Quotes From “John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs”

finished loving john and am turning it around and around in my head. may pang is not without her biases but it's pretty easy to flag where they are and what they're colored by. it is clear to me that she didn't like paul very much, and im not sure whether that's because of the way john presented him to her amidst the business troubles or because she perceived he didn't like her with john. the way may presents the johnandyoko reconciliation, it's entirely caused by yoko's hypnotherapist. but we know that's not entirely true and i dont know if at the time of writing she knew about paul telling john in LA that yoko wanted him back. there's a lot of instances where john and may are conspiring against yoko: keeping secrets and telling lies to pacify her. i dont know if may considered the two of them might have been doing the same to her. it seems easier for her to blame yoko for the whole thing, both the start and end of the relationship, and while she certainly deserves quite a bit of blame it's also john who won't take no for an answer when he first tries to sleep with her and it's john who chose to go back to yoko. yoko knew how to use the deepest parts of his psychology to convince him, but is was still HIS psychology. and honestly as an outside observer even though may had an incredible strength of character at such a young age i dont think anyone was really a match for the depth of trauma john had and it's entirely possible something worse may have happened had he stayed with her longer. and he did almost kill her.

I was enjoying the wackiness of the beautiful possibility podcast/blog; I didn't buy into the truly wild & sweeping claims she made about mclennon healing the world or whatever but I liked the mythopoetic themes and the sort of structured insanity of it. I also admired that she's insistent on doing serious mclennon research under her own name etc (although her wider theories are likely to put casual readers off, not to mention problems of confirmation bias in her approach etc).

With all that said, I've been totally put off by some recent episodes' parasocial insistence that paul is a little scared uwu baby that must be encouraged (by her?) to "tell his story", and indeed that he may be listening to the pod for just that purpose??

A chronic case of Too Much Fanfic brain, I fear.

Empire builder

  HBO are pulling out all the stops for their new series, the 1920s-set Boardwalk Empire, starring Steve Buscemi. The feature-length pilot episode was directed by Martin Scorsese and is said to have cost over $18 million, with the first series overall running to over $70 million. Jazz Age-era Atlantic City was recreated to exacting detail on a huge set in Brooklyn, and it seems no expense has been spared in evoking the look and feel of the 1920s, down to the last detail. It’s clear that HBO are hoping Boardwalk Empire will be the next Sopranos or The Wire, a huge, complex, involving series that draws the viewer in and hooks them for multiple episodes. Perhaps taking a leaf from AMC’s book, Boardwalk Empire appears to be trying to recreate an entire era and mindset in the same way the much-loved Mad Men does for the early 1960s.

The show revolves around the chief treasurer of Atlantic City, Enoch ‘Nucky’ Thompson (loosely based on the real-life Nucky Johnson) and his role as the public face of respectable Prohibition-era temperance – a face built on his private criminal empire that keeps the city, in his words, ‘wet as a mermaid’s twat’ (You gotta love flapper-era obscenity). The pilot episode was an epic combination of classic gangster themes, beautifully exact period detail and intense characterisation and was pretty much a movie in itself. The question is; can Boardwalk Empire live up to its own expectations?

I haven’t yet managed to get into The Wire – not for lack of interest, more that it seems too huge to embark on – but I’m a fan of both shows that Boardwalk Empire can be said to be referencing: The Sopranos and Mad Men (and, to a lesser extent, Rome). The twelve years of Prohibition are a fascinating and oddly ignored period of American history. From the very moment alcohol was outlawed in 1920, it not only remained widely available, but was even more intensely sought out than it was before. The criminal empires of such legendary figures of Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano and Al Capone (all of whom appear in Boardwalk Empire) were built on illegal alcohol, and set in motion the terrifying, compelling gangster world that in some ways defined 20th-century America. Boardwalk Empire depicts the beginning of a world that the real-life Tony Soprano caught the drug-addled tail-end of. Not only that, but the 1920s were a period of intense social change in America and worldwide – women finally got the vote in all states, the First World War challenged the myth of loyalty to king and nation and black people began to place their stake in society and culture in a major way with the emigrations from the South and the development of jazz. This was a period when films about homosexuality were being freely made in Weimar Germany and even the relatively prudish United States was infinitely more liberated in its popular culture than it would be after the Hollywood Production Code.

