The Beatles might not have been The Beatles without | UK News

When Stuart Maconie was a toddler, his mom took him to see the Beatles carry out at the ABC cinema in Wigan. It was October 1964, two days before Harold Wilson narrowly received the overall election and the start of John, Paul, George and Ringo’s meteoric rise to world stardom. “I have a vague, blurry, impressionistic sense of four guys in black suits and the noise of screaming,” the author and broadcaster tells the Daily Express. “But maybe I’ve embroidered that, having been told the tale down the years.”

He was only 4 years previous to be honest but, nonetheless, for Maconie, now 63, it was the beginning of a deep relationship with Britain’s most well-known band that has endured to this day.

Over the intervening years, this affable Lancastrian has championed myriad kinds of music from soul and various rock to classical and avant-garde. He has written for a number of music magazines and national newspapers, including this one, and has been a presenter and DJ for BBC Radios 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Live and 6 Music. Phew!

But all through it all, the Beatles have been a reassuring fixed in his life. Like many kids of the Sixties, Maconie grew up with the Fab Four as the aural backdrop to his youth. Born in the Merseyside city of Whiston (then Lancashire) in 1961, he was introduced up in Wigan.

He says of the Beatles: “I guess I’m roughly contemporary with them. I was born the week they first went to Hamburg. I saw them aged four. They were the soundtrack to my childhood. I was only a child but I was very aware of them being around. They are woven into the warp and weft of our nation’s story.” Maconie insists he admires all 4 Fabs. “But, just like the girls who screamed at them in the Cavern, you have to have a favourite,” he admits.

In his case, his biggest respect is reserved for McCartney. “I’m very much Team Paul,” he says. “He’s extraordinary – a complete force of nature. I believe he might actually be the most musical human being who has ever lived. People say, ‘Well, what about Mozart or Bach?’ The thing is McCartney writes oratorios and he wrote Helter Skelter. He wrote Yesterday and he writes experimental musique concrete.”

Maconie has met Macca 3 times and seen him play a number of instances as a solo artist. As regards the opposite three, that evening in 1964 is the only time he noticed them stay.

Now he has directed his love and enthusiasm for Liverpool’s most well-known sons into a new e book known as With A Little Help From Their Friends. It’s an intriguing work that focuses not on The Beatles themselves – after all, as its writer admits, more than 2,000 books about them have already been penned – but somewhat on the “kaleidoscopic cast of supporting players” who influenced them and helped form their story. All the apparent characters are included, each given an particular person profile – the close household and pals, their wives and girlfriends, their supervisor Brian Epstein, their producer George Martin, their guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and former band members who fell by the wayside, such as Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best.

But there are also dozens of much less apparent bit-part gamers, without whom the story of the Beatles might nicely have pivoted in a utterly totally different direction. There is Ivan Vaughan, for instance, the mutual buddy who first launched 15-year-old Paul McCartney to 16-year-old John Lennon at the Woolton village fete in the Liverpool suburbs on July 7, 1957, when the Quarrymen have been taking part in. Without him, the Beatles might never have existed at all.

Then there’s Raymond Jones, a Cavern Club common who walked into Brian Epstein’s Liverpool store NEMS in October 1961 and requested for a single known as My Bonnie that a band known as the Beatles had recorded in Hamburg. Every week later, Epstein, his curiosity piqued, visited the Cavern to try the younger band for the first time. There’s also Astrid Kirchherr, the German photographer who was instrumental in creating the distinctive Beatles’ look by persuading them to swap from greased-back Teddy Boy haircuts to distinctive mop tops.

Then there are groupies, roadies, engineers, artists and session musicians. And writers, DJs, PRs, designers, movie administrators, Svengalis and assorted hangers-on. It’s fascinating. Maconie notes how Imelda Marcos, the spouse of the president of the Philippines, formed the band’s future by instructing her henchmen to tough them up after they refused to play a non-public live performance for the notorious couple.

It was an unlucky incident that persuaded them to give up touring, focus on studio work and finally produce the groundbreaking Sgt Pepper album.

Then there’s 15-year-old Marsha Albert, who, before any Beatles songs had hit the airwaves in the US, wrote to her native radio station in Washington DC requesting that the DJ play this new Liverpool band she had heard about. Intrigued, mentioned DJ managed to wangle a copy of I Want To Hold Your Hand from a British flight attendant, taking part in it on rotation. A month later the Beatles have been primary across America.

Maconie could also be a Beatles superfan but not to the detriment of the myriad different musical genres he espouses. Currently he presents reveals on BBC Radio 4 and BBC 6 Music, entertaining his loyal listeners through his deep information and infectious enthusiasm. As a youthful man he performed guitar and sang in a couple of bands – one a punk-pop outfit known as Les Flirts, the opposite the Young Mark Twains. He still has a assortment of guitars in his workplace but performs “purely for fun”.

He now lives with his spouse Eleanor – who for a few years labored in particular faculty training – in a suburb of Birmingham known as Bearwood. He also has properties in Salford, close to the BBC’s Media City, and in north Cumbria. The latter permits him to indulge his different favorite interest – nation strolling.

In his spare time he’ll usually strike out across the Lake District, the northern lakes being his favorite space as there are fewer guests to share the paths with. He has hiked up all 214 Wainwrights – the hills principally above 1,000ft high, named after well-known fell walker Alfred Wainwright.

“I didn’t set out to do it in a macho way but one day I sat down and realised I’d done about 30,” he says. “Then I thought, ‘Why not do them all because that would be a really good way to see all the Lakes?’”

For 5 years Maconie was president of the British strolling charity Ramblers, which campaigns for higher access to the countryside. He hopes that someday England will observe Scotland in guaranteeing the public the precise to roam unfettered, even across privately owned land. “With an enlightened government and enlightened farmers and landowners, I could see that happening,” he says. “After all, ramblers are not going to damage or destroy the land. They’re not that kind of people.”

In between all that climbing, he all the time comes back to the music. He doesn’t own as many vinyl data and CDs as he used to – his assortment sadly depleted by a housebreaking – and he says he’s barely ashamed that just about all the pieces he performs these days is through a streaming platform. But his workplace stays one thing of a shrine to The Beatles.

To analysis his new e book he collated a library of around 100 books on the band and he’s fairly sure his attic still accommodates exhausting copies of all their studio albums. He says he’s not the accumulating sort but, in the age of digital music, some issues are sacrosanct.

“The Beatles’ canon is popular music’s most extraordinary body of work,” he writes in the conclusion to his e book. “For variety, innovation, significance and popularity, nothing and no one can touch it.”

Along with Shakespeare, Premiership soccer, the Royal Family and maybe Harry Potter, the Beatles stay foremost among the nation’s most important cultural exports, reinforcing Britain’s place in the broader world, he insists.

“They are right up there with Shakespeare as an abiding cultural influence. And I say that as someone who loves Shakespeare. The Beatles were the first band to play a stadium, the first to include a lyric sheet, the first to use any number of studio techniques now taken for granted, the first to introduce non-Western instruments into pop, as well as chamber arrangements, feedback, tape loops, music concrete.

“Their influence has been colossal and enduring.” It’s an affect that has formed all of us. None more so than the toddler who first noticed the Beatles at the ABC cinema in Wigan all those years in the past.

• With A Little Help From Their Friends: The Beatles Changed The World. But Who Changed Theirs? by Stuart Maconie, (HarperNorth, £20) is out now