Most of my choices are peripheral works, illuminating a specific era or personality. (In Bob Spitz’s the Beatles, for example, teenage John Lennon learns of his mother Julia’s tragic death from police arriving by “squadcar”, whereas in late-50s Liverpool it would just have been a lone copper on a bike.) One reason is that they’re often by American authors who combine greilnicking with laughable ignorance of British culture. In listing my top 10 Beatles books, I’ve omitted most of the best-known “full” biographies. To me, their combined surnames suggests a new verb, “to greilnick” - i.e., churn out leaden paragraphs overstuffed with show-offy facts, yet be unable to create a compelling narrative or convey character or atmosphere. In the US, by contrast, it’s taken far too seriously, with the earnest, plodding pair Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick vying for supremacy in the field. In Britain, writing about rock music still isn’t really taken seriously - and, by and large, doesn’t deserve to be. The second, long-term burden is becoming classified as a “rock biographer”. My new biography of Paul McCartney was full of revelations about his life, in and after the Beatles, yet from many quarters still brought that resentful chorus of “nothing new here”. I’ve noticed that many of these self-appointed sages hate to hear something about the subject that they don’t already know. The first is that almost everyone considers themselves an expert on what the band’s publicist Derek Taylor called “the 20th century’s greatest romance”. Writing about the Beatles has saddled me with two heavy burdens.
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