Before they were big

By J.W.

ON JUNE 6th 1962, peering through the control-room glass at a male quartet in EMI's recording studio in north-west London, an engineer said to himself, "Good God, what've we got 'ere?"

Four long-haired Liverpudlians in thin-lapelled suits and flamenco boots had arrived to tape some songs: "Besame Mucho", "Love Me Do", "PS I Love You" and "Ask Me Why". The band's name, according to the men at EMI, was absurd.

This scene is described on page 666 of "Tune In", Mark Lewisohn's astounding 946-page book about the early days of the Beatles. By the time readers reach this page, they'll have got the point. By the standards of the day the Beatles were quite bizarre. They were radical composers, though they didn't know a stave from a semi-quaver. Half a century on, they remain revelatory. Many have tried in vain to follow their example. The phenomenon of those odd-looking young men ranks among the most compelling stories of the 20th century.

Mr Lewisohn, a leading Beatles scholar, has been studying and writing about the group since the 1970s. With "Tune In" he starts with the family histories of each band member, and barely misses a day of their rough and rude Liverpool and Hamburg phases until fame swept them up in 1963.

"It's such a deep, broad and rich story," he explains. "There's so much myth and misinformation," he adds, complaining that little real research went into the many Beatles biographies that have come before his. "For posterity, I felt it needed to be done this way."

It is hard to imagine a wide readership for a nearly 1,000-page tome about the Beatles' pre-fame strivings. Yet "Tune In", a decade in the making and first in a projected trilogy called "All These Years", has hypnotic appeal. It wears its almost obsessive learning lightly. Readers know what's coming, but Mr Lewisohn writes with admirable restraint, scarcely alluding to the extraordinary twists and turns of the next few years.

Though a fan since the release of "Please Please Me" in 1963, Mr Lewisohn doesn't write like one. He sticks to the facts, chronicling the shabby meanness of 1940s and 1950s Liverpool, the influence of skiffle music, Elvis and Little Richard (among others), and their rough education in the nightclubs of early 1960s Hamburg.

"Tune In" is also packed with revelations and demystifications. For instance, a five-year-old John Lennon was never forced to choose between his nomadic father and flighty mother. Custody was made by parental agreement, and John went with his mother. "There was definitely no tug-of-love scene," recalls Billy Hall, a friend of Lennon's father and a lone living witness (in 2009) to the episode.

The Beatles haircut? It turns out that the mop-top was not created in Hamburg by their close friend Astrid Kirchherr, but in a cheap Paris hotel in October 1961. The barber was Jürgen Vollmer, part of their Hamburg circle, and the hair he tackled first was Paul McCartney's followed by Lennon's. Mr Vollmer stuffed the cut hair under his hotel bed. "The quiet was pierced the following morning when the concierge discovered the debris," Mr Lewisohn writes. "She would not be the last to scream over the Beatles' hair."

"I couldn't resist that," Mr Lewisohn says, a little sheepishly.

After publishing important books about Beatles concerts and recordings in the 1980s, Mr Lewisohn took on the full-time job of Beatles biographer in 2004. But he insists that "All These Years" is not authorised.

"It wasn't an issue," Mr Lewisohn. "The Beatles had done their book, the 'Anthology' [published in 2000], which I helped edit. They weren't going to authorise another."

For "Tune In" he has found old fans in Liverpool, examined ghostly footage and listened to as many pre-EMI recordings as have survived. By piecing together EMI documents and those of Brian Epstein, the band's manager, Mr Lewisohn has proven that George Martin—the producer who was instrumental in shaping almost every Beatles album—was pushed to sign the group before meeting them (owing to corporate pressure after he was found having an affair with his secretary; they got married and are still together today). This "goes against every known account," he says.

Mr Lewisohn is at work on the second book of the trilogy. Though hazy on the details, he assures that plenty more surprises are in store. Fans will need to be patient: volume two is at least five years off, while volume three won't be ready until well into the next decade.