The Long and Winding Road: Stuart Maconie on why our opinions about the Beatles changed | The Beatles

TThe early idea of ​​the Beatles as “the four boys who shook the world” has undergone many shifts in emphasis over the decades. They have been objectified, denigrated, mythologized, misunderstood, and even ignored. The release this month of The Beatles’ new collection — an expansion of the original mid-’90s compilation with CD and vinyl reissues and a documentary series streaming on Disney+ — is a testament not only to their enduring appeal but also to how the constant reworking of their story reveals so much about our changing tastes. The 2025 remake arrives as a wide-ranging reexamination of the original project, bringing with it an expanded and remastered docu-series and a major re-release campaign.

But what is likely to reshape the way we see the band is the addition of a brand-new ninth episode to the original TV series, created from recently excavated footage of Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr working together in 1994-95. More intimate and informal than the original broadcast, this material captures the three surviving Beatles rehearsing, reflecting on and spending time simply as old friends rather than cultural landmarks, albeit still with ‘little brother’ tensions between Harrison and McCartney. They work on Free As a Bird and Now and Then, jokingly speculate about a stadium reunion tour and generally talk about their history, loss and unfinished musical ideas. It is a rare humane ending to a well-worn story. With new material like this, and after self-evidently more than 50 years since the Beatles broke up amid a storm of lawsuits and “funny papers,” are we finally getting closer to a unified theory of everything cool?

HeyIn the estimated 2,000-plus books about the Beatles — shelves groaning with slavish hagiography and angry shaming, as well as entire volumes on their hair, their shoes, and the Soviet mind-control program in which they allegedly participated — Irene Torkelson Weber’s 2016 The Beatles and the Historians, an academic history written by a tenured professor at Newman University in Kansas, may seem less interesting than, say, Turn Me. On the Dead Man: The Complete Story of the Paul McCartney Death Hoax; Or communism, hypnosis and the Beatles. However, her “four novels” theory among the Beatles’ crazies has been much celebrated and discussed.

First came the story of the “Fantastic Four”, which was prevalent during their lifetime. This was breezy and festive, and it highlighted positivity, emphasizing the joyful collective charm and energy of the early Beatles and ignoring drug use, picadillo sex, Brian Epstein’s homosexuality, and even John Lennon’s marriage to Cynthia. Hunter Davis’s 1968 authorized biography is key here. Davies has the keenness of seasoned Fleet Street residents for facts and details – Ringo paid £32,000 for his house in Weybridge in Surrey, and the £17-a-week Pete Best was earning in a bakery when Davies met him – rather than the bombastic musings of the underground press.

“Lennon Remembers” takes its name from a January 21, 1971 magazine interview and a later book by Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner. With Lennon in a raw and corroded state of mind just three weeks after the Beatles’ breakup, his bitter, self-pitying diatribe was either a planned purging of the suffocating Beatles myth, or, as comedian and Beatles fan Mitch Penn acerbically summed it up, John in “destroyed messianic” mode (although Lennon claims in the interview that he is no longer a “drug addict”). Here, he takes a swipe at Harrison and McCartney and talks about loyal partners like Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor and George Martin. When the latter asked him sadly in 1980: “What is all this nonsense about, John?” Lennon sheepishly replied that it was “out of my head”.

From this arose what Torkelson Weber calls the “Whoop!” Narrative, a point of view named after Philip Norman’s 1981 autobiography in which that author recasts the drama with Lennon as a saintly rebel, McCartney a skilled vaudeville thespian of studious mediocrity, and Harrison and Starr cruelly consigned to cameos as weights and tagalongs. It promotes the myth of genius versus ingenuity, updated to suit the post-punk conscience and sense of loss in the wake of Lennon’s murder. McCartney referred to the matter, with some justification, as “frivolous”.

