One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time

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They became boyfriend and girlfriend, and Jane’s parents gave Paul his own little bedroom on the top floor of 57 Wimpole Street, next to Jane’s brother Peter’s room. Paul was to live there, as part of the Asher family, for the next three years, his bedroom filling up with the fruits of his extraordinary career: eventually he was to stow his gold records under his bed, and his MBE on a shelf, alongside two drawings by Jean Cocteau. It was at Wimpole Street that Paul received a letter from the Beatles’ accountant in 1965 informing him that, at the age of twenty-three, he had become a millionaire.

The Ashers were a remarkable family in every way: remarkably accomplished, remarkably civilised, remarkably welcoming. At the age of eight, Peter Asher had appeared opposite Claudette Colbert and Jack Hawkins in the film The Planter’s Wife, and at ten, opposite Cecil Parker and Donald Wolfit in Isn’t Life Wonderful. Jane’s younger sister Claire had acted in the BBC’s long-running radio soap opera Mrs Dale’s Diary. Their mother Margaret was a professor at the Guildhall: back in 1948 she had tutored George Martin in the oboe.

Just like Paul fifteen years later, Martin had relished his visits to the Asher home, with all its comfort and erudition. Despite his upper-class persona (the legacy of wartime service with the RAF, during which ‘we were taught important military details like how to hold a knife and fork correctly’) he had been brought up in a three-room flat in Drayton Park with no kitchen, no bathroom and a toilet shared with three other families. Coming from such an impoverished background, he had been tantalised by the glimpse of a more agreeable life offered by the Ashers of Wimpole Street. And now, Paul, in his turn, was to be tantalised. Everything seemed touched by culture. In the hall of no. 57 hung an engraved portrait of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a distant relative of Margaret Asher; the glass-fronted bookcase in the dining room contained a rare 1926 first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, brought into the family by Margaret’s father, the Hon. Edward Granville Eliot, who had been Lawrence of Arabia’s solicitor.

Jane’s father, Dr Richard Asher, was a pioneering endocrinologist who in 1951 had named and identified Munchausen’s Syndrome, the mental disorder that drives individuals to fabricate symptoms of illness. He was also a skilled and witty writer: an article by him in the Lancet in February 1951 begins: ‘Here is described a common syndrome which most doctors have seen, but about which little has been written. Like the famous Baron von Munchausen, the persons affected have always travelled widely; and their stories, like those attributed to him, are both dramatic and untruthful. Accordingly, the syndrome is respectfully dedicated to the Baron, and named after him.’ Inevitably, the title ‘Munchausen’s Syndrome’ was criticised by the po-faced for being inappropriately light-hearted.

Dr Asher’s articles in the British Medical Journal remain a joy to read – funny, alert, aphoristic, self-deprecatory, sparklingly clear – and they indicate the breadth of education Paul would have received in his conversations with him. In ‘The Dangers of Going to Bed’, Asher argues against the medical consensus that staying in bed was the surest route to recovery: ‘Look at a patient lying long in bed. What a pathetic picture he makes! The blood clotting in his veins, the lime draining from his bones, the scybala stacking up in his colon, the flesh rotting from his seat, the urine leaking from his distended bladder, and the spirit evaporating from his soul.’ He then undercuts himself by saying, ‘I have painted a gloomy and unfair picture: it is not as bad as all that.’ Later in the same article, he speculated as to the reasons why confinement caught on: ‘Too often a sister puts all her patients back to bed as a housewife puts all her plates back in the plate-rack – to make a generally tidy appearance.’

Another of his articles in the BMJ, carrying the incendiary title ‘Why are Medical Journals so Dull?’, argues against stodginess and obscurity in favour of lucidity and precision: ‘A poor title dulls the clinical appetite, whereas a good title whets it. I have called this article “Why are Medical Journals so Dull?”. I do not claim this title is specially good, but it is better than “A Study of the Negativistic Psychomotor Reactions induced by Perusal of Verbalized Clinical Material”.’

It’s easy to see how Paul would have revelled in such cheery cut-and-thrust. The whole Asher family involved themselves in discussions around the table, alive with erudition and curiosity and fun. ‘They would do things that I’d never seen before, like at dinner there would be word games,’ Paul told Barry Miles. ‘Now, I’m bright enough, but mine is an intuitive brightness. I could just about keep up with that, and I could always say, “I don’t know that word.”’ He remembered an argument over dinner between Dr Asher and his son Peter, Paul’s contemporary, over when the tomato was first introduced to England. This was not the sort of topic they discussed in Forthlin Road. Throughout his years with the Ashers, Paul was treated not as a pop star, but as one of the family: ‘It was very good for me, because in their eyes I wasn’t just the Beatle.’ The atmosphere at Wimpole Street also appealed to his competitive spirit: ‘I often felt the guys were sort of partying, whereas I was learning a lot; learning an awful lot.’ In her music room in the basement, Margaret Asher taught Paul how to play the recorder – he plays it on ‘Fool on the Hill’ – though her attempts to teach him how to read music were soon abandoned.

