Mark Lewisohn - The Beatles - All These Years Vol. 1: Tune In (Extended Special Edition)

Every once in a while, life conjures up a genuine ultimate.

It can be said without fear of hyperbole: this is what the Beatles were and are, and fifty-plus years after they leapt into view fifty theres little hint its going to change. So many would-be successors have come and gone, theres now an acceptance that no one can be bigger or better. John Winston Lennon, James Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey hold on strong, universally acknowledged as a cultural force, still somehow current and woven into the fabric of modern lives. John, Paul, George and Ringo, the four Liverpool lads who pumped the heart of the decade that also wont shut up, the 1960s.

If it was necessary to sell the Beatles you could point to many achievements, but their music underpins everything: one game-changing album after another and one game-changing single after another, 214 tracks recorded in seven crowded years in a kaleidoscope of styles. This music is known, loved, respected, discussed, imitated, cherished and studied, it continues to inspire new artists and be reshaped impressively in every genre, its adapted for headlines in twenty-first-century media, quoted and folded into everyday vocabulary, chanted in football stadiums. Infused with the Beatles energy and personalities, this music still lifts the spirit and is passed joyfully from generation to generation.

Clearly, something special happened here but what? How? Consider too

Ive been waiting for the book this sweeping story demands, one that stares unflinchingly at how it happened and what it was all about; a book to shoot adrenalin back into extraordinary events crushed under the weight of fifty years telling (and not always very good telling at that). Ive wanted a history of deep-level enquiry where the information is tested accurate, and free of airbrushing, embellishment and guesswork, written with an open mind and even hands, that unfolds lives and events in context and without hindsight, the way they occurred, and sets the Beatles fully among their contemporaries they never existed in isolation and were always part of musical scenes with friends and rivals, young turks together in clubs and night-clubs.

Ive also wanted a book that explains how the society that shaped the Beatles first received them and was then shaped by them, that looks at how John, Paul, George and Ringo dealt with each other as bandmates, and how they so deftly handled the media and such phenomenal celebrity. Ive wanted it shown how they transformed the worldwide music industry, and shook global youth culture awake, and induced a revolution in listening to and playing music. The Beatles didnt invent the electric guitar and werent the first guitar group but every rock band since 1963 is fulfilling their legacy, especially if they write their own songs.

In 2003, I decided to have a go. As a professional historian-researcher working around (and sometimes for) the Beatles for thirty years, I could draw on long periods of access to the right people and resources. Beyond that, I was aware that mountains of unfound knowledge vibrant colour, vital details were out there if you knew where to look.

But, one book? Way too much of relevance and interest happened in and around the Beatles to fit into one book. This is a richly epic tale, and cramming it into a single volume would mean cutting reams of material essential to the understanding. This book, Tune In, is the first in a trilogy titled All These Years that I hope will do the subject justice. (It is, at any rate, my best shot.) Its an objective and independent three-volume series that begins at the beginning but fictions fall quicker through the sieve.

Its been a continually surprising experience. Ive likened the challenge (which still goes on) to assembling a multi-million-piece jigsaw puzzle of lives and moments the more pieces you have and can place right where they belong, where they really fit, the clearer becomes the picture both in close-up colour and broadly detailed context.

Tune In takes the Beatles from before their beginnings up to the final night of 1962. After packing several years into the previous three, they know success is theirs to grasp, but have no clue theyre on the cusp of a whole new kind of fame, a white-hot and ever-royal celebrity. These then are the formative years, the less visible years, the pre-madness years and in many respects the most absorbing and entertaining period of them all. (This can also be claimed for the others, of course.)

What the research yells loudly is that the Beatles didnt begin to be remarkable when they upped and took over Britain or (all the more amazingly) America and the rest of the world, and that they didnt suddenly become funny when they filmed A Hard Days Night or beguiling when recording Rubber Soul. It shouts that their compelling urge to move on fast, to innovate and progress, didnt start with Revolver or Sgt Pepper or even when, in the last chapters of this book, their first record came out. Everything was revved up and running in the halls, houses and streets of an exceptional city, the only place these people and those events could have happened: Liverpool, that great Anglo-Celtic alchemy.