So does Boardwalk Empire do this febrile period in history justice? Rather like the epic times it’s set in, it tends to succeed and fail on grandiose terms. Firstly, I have to comment on the ear-wrenching horror that is Kelly MacDonald’s attempt at an Irish accent. It probably isn’t the most dramatic failure of the series, but it is certainly the most audible. MacDonald plays an Irish immigrant named Margaret Schroeder, whose abusive husband comes to a sticky end in the pilot and whose subtly combative relationship with Nucky Thompson is the key dramatic fulcrum of the early episodes. Margaret is an interesting character; almost impossibly meek and virginal in early episodes; she reveals a will of steel and appealing sense of wickedness as the series unfolds. But that accent! Imagine Julia Roberts in Far and Away and you’re halfway there. Considering MacDonald is Scottish and a talented actor, one would expect her to do better. However a radio interview I caught once with an accent coach may provide an explanation, not only for MacDonald’s accent, but for all the hideous ‘brogues’ that are inflicted upon viewers of US movies and TV. According to the coach, when an American actor is taught an ‘Irish’ accent, s/he is encouraged to speak in a ridiculous ‘begorrah’ voice because apparently American viewers cannot tell the difference between an average Irish voice and an English one, and cannot understand a genuinely thick Irish accent. I’m inclined to believe this, if only because it explains why otherwise competent actors seem to consistently fall so spectacularly at the hurdle of the brogue. Left to her own devices, I’m confident Kelly MacDonald could sound convincingly Irish, but since HBO’s audiences are largely from the States (except for those who watch its programmes from various dubious streaming sources….ahem) she has been instructed to speak like Chris O’Donnell in Circle of Friends. The theory is backed up by the fact that not a single review of the show on Slate, Vanity Fair, Time Magazine and any number of US blogs has commented on her accent. Terrifyingly, she must sound genuinely Irish to them!

It’s a credit to MacDonald’s acting skills that Margaret is an interesting character despite her voice being less pleasant to listen to than nails on a blackboard. But she’s taken a while to establish herself, which leads into one of the other problems of the series – the use of lazy shorthand in defining some of the female characters. The other woman in Nucky’s life is the cartoonishly slutty Lucy, who is ‘acted’ by Paz de la Huerta as some weird combination of a sleep-walking crack whore and an extra from ‘Chicago’. She’s an utterly ridiculous character, and seems to exist purely to be the whore to Margaret’s madonna, even though Margaret develops into a far more complex character than her Temperance League goody-two-shoes persona in the pilot. There’s plenty of scenes involving Nucky and his ‘business associates’ living it up with good-time girls, but these don’t feel gratuitous in the way scenes involving Lucy do. She might as well have big red arrows pointing at her saying ‘Scarlet Woman!’. Other characters are written in a subtle and intelligent way, so there’s no excuse for this nonsense. Another female character, the mother of Nucky’s young protégé-turned-bad, Jimmy Darmody, is well-acted by Gretchen Mol but horribly miscast. Anne Bancroft as a woman who could be Dustin Hoffman’s mother in The Graduate is more plausible casting than Mol as Jillian Darmody. As the reviewer Paul Martinovic on Den of Geek has been saying: ‘And, as for Gretchen Mol, the only interest I have in her character is once more getting the answer to this question: just how did you give birth when you were nine years old?’. Unlike Martinovic, I think that Jillian is an interesting character, but her appearance compared to her ‘son’ is as jarring as Margaret’s accent. It yet again seems to confirm 21st-century TV’s mortal fear of casting a woman over 40 in a leading role.

These are the two most glaring problems in the show, but when they are laid aside, there’s a lot to like. Chiefly Steve Buscemi, in his first TV leading role, who pulls the show together as the enigmatic, subtle and nattily-dressed Nucky Thompson. Nucky, as Jimmy Darmody puts it, is trying to be ‘half a gangster’ – living the high life on the proceeds of bribery and kickbacks, supplying Atlantic City with booze through deals with Italian gangsters, but trying to keep his hands clean and his head above the murderous violence that Prohibition is helping to engender. Nucky is the go-to man in Atlantic City when anyone has a problem, yet despite his double life he hasn’t lost his true human side; as the show unfolds his complex nature becomes apparent. It helps that Steve Buscemi is such a compelling actor – he packs more narrative into a single glance than most would with reams of dialogue. This is the biggest leading role he has taken on to date, and it’s great to see him finally shaking off the constraints of being a ‘character actor’.

