Shouting about The Beatles

I think I was 14 when I got into The Beatles and it didn’t take long before I wanted to find out the story behind this band that made such a weird mix of music. The band who did ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ just couldn’t be the band who made ‘Hey Jude’, right? And, as it happened, a big best-selling biography of the band had just come out. It was Philip Norman’s Shout! The True Story of The Beatles. I devoured it. I must have read it two or three times. It shaped a lot off how I understood their story for a decade.

It was an odd read. I’d always liked Paul’s songs. I mean, I’d liked pretty John and Pal’s songs too, but I’d found his songs extraordinary in their range and memorability and melodic strength. But reading Norman’s book, I discovered that Paul’s songs were meretricious, cheap, sentimental and that Paul himself was only in it for the money, a conniving, manipulative schemer. John, on the other hand, the authentic working-class hero who connected to the avant-garde, was the real creative force behind the music.

It was probably a decade later that I discovered what nonsense Norman’s picture was and later still when he admitted (though it’s so weird an admission, I suspect there’s another deeper motive he’s not yet understood) that he was down on Paul unfairly because he wanted to be Paul.

Anyway, I’m on the excellent Beatles Books podcast - a prolific series of interviews covering books about every aspect of The Beatles - discussing Shout! with the host Joe Wisbey. We try to be even-handed, to acknowledge the book’s strengths, but we also talk about its weaknesses, the datedness of some of its judgments, how its up-and-down-the-mountain narrative forms distorts everything, and the role it played in Paul’s 80s slump.

You can listen here: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-un52d-10a133d