Norman - Shout!: the True Story of the Beatles

PAN BOOKS

Part One
WISHING

Part Two
GETTING

12 Theyve got everything over there.
What do they want us for?

Part Three
HAVING

Part Four
WASTING

Part Five
LASTING

First photo section, pages 18: John in garden, Mimi Smith, Julia Hunter Davies. George and family Freda Norris. Ringo as a boy, Ringos parents, Mary McCartney, Michael and Paul Hunter Davies. Quarry Men Colin Hanton. Rory Storm and The Hurricanes Keystone Press. Rooftop cowboys Keystone Press. Stuart Sutcliffe, Astrid Kirchherr Sutcliffe family (photographer: Astrid Kirchherr). John and Stuart on the beach Sutcliffe family. At the Top Ten Club in Hamburg Jurgen Vollmer. Mathew Street Pix Features. Cavern Club Dick Matthews. The band in suits Albert Marrion. Recording Love Me Do Rex Features (photographer: Dezo Hoffman).

Second photo section, pages 916: wearing art students clothes Rex Features (photographer: Dezo Hoffman). Beatlemania Rex Features. With Ed Sullivan in New York Rex Features (photographer: Suomen Kuvapalvelu). Royal Variety Show Rex Features (photographer: Dezo Hoffman). Ringos wedding Camera Press (photographer: Robert Freeman). Georges wedding Keystone Press. Press conference Keystone Press. John with Julian at Kenwood Keystone Press. Allen Klein United Press International. Linda, Paul, Yoko and John Camera Press (photographer: Bruce McBroom). John and Yoko Iain Macmillan. John and Yoko John Hillelson Agency (photographer: Tannenbaum). Yoko outside Lennons house Mercury Press Agency/ Rex Features. Paul and Heather Mills Rex Features. George with Olivia; Ringo performing Richard Young/ Rex Features.

Every effort has been made to acknowledge all those whose photographs have been used in this volume, but if there have been any omissions in this respect, we apologise and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgement in any future editions.

We would also like to thank Northern Songs Ltd. for the three lines from the LP Abbey Road, The love you take, Is equal to the love, You make; and for the line All the lonely people from Eleanor Rigby.

John alone seemed to get it right, back in the Seventies bleary dawn when everyone around him was mourning the end of an era, the disintegration of a movement, the extinction of a culture, the death of a dream. Its just a rock group split up, he said with his usual withering bluntness. Its not important.

And, surely, thats what it all comes down to in the end. However talented, innovative, famous magic, even the Beatles were fundamentally just a rock group that split up.

Oh, were they?

More than two decades have passed since John Lennon died at the hands of a deranged former fan outside his New York apartment. Even those with no special feelings for him or the Beatles recognised the event as a milestone; a moment when craziness and murder moved into previously uncharted terrain. He was only a pop musician, for Christs sake, coming home late from the recording studio. What cause could possibly be advanced, or grievance assuaged, by blowing him away?

Now, in the city that sheltered John but could not protect him, another such milestone has been reached. Like nothing else in the long history of human cruelty, it will be forever defined and its horrors recalled simply by numbers, like the innocent reading on a digital clock face: 9/11.

Whereas Lennons end came near midnight on a dimly lit sidewalk, witnessed only by his wife and a handful of chance bystanders, this new kind of annihilation happens at peak commuter time on a glorious autumn morning and is viewed in its entirety on live television. Millions of people, not just in New York but across America across the world see those two airliners hijacked by Muslim terrorists fly straight at the twin towers of the World Trade Center. They see the dark lizard shape of each plane merge seamlessly into its chosen satin-silver column, and the blossoming of black smoke on the opposite side. They see the victims just brokers and financial planners and secretaries, for Christs sake! craning from the windows of summit floors beyond any hope of rescue. They see the plunging bodies of those who prefer to jump 80 and more storeys to their death (some in pairs, holding hands) rather than face the holocaust within. It is a real-life disaster movie beyond the worst paranoia of the Cold War years or the most lurid dreams of Hollywood. Minutes later, each tower in turn implodes in a billowy grey cascade, engulfing scores of firefighters and rescue workers, including a priest administering the last rites. The worlds greatest skyline is defiled by the hideous semblance of a nuclear mushroom cloud. Where the uttermost symbols of its power and wealth and pride stood half an hour ago, there is now only a charred, Hiroshima-like wilderness.

Armageddon has not come to sunny Manhattan alone. In Washington, another hijacked airliner has ploughed into a ground-floor sector of the Pentagon, the nations military nerve-centre, incinerating hundreds of service and civilian staff. A fourth plane has been diverted from its kamikaze course, thanks to heroic resistance by its passengers, and has crashed in open country near Pittsburgh, killing everyone on board.

It is Americas darkest day since 22 November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas the very first of those modern milestones backward to Hell. And, incredibly, in an equivalent national trauma 38 years on, Americans turn to the very same voices their parents and even grandparents once did for consolation. For hope.

On 20 October, a bevy of US and British rock stars give a charity concert in New York for the families of September 11s victims, now finally tallied at close to 3,000. The roster onstage at Madison Square Garden includes Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Bon Jovi, Billy Joel and The Who, supported by Hollywood names like Robert de Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford and Meg Ryan, plus the citys doughty mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and representatives of the fire and medical services who have lost their bravest and best.

But the headliner, as always and everywhere, is Paul now Sir Paul McCartney. Nearing 60 he may be, a widower with grown-up children and a grandchild, but there is still no other performer on earth with a presence to equal his. Wearing a firefighters T-shirt, he performs a new song, Freedom, written in the aftershock of the atrocity, which now becomes New Yorks defiant response to the mass murderers from the sky. More poignant still is his rendition of Yesterday, not with his traditional sad puppy-dog look but genuinely in tears for the young widows and fatherless children who now long for yesterday. As the shows finale, performers and audience join in the most emollient and prayerful of his Beatles anthems, Let It Be. And in my hour of darkness, there is still a light that shines on me...

Even at a moment like this, it seems, Paul and John cant stop competing. To mark the twenty-first anniversary of Johns death in two months time, TNT television had planned a tribute concert, Come Together, at Radio City Music Hall, featuring its own cast of fellow musoes and Beatles-addicted Hollywood names, with its proceeds to be donated to the apposite cause of gun-control. But with September 11, Come Together turns into a fund-raiser in MC Kevin Spaceys words to keep Johns memory alive and help rebuild New York. There are reverential cover versions of Lennon tracks, in and out of the Beatles, plus those familiar film clips of him holding forth on long-ago chat shows and loping around Central Park. Dave Stewart and Nelly Furtado duet on Instant Karma. Lou Reed sings Jealous Guy. Johns widow, Yoko, and their son, Sean, harmonise with Rufus Wainwright in Across the Universe. The most touching moment is relayed live from the corner of the park that has been renamed Strawberry Fields in his memory. Cyndi Lauper performs Strawberry Fields Forever, with candles flickering on the mosaic pavement that bears his one-word epitaph, Imagine. The thoughts of Lennon are written once more on enormous billboards, but this time no one looks exasperated or sniggers behind their hand: IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE, LIVING LIFE IN PEACE.