The opening episode shows Nucky’s tendency to try and have his cake and eat it, as he strikes a deal to provide Arnold Rothstein with oceans of booze, only for Jimmy and Rothstein’s driver, one Al Capone, to secretly plot the hijacking and robbery of the consignment. The smoothly-planned operation goes awry and ends in bloodshed. To protect his reputation, Nucky arranges for Margaret’s husband to be framed and killed (helped by his knowledge that he beats her), the booze to be dumped and pays Jimmy off to make himself scarce. This leads Jimmy to set up camp with Al in Chicago. Despite Nucky’s attempts at damage-limitation Rothstein doesn’t take kindly to being deprived of his end of the deal, and the incident sets in motion a slow-burning feud between Nucky and Rothstein and his crew of thugs, including Lucky Luciano. The action moves between Atlantic City, New York and Chicago, as the family tree of the big gangs is traced and their evolution explained. A recurring theme is the shock experienced by the nineteenth-century surviving gang bosses, mostly of Irish, Greek and Jewish extraction, at the levels of random violence used by the new, mostly Italian generation – embodied in the person of Al Capone, played with a scary viciousness by English actor Stephen Graham. African-Americans feature too – one of Nucky’s bootlegging associates is the grimly commanding Chalky White, played by Michael K. Williams of The Wire fame.

Michael Pitt, an actor I’d never heard of before, is a revelation as Jimmy Darmody. Some blogs have unkindly intimated that he’s the ‘poor man’s diCaprio’, but while he shares some of the same intense qualities as Leonardo, he is more than able to make the role his own. Jimmy is a war veteran who’s had his humanity blunted by the horrors of Verdun, yet his fierce intelligence and philosophical nature have saved him from the depraved depths the other Chicago gangsters he works with sink to. He is exacting in his revenge, but knows that as an Irish-American he will always be an outsider with the Italians, and needs, like Nucky, to decide once and for all if he is ‘fully a gangster’. As an aside, the various ethnicities cheerfully use now-unacceptable derogatory terms to refer to each other – terms like ‘dumb Mick’, ‘fucking kike’ and ‘filthy Hun’ abound.

The anti-gangster is as alarming and unappealing as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano at their worst. Nelson van Aldren, Fed agent and head of the anti-Prohibition drive in Atlantic City, is a man so repressed as to be barely human. He recites Bible passages while torturing a man for information, and whips himself rather than admit to his passion for Margaret. Van Aldren is on a mission: to gather enough evidence to bring down Nucky Thompson, and will stop at nothing to get it. He could be cartoonish but Michael Shannon imbues the character with a surprising humanity, as well as being possessed of the most compelling voice I’ve heard in a long time. The unhealthy puritanism that drove much of Prohibition is personified in van Aldren, but at the same time the show avoids simplifying the issue – Prohibition was not inspired merely by prudes, but by many who genuinely believed banning alcohol would help working-class people rise out of the terrible conditions they suffered in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was a popular cause with suffragettes too, who had valid reason to believe that alcohol made more women’s lives a misery than men’s. This aspect of the movement perhaps explains why the independent-thinking Margaret becomes involved in the Women’s Temperance League in the first place. These women were not just the schoolmistress-y prudes of popular cliché, but fighters for the good cause.

There are endless other narrative threads in this programme, but they can’t all be contained in one blog post! Boardwalk Empire is not perfect – it suffers occasionally from heavy-handedness and there are a few too many characters and stories running simultaneously – but the richness of the plotting and acting makes up for this. Its production values are glossily gorgeous too, only let down by the rather obviously CGI-generated ocean in the boardwalk scenes. Like Mad Men, it succeeds in evoking the period with little, well-observed details. The full ferment of the early 1920s, the period where the 19th and 20th centuries clashed resoundingly, is called up in the clothes, conversation and rooms of the characters.

One of the best episodes so far is ‘Nights in Ballygran’ where the self-delusions and sentimentality of Irish-Americans is brilliantly exposed. The spectre of a largely imaginary Ireland looms heavily over the lives of many of the characters, informing actions and lifestyles that would be unrecognisable ‘back home’. Yet some of the attendees at Nucky Thompson’s St Patrick’s Day dinner reminded me unnervingly of the sickenly complacent Fianna Fail TDs that have recently been exposed for the criminals they are. That’s the kind of programme Boardwalk Empire is – by holding up a mirror to the past, it tells us a lot about the present.