More recently, we have come to Lewisohn’s novel. Mark Lewisohn is generally regarded as the pre-eminent authority on The Beatles in the world, and his approach is forensic, dispassionate, archival and driven by a love of the music. He is immersed in researching and writing All These Years, a massive, fascinating three-volume biography of the Beatles, the second part of which is now in production, 12 years after the first. Our knowledge of Shakespeare’s life is superficial, vague, and largely unsatisfactory. Lewison, who is often in his Kent office from 6am until the early hours of the night, is determined that the same does not happen to our other great cultural exports.

“My interest is just to get the story right while there are still eyewitnesses to what happened, to get to the truth if I can and let the rest fall away,” he told me. “I don’t have any agenda whatsoever. I try to tell the story as impartially as possible and put in anything I think is appropriate and interesting that moves the story forward. I take my job seriously, but the Beatles were very funny people, so I want to be entertaining and reflect that. But I take it seriously in the sense of trying my best to do it as right as I can while it’s still possible.”

His commitment is absolute. He spent more than a year trying to correct a single sentence in an Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry about one of the Beatles, a Trinidadian calypso musician named Lord Woodbine, which inaccurately states that the fledgling Beatles were once nicknamed “the Woodbine Boys.” (I just checked, and unfortunately, it’s still there.)

Times are changing. The “Beatles fatigue” of the early 1970s calcified into something more overtly aggressive with the rise of punk: the group was seen as bastions of irrelevant pop-lite and restless nostalgia. “No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones” sparked a feud in 1977, while Glenn Matlock was said to have been fired from the Sex Pistols because he dared to like the damned Mobtubes.

Then, in the wake of Lennon’s murder, he became popular at the expense of his peers, especially McCartney, and was considered (wrongly) the experimental and creative engine of the group. This, Lewison says, is now starting to swing in the other direction. “After the assassination, we lived in a Lennon world and I think that lasted about 15 years or so, during which time Paul was unfairly downplayed. I think that has been rectified. If you stopped eight people in the street now and asked them to name a Beatle, they would say Paul first, I think – as a result of him continuing to be around and being involved in any number of projects that keep his name at the forefront.”

Times are changing again. Fortunately, in recent years, several women, like Torkelson Weber, have entered the world of Beatles scholarship, scrutinizing gender roles and masculinity in music. Questlove, Nelson George and Yaw Owusu have written about the Beatles in relation to black artists and Liverpool’s colonial history. In his brilliant documentary The Beatles and India, Ajoy Bose examines how the culture of the subcontinent was changed by – and was changed by – the band.

The Beatles’ Magical Historical Tour shows no signs of slowing down. With the constant tide of Beatles worship, scrutiny, and scholarship, new waves are breaking every day, and we can only speculate about how the Beatles’ historical landscape will change. Philip Norman’s upcoming biography of Epstein promises to refocus attention on the band’s early professional years, potentially reevaluating his role not just as a manager but as an architect of their public persona and development into global cultural icons.

Meanwhile, Sam Mendes’ ambitious plan for four interconnected biopics, each told from the perspective of one Beatle member, suggests a further decentering of the traditional “Fantastic Four” narrative. Early casting and production details suggest that the films may also give greater weight to band members’ partners and familial relationships, highlighting women whose influence has often been marginalized in previous narratives. Perhaps this will reshape how audiences understand the individual motivations, creative dynamics, flows and pressures that ultimately tore the group apart.

So, have we arrived at a “grand unified theory” – or are we simply in a period where some explanations seem temporarily stable? Lewisohn, Peter Jackson’s (and, it must be said, Disney’s) authoritative and authoritative point of view suggest so, but as the lesson of Francis Fukuyama reminds us, those who confidently predict the “end of history” can end up white in the face. The constant arrival of new material, new perspectives and new techniques means that the band’s story remains essentially open-ended.

Rather than closing the book, these projects might encourage us to see the Beatles not as fixed historical figures, but rather as subjects whose meaning continues to evolve with each telling. Shout Philip Norman! The narrative may have fallen from critical support, but at least two of its assertions remain true. That the Beatles are “the greatest engine of human happiness that the world of entertainment has ever seen,” and that when you hear that word, a little black insect is the second thing that comes to mind.