All You Need Is Love
The End of the Beatles
Peter Brown and Steven Gaines
Octopus
Review: Lauren O’Connor-May
Don’t pick up this book unless you are a Beatles uberfan and already have an encyclopedic knowledge of the band.
If not, you would be lost because the book, a collection of previously unpublished transcripts of interviews with three of the Beatles and the people closest to them, including Yoko Ono, presupposes that you already know the basics about them and some of the more intimate details of their lives.
Peter Brown and Steven Gaines did the interviews and used a fraction of it for their book The Love You Make, which was published in 1983.
The rest of the recordings were locked in a bank vault and resurrected for this 40-year-later sequel.
All the interviews were done before John Lennon was murdered so the prospect of reading this long-hidden raw material sounded far more exciting than it actually turned out to be.
I am a huge Beatles fan and have watched many documentaries and read maybe half a dozen books about the band but I found this book very dull.
One has to sift through the padding for the good bits and because, as the cover boasts, the transcripts are “unvarnished”, there are lots of ums and ohs and random breaks when I can only assume the speaker - who may well have been high - lost their train of thought or changed their mind about what they were going to say. That’s not exactly riveting stuff.
The book’s most interesting parts, for me, were the introduction and afterword, which summed up the interviewee's sentiments and tries to give the mysterious answer to the question: “Why did the Beatles break up?”
Perhaps the book would be better in an audio format, but I didn’t find it enjoyable.