The Beatles in Time
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-01-31

50 years ago last April, Paul McCartney announced the break-up of The Beatles. Craig Brown talks to Richard Williams about his acclaimed book One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in Time which is part biography, part anthropology, part memoir, by turns humorous and serious, elegiac and speculative. It follows the unique “exploded biography” form of his internationally bestselling, Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret.

The Beatles continue to occupy a position unique in popular culture. They have entered people's minds in a way that did not occur before, and has not occurred since. Their influence extended way beyond the realm of music to fashion, politics, class, religion and ethics. Countless books have doggedly catalogued the minutiae of The Beatles. If you want to know the make of George Harrison's first car you will always be able to find the answer (a second hand, two-door, blue Ford Anglia 105E Deluxe, purchased from Brian Epstein's friend Terry Doran, who worked at a dealership in Warrington). Before she met John Lennon, who was the only Beatle Yoko Ono could name, and why? Ringo. Because ‘ringo’ means ‘apple’ in Japanese. All very interesting, but there is, as yet, no book about The Beatles that combines the intriguing minutiae of their day-to-day lives with broader questions about their effect – complicated and fascinating – on the world around them, their contemporaries, and generations to come. Until this one.

About the speakers:

Craig Brown is the author of 19 books, and a prolific journalist. He has been writing his parodic diary in Private Eye since 1989. He is the only person ever to have won three different Press Awards - for best humorist, columnist and critic – in the same year. He has been a columnist for, among others, The Guardian, The Times, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph. He currently writes for The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday. His book, One on One, was translated into 10 languages, and was a New York Times bestseller. Ma'am Darling won the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Award 2018 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography 2018.

Richard Williams is a British music and sports journalist. As a writer, then deputy editor, of the weekly music newspaper Melody Maker, he became an influential commentator on the rise of new forms of rock music at the end of the 1960s. He is The Guardian's chief sports writer and the author of The Last Road Race, Long Distance Call: Writings on Music, The Death of Ayrton Senna and Enzo Ferrari: A Life. His previous jobs include chief sports writer for The Independent, editor of The Independent on Sunday's Review, editor of Time Out and the Melody Maker and head of A&R at Island Records. He has written for Granta, the TLS, Mojo, The Word and many other publications.The list of people he has interviewed include Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis, Curtis Mayfield, Charles Mingus, Smokey Robinson, Ornette Coleman, Chet Baker, Isaac Hayes, Phil Spector, Ry Cooder, Gladys Knight, Lou Reed, Bob Marley, John Lennon, Allen Toussaint, Bruce Springsteen, Stan Getz, Boz Scaggs, Nico and Martha Reeves.