"One, Two, Three, Four" by Craig Brown

 A voluminous book about the Beatles. Brown's technique, already displayed in his book One on One,  is to assemble a collage of snippets, offering peeks into events in the history of the Beatles. These include comments from celebrity and non-celebrity fans, Brown's own experiences as a boy growing up to the background of the Beatles, and Brown's notes taken while on tours of National Trust properties linked to the Beatles. There are even some counterfactual pages. This can be quite endearing, and it is easy to read a few of the mostly short chapters and then put the book down, but I found it annoying in the end.

The author is clearly a wordsmith. He spends a great deal of time tracing the provenance of lyrics, sometimes explaining what they mean. He very rarely says anything about the music, except sometimes quoting often pompous musicologists. And yet these lads were, first and foremost, musicians. It seems an enormous blind spot.

Selected quotes:

• "All night parties have become so popular among art students in  Liverpool that partygoers are expected to bring not just a bottle  but also an egg, for breakfast." (Ch 11)
• "Their rooms are a hair's breadth from being en-suite, because the wall is paper thin, and on the other side is a toilet, also used by customers of the cinema." (Ch 13)
• "It gave you some kind of new avenue of sexuality. It could be more cerebral. You didn't have to actually touch the person's acne." (Quoting Chrissie Hynde) (Ch 42)
• "At their first American concert, at the Washington Coliseum, the screaming was so piercing that a police officer was driven to block his ears with bullets." (Ch 51)
• "The first policeman on the scene of the crash [in which Eddie Cochran was killed] was a young cadet called Dave Harman ... he left the police force, changed his name to Dave Dee and formed Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich." (Ch 56, footnote)
• "The song was further filtered through ... the poem 'The Walrus and the Carpenter' ... Beneath its merry rhythm lies a Hannibal Lecterish tale of two exquisite psychopaths." (Ch 105)
• "This wizard was, of course, his new friend 'Magic' Alex Mardas, for whom no job was ever too large to be started or too small to leave unfinished." (Ch 110)
• "Youth thinks itself wise, just as drunk men think themselves sober." (Quoting Anthony Burgess) (Ch 126)

Easy to read but how can one miss out the music?

Shortlisted for the 2020 Waterstones Book of the Year

August 2021; 627 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God