Beatles fans Arthur Macfarlane (left) and Martin Bartlett, who appears in the book, with me at the Beatles Day launch event in Bournemouth in September. Photo by Richard Crease, Daily Echo
People keep asking me, so how did I come to write a book about The
Beatles? After all, it’s not like there’s any shortage of Beatles books, many of them
written by people far more qualified to do so than me. But the thing with The
Beatles, more than any band before or since, is their music belongs to all of
us.
Nearly 50 years after they released their first single, The
Beatles’ music is almost part of human DNA, something that connects young and
old alike across national boundaries, a shared consciousness. Man.
Which is a roundabout way of explaining how The Beatles left
their mark on my tender ears growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s in the village of Stoborough on the Isle of Purbeck in South Dorset, at least hundreds of miles away from anywhere to do with The Beatles. Or so
I thought.
I don’t know why dad and mum had three Beatles' singles in
the radiogram because they weren’t fans, but those records constitute my
earliest musical memories. I used to tape a hairbrush to the Ewbank carpet
cleaner and sang along to I Want To Hold
Your Hand, I Feel Fine and Can’t Buy Me Love so many times I still
know the words by heart.
All through the punk rock wars and into my immersion in the
Mod revival, those songs stayed with me. They were there when I was dancing to
Northern Soul all night and right at home next to later passions like The Stone
Roses. By the time their mix of classic guitar pop and dance music’s
sensibilities had morphed into Britpop I was less concerned with music of the
moment and far happier in the broad church of sound to which The Beatles
ministered.
(It’s worth noting that childhood exposure to The Beatles
also instilled in me a healthy distrust of heavy metal and it’s bratty American
cousin, grunge. I Hate Myself and Want To
Die? Not round our way, Kurt!)
And so to Yeah Yeah
Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth…
I first heard stories about Beatles’ concerts as a kid. They
always seemed to be told by hairy hippy types with acoustic guitars and too
many folk records who had ‘grown out of all that’, but when pressed would
reveal they had such tremendous fun. By the time I heard the first Clash album
I already knew about The Beatles playing in Bournemouth so when Clash fans
rioted in the Winter Gardens in 1977 and the town’s burghers called for punk
rock to be banned, I knew it couldn’t have been much worse than Beatles fans
wetting the seats more than a decade earlier.
I was further tantalised a few years later when an old boy
on Wareham Quay correctly spotted the Beatles reference in the Nelson cap I was
sporting on top of my teenage Mod regalia and told me John Lennon had a drink
in the Quay Inn one night. He couldn’t add to the story, didn’t talk to the
Beatle, just noticed he’d come in the pub. A few months later I got up to go to
school and dad told me John Lennon had been shot dead. That made me sad.
And ever since then I’ve never been far from a Beatles story
with a Dorset connection. There’s the waterside home John Lennon bought his
beloved aunt Mimi at Sandbanks, the instantly recognisable half-shadow cover
shot for With The Beatles that was
taken in the Palace Court Hotel in Bournemouth, George Harrison writing his
first song in the same hotel, American newsreel footage of the Winter Gardens
concert, people who met The Beatles and McCartney’s ex-Wings-man, sax player
Howie Casey who was there the first time John, Paul and George played as the
Silver Beetles. He said they were rubbish, but when they joined him in the
fleshpots of Hamburg a few months later they were well on their way to becoming
the greatest band the world has ever known.
The stories mounted up, my interest only grew, but was I
alone? Who else could share this passion for the improbable links between The
Beatles and Bournemouth?
The die was finally cast when, after more than 20
years plying my trade in regional journalism, I was granted access to a cache
of rare and previously unpublished photographs of The Beatles taken in
Bournemouth.
What else could I do but start writing?
- Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth is available
now from www.beatlesandbournemouth.com
- An exhibition of rare and previously unseen photographs from the book can be seen at the Central Library in Bournemouth until 18 January. Copies of selected prints from the book can be bought here.
