze, the madness and delight from the girls around me, The Beatles on stage before me.” There is a coda to this happy moment, where Maconie recalls “the difficult, unhappy person” his mother became, and suggests that The Beatles “among a million other things, have given me my mum back.”