A selection of books about The Beatles, reviewed down the years for Mojo magazine. They are:
All You Need Is Love: The Beatles’ Dress Rehearsal
The Beatles And Some Other Guys, by Pete Frame
The Quarrymen, by Hunter Davies
The Beatles: The Dream Is Over, by Keith Badman
Beatles For Sale, by David Rowley

From Mojo August 1997
All You Need Is Love: The Beatles’ Dress Rehearsal, by David Magnus
Thirty years ago this summer The Beatles made a live TV appearance to more than 300 million people worldwide. The new song they played that evening – Sunday, 25 June 1967 – was All You Need Is Love, and in just four minutes it became the universal anthem of its era. But it was not The Beatles’ plan to make pop music history: they only wanted to have a party. Famous friends were invited and beautiful people were summoned from London’s most exquisite nitespots. Abbey Road’s enormous Studio One was the venue, and the BBC – broadcasting the event for a global satellite link-up called Our World – supplied the revellers with cheap red wine. This month, a new book commemorates that party with many rare pictures by a young photographer, David Magnus, and the recollections of some who attended. The BBC’s Steve Race, a well-disposed if ageing straight, was the night’s commentator: flitting about him were the social butterflies of newly-born psychedelia. He remembers that the guests “included some of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen in my life. The most rivetingly pretty turned out to be Pattie Boyd.” The Beatles’ assistant Tony Bramwell recalls Eric Clapton arriving with a freshly-permed Afro, in fashionable homage to that season’s sensation Jimi Hendrix. Also, “everybody had bells, so there was a lot of jangling.” Mick and Keith were in attendance, too. Commissioned by NEMS to record the whole event, David Magnus photographed the two days of rehearsals; The Beatles larked with their orchestra’s gear and prepared the hand-made signs that said All You Need Is Love in various languages. Of all his photos, he is fondest of those with Brian Epstein: with a rare lack of stiffness, the manager goes tie-less, and beams happily at his boys. But two months later Brian was dead, an apparent suicide, and these are the last pictures of him with his beloved Beatles.

From Mojo August 1997
The Beatles And Some Other Guys, by Pete Frame
Everyone knows what Pete Frame’s Family Trees are like. Scarily careful, detailed beyond belief, they make the Book of Kells look slapdash. On a rational level, we shouldn’t want to know most of the information they contain. And yet, we do. Show us the shifting permutations of Spooky Tooth, or the dramatis personae of Skip Bifferty, and we’re lost to the trifling world outside. The appetite grows by what it feeds on, and we welcome another volume. Now it’s the turn of Liverpool’s Cavern bands, with updates on their 1980 counterparts in the Bunnymen generation, and McCartney’s solo bands; plus the R&B boys in London, and Van Morrison’s Them in Belfast. Step forward, Wump & His Werbles (“Wallasey based,” lasted 11 months). Stand proud, Terry McCusker of The Roadrunners (“ex-Valkyries, later a Fruit-Eating Bear”). You are not forgotten, and thanks to this book, you never will be.

From Mojo June 2001
The Quarrymen, by Hunter Davies
The biggest surprise about this book is that it really is about The Quarrymen. John, George and Paul are merely three members of an early line-up; The Beatles are treated as an offshoot from the family tree. The real stars of the story are blokes called Colin, Len, Rod, Pete and Eric, who were also early Quarrymen, but who re-formed the band in 1997 to play at Beatle conventions around the world. In the years between they led lives as ordinary as their former bandmates’ lives were extraordinary, and quietly played down their parts in the rudimentary skiffle group they’d joined for a teenage lark. The journalist Hunter Davies, whose authorised 1968 biography is the granddaddy of Beatle books, relishes this return to one of his story’s footnotes; he follows the fortunes of the “other” Quarrymen with empathy and benevolence.
     So far as mainstream rock history goes, only the opening chapters are of much relevance, replenishing our stock of teenage Beatle yarns. After that the book is becalmed in provincial obscurity, as one Quarryman becomes a Civil Servant, another an upholsterer, and so on. (Only Lennon’s friend Pete retains a toehold in show business, helping to run Apple before launching a chain of restaurants called Fatty Arbuckle’s.) It’s the final chapters, however, that really entertain. Now in their 50s, Colin, Len and co are coaxed on to the mop top nostalgia circuit. Dusting off those old Lonnie Donegan licks they evolve, to their own surprise, into a real band at last, albeit a ramshackle hybrid of Dad’s Army and Spinal Tap. We leave them blinking in the flashlights of Fab-fans’ Instamatics, wondering what brought them from Penny Lane to this. Somewhere at the back of their heads, The Beatles probably feel the same.

From Mojo January 2002
The Beatles: The Dream Is Over, by Keith Badman
Badman’s last Beatle book, After The Break-Up, pulled off the difficult trick of bringing something new and useful to the genre. It was a simple idea, too – just a chronology of their activities since 1970, tracing their uneasy passage from Fab Four to Four Fabs. (And thence, of course, to Three…) His new book is by way of a companion to its predecessor, serving up the quotes from all those press cuttings he presumably used in his research. You could argue that he’s taking two bites at the same cherry, then, but the Beatle cherry is particularly fat and juicy, and their solo careers are much more interesting than conventional wisdom has it. It’s a pity that he largely limits his sources to Fleet Street periodicals, where the writing seldom conveys a real flavour of the music being made in these years. Weird, too, that Lennon’s death gets less coverage than Paul’s return to the Cavern in 1999. That apart, Badman’s earning a place alongside Lewisohn in the ranks of Fabbological Archivists.

From MOJO July 2002
Beatles For Sale, by David Rowley
Every song by the noted Northern four-piece, chronologically presented, dissected and assessed.
The Everest-sized obstacle facing any author of a track-by-track Beatle guide is that it’s already been done. Most of your audience will know and own MacDonald’s Revolution In The Head; many will have Steve Turner’s A Hard Day’s Write, or maybe Mark Lewisohn’s Complete Beatles Chronicle. What’s to be added or improved upon? As if in a bid for some elbow room, this new arrival begins by over-claiming its own intention to demolish conventional wisdom. Soon enough, however, it settles into a familiar ramble across the catalogue, faithfully tracking those earlier authors’ footprints. As a digest of existing research on each Beatle song, David Rowley’s book is a convenient read. As a basic Beatle guide it’s adequate, if a little eccentric in some of its critical opinions. But as an expose of what the cover states are “musical secrets”, and for all its introductory snarls about the “myths” surrounding the world’s most scrutinised group, Beatles For Sale is possibly not the Book of Revelations it believes itself to be.

See a complete index of Paul Du Noyer's Beatle articles here.