It would be churlish to give anything less than five stars to what is an extremely impressive, comprehensive and enjoyable analysis of the Beatles phenomenon, generously sprinkled with laugh-out-loud quotes and observations and some surprising or even jaw-dropping well-I-never connections and revelations
Mr Brown has many tricks up his sleeve to make his old material fresh and interesting for the reader, effectively creating a mosaic—almost a cubist composition—of his subject with short, overlapping chapters, often trying to sculpt an event from wildly varying accounts, casting doubt on the very validity of biography or history as a discipline—or even the veracity of memory. The inclusion of so many angles and approaches does bloat the book a little—including acknowledgements it weighs in at 642 pages—and occasionally the reader might feel that some material perhaps does not quite merit its place, or some literary technique borders on a gimmick. For example, a couple of stories from fans underwhelm and there is a crude piece of satire from Private Eye at its worst, greatly inferior to what Mr Brown himself writes for that organ.
Equally, the forays into alternative universes—what if Gerry and the Pacemakers had been the Merseybeat group which had attracted all the fame, what if Paul had got different O-Level results?—are a little awkward. All but two of the pictures in the book are uncaptioned, but the one of Gerry and the Pacemakers ensures that the chapter is redundant. Into the same category falls an attempt to compare six years of the Queen’s Christmas message to that of the Beatles—a paragraph rather than a chapter would have sufficed.
And while Yoko Ono’s sinister—if in the author’s treatment often hilarious—presence becomes a necessary focus as the group becomes increasingly troubled and its members progressively isolated one can be forgiven for wondering what was happening outside the John-and-Yoko circus—to Ringo, say, or George. Plus, despite the encyclopaedic array of characters associated in time and place with the group, omissions do spring to mind—Kenny Everett, for instance. Finally, on a smaller scale, there are a couple of continuity errors, as well as the odd factual one, as already pointed out by fans.
But the problems that this vast wealth of material throws up are, where it counts, astutely and deftly handled. For example, Brian Epstein’s death is shown to precipitate the Beatles’ demise, creating a vacuum filled by charlatans whose exploitation—both intentional and unintentional—of the lads’ winning, but naïve and even gullible ways, sets a giant question mark over the rest of the work as to why on earth at the height of success Epstein should kill himself? Mr Brown in closing the book cunningly attempts to resolve this enigma with a reverse potted biography of Epstein’s life vis-à-vis his charges, exposing the key issue and at the same time finishing the book satisfyingly with the story with which it began.
My only significant disappointments overall were one that the author could have dealt with—that the book has no index—and one that he could not have. Craig Brown was born a few years too late and in the wrong place to capture in essence the exhilarating, astonishing sense that us older folk in the North felt in the advent of this group, of a lifting, a transformation of a drab world into an optimistic future, a sense that we had been elevated to the very place that the Beatles themselves sought in India later in their all-too-short careers as the world’s most phenomenal musical group.
All this said, at its heart One Two Three Four is a true labour of love, an enormous achievement of genuine literary grandeur and, despite its length, both mesmerizing and unputdownable. It’s been a long time since I read anything quite so engaging.
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Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2020
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Book arrived destroyed
Book arrived with the top right-hand edge of pages sliced right through to page 555. The cut is a clean one, about 5cms in length. Page 555 where the cut ends and minor indentations & nicks on the pages then begin all way through to page 575. A gift for aging parents, to bring back some happy memories - completely ruined.
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 January 2021
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 April 2023
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- Ed HaysomReviewed in Australia on 12 September 2020
One of the Best Books on The Beatles
