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”.
When American censors objected to the name of the character Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, they were reassured by pictures of the actor Honor Blackman at the UK premiere with Prince Philip. When the Australian model George Lazenby was auditioning for the part of Bond in the late 1960s, the producers sent sex workers to his hotel room to check that he wasn’t gay.
Love and Let Die works well as a collection of sharp and pacy stories, though it is a pity Higgs has a weakness for grandiose flourishes. There were “truths in [the] screaming” of the girls at early Beatles concerts, he writes, “that many religions have yet to grasp”. He also offers us a bold overarching thesis, based on Freud’s idea of the conflict between Eros and Thanatos, that “while the Beatles represent love, James Bond represents death. What makes Bond different from other spies is that he has a licence to kill.”
It is clearly true that Bond and Beatles embody different attitudes to class, privilege, violence, masculinity and Englishness. But Higgs wants to go much further and claim that they are engaged in a kind of permanent “struggle for the soul of [British] culture”.
“When we cheer on Bond, and fantasise about living his life,” he argues, we “unconsciously find ourselves supporting the powers that be … The spell was massively weakened, however, by the arrival of the Beatles.” Once the Beatles had broken up, the Bond of the early 1970s “continued to insist that he and the British establishment were the best in the world. And now … there was nothing of equal stature to contradict him.”
None of this is very plausible. There has been a vast amount of pushback against the politics and sexual politics of Bond’s world that has not needed to evoke the Beatles as a counterweight. And many people clearly enjoy the films for the suits, stunts, hedonism and exotic locations, and the “sophistication” of a hero who can’t resist telling bar staff how to make the best martini, without buying into their values. Higgs himself cites the interesting case of 007 (Shanty Town), a 1967 song by Desmond Dekker, the voice of the new post-independence Jamaica, which offered “a strange mix of topical political reportage and Bond fandom”. It is safe to assume that he had no time for what the book describes as “post-imperial fantasies of British exceptionalism”.
It no doubt makes a kind of sense to say that “the Beatles represent love”, though love is hardly an unusual topic for songs, but what about Higgs’s notion that the Bond films are “about selling people death”? It is true that women tend to die after sleeping with 007, that some of the films feature terrifying stunts and that the producers have a knack for tapping into current fears, most recently about surveillance, hacking and nanotechnology. Yet much of the franchise treats violence and death in a cartoonish style far less visceral and disturbing than in the average TV cop show. Higgs himself mentions the scene in Diamonds Are Forever featuring “an almost uncountable number of police cars smashing into each other – often followed by a shot of their unharmed drivers exiting the cars and throwing their hats to the ground in frustration … people usually survive car accidents in the James Bond universe”.
Higgs is a lively writer and has assembled many intriguing nuggets from six decades of British popular culture. I remain unconvinced that the eternal battle between Eros and Thanatos provides the key to them all.
Love and Let Die: Bond, the Beatles and the British Psyche by John Higgs is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
