He looked and sounded just like a genius was expected to look and sound then: irascible, uncompromising, iconoclastic. “The issue with that is,” says Weber, “as a historian, you are trained that the more emotional a source is, the less reliable they are.”Īs Weber points out, “You have John himself denouncing as early as 1973”, but the music press were happy to take Lennon at his word. Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono had just emerged from four months of primal scream therapy, and Lennon in particular sounded like a man finally letting out years of pent-up emotion in one bitter, guttural burst. “We were just a band that made it very, very, big,” he said. He had barely a good thing to say about Paul (“Engelbert Humperdink”), George (“the invisible man”), Ringo or George Martin. The Lennon-McCartney thing fell apart in 1962. They were “the biggest bastards on Earth”. The Beatles, he said in a mammoth piece headlined “Lennon Remembers”, weren’t what you thought they were. Over the course of one interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, he took a flamethrower to the Fab Four narrative. Into that void, Lennon poured all of his vitriol and resentments. “But he doesn’t release the information that John has already quit the band, and you don’t have a new narrative that Paul offers to take the place of the Fab Four narrative,” says Weber. McCartney put out a press release to promote his first solo album, saying Lennon-McCartney was over, and heavily implying The Beatles were, too. ![]() Lennon finally, definitively, left in September 1969, but the “Fab Four” narrative really crumbled in April 1970. ![]() By February 1969, “Ringo has left, George has left.” “Paul walked out during Revolver, stormed out of a session on the last song to be recorded, so there was a huge fight then,” says Cockcroft. That wasn’t quite the truth, but anything thought controversial was whitewashed out: drugs, manager Brian Epstein’s sexuality, tour debauchery, disharmony. Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon in a scene from the nearly 8-hour Peter Jackson-produced documentary Get Back (Photo: Disney+ via AP) Before the break-up, most thought of them as “moptops, and they’re a gang, and they’re all best mates”, says Carty’s podcast co-host Steven Cockcroft. What a change from the self-pitying moaners crooning their lovelorn tunes from the tortured shallows of lukewarm hearts.”Įven as things took a turn for the goo goo g’joob – the Queen supposedly remarked to EMI’s Sir Joseph Lockwood in 1967 that “The Beatles are turning awfully funny, aren’t they?” – their story remained roughly the same. ![]() “They’re young, new,” gushed a Daily Mirror editorial in 1963. John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting partnership and the palpable glee The Beatles felt at being The Beatles were at its heart. She calls the first the “Fab Four” narrative. Her book The Beatles and the Historians: An Analysis of Writings About the Fab Four details four distinct ways historians and journalists have told and retold their story. “You get that in their press conferences, you get that in their movies, you get that in their interviews,” says historian Erin Torkelson Weber. Angel Olsen: 'Learn to confront people you love about things that are ugly' 18 October, 2022 The blink-182 reunion is a triumph for ageing emos 12 October, 2022 Graham Coxon: 'I’m terribly bitter - I’m bitter every time I listen to the radio' 05 October, 2022
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