The writer is author of ‘John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs’
On Monday, the Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes took to a stage in Las Vegas to announce plans for a music biopic that will not see the light of day for three years. Had it been about almost any other act, it’s likely that this news would have gone unheralded beyond Mendes’ immediate audience of movie industry insiders. What happened in Vegas would have stayed in Vegas. But this wasn’t any other act — it was The Beatles. The coverage, therefore, has been feverish and unavoidable.
Opinions have been aired, questions hotly asked. Four movies, one for each member of the group — how is that going to work, exactly? Will they tell the whole story or just part of it? Is Paul Mescal pretty enough to be the young Paul McCartney? Who will play Yoko?
Beneath this clear evidence of enduring appetite lies another question: why are we still talking about these guys? We are further away in time from the break-up of The Beatles than that moment was from the Treaty of Versailles. Since they parted ways, we’ve seen the fall of Saigon, the rise of hip-hop and Taylor Swift, the end of the cold war and the birth of the internet. We’ve moved from a world of rotary phones and smoke-filled offices to the climate crisis and artificial intelligence. The Beatles shouldn’t be relevant. Yet here we are.
There are, of course, other acts we still listen to from the 1960s, but, with the possible exception of Bob Dylan, we are not nearly as fascinated by them. In our endlessly fragmented culture, there is something about John, Paul, George and Ringo that grips us. It’s not just the boomers or Gen Xers either. Having just published a book about the relationship between John and Paul, I can tell you some of its closest readers are teenagers on Tumblr and TikTok.
I see two major reasons. First, and at the risk of provoking disagreement, The Beatles were just better at making music. They produced a body of work so various, so capacious in its emotional and sonic span, so complex and yet so damn catchy, that talking about them in the same breath as the Rolling Stones is akin to debating how Shakespeare compares to Marlowe or Jonson — interesting on one level but on another, completely missing the point.
Second, the story of The Beatles is miraculous and irresistible. It’s the late 1950s and pop music is almost exclusively an American export, but two improbably gifted teenagers from Liverpool have the nerve to imagine they can take this music, make it their own and become more famous than Elvis Presley. John and Paul recruit the perfect fellow conspirators — a friend from school who plays guitar and shares their sense of humour; a drummer with an intuitive sympathy for what they’re trying to achieve; a local businessman with an artist’s soul who persuades a maverick London record producer to take them on. And they pull it off.
Not content with this wild success, they then move through several different musical incarnations, inventing modern pop and rock, and at warp speed. In 1964 they play “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on The Ed Sullivan Show; two years later they release “Tomorrow Never Knows”, a psychedelic trip in aural form, and the world’s mind is blown.
Not only that, but each of them is a compelling character in their own right, with loving but knotty feelings about each other. At the end of the decade, The Beatles make one last album. Then, after seven years, the band splits, leaving behind a permanently changed world. End of story.
But of course, it’s not the end. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have asked whether we need more books — or more movies — about The Beatles. Perhaps it’s time to put that question aside. If anything of our civilisation is remembered in a thousand years’ time, there’s a good bet it will be the chorus of “Hey Jude” and an image of four men crossing Abbey Road in single file. Believe me: we’re only at the beginning.