Patrick Humhries told David Hennessy about his Beatles biography, meeting Paul McCartney and the day John Lennon was shot.
Acclaimed author Patrick Humphries has just released his biography, With The Beatles.
The Beatles are the best-selling music act of all time with over 1 billion record sales. Their 20 US number one singles is the record for the most Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers and the Fab Four are second to Elvis Presley for most UK number one singles.
Patrick has enjoyed a long career as a music journalist and met three of the four Beatles.
Patrick’s books include Rolling Stones 69, Nick Drake – The Biography, Meet on the Ledge – A History of Fairport Convention, A Little Bit Funny – The Elton John Story and Lonnie Donegan and the Birth of British Rock & Roll.
He has written for Record Collector, Mojo, The Times, The Guardian, Melody Maker, New Musical Express and Daily Mail.
Patrick has also interviewed other big names such Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Tom Jones and Art Garfunkel.
With the Beatles is based on Patrick’s interviews with Paul, George and Ringo, as well as looking at how the Beatle brand has developed since the group split in 1970.
It is also the first full-length biography in nearly 20 years and covers everything from Liverpool in 1940 to their 2023 No.1 single.
It contains previously unknown details of The Beatles’ third film are revealed.
Paul also talks about the controversial Lennon/McCartney songwriting credit.
George reflects on Beatlemania and Ringo on his skiffle roots.
The book also discusses plans for Lonnie Donegan to act as go-between to coax John Lennon out of his New York exile.
There are first-hand accounts of Liverpool and Hamburg painting a picture of the Beatles’ roots, plus an exhaustive analysis of how their American breakthrough was achieved.
There are fly-on-the-wall accounts of Paul rehearsing for a world tour and The Beatles’ Love musical in Las Vegas.
There are interviews with Tom Jones discussing plans for him and Elvis Presley to recruit The Beatles as their backing band.
There is also, poignantly, the last words John said to Paul.
Roxy Music producer and guitarist Phil Manzanera said of the new biography: “If you thought you knew everything about The Beatles, this book makes you think again.”
All the Fab Four had some, or a lot, of Irish blood.
Paul McCartney’s mother Mary’s father was born in Ireland.
John Lennon’s grandparents, John and Mary, were born in Dublin, and he had other family ties to County Down.
George Harrison had the strongest Irish connections through his mother, Louise, whose father, John French was from Wexford and moverd to Liverpool where he joined the police.
George had cousins in Drumcondra whome he made sure to visit even at the height of Beatlemania when they played Ireland in 1963.
But long before that in the 1940s and 1959s he and his mother- to whom he was close- would take the ferry from Liverpool to Dublin to stay with them and go to places like Malahide Beach.
Even Ringo (Richard Starkey) had Irish blood. His third- great- grandfather on the paternal Starkey side of his family, Thaddeus John Edward James, was born in Ireland in 1833. He married a loscal Liverpool girl, Sarah Jane Steele, whose own grandfather was born in Ireland in 1770.
The author also has Irish blood. Patrick’s mother was from Banbridge in Co. Down and he has very fond memories of family visits and holidays.
He is from and lives in the South East London area.
Patrick Humphries told The Irish World: “They just changed pop music forever.
“I don’t think anyone has ever come close to that, I don’t think anyone ever will.
“In the 60s, I remember, a new album by Dylan or the Beatles was like Moses coming down with the tablets.
“These records were listened to and poured over.
“Now you’ve got computer games, smartphones, trainers, artificial intelligence.
“There are so many other distractions from the music. I don’t think the Beatles could ever be replicated.
“This one group did over 200 songs over a eight year recording career and there is so much variety in that one group, and I don’t think you get that today either.”
What inspired you to write this book? Is it something you have always wanted to do?
“It’s always been in the back to my mind.
“I’m quite lucky that working journalist for 40 odd years in the music press.
“I’ve been really lucky.
“I’ve met Paul most of all.
“I did a book about the Stones in 2019 which I really enjoyed doing.
“I was talking about this to a mate, ‘I’m thinking about maybe doing a book on The Beatles..’ and he went, ‘Duh. You’ve interviewed the three surviving Beatles, not many people can claim that’.
“’Yeah, that’s a good point’.
“And then lockdown came in.
“I needed something to occupy me and I had drawers and drawers and drawers and shelves full of books on the Beatles and cuttings and records and bootlegs.
“And I thought, ‘Now’s the time to put it into some sort of order’.
“I was looking and there hasn’t been a proper full length biography of the Beatles in nearly 20 years.
