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'The Beatles were history-makers from the start,' proclaimed the liner notes for the band's first LP in March 1963.1 It was a bold claim to make on behalf of a beat combo with one charttopping single, but the Beatles' subsequent impact on 1960s culture put their historical importance (if not its meaning) beyond dispute. The notion that they represented the spirit of the sixties was firmly established in the British press by the end of 1 963, achieved global acceptance after their conquest of the United States in 1964 and was preserved in perpetuity by the dissolution of the band at the end of the decade.
During the 1960s, the Beatles expressed conflicting views about their place in history. Ringo Starr looked forward to appearing in 'school history books ... read by kids' in 1967, whereas two years later lohn Lennon reportedly suggested that 'history books should be eliminated completely from schools.'2 On the whole, however, they didn't dwell on such matters while still performing and recording together. They were busy, perplexed by their phenomenal fame and understandably reluctant to be categorised and misconstrued (a problem highlighted in 1969 by the 'Paul is Dead' hoax and the White A/frum-inspired Manson murders).
The two leading Beatles reacted to the break-up of the band in characteristically different fashions. While Paul McCartney clammed up and moved on, John Lennon laid waste to what he termed the 'Beatles myth' in a notorious interview conducted by Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone in 1 970. Lennon characterised the four happy-go-lucky mop-tops as 'the biggest bastards on earth' and himself as a tormented genius forever seeking to escape his Faustian pact with fame.3
Though Lennon was an unreliable narrator, his account encouraged an iconoclastic approach among popular historians of a sensationalist bent, who set about exposing the Beatles as plaster saints. Since Lennon had asserted that 'No truth was written' by Hunter Davies in his authorised biography of 1968, Philip Norman promised 'The True Story of the Beatles' in his unauthorised biography of 198 L4 Norman made Lennon the tragic hero of his warts-and-all narrative and correspondingly denigrated McCartney as a facile tunesmith and control freak.
The success ofNormans book and the authorised documentarycum-hagiography Imagine: John Lennon ( 1 988) indicated...