Derek Taylor - As Time Goes By

Did it happen, all of it, or was it a dream?

Derek Taylor, As Time Goes By, Chapter 19

The world first focused on Derek Taylor in 1964, when he wrote the sleeve note to the multi-million-selling Beatles for Sale album. The previous three Beatles albums all had notes on the back but these were a definite step up a winning mixture of hype, acute analysis and sharp humour: The young men themselves arent for sale. Money, noisy though it is, doesnt talk that loud. But you can buy this album you probably have, unless youre just browsing, in which case dont leave any dirty thumbprints on the sleeve!

Most of all, Derek Taylor understood that the Beatles were not a transitory phenomenon but would last into the twenty-first century: When, in a generation or so, a radioactive, cigar-smoking child, picnicking on Saturn, asks you what the Beatle affair was all about Did you actually know them? dont try to explain all about the long hair and the screams! Just play the child a few tracks from this album and hell probably understand what it was all about. The kids of ad 2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of well-being and warmth as we do today.

Between 1964 and 1970, Derek Taylor was a Beatle intimate. Beginning as an observer and a fan, he became, in turn, their press officer and travelling companion; their supplicant; their friend; their colleague in the utopian visions of Apple; and, finally, the keeper of the flame just as it was being, albeit temporarily, extinguished. Apart from Brian Epstein whose absolute faith would never be swayed and was fully repaid he was the only Beatle insider who was able to clearly communicate a wider perspective on the events that they were living through.

Born in May 1932, Taylor was a decade or so older than the four Beatles and this, plus his old-school journalistic training, gave him the toughness and the distance to survive being in the centre of the storm and then the ability to write beautifully about the experience. He was, above all, a proselytiser, with a sure sense of the Beatles importance, the intricacies of their interpersonal relationships, and the precise nature of their myth as it was in the process of construction. Having had his life changed, he wanted others to share the experience.

At the same time, he was not a Beatle. He was at first Brian Epsteins personal assistant at NEMS, and then the Beatles employee as, in a couple of terse exchanges reproduced in this book, he was occasionally reminded. Yet he was more than that. In 1964, he gave the job of Beatle press officer a sense of class that made him a mini-celebrity in the eyes of the Brit-hungry American media. During 1968 and 1969 he was the go-to person at Apple a vital function which he executed in a bedazzling torrent of words.

Derek could charm the hind legs off a horse, and, as a poacher-turned-gamekeeper, understood exactly how the different sections of the press worked at any given time. His chapter Of a day in 1968 was written while still fresh, and in four long paragraphs, it captures the mad immediacy of having to deal with at least thirty demanding journalists from around the world at the same time. Its his job to placate the voracious beast and, by the end of the day, he doesnt know who he is: I must be crazy. I am crazy. And so are you. And so are they. So its OK.

Derek Taylor was that rare beast: a Fleet Street man who left its brotherhood and then criticised its inner workings. As he writes, Your newspaper reporter lives in a strange and frightening world, oversimplified by the need to write in baby-talk, overcomplicated because the reporter is never told the whole truth. He cites a dozen or so hoary cliches (a world where judges lash rapists and governments are flayed by the opposition) before concluding: For a week or two, it is OK, even exciting. After fifteen years, which is how long I lived in it, it becomes a pain.

At the time when pop was just for the young, incomprehensible to adults, he crossed over the generational divide and never even thought about coming back. As he writes in Chapter 18 about the year 1969 (when he turned thirty-seven), Me, I think the grownups are daft. They are Martians, sitting on the trains with their erections hidden under their Evening Standards. I hate them. He swapped professional cynicism for belief and wonder an unforgivable sin in some eyes, but then he understood history.

How did this happen? Derek Taylor was from Merseyside West Kirby on the Wirral if we are being specific and he had a deep knowledge and respect for the city over the water. His world was formed in postwar austerity: dressing like your parents, the Festival of Britain, two years of National Service. In this memoir, he writes about the famous people he met in his early days on the Hoylake and West Kirby Advertiser, glimmers of postwar glamour: Richard Attenborough, Danny Kaye thus far, thus early 1950s.

In 1955, he joined the Liverpool Echo and Daily Post, before moving to the expiring Sunday Dispatch and then onto the Daily Express in 1962. His conversion came in late May 1963, when he went with his wife Joan to review the Beatles/Roy Orbison package tour in Manchester: The Liverpool sound came to Manchester last night, he wrote in the paper that night, and I thought it was magnificent Indecipherable, meaningless nonsense, of course, but as beneficial and invigorating as a week on the bench of the pierhead overlooking the Mersey.

His later recollections in Fifty Years Adrift went further than his contemporary tabloid-ese: It has always seemed to me that the true essence of the Beatles is to be found distilled in From Me to You. Boygirl love song it may have been, but it was also a universal offering, spelled out with Liverpool directness and warmth and picked up by a whole generation including, from that night on, Joan and me. Though maybe at the wrong end of that generation, we were nevertheless open thereafter to the possibilities of being truly young in heart.

A few weeks later, Taylor interviewed Epstein for the Express: commissioned, as he later remembered, to write a feature about the man behind the Beatles. Svengali stuff. I did this interview with this amazing man, with his monogrammed shirt and his buckle shoes, and we got on awfully well, considering what a front he had. He was awfully remote. People hadnt been asking anything for very long. So he did like the interview, but also had this kind of sniffy front, but that didnt fool me, cos I was from Liverpool.

Out of this meeting came a rapport that resulted in Taylor being hired to ghost Epsteins memoir: In the first lunch hour, he said, Im going to have to tell you now, did you know I was queer? No, I said, I didnt. Well, he said, I am, and if were going to do this book Im going to have to stop buggering about, saying I was with this girl, when I was with a boy. Does that make any difference? No, I said, it does not make any difference, itll make it a lot easier, so you mustnt worry any more, difficult as it may be to convince you perhaps, but I wont ever let you down.

Trust thus established, Taylor became Epsteins personal assistant at NEMS and in short order, the Beatles press officer. He left Fleet Street without a thought, as he writes in this book: I had been working for the