“There’s been lots of books about their career, what they recorded, where they recorded, fantastically detailed books by Martin Lewis particularly, but there hasn’t been anything to take the story from when Ringo, the oldest Beatle, was born in 1940 through to their last single Now and Then last year.
“So I thought, ‘Well, that was interesting’.
“But then one of the other things that fascinated me was the way that the Beatles brand endures.
“I mean, they broke up over 50 years ago but barely a week goes by that you either find a newspaper or a photograph or an autograph turns up on The Antiques Road Show or there’s a court battle about copyright, there’s always something about them.
“They’re in the national curriculum so I put all those elements together in the book.”
Everyone knows the Beatles and thinks they have some idea of what they are like. You have met Paul, George and Ringo, are they?
“I think so, yes.
“George was very grumpy.
“He really didn’t like talking about the Beatles.
“He felt that it was just part of his career but if you got him on Monty Python, Bob Dylan, gardening, or Formula One and he was very chatty.
“And then eventually he realised that those years in the Beatles were what would define him and he got very chatty about that.
“Ringo was really nice, not at all reluctant to talk about the Beatles.
“I went to interview him about his All Star Band and he kept referring to ‘my other band’ and I thought, ‘That will be the Beatles then’.
“So he’s aware that there’s an intense interest in them.
“Paul I first met back in the early 80s.
“People say, ‘Oh, he’s the nice Beatle’ and, ‘It’s an image, it’s an act’.
“I must have seen him probably three dozen times in various locations and if it is an act, it’s a very good one because that never dropped.
“I think during the 70s, he really struggled to get away from the shadow of the Beatles with Wings and his solo work.
“When I got to know him, he was coming around to it.
“Now, of course, he’s one of the world’s biggest Beatles fans.
“I think he realised what he did in that group and what the group achieved was unrepeatable and unbeatable.”
There is one Beatle we haven’t mentioned. That is John Lennon who you never met but were due to and if tragedy had not struck..
“Absolutely.
“I was a working journalist on Melody Maker.
“My editor was Ray Coleman who was very matey with John.
“I was in the office one day and Double Fantasy had just come out which by the way, got terrible reviews when it was released, people forget that.
“I was like ‘I’ve never met the Beatles’ and Ray said, ‘Oh, John’s been in touch and he tells me he’s coming back to England for a private visit in 1981. I’ll be meeting up with him and I’ll make sure you get to meet him’.
“But, as you say, tragically that never happened.”
Do you remember where you were when the news broke that John Lennon had been shot?
“Oh yeah, vividly.
“I think it happened on Sunday night in New York and it broke Monday morning in London.
“The holdings were saying, ‘Beatle John Lennon shot’.
“I rushed back to the Melody Maker office.
“I think we held the issue over, and I just wrote.
“We were all just writing and writing and writing memories about John and everything.
“It was pretty overwhelming.
“It was very emotional.
“I think he was the first pop star of our generation who had died.
“Elvis had died a few years before but he was from the 50s really.
“For a Beatle to go was really shocking actually.”
It must have been even more so for the senselessness of it. John was nice enough to sign an autograph and then, for no reason at all, that autograph hunter shot him.
“This guy, I won’t even name him, was a very confused individual.
“I think he was one of these pathetic people who thought killing somebody would make them famous.
“He asked John for his autograph which he duly gave and was shot, I think, five times in the back by this scum.
“It’s just awful that a man of peace- I mean, I think there was a lot of contradictions to John Lennon.
“I don’t think he was the saintly figure that people make him out to be, certainly not in his early years but I think what he did for peace, just in the Beatles alone: He deserved a better end than that.
“He was very happy in New York.
“He could get around without being hassled too much.
“It was undeniably his second home so it was just awful.”
Let’s go back to the beginning of the story. You describe them in the book as the band who would ‘unwittingly’ change the world and it was like that, wasn’t it? They had no idea what was ahead of them when they set out to form a group..
“No.
“I remember talking to Paul once.
“It was some Beatles anniversary and I said, ‘Did you think they’d still be talking about you?’
“And he said, ‘Well, I kind of thought for the big anniversaries, All You Need is Love or Sergeant Pepper, She Loves You…’
“But he said, ‘Not every day’,
“He was as surprised as everyone.
“At the beginning, you’re right.
“They began because they realised they could make a living out of playing music.
“It got them out of doing proper jobs and they got to meet girls.
“There was no grand plan to it.
“They put the hours in in cellars in Liverpool and Hamburg and when it broke, it broke so big.
“They were just overwhelmed by it in 1963 in Britain, with Beatlemania.
“It was hysteria.
“I was 11 at the time, I remember.
