Wearing well

Born in the same year as John Lennon (1940), I was a sucker for the Beatles from the start. They were the accompaniment of my youth, love’s obbligato. I liked their music because it replaced the raw animality of rock ‘n’ roll with sophisticated melody. I think Schubert would have been proud to have composed ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Hey Jude’.

Also, unlike most of the rock ‘n’ roll hunks, the Beatles were skinny. So was I — grievously thin — and it was a relief that we skeletons could now come out of the cupboard. In the early photographs of the Fab Four, wearing the monkey-suits their manager Brian Epstein insisted on, they look quite tame; but their hair was already long enough to outrage rednecks. ‘Mop Tops’ was the gibe of the moment. Like the term ‘Impressionists’ around 1874, it was accepted as a compliment, a badge of honour.

I was in a taxi from JFK airport to New York in 1980 when the driver told me that Lennon had been shot. Of course I was sorry; but I had never much taken to Lennon. I saw him as the boy who would have bullied me at school. (Recently his son Sean said: ‘He sang a lot about love, but he didn’t spare much for me.’) In the first five years of our lives, Hitler was trying to get both of us with bombs and doodle-bugs. In Lennon’s case, Mark David Chapman succeeded where the Luftwaffe failed.

Paul McCartney had (still has) the choirboy-with-hooded-eyes look. George Harrison was a handsome reg’lar guy — Matthew Parris has recorded a youthful crush on him. And Ringo Starr was the endearingly ugly one with the big hooter.

When I first saw this massive tome I thought: Fashion? Beatles? Isn’t it missing the point to treat them just as clothes horses? But a trip (I use the word advisedly) through its lavish pages soon showed me it was a valid approach.