World celebrates birth of the Beatles 50 years after release of Love Me Do
Hunter Davies gets up on the roof to mark the global resurgence of Beatlemania
Hunter Davies
The Guardian, Friday 5 October 2012
I'll be going on the roof at 3 Savile Row on Friday afternoon, so I told my younger daughter and my two grandchildren. "For obvious reasons," I added.
They all looked blank. "You buying a suit, Humper?"
"Course not. I don't need clothes. I've got clothes. Don't you know the significance of the date?" More blank looks.
"It's 5 October 2012, exactly 50 years since it all began."
"Since what all began?"
Oh gawd, do I have to explain everything …
On 5 October 1962, the Beatles' first record came out, Love Me Do. It only reached number 17 in the charts, but that was it, the Beatles had got started, which is why, 50 years later, there will be anniversary celebrations, dancing in the streets, imposing symposiums, TV and radio progs, and thousands, yes I do mean thousands, of lookalike Beatles groups performing all over the globe. Plus a few events in England, where it all began. And ended.
It's not that in the UK we are totally unaware of what is happening, but that Beatlemania is so much stronger abroad – and they are also more knowledgeable, enthusiastic, less cynical, less blase.
The reason I am going on the roof at Savile Row is to appear on Dutch TV, who will be asking me a few questions about the Beatles, most of which I will not be able to answer. There are today so many real Beatles Brains that I feel humble in their presence and can never remember anything.
And the reason for picking 3 Savile Row as a location is that it was here, on cold and dismal morning on 30 January 1969, that the Beatles gave their last live, public performance anywhere. It was not a concert as such, just an impromptu gig in the open air, on the roof of their Apple offices. They hoped to have a helicopter hovering overhead, filming them playing, for use in their Let it Be film, never thinking that the authorities would ban such a stupid stunt. The noise could be heard more than a mile away, everyone stopped to stare, bringing the traffic to a halt in Piccadilly. Their performance lasted only 42 minutes before the police arrived and stopped them. Ah, happy days.
True Beatles fans, all over the world, know the importance of this event, along with the date of Love Me Do – but it takes a foreign TV company to go to the bother of finding out who has the building today (Abercrombie & Fitch, the American clothes chain, who are refitting, ready, so they hope, to open a kids' clothes store) and then doing a deal to have access, to get up on the roof and do some filming. Such enterprise. You'd never catch any Brit TV news crew going to such trouble for three mins' chat on the Beatles. It's more like five minutes at your front door with a one-man crew.
I was last in the building about 1970, in the Apple days. John was slumped in his office, bored, waiting for a meeting to begin, so I went to see Derek Taylor, the Beatles PR. While I was in his office, a debbie-looking girl brought in a steaming ginger cake fresh from an oven, which she had just baked, saying it was Derek's birthday. It was delicious. I had two slices.
We then went out for lunch – and I came over all funny. It was a hash cake. My first and last experience with drugs. Yes, I know, shocking, as I am supposed to be a 60s person, so I tell my grandchildren.
I did once talk to John about Love Me Do. Nice song, neat bit of harmonica playing, but come on, the words are banal. Imagine rhyming "you" and "do" and "true". How corny, couldn't you have tried harder? I think Strawberry Fields had just come out, and people were overanalysing every word, which was beginning to annoy him. He maintained that the words of Love Me Do were just as meaningful as Strawberry Fields or any other later, supposed cleverer, more literate, more complicated lyrics. Words were words. You just say them. Or sing them.
Today, that sort of overanalysing still goes on, especially when we have a Beatles anniversary, but it happens mainly abroad, where the Beatles academics, in universities from the US to Japan, are the most passionate about studying every lyric, treating them as sacred texts, considering every scrap of their writings and scribblings as holy relics to be worshipped and treasured.
I wrote a biography of them, oh, many decades ago now, and 40 other books since on totally different subjects, but that Beatles book turned out to be the only authorised one. Brian Epstein, their manager, offered to write it into my contract that he would give no access to the Beatles to any other writer for two years after my book came out. The book appeared in 1968. In 1970, the Beatles split, so, by default really, mine became special. Because of this, I could spend the rest of my life, every day, giving a Beatles talk somewhere around the world. Sad thought.
I went to Russia in 1986, nothing to do with the Beatles, invited by the Russian Writers' Union who wanted a British writer and family to have a holiday with Russian writers on the Black Sea. I met a 15-year-old boy who knew the words of every Beatles song, who spoke English with a Scouse accent, picked up by listening to Beatles records and interviews – illegally, as the Beatles were still banned in Russia. In 1998, I went to Cuba, while researching a travel book about the West Indies, and found the Second International Beatles Conference in full swing. Dunno how I missed the first one. It was an enormous event, even though the Beatles never played in Cuba, or Russia for that matter.
A new book I've edited, The Lennon Letters, is coming out in Spanish and Russian and another 15 or so languages, and I have been driven mad these few months by the different translators pointing out mistakes I have made, stuff I have missed out. On Thursday I had German TV in the house. On Friday, before the Dutch arrive to whisk me off to Savile Row, Polish TV is coming. All obsessed by the 50th anniversary. My only UK media excitement on Friday will be at 10.10am when Radio Cumbria will talk to me live – on the phone, of course. They don't throw their pennies around.
I must find out how much Dutch TV have paid, if anything, for access to the Savile Row roof. And I do hope they don't ask me too many hard questions …
• The Lennon Letters, edited by Hunter Davies, is published next week by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, price £25
The Beatles pose for a group portrait backstage in 1962, the year of Love Me Do. Photograph: Harry Hammond/V&A Images/Getty
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