A parcel arrives, the delivery driver expertly posts it through the letterbox and it plops to the floor. I knew it was coming today because I’ve been following its progress on the delivery company’s website and I am incredibly excited, as much as, if not more so, than a young child on Christmas morning. It’s my birthday present to myself: a brand new, just published paperback book, said to be one of the best and probably last great books about The Beatles. It’s called ‘John & Paul. A love story in songs.’
The Beatles split up in April 1970 and you might think there would be nothing left to learn about the band. Innumerable books have been written about the band as a collective and the individual members. Some have been better than others, few have dared tread a different path, but from what just about everyone who has read the book tells me, this book is genuinely different. It tells the story of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting partnership and how they produced the greatest body of work in the history of popular music.
My introduction to the band was in 1964 when I first heard She Loves You. My lone parent mum was negotiating through our life of poverty, passing up her own meals so that I never went hungry and her seven year old son was desperate to own a 7″ single of the song. Once I had heard it, I never stopped singing it. In the end, she went out and bought it for me and I played it to death. I shiver when I wonder whether that meant another meal skipped but, I suppose, love for your child cannot be measured by logic alone.
My Auntie Gladys, who wasn’t an auntie at all (it was common in the 1960s to call people uncle and auntie, even though they weren’t related), had quite a singles which she played on her record player for me when my mum took us to visit her. I would sit for hours, watching the singles fall from the spindle, on to the turntable and I would wallow in the music. My favourite song before The Beatles shook the world was Sidesaddle by the Bristolian piano man Russ Conway. We had a record player, too, but no records, just my dad’s jazz LPs. I wasn’t quite ready for Kenny Ball, Chris Barber and Acker Bilk so it remained unused until She Loves You, and later in 1964 The Rolling Stones’ Not Fade Away, came along.
I don’t remember much about my childhood, which is either because it was so crap I’ve shut out the worst bits or because there was nothing much to remember. It’s probably somewhere in the middle but the most exciting bits remain totally fresh in my mind, like sitting in our front room to hear She Loves You. I felt the same frisson on Christmas Day 1964 when I removed the wrapping from my main Christmas present, an actual LP, my first, called A Hard Day’s Night. Beatlemania utterly consumed me and while we were unable to afford any more Beatles music in the 1960s, I was utterly smitten. Today, I am more smitten than ever.
Today’s book delivery was the most excited I had felt since Christmas Day 2025 when I received The Beatles Anthology 4, a boxset of remixes and out takes. The Fab Four keep doing it to me. Fashion comes and fashion goes, but The Beatles are always there.
As the legendary drummer Joe Vitale, who was touring with Crosby, Stills and Nash, told me, “Without The Beatles, none of us would be here.” Even if you don’t like The Beatles – and I find it impossible to understand how people couldn’t – you have to acknowledge the simple truth that they were pivotal to the evolution of rock music. To me, The Beatles are underrated.
I keep gazing, lovingly, at my new book. I want to start reading it straight away although I can’t because I’m in the late stages of another book and it will have to wait. I love the smell and the feel of a brand new book, as I love the having my own physical copy of a record. Little things please little minds, eh?
And Happy Birthday to me. I’ve absolutely smashed it buying myself this wonderful present and I thank myself very much. It’s better to give than receive, although I might make an exception to that rule today.