Blue on Blue

Victorian sexplorer and cross-cultural relationships

Richard Burton

Last night I watched a documentary on Richard Burton presented by Rupert Everett (The Richard Burton in question was the 19th century explorer, writer and translator of the Kama Sutra, not, as Everett put it, ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s fifth and sixth husbands’). Unsurprisingly, considering its lubricious presenter, the documentary focused on Burton’s exploration of sexuality in various parts of the world and his rejection of hypocritical Victorian mores.

I’ve seen Everett in presenter mode before, in a documentary on Byron a few months ago, and while he can be insufferably irritating, I’ve always quite admired his consistency of personality, This was even more evident in this programme, where he was filmed wandering around Egypt, India and Goa among other places. Whether talking to old ladies in the Indian streets, bantering with nuns in a Goa convent or quizzing an Egyptian masseur on his sexual preferences, Everett didn’t substantially change his personality or delivery to fit in with his surroundings. Even when quizzing an imam on the position of homosexuality in Islam (unsurprisingly, verboten!), he was still himself, understandably a heavily dialled-down version for his own safety, but essentially unchanged. The almost jarring sight of a Western person just being relaxed and normal in foreign countries shows us how most TV presenters (and many travellers) take on a fake, simplified persona to interact with ‘natives’. Does this spring from lack of confidence in one’s own personality, or a persistent Western concept of darker-skinned people as eternally ‘other’? Probably a bit of both.

Somebody like Everett, who is clearly an unapologetic egoist, simply doesn’t think to behave any differently – he does not seem hamstrung by post-colonial guilt, which ironically causes many British travellers to be more condescending to their former subjects than if they weren’t plagued by it. The only other TV personality I can think of who displays the same unselfconsciousness is Hector Ó hEochagháin, who shares Everett’s qualities of being intensely annoying and deeply engaging. I remember seeing him in a travel programme where he crossed part of the Sahara, and was struck by the ease with which he interacted with the men accompanying him, drinking and bantering around the campfire. It shouldn’t be striking to see a group of people from different countries interacting normally, but western attitudes and the disparity of wealth between the First and Third Worlds usually places a stranglehold on normality.

Burton found it very easy to interact in the various countries he lived in, mainly due to his skill in assimilating. Local prostitutes (male and female) and mistresses taught him about a world of sexuality miles away from the whalebone corsets of his upbringing. However the key issue of sexual relationships between people of vastly differing wealth appears to have changed little since his time. In the documentary, an unnamed Egyptian masseur gave insight into this as he tried to entice Everett into a ‘hard sex’ or ‘soft sex’ massage. Politely deflecting the proposition, Everett asked the man if he liked men or women, who replied that he preferred women. When Everett asked how he could perform sex acts on men if he was not homosexual, the man seemed confused and replied ‘it’s my job.’ Therein lies the key issue in relationships that cross these kinds of boundaries. Even outside the world of prostitution, how often do the people from the poorer countries actually love their richer partners, and how much of the attachment is driven by monetary need? Is their even a division in the mind of a very poor person between loving attachment and financial security? How much does the richer partner even mind if their lover really cares for them or not? Is a separate homosexual identity a purely western invention, when a married man with children living in a poor country sees no discord in performing sex acts on other men for money?

There’s no doubt that some cross-cultural relationships work very well, but it seems that in many of them a certain amount of delusion is required on the part of the richer partner that they won’t be abandoned if the money runs out. This sounds like an offensive cliché, but I don’t mean it that way at all – primarily it’s not cultural reasons that lead to this disparity in expectations, but simple economics. It’s impossible to underestimate the effect poverty has in shaping personality, and the same for wealth. Coming from a middle-class background, there are dozens of things I used to take for granted – the idea that people can follow any career they wish, that the norm for romantic relationships is financial and gender equality, that only ‘bad’ people commit violent crime – but these assumptions are founded on the comfortable base of coming from generations of professionals who worked hard to give me such an easy view of the world. There’s no shame in coming from such a background, but it’s crucially important to recognise that our views on life are often hopelessly narrow and things sometimes assumed to be universal are impossible for thousands of people, due to the financial inequality of the world. I could be biologically the same person but I would have vastly different views of the world, life, work, marriage and my sense of self if I had been born in Calcutta, Burundi or even deprived parts of Dublin.