“Everywhere you went was about the Beatles.
“But they were very lucky they had Brian Epstein, the manager, who was very honest and very scrupulous: Not sentences you use often about pop music management.
“He was a fundamentally decent man.
“People say he wasn’t the best manager but he got them out of Liverpool, he got them to London and he got them a recording contract.
“That was the great contribution, I think.
“And once they were on record George Martin, the producer, appreciated there was something in the chemistry between the four of them and also the songwriting of John and Paul was just remarkable: They were this self-contained unit that could and did do pretty much anything, and they went on to prove it.
“They did do pretty much everything on record.
“They went from Love Me Do to Strawberry Fields Forever in four years, you’re never going to get that again.”
I’m sure they knew they were good but did they know just how good they were?
“They went to America in February ‘64 with a number one record, I Want To Hold Your Hand.
“That was not unique.
“There had been acts in the UK that had had hit records in America but no British act had sustained a career in America.
“Of course, the Beatles went on to do that.
“At one point in 1964 they had the top five singles in the Billboard charts and I think it was 12 other records.
“They had nearly 20% of the chart that week.
“I think that’s when they realised that things were really unstoppable.
“But it got very wearing, very draining and they couldn’t hear what they were playing because of the screaming.
“They were this incredible cultural phenomenon but they didn’t really get it.
“They didn’t get how much of an impact and influence that they had on people’s lives.
“But they had this incredible impact on lives, on culture, on history.
“They lived through it.
“They were in the eye of a hurricane.
“They couldn’t really appreciate it until it was all over and they came out of it punch drunk.
“It was an extraordinary period to live through.”
You got a bit of a taste of what it must have been like to be a Beatle when you saw up close the reaction Paul got albeit not at the height of Beatlemania.
“Paul and Linda knew me from over the years so I went out to cover a gig.
“It was in Spain and Linda says, ‘What are you doing after the show?’
“I said, ‘I’ll go back to hotel bar and drink some rioja’.
“’Do you want to fly back with us?’
“From the stage door to the van was about 30 feet, 40 feet and I was walking out with Paul.
“The fans on either side were behind these barriers and they were reaching out to try and grab Paul.
“They couldn’t grab Paul so they would grab a bit of me.
“I had about 40 feet of being a Beatle.
“I didn’t like it that much actually.
“I thought, ‘I’ll leave it to them’.”
Speaking of screaming fans, you write in the book about a gig they played at Stowe School, a private school, in 1963 and because the audience were so well mannered, it has turned out to be an excellent recording of one of the world’s greatest ever bands on the cusp of greatness..
“Yes, it was a fee paying school so it was very well brought up young gentlemen applauding politely at the end of every song.
“They were amazed because in the Cavern and in the Star Club in Hamburg, it was all very boisterous and loud.
“Then when they started playing theatres, the girls started screaming and just wouldn’t stop.
“They couldn’t hear themselves sing so it just got ridiculous.
“This tape by one of the pupils of that school only turned up quite recently and it is remarkable how good they sound.
“I think you can hear them quite pleasantly surprised at hearing themselves.”
You mentioned the Cavern there which, of course, The Beatles are synonymous with but their crowd there were not so pleased when their popularity spread as they felt they were losing them.
You say in the book about it being announced there that the band had gone to number one and the news being met with frosty silence rather than the excitement that was expected..
“That’s absolutely right.
“They were expecting hysteria but there was just stony silence because the Cavern fans in Liverpool knew they’d lost the Beatles.
“I think there was a lot of resentment.
“There’s a lovely thing I found out.
“I interviewed Ray McFall who used to run the Cavern.
“The last time the Beatles played there was August ‘63 and the capacity of The Cavern was only 300 or whatever but that time they were hanging off the ceiling and God knows how many people were there.
“He said the power failed so the Beatles were just standing there so Paul went over to the piano, started playing this melody and then the power came back on.
“Years later, people in the audience realised the melody was from When I’m Sixty Four.
“He had the melody in his head four years before they recorded it for Sergeant Pepper.
“That came out in 1967 but Paul had the tune in his head as early as 1964.”
Patrick writes in the book that the McCartney family may have been McCarthys before they left Ireland.
“Lennon and McCarthy, there was that strong Irish heritage.
“I think there was this tremendous camaraderie in the group, the four of them.
“There was a quote from one of the engineers, ‘It’s only when it’s the four of them together that there is this magic happens’.
“I think that’s what sustained them during all those years when it was really hard going.
“I mean, they were trapped in the dressing room eating cold fish and chips that had been brought in because they couldn’t get out anywhere, they would be literally torn to pieces.
