12- Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years
Tune In is the first volume of All These Years by the world’s leading Beatles historian, Mark Lewisohn. A decade in the making, it follows the band members from their childhoods through 1962 when their breakthrough– and their unexpected success– was just days away. This book has been almost universally lauded as the most thorough (944 pages), riveting and accurate story of the Fab Four.
Mark Lewisohn
13- The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles , Peter Brown
Peter Brown was a close friend of and business manager for the band. This book tells the inside story of the music and the madness, the feuds and the drugs, the marriages and the affairs—from the greatest heights to the self-destructive depths of the Fab Four. In-depth and definitive. It’s one of the most comprehensive, revealing biographies of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Newsday called it “the most authoritative and candid look yet at the personal lives…of the oft-scrutinized group.”
14- Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation ,Philip Norman
Philip Norman’s biography of the Beatles is considered by many the definitive work on the world’s most influential band. The updated edition charts the rise of four scruffy Liverpool lads from their wild, often comical early days to the astonishing heights of Beatlemania. It describes the chaos of Apple and the collapse of idealism as the band heads for breakup. It also describes their struggle to escape the smothering Beatles’ legacy and the deaths of John Lennon and George Harrison. Witty, insightful, and moving, Shout! is essential reading for Beatles fans and anyone interested in pop music.
15- The Beatles Off the Record , Keith Badman
This is a nearly 500-page compendium of unrehearsed interviews and outrageous opinions by each of the four Beatles’ members. Their commentaries on the personalities, events, and issues of the day are arranged chronologically by year from the beginning of their careers to the end of the Beatles in 1970. “This is the most comprehensive oral history of The Beatles ever published. . . .” Midwest Book Review.
16- Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock ‘n’ Roll , Robert Rodriguez
Released in 1966, Revolver packed the ammunition to signal a huge change in the Beatles — from a performing rock bank to a studio-based creative force. Revolver sparked a revolution in music. It influenced everything from the psychedelic San Francisco sound (Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead) to the first wave of post-blues hard rock (Sabbath, Zeppelin) through heavy metal and movie soundtracks. The Beatles’ seventh album was the game-changer, the author argues, placing it above Sgt. Pepper as the group’s artistic high-water mark.
17 – Here There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles , Geoff Emerick
Emerick became an assistant engineer at Abbey Road Studios in 1962 at age 15, and was there as the Beatles recorded their first songs. He later worked with the Beatles as they recorded the groundbreaking She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand. He watched them mature from a young and playful group to professional, polished musicians as they recorded such hits as Eight Days A Week and I Feel Fine. In 1966, as chief engineer, he was responsible for their distinctive sound in Revolver, whose recording techniques changed the course of rock history. Emerick also engineered Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road, considered by many the greatest rock recordings of all time. Emerick talks about the band’s creative process and the personal dynamics, from the relentless competition between Lennon and McCartney to the infighting and frustration that brought a bitter end to the world’s greatest rock band.
18 – Love Me Do: The Beatles’ Progress by Michael Braun
Braun was a 27-year-old New Yorker working in London, who presciently joined the Beatles’ 1963-64 British tour and so was on hand for their first breakthrough in the US with I Want to Hold Your Hand. Though American, he was no greilnicker but a gifted reporter whose fly-on-the-wall account prefigured many later scenes in A Hard Day’s Night. Braun paid a high price for this amazing access: John later admitted the Beatles had been “bastards” to him and photographer Dezo Hoffman remembered them throwing him a lamb chop from a room-service trolley “as if he was a dog”.
19- Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles
An authorised biography. Formerly known simply as “Miles”, the author was a co-founder of Indica, the art gallery and bookshop that became the epicentre of London’s underground scene in the mid-60s (and where John famously met Yoko Ono). Initially, Paul intended the book to deal solely with his “London years”, proving how he, not John, was the first to explore the avant garde, but Miles convinced him to include his childhood as well. The result is part-biography, part-autobiography, with long, fascinating first-person reminiscences by its subject. But there’s little about his marriage to Linda and nothing about their much-criticised career in Wings.
20 – The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard DiLello
One of many American flower children who washed up in London in the late 60s, DiLello became Apple’s “house hippy”. His sharp-eyed account runs from the early days, when the Beatles’ business was plundered by con artists and freeloaders, to the arrival of Allen Klein and the reign of terror that followed. Along the way, he assists in ticklish PR projects like promoting John and Yoko’s film Self-Portrait. When this extended study of the Lennon penis is boycotted by conventional reviewers, Yoko comments that “the critics wouldn’t touch it”.
21- . The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away by Allan Williams
In later years, Williams competed with Pete Best as the worst case of what I call “Liverpool eyes” – the tragic gaze of those left behind when the Beatles conquered the world. His coffee bar, the Jacaranda, was the favourite hangout for a band he initially termed “a right load of layabouts”. He nonetheless got them their first work in Hamburg, driving them there in his own beaten-up van. But after they’d avoided paying his commission, he let Brian Epstein take over. This book, ghosted by Daily Mirror journalist William Marshall, has the authentic reek of Liverpool back alleys circa 1961.
22- The Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman
Included as a masterclass in how not to write a biography of a pop star – or anyone else. Firstly, for its blitz of untruths (John is portrayed as a schizophrenic, epileptic, autistic, bisexual killer and wife-beater) which often contradict one another. Secondly, for its ludicrous ignorance (to take just one random instance, the British police are said to wear “balaclava helmets”). Thirdly, for the sheer futility of writing an 800-plus book about a musician – and a music – its author despises. Even if the subject is a monster (which John wasn’t) your first duty as a biographer is to love your monster.
Sources : https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/22/top-10-books-about-the-beatles
https://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/1A1A2OA17JO37
“http://www.aboutgreatbooks.com/topics/music/books-about-the-beatles/”
