Paul Bryant's Reviews > Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties

There's a generalised kneejerk cultural reaction against the Beatles by some members of the popular music audience and it's quite understandable. What a pain in the ass to have the giant four-headed shadow of the perfect pop monster forever looming over today's epigones, like looking up out of your window in the fresh morning of your youth and in the clear blue sky someone has skywritten "we did it first, we did it bigger, and we did it better" every fooking day. Then all these books pour forth from the world's publishers every year detailing the Beatles' every last chord change and every last wife and every last fart and every last wife's fart. And then the whole thing gets revived every ten years, or so it seems, like the last time there was all that Anthology endlessness culminating with that giant book which wasn't a coffee table book at all because it was bigger than most coffee tables and took several Beatle fans to lift. That's because they've all got so old and saggy and wasted muscled and superannuated - how many Beatle fans does it take to change a lightbulb? Around 18 because they're all so old and enervated and gasping for breath, and they'd probably need a stairlift to do it, the one Led Zep will use to take them all to heaven, and good riddance.
So someone needed to set right down and put their shoulder to the cds and their nose to the keyboard and get down on paper why the above may be understandable but it's also substanceless. And it was Ian MacDonald. I'm very glad he wrote this book otherwise I might have had to, and I couldn't have done it a tenth as good because he actually knows what he's talking about. This is the one necessary Beatle book, the only one, the rest is gossip.