LSMedia or Liverpool student media at liverpoolstudentmedia.com is a brand new website launched by the University of Liverpool's students to promote and support talented Liverpool student's creative written, visual or radio content.

There’s a delicious irony in the current fashion for all things retro in the world of music. Here we are, almost a full 10 years into the 21st century and yet the appetite for the past has, it seems, never been bigger. And indeed the appetite for all things Beatles would seem to epitomise this. On the 9th of this month the entire back catalogue of albums is being re-released having been painstakingly polished and touched up to give us what we are promised will be the ultimate sonic make-over, as well as a ‘making of’ documentary to accompany each one. On the same day The Beatles: Rock Band game is released, capitalising on both the band’s current cultural capital as well as the enormous success of similar games in the last couple of years. It will almost certainly top gaming charts worldwide and help bring the music of this most important of groups to a whole new young audience, as well as undoubtedly bringing this type of gaming to a whole new, but much older audience. And of course here in Liverpool it is pretty much impossible to escape the long and wide shadow that John, Paul, George and Ringo continue to cast over their native city as the Matthew Street festival and its countless fab four tribute acts from all over the world proved over the recent Bank Holiday weekend. This in addition to the Cavern quarter and the various tours, shops, exhibitions and suchlike that draw tourists to this famous city 52 weeks a year. The Beatles are not just a cultural phenomenon but a capitalist one too which at this time of recession and financial strife would appear to be in pretty rude health.

To add to all of this we have the release of the expanded and revised 4th edition copy of the only authorised biography the band ever commissioned, and certainly the only one to have been written whilst the Beatles were still a going concern. And it’s this fact that makes it such a fascinating and insightful read. Written during 1967-68 over a period of 18 months during which Davies had full access to the band and their families, friends and associates it paints an absorbing and intimate picture of four 20-somethings who having not long since released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to enormous critical acclaim and commercial success were at the peak of their powers. It begins by telling with warmth and candour the now familiar tale of their Liverpool upbringings and schooldays; John and Paul's meeting and the Quarrymen; their subsequent name change to the Silver Beatles; the long stays in Hamburg where they honed their skills as musicians and performers as well as perfecting their energised and raucous sound; the return to Liverpool and their popularity at the Cavern; meeting Brian Epstein whose dedication and enthusiasm would eventually lead to them signing to EMI and meeting producer George Martin; the replacement of Pete Best with Ringo and the first run of singles all of which would ultimately resolve itself in ‘Beatlemania’ – 3 or so years of almost impossibly intense and impassioned fervour the likes of which the world has not seen before or since. It is a tale that has been told and re-told in increasingly minute detail over the last 40 years by more people than are worth mentioning and of course by the Beatles themselves in their hugely successful Anthology films.

Rarely though has the tale been as acutely observed. The accounts of their childhoods contained here are genuinely illustrative and detailed and benefit enormously from interviews done with all the Beatles parents and family alive at the time. These early chapters offer not just an insight into their lives but also a fascinating glimpse of what it was like to be a child in 1950’s Britain, and paint a picture of four lads who were all in their own ways trying to avoid the drudgery of the working life that their upbringing had supposedly primed them for. All of their parents, in slightly varying degrees, saw their son’s musical exploits as a distraction and wished they would get ‘proper’ jobs in the way that generation who had lived through the depression and WW2 naturally would have, and interviews in particular with Jim McCartney and John’s Aunt Mimi (his real parent in the absence of his mother Julia) provide a depth and detail that is so often absent from other books on this period of their lives. Aunt Mimi in particular, with her austere middle class values and strong opposition to John’s chosen career path comes across as an unwittingly huge influence on the rebellious Lennon, giving him both a figure to pull towards and then push against in those formative years.

The middle section of the book detailing their rise to global fame is similarly coloured with insight and acute observations drawn from a whole host of people from their inner sanctum, and in particular the death of Brian Epstein, which happened during the 18 month period that this book was written, looms large. The portrayal of Epstein is, as the author explains in the lengthy and newly-written introduction, coloured by the fact that his mother Queenie was, at the original time of publishing, in charge of his estate and therefore had to be appeased before the book could go to print. This means his sexuality and his often sordid personal life are glanced over and as a result the portrayal of him does seem a little two-dimensional. If this is one of the books few weaknesses then it is balanced out by what is definitely the books main strength: the final section which offers a genuinely intriguing insight into the lives of the four most famous musicians in the world at the time. Davies was present throughout not just the recording of Sgt. Pepper but also at Paul’s St John’s Wood home in London to watch the creative processes that went into the writing of tracks such as “With A Little Help From My Friends” and “Getting Better” and in a chapter entitled “The Beatles and their music” we are provided with first-hand accounts of the working methods of Lennon and McCartney, the song-writing team. Of particular interest is them working the lyrics out for “With A Little Help...” and the way the two, with the help of Cynthia as a sounding board, throw ideas back and forth until they arrive at just the right wording for the song’s 3rd verse. It’s this kind of information that makes this book so essential for any serious Beatles fan.

However, the meat on the bones comes towards the end. Chapters 31-34 are simply entitled John, Paul, George and Ringo and offer a vivid snapshot of home, family and working life that is unique to this book and provides it with its greatest value as a historical document. Written just prior to John and Paul’s meetings with Yoko and Linda the chapters on the two paint pictures of a lazy, bored and house-bound husband and father in a functional relationship with a woman who neither stimulates or even seems to particularly interest him (John) and a self-conscious, conservative and sociable man who is caught between his then-girlfriend Jane Asher’s upper-class and culturally educated world and his unpretentious and wholly down-to-earth upbringing (Paul). Both are men on the cusp of something new and unforeseen, and the knowledge of what was to shortly happen in their lives is what provides these chapters with their intrigue. John’s cosy but unsatisfying domesticity is just waiting to be shattered by the arrival of the intellectual and exotic Yoko, whereas Paul’s seemingly fractious and unemotional relationship with Asher could only ever flounder once Paul had finally met Linda; a woman who would give herself over to him an a way that Asher was never prepared to. The chapters on George and Ringo offer much of their own (a spiritually awakened and slightly sulky George already showing little interest in being a Beatle; Ringo’s self-deprecating awareness of how lucky he was and his struggle to fill his spare time without the creative outlets of the others) but the chapter’s on the two most famous songwriters of the 20th century are just about worth the asking price on their own.

There are myriad publications on this most famous and important of bands out there ranging from the brilliant to the banal, and in the coming years more will undoubtedly appear. But whether you’re someone whose awareness of them has been tweaked by the current wave of commercial activity, or whether you’re a longstanding fan of the band looking for an authoritative account of their ascent to fame and a way into the minds of these ubiquitous individuals then this is the place to start; a primary source that by virtue of being the first and only book to have been written with this amount of access remains the Beatles biography that all others must look up to.

Paul Brown.