The deepest pleasure afforded by the beatles in scotland-a handsome hardback custom-built for the christmas stocking of every rock dad north of berwick-is its depiction of a time when the four were not yet so stratospherically and unreachably fab. we know all too well the sorts of people by whom the beatles were later surrounded-gurus,managers with grievances,flakes and acolytes, cocaine set serpents and, in the cases of john lennon and george harrison, fans with murder on their minds.
In the transit van and gusthouse stage of their career, though, there was an altogether more seemly class of beatle disciple. it is these people who are tha stars of the many wonderful photographs and I-was-there accounts in ken mcNab's book: the baffled lord provosts pushed in the band's direction, the haressed policemen mentally calculating what beatlemania is earning them in overtime, the adolescent offspring of scottish theatre managers crammed into kilts to meet the singers off the telly, the beehived ravers who firted their way by what passed for security in those far-off days.
Who knew what they were dealing with back then? virtually nobody, least of all the beatles themselves. performing one-night stands in elgin and kirkcaldy, aberdeen and bridge of allan they were merely one band among a multitude of touring beat groups, slightly superior to billy J kramer and the dakotas but little more; unlìkely candidates for cultural deification, certainly.
It's this deminsion that gives a heartbreaking, beatifully sad cast to much of this admirable book. its characters had the briefest walk-on parts in the greatest secular nativity story known to humanity but couldn't have appreciated the fact until much later. their anecdotes, therefore, have the burnished, well-rehearsed sheen that comes from nearly 50 years of telling. how many howffs and saloons have been been warmed down the years by a ritualised recollection of the time, say, brian meechan of dundee phoned ringo starr at his hotel in the city and gop put straight through?
This book bursts with similiar tales, all of them happy, hopeful and redolent of a barely recognisable era. they are underscored, however, by the same blue notes that made hey jude possibly the greatest record of all time, the haunting sense that none of this can ever happen again. it's a book about the beatles, youth at a time when society was relinquishing the keys to everything.
In the transit van and gusthouse stage of their career, though, there was an altogether more seemly class of beatle disciple. it is these people who are tha stars of the many wonderful photographs and I-was-there accounts in ken mcNab's book: the baffled lord provosts pushed in the band's direction, the haressed policemen mentally calculating what beatlemania is earning them in overtime, the adolescent offspring of scottish theatre managers crammed into kilts to meet the singers off the telly, the beehived ravers who firted their way by what passed for security in those far-off days.
Who knew what they were dealing with back then? virtually nobody, least of all the beatles themselves. performing one-night stands in elgin and kirkcaldy, aberdeen and bridge of allan they were merely one band among a multitude of touring beat groups, slightly superior to billy J kramer and the dakotas but little more; unlìkely candidates for cultural deification, certainly.
It's this deminsion that gives a heartbreaking, beatifully sad cast to much of this admirable book. its characters had the briefest walk-on parts in the greatest secular nativity story known to humanity but couldn't have appreciated the fact until much later. their anecdotes, therefore, have the burnished, well-rehearsed sheen that comes from nearly 50 years of telling. how many howffs and saloons have been been warmed down the years by a ritualised recollection of the time, say, brian meechan of dundee phoned ringo starr at his hotel in the city and gop put straight through?
This book bursts with similiar tales, all of them happy, hopeful and redolent of a barely recognisable era. they are underscored, however, by the same blue notes that made hey jude possibly the greatest record of all time, the haunting sense that none of this can ever happen again. it's a book about the beatles, youth at a time when society was relinquishing the keys to everything.
