Authors: Philip Norman
Shout!
FIRESIDE
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This revised and updated edition first published in Great Britain in 2003 by Sidgwick & Jackson, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd.
This Fireside Edition 2005
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IRESIDE
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We would like to thank Northern Songs Ltd. for the three lines from the LP
Abbey Road
, “The love you take, / Is equal to the love, / You make”; and for the line “All the lonely people” from “Eleanor Rigby.”
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ISBN 0-7432-3565-7
eISBN 978-0-7432-5378-9
John alone seemed to get it right, back in the seventies’ bleary dawn when everyone around him was mourning the end of an era, the disintegration of a movement, the extinction of a culture, the death of a dream. “It’s just a rock group split up,” he said with his usual withering bluntness. “It’s not important.”
And, surely, that’s what it all comes down to in the end. However talented, innovative, famous—magical, even—the Beatles were fundamentally just a rock group that split up
.
Oh, were they?
CONTENTS
Prologue
September 2001: Across the Universe
1: “He was the one I’d waited for”
2: “Quarry Men, strong before our birth”
3: “If I’d just said a few more words, it might have saved her”
4: “The bass drum used to roll away across the stage”
6: “Hi, all you Cavern-dwellers. Welcome to the
best
of cellars”
7: “What brings Mr. Epstein here?”
8: “Elvis’s manager calling Brian Epstein in Birkenhead”
9: “Somebody had to pay for those 10,000 records Brian bought”
10: “Four frenzied Little Lord Fauntleroys earning 5,000 pounds a week”
11: “Even the jelly babies are symbolic”
12: “They’ve got everything over there. What do they want
us
for?”
13: “One more stage, one more limo, one more run for your life”
14: “This is it. This is the last one ever”
15: “I don’t think there was any hope for him since the day he met the Beatles”