It is a curious fact that the Beatles’ debut single, Love Me Do, and the first James Bond film, Dr No, were both released on Friday 5 October 1962. No one could have predicted that we would still be thrilled by the band’s music six decades later, or that the film franchise would still be going strong. John Higgs, however, had the intriguing idea of exploring their creation, development and afterlives in parallel.
Though he inevitably covers some well-trodden territory, much of the detail is poignant and entertaining. In the early days of Beatlemania, Ringo Starr’s house was surrounded by fans 24 hours a day. His mother, Elsie, politely offered them sandwiches – which they took away, uneaten, as souvenirs. A friend admitted it was “awkward, particularly as the toilet was still in the yard”. The rulers of the Soviet Union, anxious about the rise of western youth culture, made strenuous efforts to discredit the Beatles. One article depicted them as monkeys and called them “Dung Beatles”, while a propaganda film, reports Higgs, bizarrely “intercut unflattering photographs of [the band] together with images of the Ku Klux Klan, ecstatic pop fans dancing, burning crosses and images of rural poverty from the American south”.
