“Shout! The True Story of the Beatles”, by Philip Norman

528 pages, Pan Books, ISBN-13: 978-0283073335

It took me all of two-and-a-half-weeks to read Shout! The True Story of the Beatles by Philip Norman, a length of time is not a reflection on the quality of writing, as this book is, in a couple of words, bloody brilliant. Another word that could be used is exhaustive, as Norman is in no hurry to get to Beatlemania and instead writes a proper biography in which spent the first half of the book writing about the Beatles just prior to their American invasion in 1964. Within those first two hundred pages, he talks about the early lives of John Lennon and Paul McCartney from the times of their birth; George Harrison is introduced when he joins John and Paul in the Quarrymen, and we meet Ringo Starr as a 20-year-old, just before he joins the group by then known as The Beatles. Once I got into Shout! I had a sense of déjà vu because I was certain I had come across these same passages somewhere else. Turns out, I had: in other authors’ citations, as it seems that many an author used this 1982 work as source material for their own projects (my edition is from 2003).

Shout! has been called one of the best Beatle biographies and it deserves this reputation: Norman interviewed the Beatles several times from 1965 on, but admits at the end of Shout! that he was not able to interview any of the Beatles in the two years he spent researching the book starting in 1978. Thus his quotes from the Beatles themselves are from the times of Beatlemania and not from the perspective of a man in his late thirties looking back. I enjoyed the stories about the Beatles’ times in Hamburg and the interviews Norman conducted with their club managers and close friends. Norman spent as much time writing about the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein as he did with each individual Beatle (it was a fascinating story how Epstein learned about this Liverpool group apparently causing a commotion right under his nose, then finally how he won them over in spite of their doubts about all his promises of worldwide success).

There are many brilliant snatches in Shout! Of the Beatles in the mid-1960s, and their phenomenal success a mere three years or so after “Love Me Do” appeared, Norman wrote this:

Only in ancient times, when boy emperors and pharaohs were clothed, even fed with pure gold, had very young men commanded an equivalent adoration, fascination and constant, expectant scrutiny. Nor could anyone suppose that to be thus – to have such youth, and wealth, such clothes and cars and servants and cars – made for any state other than inconceivable happiness. For no one since the boy pharaohs … had known, as the Beatles now knew, how it felt to have felt everything, done everything, tasted everything, had a surfeit of everything; to live on that blinding, deadening, numbing surfeit which made each, on bad days, think he was ageing at twice the usual rate.

That is just one example. Another is upon the release of one of the seminal albums of the modern age, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when Norman wrote this:

Each decade brings but one or two authentically memorable moments. As a rule, only war, or some fearful tragedy, can penetrate the preoccupations of millions in the same moment to produce a single, concerted emotion. And yet, in June 1967, such an emotion arose, not from death or trepidation but from the playing of a gramophone record. There are, to this day, thousands of Britons and Americans who can describe exactly where they were and what they were doing at the moment they first listened to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That music, as powerfully as Kennedy's assassination or the first moon landing, summons up an exact time and place, an emotion undimmed by time or ageing. The memory is the same to all – how they first drew the shining disc from its gaudy sleeve; how they could not believe it at first and had to play it all through again, over and over.

It would not be pushing the point too far to say that Shout! has itself become the subject of a certain degree of media mythologizing. The idea that the Beatles might be “overrated” may be absurd, but one of the factors which can contribute to such a view is the way in which the group are sometimes held in almost religious awe: nobody dare criticize or make distinctions between good or bad (or maybe that should be good or great) songs, albums, etc. Similarly, Norman’s book has, over the years, begun to gather an unimpeachable aura, its (many) good points threatening to obscure its weaker aspects. 

Norman’s greatest strength is that he approached the writing of his book as an investigative journalist, and the result is, above all else, a work of journalism; as such, it’s very successful, both in terms of unearthing facts and bringing Norman’s considerable descriptive skills to bear on the phenomenon of Beatlemania, for Norman’s focus is very much on the phenomenon of The Beatles, the story of their rise to unprecedented levels of fame and acclaim, and their descent from those dizzy heights at the end of the 60s. The group’s longevity, Norman believes, reflects “the residual power of the generation that grew up with them: the Chelsea-booted boys and Biba-frocked girls who would one day metamorphose into presidents, prime ministers, captains of industry, television bosses and newspaper editors”. This view ignores the most important aspect of the phenomenon: the music. Very little is written here about the Beatles’ records; Revolver, for example, is first mentioned when it arrives in the record shops, and each song on that pivotal album is accorded no more than a brief, often dismissive mention (“Taxman”, for instance, is described as “a bitter satire” sung by “the chronically bitter George Harrison”).

Shout! The True Story of the Beatles is probably the most critically acclaimed Beatles book ever written, and Philip Norman has become widely renowned as a Beatles expert. While not without its flaws, Shout! remains a glorious example of how to write about music, while also writing about so much more.