His intellectual curiosity was stimulated. ‘I don’t want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on, but I’m trying to cram everything in, all the things I’ve missed,’ he told the journalist Maureen Cleave in 1966. ‘People are saying things and painting things that are great, and I must know what people are doing … I vaguely mind people knowing anything I don’t know.’ He read Jung and Huxley, watched plays by Alfred Jarry and Harold Pinter and listened to avant-garde composers like Stockhausen and Luciano Berio.

Sometimes Jane would take Paul to stay with family friends out of town. ‘This was another rather upper-class thing: going for the weekend to the country … It was the first time I’d seen people leaving a book by your bedside for you to read. I was quite impressed by their choice of books. It was the assumption that you were reasonably intelligent that I liked. They didn’t talk down.’

John Downing/Stringer

Inevitably, Beatles fans would linger outside the house, ready to pounce. While Paul was away filming Help!, Jane’s father set himself the task of plotting an escape route for him. He climbed out of a back window and scaled his way along to the house next door, then tapped on a window to explain Paul’s peculiar problem to the occupier of the neighbouring flat. On Paul’s return to London, Dr Asher was thus able to present him with a secret route through to New Cavendish Street. ‘I used to go out of the window of my garret bedroom, onto a little parapet. You had to be pretty careful, it wasn’t that wide, it was only a foot or so, so you had to have something of a head for heights. You’d go along to the right, which was to the next house in Wimpole Street, number 56, and there was a colonel living there, an old ex-army gentleman. He had this little top-floor flat, and he was very charming. “Uh! Coming through, Colonel!” “Oh, oh, OK, hush-hush and all that!” and he’d see me into the lift and I’d go right downstairs to the basement of that house. There was a young couple living down there and they’d see me out through the kitchen and into the garage.’

If I could be any Beatle, at any time, I would be Paul in his Wimpole Street years, living with Jane, cosseted by her family, blessed by luck, happy with life, alive to culture, adored by the world, and with wonderful songs flowing, as if by magic, from my brain and out through the piano: ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘I’m Looking Through You’, ‘The Things We Said Today’, ‘And I Love Her’, ‘We Can Work it Out’, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘Yesterday’.

But nothing lasts. On Christmas Day 1967, Paul and Jane announced their engagement; seven months later, in reply to a chance question from the TV chat-show host Simon Dee, Jane announced that it was all over: ‘I haven’t broken it off, but it is broken off, finished. I know it sounds corny, but we still see each other and love each other, but it hasn’t worked out. Perhaps we’ll be childhood sweethearts and meet again when we’re about seventy.’

Over fifty years on, they both remain discreet about the break-up, speaking about it in nothing but the most general terms, leaving others to speculate. Some suggest Jane caught Paul in bed with an American woman called Francie Schwartz.1 While Jane was away acting, Paul and Francie had been together in his new house in St John’s Wood. ‘There were fans waiting at the gate as usual and they tried to warn Paul that Jane was approaching. But Paul thought they were joking,’ recalled Alistair Taylor. According to Taylor, Jane broke up with Paul, rather than vice-versa, and refused to take him back. Though Paul, a master of self-possession, has said ‘I don’t remember the break-up as traumatic really,’ and ‘I got cold feet,’ elsewhere he has admitted, ‘It was shattering to be without her.’ Others remember the shock he suffered. Taylor, who thought Jane ‘the most adorable woman you could expect to meet’, recalled Paul being ‘absolutely devastated … he went completely off the rails. “I had everything and I threw it away,” he would say.’ His hairdresser, Leslie Cavendish, noted that ‘he seemed heartbroken to me. He’d stopped shaving his beard, hardly ever left the house and began taking more drugs.’

One or two of their acquaintances claim to have seen it coming. Marianne Faithfull never felt they were a natural fit: ‘I always thought Jane and Paul were very tense. I do remember very clearly an evening at Cavendish Avenue where she wanted the window shut and he wanted the window open. That really was like a Joe Orton play. It was fucking great. I sat there all night watching Jane get up and close it, and Paul open it, and … nothing was said. And quite soon after they split up, which of course I could have told anyone they would.’ But she fails to offer a reason why Jane would have wanted the window open. Might it have been to release the fumes of marijuana that were the necessary accompaniment to any visit by Mick and Marianne?

