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The Beatles, Billy Graham assured us back in 1964, were no more than "a passing phase - symptoms of the uncertainty of the times". Forty years on, here comes Bob Spitz's biography of the passing phase - a work of such avaricious excavation it has required 983 (count them, 983) pages to tell a story that took not much more than a decade to live through. But with its near gratuitous accumulation of detail - sourced chiefly from interviews with hundreds of people, many of them never-before-heard-from sexagenarian Scousers - The Beatles (Aurum, £25) is the most vital account of the band since the late Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head.
Fascinating to learn, for instance, that the Beatles' first amps were paid for courtesy of a hooky deal with the Liverpool College of Art's Student Union. And that for all the
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A new biography reveals some of the Fab Four’s dodgier deals, writes christopher bray
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help they got from such public funds, the band were Thatcherites 20 years before the fact.
One night in 1959, when their first rhythm guitarist, Ken Brown, turned up at a gig so stricken with flu that he couldn't go on, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison harangued the promoter until she handed over Brown's share of the payment to them. But as Lennon said shortly after the group's split, "You have to be a bastard to make it, and the Beatles were the biggest bastards on Earth." Through his painstakingly precise researches, Spitz has rehumanised those bastards, helping us realise why, a month before a certain Beatle turns 64, we still need them, feed them, love them do. 
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POSTED MAY 11, 2006
Jonathan Wright's The Ambassadors
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