When Stuart Maconie was a toddler, his mother took him to see the Beatles perform at the ABC cinema in Wigan. It was October 1964, two days before Harold Wilson narrowly won the general election and the beginning of John, Paul, George and Ringo’s meteoric rise to global stardom. “I have a vague, blurry, impressionistic sense of four guys in black suits and the noise of screaming,” the writer and broadcaster tells the Daily Express. “But maybe I’ve embroidered that, having been told the tale down the years.”
He was only four years old to be fair but, nonetheless, for Maconie, now 63, it was the start of a deep relationship with Britain’s most famous band that has endured to this day.
Over the intervening years, this affable Lancastrian has championed myriad styles of music from soul and alternative rock to classical and avant-garde. He has written for multiple music magazines and national newspapers, including this one, and has been a presenter and DJ for BBC Radios 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Live and 6 Music. Phew!
But throughout it all, the Beatles have been a reassuring constant in his life. Like many children of the Sixties, Maconie grew up with the Fab Four as the aural backdrop to his youth. Born in the Merseyside town of Whiston (then Lancashire) in 1961, he was brought up in Wigan.
He says of the Beatles: “I guess I’m roughly contemporary with them. I was born the week they first went to Hamburg. I saw them aged four. They were the soundtrack to my childhood. I was only a child but I was very aware of them being around. They are woven into the warp and weft of our nation’s story.” Maconie insists he admires all four Fabs. “But, just like the girls who screamed at them in the Cavern, you have to have a favourite,” he admits.
Broadcaster and writer Stuart Maconie has explored the lives of those who helped The Beatles (Image: Andrew Fox / Times Newspapers Ltd)
In his case, his greatest respect is reserved for McCartney. “I’m very much Team Paul,” he says. “He’s extraordinary – a complete force of nature. I believe he might actually be the most musical human being who has ever lived. People say, ‘Well, what about Mozart or Bach?’ The thing is McCartney writes oratorios and he wrote Helter Skelter. He wrote Yesterday and he writes experimental musique concrete.”
Maconie has met Macca three times and seen him play several times as a solo artist. As regards the other three, that night in 1964 is the only time he saw them live.
Now he has directed his love and enthusiasm for Liverpool’s most famous sons into a new book called With A Little Help From Their Friends. It’s an intriguing work that focuses not on The Beatles themselves – after all, as its author admits, more than 2,000 books about them have already been penned – but rather on the “kaleidoscopic cast of supporting players” who influenced them and helped shape their story. All the obvious characters are included, each given an individual profile – the close family and friends, their wives and girlfriends, their manager Brian Epstein, their producer George Martin, their guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and former band members who fell by the wayside, such as Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best.
But there are also dozens of less obvious bit-part players, without whom the story of the Beatles might well have pivoted in a completely different direction. There is Ivan Vaughan, for example, the mutual friend who first introduced 15-year-old Paul McCartney to 16-year-old John Lennon at the Woolton village fete in the Liverpool suburbs on July 7, 1957, when the Quarrymen were playing. Without him, the Beatles might never have existed at all.
Ivan Vaughan introduced Lennon and McCartney in July 1957 (Image: BBC)