1 Who later wrote a kiss-and-tell book called Body Count.

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Before going onstage at the Majestic Ballroom, Newcastle upon Tyne, John and Paul seized the time to write a song.

On 26 June 1963 the two of them were sharing a twin-bedded room at the Royal Turk’s Head Hotel.1 Paul reached for his cigarettes. ‘We must have had a few hours before the show, so we said, “Oh, great! Let’s have a ciggy and write a song!”’

The lyrics of their previous singles – ‘Love Me Do’, ‘Please Please Me’, ‘From Me to You’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ – all revolved around a single person, but Paul now resolved to do something different.

‘It was Paul’s idea,’ recalled John. ‘Instead of singing “I love you”, we’d have a third party.’ This signalled the way their different approaches to songwriting were to develop: Paul’s towards a third-person narrative, rather like a miniature short story, and John’s more autobiographical.

You think you’ve lost your love

Well I saw her yesterday-ay

One young man is talking to another about a girl who may or may not have left him. The two men are, consciously or unconsciously, versions of the two composers – Paul optimistic, self-confident, never short of advice, and John, primed to cause hurt – ‘she said you hurt her so’ – while in retreat from his own sense of guilt. Like so many subsequent Lennon/McCartney songs, its energy comes from this intermingling of the dark and the sunny.

The Beatles had the next day free, so John and Paul went back to Liverpool. This gave them the chance to complete their new song in Forthlin Road, while Paul’s dad Jim sat in the next room, smoking and watching television.

At this stage John and Paul were both magpies, lifting whatever took their fancy from other people’s songs: the ‘woo woo’ came from the Isley Brothers’ ‘Twist and Shout’. John, in particular, was fond of these whoops and hollers, noises below or beyond words: when he heard Elvis Presley singing ‘All Shook Up’, his first thought was that he had never heard ‘uh huh’, ‘oh yeah’ and ‘yeah, yeah’ all in the same song before.

After a while, the two of them burst into the living room. ‘Dad, listen to this. What do you think?’ Then they sang him their new song: ‘She Loves You’.

‘That’s very nice, son,’ said Jim, one of the old school. ‘But there’s enough of these Americanisms around. Couldn’t you sing, “She loves you, yes, yes, yes”?’ John and Paul failed to take this advice seriously. ‘We collapsed in a heap and said, “No, Dad, you don’t quite get it.”’

Four days later, the Beatles went to the EMI studios in Abbey Road to record their new song. They arrived early, in order to pose for a new set of pictures in the alleyway behind the studio. By now, wherever they went they were attracting fans. One thing led to another: the fans who were already waiting outside telephoned their friends to tip them off, and those friends told more friends, and so forth. Before long, this mass of girls somehow managed to break through the front door and to rush around the building in search of their idols. ‘It’s a bloody madhouse out there,’ said Neil Aspinall as he entered the studio.

Meanwhile, placing the song sheets on the music stands, the EMI recording engineer Norman Smith2 glanced at the lyrics. ‘I thought, “I’ll just have a quick look. ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah; She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah; She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.’” I thought, “Oh my God, what a lyric. This is going to be one that I do not like.”’

George Martin, calm as ever, ran John and Paul through their new song, with George Harrison joining in on the choruses. ‘I thought it was great, but was intrigued by the final chord, an odd sort of major sixth, with George doing the sixth and John and Paul the third and fifths, like a Glenn Miller arrangement. They were saying, “It’s a great chord! Nobody’s ever heard it before!” Of course, that wasn’t quite true.’

In fact, much of John and Paul’s early inventiveness as songwriters sprang from a kind of blissful ignorance. Neither could read music, or had ever had formal lessons. This meant they tended to come across chords by chance. Their early songs reflect the innocent wonder with which they chanced upon the source of all music, as if for the very first time.

With the marauding fans dispersed from the building, the recording session could begin. It occurred to recording engineer Geoff Emerick that the excitement generated by the invading fans helped to spark a new level of energy and invention in the band’s playing, not least from Ringo and George. Hearing the song performed, Norman Smith, having been sceptical, immediately got the point of it: ‘When they started to sing it – bang, wow, terrific. I was up at the mixer jogging around.’

Emerick, too, was enthralled: ‘There was a level of intensity in that performance that I had not heard before and have rarely heard since. I still judge that single to be one of the most exciting performances of the Beatles’ entire career.’

