Realising this, their producer and collaborator, George Martin, apparently persuaded them to begin 'She Loves You' with its bombarding drum-led chorus, the roaring noise which inaugurated Beatlemania.Īt first the Lennon and McCartney lyrics didn't pretend to be anything other than hip phrases arranged in some make-do intuitive sequence for immediate emotional impact - a kind of cleaned-up Teddy Boy delirium. Nothing mattered except the mood of screaming, head-shaking, hair-waving, tight-harmonised ecstasy, the gleaming, electric vibrancy of the sound. Their first chart hits were almost completely atmospheric. To start with, the Beatles simply revamped the old formulas. The 1950s rock'n'rollers - even Elvis and Buddy Holly, their two most important predecessors - had lived in the moment and traded in off-the-peg emotion. Quite early on, probably at a musically instinctual rather than intellectual level, they understood that rock'n'roll needed to be more than just a combination of rhythm and sensuality, sex and sass. Underneath their playful, prodigious musical sophistication there lay a fundamental simplicity of feeling, a lightly worn but profound emotional eloquence that represented a broadening of the whole psychological palette of popular song. Mainstream rock music as we understand it today is still largely what the Beatles created between 19. It seems false not because it is necessarily untrue factually, but because it isn't true to our collective emotional memories. The story is told at too low a psychological temperature to be convincing. The intense, drug-accentuated extremes of love, ambition, self-interest, boredom, anger and outright hatred which other more readable accounts have evoked dwindle here into a careful, guarded hindsight.

The result has the official-imprimatur feel of an extended South Bank Show special without any complementary sense of inquisition or revelation. Paul, George and Ringo give their own accounts of what they did and said at the time and therefore of what they believe that the Beatles were all about, while the voice of John Lennon speaks as best it can from the accumulated garble of old press and television interviews. Sumptuously produced, with satin-smooth, psychedelic page layouts and rare, deep-saturated colour photos, but also bloated and, often, irritatingly digressive, it really isn't much more than a long-overdue fan-magazine souvenir issue, an astute retrospective commercial cash-in on a phenomenon which, if it was going to receive this sort of autobiographical attention, deserved it a quarter of a century ago. It is a pity The Beatles Anthology isn't a more exciting book.

The beatles anthology paperback