The beat goes on

DECEMBER 1965. A young Northern Echo reporter waits backstage at Newcastle City Hall for an audience with The Beatles, the biggest thing in the music industry at that time.

After standing for 20 minutes on a stairway and sweet-talking the Fab Four’s press officer, he’s ushered into the presence of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

He asks them questions. Paul throws him his bass guitar. John speaks about his books, Ringo about film scripts. George continues to watch The Avengers on the TV in the dressing room.

The story appeared in The Northern Echo under the headline How I Won My Audience Of The Beatles.

Reporter Philip Norman didn’t know at the time that the Newcastle date would be part of their final UK tour. But it was only the start of his relationship with the Beatles that led him to write what’s widely regarded as the best Beatles biography, Shout!, and now the definitive biography of John Lennon.

Talking to him, it’s clear that there’s not much he doesn’t know about the foursome. The Lennon biography is a 817-page doorstop of a book that’s been praised as “beautifully written and acutely perceptive”.

It all began back on that night in Newcastle when he was thrown out of their dressing room after 20 minutes of chat.

“McCartney was his usual charming self, I asked about his bass guitar and he threw it to me to see how cheap it was. He said he was a skinflint,” he recalls. “I talked to John and Ringo, and then Paul. George was very aloof, watching the TV.”

There were signs that all wasn’t well among the foursome. “The writing was on the wall for them as a band. Lennon was very resentful of what he had to go through. He called out something very mocking from the car and was very clearly in a sour humour,” says Norman.

He watched them on stage from the wings but couldn’t hear a note because of screaming fans.

He saw Lennon slam down his hands on the keyboard out of frustration.

Norman got the job of interviewing them because the two older journalists in the Newcastle office were more concerned with selling lineage stories than anything. “I was allowed to do everything else,” he says.

Meeting the Beatles was something everyone wanted to do. “They really did dominate the pop culture of Britain, despite all the other people that had come along,” he says.

“It was like national pride when they went to America in ’64. It was like Neville Chamberlain flying off to negotiate with Hitler, only they were more successful. It was the same feeling of pride as in the England team.

“You didn’t have to qualify as a fan because everything they did was another big leap forward in originality. The Stones were the only ones competing with them.

“Of course, everyone thought they were lucky to be The Beatles and that they had a wonderful time. We now know they had a horrible time in many ways.”

He got involved with them again while working for The Sunday Times Magazine and the London edition of US publication, Show. Amid rumours that The Beatles were breaking up, he was assigned to “hang around” the Apple headquarters.

One day he was allowed to see John and Yoko’s office and find out about their work.

“They were like a helpline and everyone came to them for help. They would sit, looking like monarchy, dispensing charity.”

He wrote his Beatles book Shout! The True Story Of The Beatles when the Sunday Times was shut down for a year because of union problems.

“I thought I’ll do a biography that’s guaranteed to get most interest,” he says.

Writing Shout! was not without difficulties as The Beatles “were in denial” and never talked about the band. Then John reappeared out of retirement and he tried to get to talk to him. Two weeks later Lennon was shot.

He returned to Lennon because, although many books with his name in the title have been published, he felt a real biography hadn’t been written. “I felt John Lennon had to be brought to life on the page like he’s still a presence in the world. It was a literary biography of interest to the general reader not just fans.”

He’s spent the past five years researching and writing. He’d spoken to a lot of people for Shout!

and become friends with many of them. He was in contact with Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, whom he’d met around the time Shout! was published.

“She saw me on TV in America and invited me over to the apartment. It was only five months after John’s death, so the apartment was exactly like he left it,” he says.

She was still frank about her and Lennon.

“She really spills the beans about the relationship with John, and she’s strangely like John. If you ask her, she will tell you anything,” says Norman.

He sees his book as a positive and affectionate portrait but clear-sighted about Lennon’s flaws. “He’s such a complex character. There’s so much to love about John and commiserate with John about. You realise the most successful, most talented people can be insecure.”

He doesn’t know how McCartney will react to the book, especially if he’s only read the tabloid stories – John Had Gay Lust For Paul – in advance of publication. That isn’t what the book says, he maintains. Lennon believed in trying everything and focused on McCartney, although looking was as far as it went.

He can’t say if this is the end of his association with The Beatles. He’s also written biographies of the Rolling Stones, Buddy Holly and Elton John, seeing them as all part of the same story.

Norman also saw the Stones during his time on The Northern Echo and then its sister paper, the Evening Despatch. The ABC Stockton was a regular venue for live gigs by chart groups, which he reported on for the Despatch’s Teenage Special supplement.

His next project continues the musical theme, a stage musical based on the life of Neil Sedaka.

For Norman, the beat goes on.

■ John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman (HarperCollins, £25)