Charles Shaar Murray
Before They Were Famous
The Beatles: All These Years, Volume 1 – Tune In
By Mark Lewisohn
Little, Brown 946pp £30 order from our bookshop
Daddy, I can’t sleep. Will you tell me the story of The Beatles?
As any parent who’s ever narrated a bedtime story (and every child who’s ever demanded one) knows, the primary challenge is to provide simultaneous security and novelty: to render the familiar tale both comfortably predictable and stimulatingly fresh. At a time when devotees of popular culture study the oft-recounted histories of Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe as closely as the devout of previous centuries pored over the lives of the saints, what virgin territories could possibly be discovered by yet another retracing of a path as thoroughly trampled as the saga of the Fab Four Moptops from Liverpool who somehow became first the world’s teddy bears, then the world’s gurus and finally the world’s holy fools?
With All These Years – a putative trilogy of which the present burglar-killer is merely the first volume, taking The Beatles’ story up to New Year’s Eve of 1962 – Mark Lewisohn raises the biographical bar to stratospheric heights. His narrative focuses on the gradually developing intersection of four young
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete