Centre piece
Passing the torch
Colin Welch
Mrs McCartney, wife of the dis- tinguished composer and retired Beatle Paul, has sent a giant hamper from Fortnum's to the Greenham ladies. It con- tained champagne, vol au vent, stuffed vegetables, chocolate cake and delicacies (no dope is reported), also a message: 'You are doing a great job! Keep it up and don't give up. Love and kisses, Linda McCart- ney'. Whether the goodies were well chosen or not depends, I suppose, on whether the Greenham ladies actually like the, weird messes on which they normally feed. That Mrs McCartney can afford to be munificent is beyond doubt. Her husband was hailed by Tony Palmer (though more distinguish- ed critics made bigger fools of themselves at the time) as the greatest songwriter since Schubert. This judgment incidentally made him the superior of such lesser tune-smiths as Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, R. Strauss, Reger, Debussy, Faure, Hahn, Duparc, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and others, not to mention innumerable composers of opera and operetta, all so far as I know ac- tually able to write music, an accomplish- ment never attained by Lennon and only relatively recently by McCartney. Whatever his merits, he is certainly the richest songwriter in his own lifetime. The Guin- ness Book of Records places him, with a fortune of $500 million, as the most com- mercially successful musician in history.
Handsome in itself, Mrs McCartney's gesture has a certain peculiar resonance, as of a solemn bequest made by one genera- tion of fools to another, a benediction, a torch or ignis fatuus handed on, an inex- tinguishable Olympic flame of simple wishful silliness. She can rest in peace, knowing that a little of the spirit of her own wild and wayward decade is alive and well and living at Greenham. The Beatles were already much in my mind at that moment. I have just finished the excellent book about them by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, The Love You Make: an Insider's Story of the Beatles (Macmillan, and exceptional value at £8.95). The authors boast, and I'm sure Justly, that no other book on the subject has been so frank and outspoken. They describe how Hunter Davies's book was literally pulled to bits by the Beatles, whole Pages torn out to excise 'curse words', to tone down drug abuse and delete references to such unsavoury topics as homosexuality, venereal disease and illegitimate children. The Beatles now appear before us warts and all, and emerge from the scrutiny looking not much better than the Metropolitan Police.
I can't in honesty say that the book came as a stupendous revelation to me. Rather.
was it confirmation of what I and other in- fidels had always suspected or sensed behind the glittering facade. It will be a revelation only to those who saw in the Beatles and still retain a seductive vision of youthful innocence and charm, powerfully attracting not only the young but some of their deluded elders. It is astonishing and to me shameful to recall how at their over- crowded concerts, at which the audience shrieked so loudly that not a note could normally be heard, applications for tickets poured in from VIPs, senior government officials and politicians, royal bigwigs and people eminent in 'the arts'.
It is tempting to imagine that the Beatles deluded almost everyone, young and old alike; tempting but not, I think, true. They deluded some of their elders, who probably wanted to be deluded, and who showered them with honours and invitations, often received with ill grace. Yes, it is true that they smoked a reefer in Buckingham Palace when they went to collect their MBEs, and had even brought one along for Prince Charles. Lennon thought his MBE better deserved than those returned in disgust by retired soldiers, which had been won for 'killing people'.
At a Washington embassy party they in- sulted and humiliated our ambassador, then David Ormsby-Gore, by giving him their names all wrong (I'm not John,' said John. 'I'm Charlie. That's John.'), by refusing to sign autographs and behaving with a graceless pomposity common in parvenus. The Beatles book is full of like warnings that those who lick the boots or worse of the unworthy are likely to gain nothing thereby but a dirty tongue. An exception must be made here for Sir Joseph Lockwood, boss of EMI, who must have made a bomb out of the Beatles. This 'loyal friend', seemingly good for a million or two on request, is perhaps the most drably incongruous of the Beatles' en- tourage. He was a former flour miller (flour power?), director of an engineering works as of practically everything else under the sun, including various respectable quangoes, the Royal Ballet School, Arts Council and the like, author of a book stirr- ingly titled Provender Milling — the Manufacture of Feeding Stuffs for Animals.
He appears to have stood in relation to the Beatles much as the elder Verkhovensky stood to Dostoyevsky's Devils, or perhaps
as Lafayette to the masses. Heine describes the latter as resembling, in his dealings with the mob, 'the tutor who accompanied the pupil in his charge to brothels lest he get drunk, to pubs that he should not gamble, to gaming houses lest he should duel and who when it came to a duel good and pro- per, acted as his second'.
When Lennon was 'busted' for having marijuana (a tip-off had enabled him to rid his house of all heroin), Sir John was urgently beseeched to 'use his political in- fluence and connections to help John'. There is no evidence he did so. On another occasion Princess Margaret, favoured with a like request, prudently fled. Other VIPs were not too proud to serve the Beatles. Mr Callaghan, then Chancellor, took an avun- cular interest in the vast funds needed to buy a Greek island, and Lord Poole offered to sort out the finances of Apple, a Beatles' firm, free of charge.
Shortly after the 'busting', Lennon and Yoko proposed a record sleeve showing them both naked, 'her breast sagging', 'John heroin-stoned' exposing his 'shrivell- ed uncircumcised penis'. Sir John's horror was almost pitiable. 'Why not show Paul in the nude,' he feebly joked, 'he's so much prettier.' Though he 'deeply regretted turn- ing John down,' EMI could not possibly distribute such a cover, though it was quite ready to manufacture the record (which consisted mostly of 'Yoko's peculiar screaming and John's earsplitting feedback') for them 'at its usual fee'. Here indeed we see a man sticking fearlessly to his principles! Or perhaps another example, of those capitalists who, in Lenin's shrewdl assessment, would be quite willing to sell to their executioner the rope with which he will hang them.
Yet I don't think the Beatles deluded the young, not all of them anyway, only the most genuinely innocent. The rummer of the young clearly discerned something rum about the Beatles, a sly and hidden decadence which was what they liked about them, the basis of an elective affinity. And if most of their elders saw it not, so much the better: they did not undeceive them. It was as if the Beatles and the young had in common a secret language, incomprehensi- ble to others, yet full of dark meaning to them. They got the point all right, but kept it to themselves.
The perceptive music critic Fritz Spiegl charged the Beatles with doing more damage to music than any four other peo- ple in history. This they did by offering ins- tant bliss without effort. In other words, their music lacks that reserve which characterises all really good music. Of course good music can be very attractive on a first hearing; but it always has something extra held back for later. The Beatles of- fered others what drugs and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi offered them: 'instant relief and salvation', as Brown and Gaines put it, 'a mystical trance that sent you into a psychic dreamland . . . the key, the answer, . . the Next Big Thing'.
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