The scandals involving the poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh and his Nepalese boyfriends showed how little has changed since Burton’s day. From watching the documentary, it seemed fairly obvious that few, if any of the young men would have identified as homosexual in the Western sense, but they were happy to play that role (and the role of obsequious, shoe-cleaning servants) for their rich white benefactor. Again, the lines between avarice and affection seemed blurred – the men were not in love with Ó Searcaigh, but they had affection for him nonetheless. From the poet’s point of view, it didn’t seem to matter a great deal to him whether they cared deeply for him or not. The documentary on Ó Searcaigh was keen to portray the Nepalese boys as helpless victims of an evil predator, but this was simplistic and condescending – it seems unlikely they were not at least partly driven by personal gain. The relationships were essentially exploitative, but not hugely more so than many so-called ‘equal’ Western marriages. Maybe the real scandal should be that an economic situation still prevails in the world that allows such relationships to thrive.

Conspiracies and arson - St Patrick's Day in 1741

The Bowery Boys are two guys with a blog and podcast who serve up regular helpings of truly fascinating New York history. With erudition and infectious enthusiasm, they present the histories of countless New York landmarks, from the famous (Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge) to the obscure (the African Burial Ground and Famous Dogs of New York). Today on the blog they remember a shameful episode of the city's history from 1741, where the authorities became convinced, seemingly on no conclusive evidence, that the local slave and freed black community of the city were planning its destruction, and executed over 30 almost certainly innocent people. The Patrick's Day link reveals how the soldiers patrolling Fort George outside the city were so hungover this very morning in 1741 that they didn't catch a mystery arsonist who burned down the camp and almost let the flames spread to the city. In the febrile atmosphere of the time, when the authorities were whipping the white populace into a panicked frenzy about supposed plots, it didn't take long for blame for the fire to be put on the black population.Whoever the arsonist was, if the soldiers had been on the ball that morning the arson could have been stopped and the fire of paranoia dampened. There really are some jobs you can't turn up hungover for! 

Read the full article here. And subscribe to the podcast, it's brilliant!

Veep style tv shows about the Beatles that I want

Veep style tv show about Apple in 1968

Veep style tv show about the staff at the Dakota

Cor Klaasen

Record sleeves for the Mercier Catholic Record Club, designed by Cor Klaasen

Cor Klaasen was a Dutch designer who worked in Irish advertising throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, but is best remembered for the covers he designed for numerous Irish books and records, including school books for Fallons and sleeves for the Mercier Catholic Record Collection, the original incarnation (pardon the pun) of Mercier Press. A brief exhibition of his work, held as part of Dublin Design Week, is on show in Adifferentkettleoffishaltogether, a small gallery on Ormond Quay, until next Wednesday 10th November. It’s worth a visit, both to appreciate Klaasen’s clean, clever design and to get a feel of some of vibrancy that existed in Irish art and design between the 50s and the 70s.

As exhibition co-ordinator, Niall McCormack (who also maintains the excellent site about vintage Irish book covers, www.hitone.ie) said at a talk he gave as part of OFFSHOOT last night, we assume that 50s Ireland was all ‘Angela’s Ashes and people whipping each other’, but while Ireland was nowhere near as advanced as other European countries in art and design, there was still a number of talented, enthusiastic people who did their best to shake up the stifling social conservatism that dominated in all cultural fields for so long.

I thought McCormack was perhaps a little too dismissive about the Catholic Church’s cultural influence in this period during his talk, because the Klaasen exhibition shows that though it was largely responsible for the lack of innovative cultural activity in the country at the time, there was a surprisingly strong forward-thinking element within the Church at the time too, who provided Klaasen with a substantial portion of his employment. Some of the record sleeves he designed for Mercier are astonishingly radical, like one where the almost cartoonishly dull title ‘Building a new moral theology’ read by Rev. Albert Johnson, belies the surreal black-lined Christ-head, complete with long red spikes extending from his stylised crown of thorns. It certainly wasn’t John Charles McQuaid and his ilk who were OK-ing this and other striking cover designs.

