Katya’s Reviews > With a Little Help from their Friends: New for 2025, a fun guide to the history and music of the Beatles > Status Update

While Sinatra sneered about 'kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons' and Noel Coward blustered that they were 'totally devoid of talent' and Lou Reed thought they were 'garbage', classical composers and critics, maybe smarter or perhaps just less bitter and envious, were often (and often very quickly) more embracing.

She wasn't old enough to vote. She wasn't old enough to drink in a pub. She couldn't get married without her father's consent. Freda Kelly was just 17(.) She worked (.)as The Beatles' fan club secretary. On her first day in the job, the mailbag consisted of two letters. A couple of weeks later it was forty. Soon there were eight hundred a day, which made Freda regret giving her home address as the fan club contact.

On 11 September 1964,The Beatles were scheduled to play in Florida(.)when they were told the show would be racially segregated. (.)they argued against it(.)There were nineteen days of negotiations. Eventually the Jacksonville Gator Bowl was desegregated for the first time.To The Beatles, raised in a multi-ethnic city on the black music of Tamla Motown, segregation and its implicit rationale, racism, was 'just stupid'

(.)Fascher grew to love The Beatles,taking them under his wing and warning anyone who gave them trouble that he would 'find them'.He became their informal bodyguard during their Indra and Kaiserkeller days when they slept four to a room next to the toilets in the Bambi Kino cinema and even took them home to Neustadt to meet his mum,who would cook them pea soup in the same cauldron she boiled their underpants in.

'It was like a merry-go-round in my head. They looked absolutely astonishing(.) All I wanted was to be with them and to know them' she recalled, which is a great testament to their personal magnetism since, for the entirety of his first two seasons in Hamburg, George never bathed or showered.

[De onde viria a tontura?]

In the spring of 1960(.)[Royston Ellis] instigated what seems to have been The Beatles' first drug experience, showing them how to crack open a nasal inhaler and to chew the Benzedrine-soaked strip to achieve an amphetamine high.'We cracked up the Vicks inhaler, ate it and sat up all night till nine the next morning rapping and burping up the taste' remembered George, affectionately.

[Tanto Vicks que desperdicei...]

'George got done once, and the teacher missed him and got him here on the wrist.[.]So, the next day we were in class, and somebody pops the head around the door and said[.]"George, come out for a moment please."[.]George's dad was there, he said,"Did you do that to my son?" and the teacher said"Yes", and he goes "Whack".[.]'I used to tell my dad, "I've got caned," and he said, "Well, you probably did something wrong.

She played the banjo and the ukulele and did the housework with woollen knickers on her head. She loved pranks and practical jokes(.)Julia Lennon, nee Stanley, was many things depending on your point of view—saint, sweetheart, muse, flibbertigibbet—but she was never anything as quotidian and prosaic as a mum, which is why she haunted her only son's psyche all his short, crowded life.

When I mentioned to Hunter Davies, the only official Beatles biog-rapher, that I was thinking of writing a 'Beatles book', he replied 'Oh you absolutely should. There hasn't been one for a good half hour.'