The long and winding road: Stuart Maconie on why our opinions about the Beatles keep changing

The early notion of the Beatles as “four lads that shook the world” has been subject to many shifts in emphasis over the decades. They have been valorised, vilified, mythologised, misunderstood and even ignored. The release this month of the new Beatles Anthology – an expansion of the original mid-1990s compilation with CD, vinyl reissues and the documentary series streaming on Disney+ – is testament not just to their enduring appeal but also to how the constant reframing of their story reveals as much about our changing tastes. The 2025 edition arrives as a full-scale revisitation of the original project, bringing with it a remastered, expanded documentary series and a substantial reissue campaign. What is more likely to reshape the way we see the band, though, is the addition of a brand-new ninth episode to the original TV series, built from recently excavated footage of Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr working together in 1994–95. Far more intimate and informal than the original broadcast, this material captures the three surviving Beatles rehearsing, reflecting and simply spending time as old friends rather than cultural monuments, albeit still with the “kid brother” tensions between Harrison and McCartney. They work on Free As a Bird and Now and Then, jokingly speculate on a stadium reunion tour and generally talk about their history, loss and their unfinished musical ideas. It’s a rare, humanising coda to the well-worn story. With new material like this, and with more than that axiomatic 50 years of distance since the Beatles dissolved in a blizzard of lawsuits and “funny paper”, are we finally approaching a unified theory of everything fab? *** Of the estimated 2,000-plus books about the Beatles – shelves groaning with both slavish hagiography and angry debunkings as well as whole volumes on their hair, their shoes and the Soviet mind-control programme they were allegedly involved in – Erin Torkelson Weber’s 2016 book The Beatles and the Historians, academic historiography written by a tenured professor at Newman University in Kansas, may seem less sexy than, say, Turn Me On, Dead Man: the Complete Story of the Paul McCartney Death Hoax; or Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles. Among Beatles maniacs however, her “four narratives” theory has become much celebrated and discussed. First came the “Fab Four” narrative, prevailing during their lifetime. Breezy and celebratory, this foregrounded the positive, emphasising the joyous collective charm and energy of the early Beatles and glossing over drug use, sexual peccadilloes, Brian Epstein’s homosexuality and even John Lennon’s marriage to Cynthia. Hunter Davies’ authorised biography of 1968 is key here. Davies has a seasoned Fleet Street denizen’s enthusiasm for facts and detail – the £32,000 Ringo paid for his house in Weybridge in Surrey, the £17 a week Pete Best was earning in a bakery when Davies met him – rather than florid musings from the underground press. The “Lennon Remembers” narrative takes its name from a 21 January 1971 magazine interview and later book by Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner. With Lennon in a raw and corrosive frame of mind just three weeks after the dissolution of the Beatles, his bitter, self-pitying diatribe was either a planned purging of the suffocating Beatle myth or, as the comedian and Beatles fan Mitch Benn has tartly summarised it, John in full “messianic smackhead” mode (though in the interview Lennon claims to be no longer “hooked”). Here, he swipes at Harrison and McCartney and traduces loyal associates such as Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor and George Martin. When the latter plaintively asked him in 1980 “What was all that shit about, John?” Lennon sheepishly replied that he was “out of me head”. Out of this grew what Torkelson Weber calls the “Shout!” narrative, a viewpoint named for Philip Norman’s 1981 biography wherein that author recasts the drama with Lennon as sainted rebel, McCartney a slick vaudevillian of industrious mediocrity and Harrison and Starr callously consigned to cameos as makeweights and tagalongs. It peddles the myth of genius versus craft, updated for the post-punk conscience and the sense of loss in the wake of Lennon’s murder. McCartney referred to it, with some justification, as “shite”. More recently, we arrive at the “Lewisohn” narrative. Mark Lewisohn is generally regarded as the world’s pre-eminent Beatles authority and his approach is forensic, impartial, archival and driven by love of the music. He is deep into the research and writing of All These Years, his huge and magisterial three-volume Beatle biography, the second instalment of which is now in production, 12 years on from the