Klaasen worked in a simple, classic style, occasionally branching out into 60s-style cartoon but overall you get the feeling he preferred the clean lines of the De Stijl style he would have grown up with in Amsterdam. One highlight is a cover for a religious book entitled ‘The Methods of Dogmatic Theology’ by Walter Kaspar, which is a plain black background broken by a simple white circle enclosing the text of the title. Smaller white bubbles extend from the large circle, but not so much so as to break the tranquil cleanness of the design. His more detailed images are successful too, particularly the abstract covers of the various schoolbooks he designed for Fallons, many of which were carved out directly on his printing surface without the aid of a pencil drawing.

He could turn his hand to political material too, evidenced by his cover for a book on the UVF, published in 1973 by Torc Press, in which a row of grotesque-looking paramilitaries, printed in lines so thick as to be almost unintelligible, line the bottom of a plain red cover, with the word UVF rendered in jarring black-lined orange above. He incorporates the symbolic orange of the Unionist paramilitaries against what would normally be a clashing red tone, perhaps to imply the blood that was on the hands of the people suggested by the images below. The grimaces of the terrorists evoke the grotesque leers of George Grosz’s villains, an artist that Klaasen admired and often imitated.

It’s easy in the 21st century to dismiss mid-20th century Ireland as a place of unmitigated drear and uncreativity, so it’s a good thing for exhibitions like this to display the often-forgotten figures who played a role in bucking that trend. I would recommend catching this exhibition before it finishes, it can be viewed in the gallery from 11am-5pm daily between now and next Wednesday.

I was looking through editions of my local newspaper for mentions of The Beatles and I thought this piece in the Bristol Evening Post was so interesting that I typed the whole thing out. I'm such a sucker for these early-ish interviews when they're all still so chatty and relatively excited by the fame and money.

Source: The Bristol Evening Post, 10 November 1964 (they played a concert in the city that day).

Transcript below the cut...

A distant volley of screams penetrated the quiet upstairs foyer of the theatre.  

“Oops, here we go,” said a middle-aged reporter.  “They’re here.  Can somebody tell me which one is which?”

The television men switched on their lights, the photographers squinted through their viewfinders and the journalists juggled with notebooks and pencils.

“I know one of them’s called Ringo,” said the middle aged reporter.  “Could somebody point him out?”

There was a clatter of feet on the stairs, and the Beatles appeared in single file through a doorway, grinning all over their faces, and made straight for the bar.

Everybody instantly forgot all their pungent, searching questions they had been thinking up for weeks, and started firing away with fairly idiotic queries like: “How do you feel?” and “What are you doing these days?”

The television people grabbed John and Paul, who happened to be in the front, and I grabbed George, who started telling me about his new airgun.

“I spend my spare time shooting potatoes off trees in the garden,” said George. “I started with bits of cardboard on the clothesline, but cardboard doesn’t do anything very spectacular when you hit it.  So now I balance spuds on the trees and blast them to bits.”

A television man sneaked up behind me and shoved a microphone in between me and George. George clinked his glass on it and shouted “Cheers” down the mike.

“What are you going to do when the Beatles finish?” asked the television man.

“I’m going to be an engine driver,” said George.  “If they won’t let me have a train, I’ll drive a fire engine.”

Ringo, meanwhile, had retired to a corner for a quiet smoke.

The middle-aged journalist was busy interviewing Paul, whom he thought was Ringo. 

 “Press conferences can be quite a laugh,” said Ringo.  “Have a ciggie.”

We lit our ciggies and talked about Ringo’s New Image.

“Since the film, people seem to notice me a bit more,” said Ringo.  “They used to talk to the others and leave me out because I was supposed to be the quiet one.  Actually I can be quite noisy.  I used to feel rather out of it, but I feel like a proper Beatle now.  It’s amazing though how many people still can’t tell us apart.  Reporters still ask me, “How are you, John?”

The Beatles’ road manager, Neil Aspinall, came over and led Ringo off to have his picture taken.  The Aspinall rescued Paul from a bunch of reporters and the Beatles wandered off to inspect the stage in the A.B.C. theatre.

On stage, Paul was doodling on an electronic organ, and Ringo was doing a violent drum duet with the drummer of one of their supporting groups.

Neil Aspinall had promised me half an hour in the Beatles’ dressing room - the pop equivalent of a pass to the Kremlin.