‘She Loves You’ was released on 23 August 1963. Within a month it had sold three quarters of a million copies in Britain, making it the fastest-selling record ever. It was to remain in the top three for eighteen weeks, and in the charts for thirty-one weeks. For many, fans and foes alike, it remains the quintessential Beatles song. The words to which Jim McCartney had objected – Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! – have become emblematic of the Beatles phenomenon: either callow and inarticulate, or fresh and liberating, depending on your outlook. In Europe, the Beatles were commonly referred to as ‘the Yeah-Yeahs’.

For conservatives who preferred the world to stay the same, ‘She Loves You’ acted as an alarm call; for Marxists, it symbolised Western decadence. ‘Is it truly the case that we have to copy all the dirt that comes from the West?’ asked the East German leader Walter Ulbricht in a speech to his party. ‘I think, Comrades, with the monotony of the yeah yeah yeah or whatever it is called we should make a stop.’

For once, America was slow to pick up on a new trend. Released in the States on 16 September, ‘She Loves You’ sold barely a thousand copies in its first few weeks, and failed to hit the charts. At the cutting-edge Café Wha? in Greenwich Village, the hard-boiled folk singer Steve De Naut first heard it in October. His then girlfriend, Vicky Tiel, remembers him marching into her apartment and – ‘Listen to this, baby’ – placing it on the record player. ‘Steve and I started to make love. At the point where it changes beats, he stopped in the middle of having sex. “Listen to this!” he said. The music went down to another beat. He said, “Nobody fucking does that! That’s no! And the ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’? That’s fucking no! Nobody does that!”’

Vicky couldn’t understand what Steve was getting at. ‘It’s a new type of music,’ he explained. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it. And it’s fantastic.’ He then added, more despondently: ‘I’m finished. It’s over. It’s over for all of us.’

1 Later renamed the Rainbow.

2 While working at EMI, Norman Smith (1923–2008) produced Pink Floyd’s ‘See Emily Play’, as well as their first four albums. He later became briefly famous as the gravelly-voiced Hurricane Smith, whose single ‘Don’t Let it Die’ reached number 2 in the charts in 1971.

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John Lennon and Ringo Starr were born in 1940, when the words blitz, paratroops, call-up and quisling came into being, as well as the verb to scramble in its new meaning of ‘to make a speedy take-off’.

Other neologisms of 1940 heralded a bold new unstuffy age of American goods and trends: beefburger, crew-cut, holiday camp, mobile home, nylons, telly, super-duper, youth club. Many were born of inventions: jeep, plutonium, radar. Some, like telly, were chummy abbreviations for recent inventions now so widespread that they felt like old friends. Others, like extra-sensory perception, emerged from a closer study of what had always been there, or – viewed from another angle – what had always been not there.

The following year, 1941, the term welfare state was coined, as were disc jockey, boogie, cheesed-off, Terylene, sunbathe, straight, in its meaning of ‘conformist’, and knockers meaning breasts. It was also in this year – the year between the births of John and Paul – that the word teenager made its first appearance.

Paul McCartney was born in 1942, when spaceman, office block, napalm and sixty-four-dollar question first appeared, along with the abbreviations PR and preggers. George, the youngest Beatle, was born in 1943, when bobby socks, disposable, paper towel, pizzeria, double glazing and falsies were coined. Squarebashing also made its debut that year, and, perhaps as a sort of cosmic counterbalance, so did group therapy and free expression. In England, Barnes Wallis invented the bouncing bomb, and in Switzerland, Dr Albert Hofmann combined Lysergic Acid with Diethylamine to create Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, later to become known as LSD.

Most people date the origin of the Beatles to 1957, when the fifteen-year-old Paul introduced himself to the sixteen-year-old John. Many of that year’s new words and expressions were centred around youth: Frisbee, skiffle, sexpot, scooter, pop art, bonkers, backlash, Hell’s Angel, flick knife, diminished responsibility, consenting adult, role model, angry young man. A long-playing record began to be known as an album. In the USA, female traffic wardens were nicknamed meter maids. The adjective fab, an abbreviation of fabulous, was first heard that year, though it wasn’t to become widespread until 1963, more often than not preceding the number four.

It was also in 1963 that another word associated with the Fab Four came into being. On 5 October 1963 a young concert promoter called Andi Lothian was in Glasgow’s Carnegie Hall when onto the stage came the young group he had booked. For him, the audience reaction called to mind the relief of Mafeking: ‘absolute pandemonium. Girls fainting, screaming, wet seats. The whole hall went into some kind of state, almost like collective hypnotism.’ Amidst the mayhem, a startled reporter from Radio Scotland yelled, ‘For God’s sake, Andi, what’s happening?’ From out of nowhere, a new word popped into his head. ‘Don’t worry,’ he yelled back, ‘It’s only … Beatlemania!’