first. Our knowledge of Shakespeare’s life is sketchy, opaque and hugely unsatisfactory. Lewisohn, often at his desk in Kent from 6am till the small hours, is determined that the same does not happen to our other great cultural export. “My interest is solely in getting the story right while there are still first-hand witnesses to what happened, to get at the truth if I can and let the rest fall away,” he tells me. “I have no agenda of any kind. I’m attempting to tell the story as neutrally as possible and to put down anything that I consider is relevant and interesting and propels the story forward. I’m taking my job seriously, but the Beatles were very funny people, so I want to be entertaining and reflect that. But I’m approaching it seriously in the sense of trying my very best to get it as right as possible while it’s still possible.” His commitment is absolute; he has spent more than a year trying to have corrected one single sentence in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s entry on a Beatles associate, a Trinidadian calypso musician called Lord Woodbine, which inaccurately states the fledgling Beatles were once dubbed “Woodbine’s Boys”. (I’ve just checked and, sadly, it’s still there.) Times change. The “Beatle fatigue” of the early 70s calcified into something more openly hostile with the advent of punk: the group were viewed as bulwarks of irrelevant and toothless pop-lite and queasy nostalgia. “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones” snarled the Clash in 1977, while Glen Matlock was said to have been sacked from Sex Pistols for daring to like the scouse moptops. Then, in the wake of Lennon’s murder, he became lionised at the expense of his peers, particularly McCartney, and (wrongly) seen as the group’s experimentalist and creative engine. This, as Lewisohn says, has now begun to swing the other way. “Post-assassination, we lived in a Lennon world and I guess that lasted about 15 years or so, during which Paul was diminished unfairly. I think that’s been corrected. If you stopped eight people in the street now and asked them to name a Beatle, they would say Paul first, I think – the result of him still being him around and engaging in any number of projects which keep his name at the forefront.” Times change again. Happily in recent years, many more women such as Torkelson Weber have entered the realm of Beatles scholarship, scrutinising gender roles and masculinity in the music. Questlove, Nelson George and Yaw Owusu have written about the Beatles in relation to Black artists and Liverpool’s colonial history. In his brilliant documentary The Beatles and India, Ajoy Bose examined how the culture of the Indian subcontinent changed – and was changed by – the band. The Beatles magical history tour shows no signs of slowing. On the ceaseless tide of Beatle worship, scrutiny and scholarship, new waves break every day, and we can only speculate how they will shift the Beatles historiographical landscape. Philip Norman’s forthcoming biography of Epstein promises to refocus attention on the band’s earliest professional years, potentially reassessing his role not only as manager but as the architect of their public persona and their development into global cultural icons. Meanwhile, Sam Mendes’ ambitious plan for four interconnected biopics, each told from the perspective of a single Beatle, suggests a further decentralisation of that traditional “fab four” narrative. Early casting and production details indicate that the films may also give greater weight to the band members’ partners and familial relationships, foregrounding the women whose influence has often been marginalised in previous retellings. Maybe this will reshape how audiences understand individual motivations, creative dynamics, and the fluxes and pressures that eventually sundered the group. So, have we reached a “grand unified theory” – or are we simply in a period where certain interpretations feel temporarily settled? Lewisohn, Peter Jackson (and it must be said, Disney’s) imperious, authoritative perspective would suggest that but, as the lesson of Francis Fukuyama reminds us, those who confidently predict “the end of history” can wind up with egg on their faces. The constant arrival of new material, new perspectives and new technologies suggests that the band’s story remains fundamentally open-ended. Rather than closing the book, these projects may encourage us to see the Beatles not as fixed historical figures but as subjects whose meaning continues to evolve with each retelling. Philip Norman’s Shout! narrative may have fallen from critical favour, but at least two assertions in it still ring true. That the Beatles are “the greatest engine for human happiness the entertainment world has ever seen”, and that when you hear that word, a small black insect is the second thing you think of.