“I can’t disturb the others for a minute,” he said, “but John’s upstairs.  You can start with him.”

John was chatting with two old school friends from Liverpool.  In the corner of the dressing room a TV set was showing a children’s programme with the sound turned off.

John jumped up, shook hands, and insisted on me taking his armchair. “You look as if you need it, Rog,” he said.

We talked about the allegations that the Beatles are slipping.

“Last year,” said John. “Beatlemania was news. Now No Beatlemania is news. The press have gone to town on the places where there have only been a couple of hundred kids outside of theatres instead of a couple of thousand.  They haven’t bothered to report things like Leeds, where there were 15 of the kids on the stage at one point.”

“Last year that would have been news.  It doesn’t bother us.  We’re sold out pretty well everywhere.  Can you think of another group that is filling halls at the moment? The Stones aren’t.  Maybe we should have done this tour earlier.  We all wanted to do England again before America this year. But Brian said no. And what Eppy says goes. He literally plans our careers.”

“I think we’re better organised now, anyway.  The police are marvellous.  They get us stowed away in the theatres before the kids come out of school, so obviously there aren’t so many riotous scenes.”

The idea of the Beatles breaking up still seems unthinkable. But I asked John if they ever considered adding any extra musicians.

“We’ve thought about it — yes,” said John. “We were once a five-strong group, before Stuart Sutcliffe died.  We’ve toyed with the idea of adding a piano or organ in the past. And for our last disc, we did think of bringing in an orchestra.  But we always rejected the idea in the end.  You see, for the kind of music we play, any more musicians would be superfluous.  I suppose we might have a couple of guest people on the odd occasion, but they wouldn’t be real Beatles.  I’d turn round at the end and say: “Ta very much to Arthur on the organ and Harry on the flute” and that would be that.  I just don’t think anyone else could fit in with us now. We’re a sort of closed shop, the four of us.  An outsider just wouldn’t be accepted, if you see what I mean.”

Before the Beatles’ Christmas show in London and the shooting of their next film — “which is going to be a bit madder than the last one” said John — they are taking a fortnight’s break.

“I’ll just stay home with the wife, Cynthia, and play records,” said John.

Home is his £20,000 Surrey country house, purchased in July as a retreat from the fans.

“Cyn and I are living on the second floor with the cooks and people,” said John. “The rest of the place is like a battlefield.  It’s swarming with electricians and plumbers and odd job men, all trying to get it straight for us before Christmas. I keep on bumping into these strange blokes on the stairs.  I haven’t a clue who they are, but Cyn seems to have them organised.  I’m not sticking my nose into that side of things, except to say vaguely how I want the house to look. Can’t even put a plug on myself.”

“The gardens? Well, there are an awful lot of them, I’ve seen a bloke sort of digging around the place. He smiles and waves, and I smile and wave back. I suppose he must be the gardener. His name is probably Fred.”

John said occasionally Beatle fans manage to find the house.

“They’re usually so exhausted by that time that they haven’t got the strength to actually battle their way in and pull my hair.  Though, the other morning when I was asleep, Cyn found some of them crawling up the stairs.”

Paul and George came in.  Paul sat on the windowsill and George read out an interview with P.J. Proby in a pop paper, in which Proby claimed to have been the first to introduce a certain sound to pop.

“He’s fantastic, isn’t he?” said Paul. “He really believes he’s the greatest. We must tell him some time.”

I asked Paul if he could think of anything which the Beatles hadn’t already been asked.

“There isn’t anything,” said Paul. “But we don’t mind answering the same questions all over again. We like talking to people.”

He enthused about his new Aston Martin. “I did 120 up the M1 and died of fright.”

And he talked about the Beatles futures.

“Whatever happens, I think John and I will carry on writing songs. And I think George, Ringo and I will all get married eventually. But not yet. We haven’t got time.”

Ringo came in with a musical paper carrying a feature article about Paul.

“Don’t like the picture,” said Paul. “They had a much better one of John last week.”

“It made me look like a fat idiot,” said John.

“Exactly,” said George.

A picture of the Beatles suddenly flashed on to the television screen.  

“Quick, turn up the sound, Rog,” said John.

“Don’t bother,” said George. “It’s only that ugly old Beatle lot. I thought they were all dead.”

Early Bloomsday.

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