“Famously, when they were preparing to film Hard Day’s Night director Dick Lester said, ‘You’ve just come back from Sweden, what was Sweden like?’
“And Lennon said it was a car, a hotel room, and an airport.
“I think that’s all they saw when they were touring.
“They really were trapped by their own success but there was a real bond there.”
The book also tells of those tragic figures who weren’t around for the Beatles’ success such as Stuart Sutcliffe (RIP) and original drummer Pete Best.
“Stuart was tragic because he died so young.
“His heart was never really in the Beatles.
“He was a far more talented artist.
“John was his mate and he roped him in to play bass guitar in the group.
“Pete Best, I’ve always had a soft spot for Pete.
“He wasn’t the fifth Beatle.
“He was a Beatle.
“He was with them for the best part of three years and literally on the eve of their worldwide success was booted out.
“He never quite fitted in.
“He had curly hair so he couldn’t have a Beatle cut like the others could.
“Even in those photos, he looks like a bit of an outsider.
“I remember George saying Pete would finish a gig or a session, and he would go off on his own.
“He was never really part of the group and at some point during the early recording sessions at EMI, I think George Martin said that he wasn’t that impressed with the drummer and that really gave Brian Epstein the opportunity to boot him out.
“To have been that close to that success must have been heartbreaking.”
You write about how the Beatles were turned down by Decca..
“They were turned down by pretty much every major label.
“They failed the Decca audition.
“Everyone was like, ‘Oh Decca were crazy for turning them down’.
“The session came out on bootleg in the 80s.
“They weren’t actually that good.
“They really didn’t have the confidence that they later grew into.
“They were turned down by pretty much every label and even Parlophone, the EMI subsidiary, which signed them was better known as a novelty label.
“George Harrison told me he went to a talent competition to help judge a talent competition in Liverpool in 1963 after they signed with EMI and one of the other people on the panel was Dick Rowe, who was the secretary executive who turned them down.
“He apologised to George and George said, ‘Actually, it’s not your fault. We weren’t that great but if you want to go down to Richmond, there’s a really good group called the Rolling Stones.
“Everyone knows Dick Rowe as the man who turned the Beatles down but he should also be remembered as the man who signed the Rolling Stones.”
There is no point asking your favourite Beatle as you’ve spent most time with Paul..
“I’ve known Paul for a long time.
“I can call him Paul because I knew him before he was knighted.
“It’s pretty overwhelming when you meet a Beatle.
“I mean you shake the hand of the man who wrote Yesterday, Let it Be.
“It’s very difficult not to be overwhelmed but he’s very good at putting you at your ease.”
You wanted to hear more about their meeting with Elvis..
“I was talking to him (Paul) and he said, ‘We were all really nervous, John was literally shaking to meet his hero’.
“He (Elvis) was sitting on the sofa and had his arm around this girl.
“There might have been two girls, I can’t remember but certainly a girl with dark hair who he thinks was Priscilla.
“As soon as they came in, she shot out the room and Elvis stood up and turned the television off with a remote control.
“But I was waiting for more musical revelations or what they said or whatever, and I said, ‘So when the King of Rock and Roll met the world’s most influential band, your abiding memory is he turned the television off without getting off the sofa?’
“And he said to me ‘Well, it’s pretty f**king impressive for 1965’,
“And I thought, ‘Oh well, fair enough’.
“We all have our own memories, I suppose.”
Why did it end? Why do you think the band broke up?
“Oh, I don’t think there was any one reason.
“John and Paul had been in the group since 1957 so they had been together for 12 years.
“Brian Epstein died in 1967, he was the steadying hand.
“He dealt with what John called the men in suits.
“He dealt with contracts and all that stuff.
“After Brian died, I think they were really floundering.
“John had met Yoko, become obsessed with Yoko.
“She was his reason for being really and so the Beatles took a back seat to Yoko.
“There were all these business issues they had to deal with that they weren’t really confident about.
“I think it just got to a point where they thought, ‘Oh let’s just break, Let’s just stop’.
“I often think if they had said to each other, ‘Ringo, you go off and do your acting. George, you’ve got enough songs for at least two albums. John, you do what you want to do with Yoko. Paul, you do your solo stuff or record with Linda. Why don’t we get back together in a year or so and see how things are going?’
“But of course, groups didn’t do that at the time and so come 1970, that was the end.
“I think it was the pressures of the business as much as anything that broke them up.”
With the Beatles, From the Town Where they Were Born to Now and Then by Patrick Humphries is available from www.gnbooks.co.uk/product/with-the-beatles.
For more information about Patrick Humphries, click here.
