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Lead book review

From Liverpool’s Cavern to the world stage: how the Beatles became a global phenomenon

Alan Johnson describes how four young men from Liverpool revived Britain, healed America and brought joy to millions

28 March 2020

9:00 AM

28 March 2020

9:00 AM

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time Craig Brown

4th Estate, pp.302, 20

When the Beatles’ first authorised biographer, Hunter Davies, clinched the deal in 1967, his publisher remarked that ‘we know everything we could possibly know about the Beatles and they’ll disappear soon’. In that same year, the philosopher Bryan Magee adopted an incredulous tone in the Listener: ‘Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be … part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?’

But here in the recently released statistics for the Top Ten global recording artists of 2019, among the Taylor Swifts and the Ed Sheerans, 50 years after they broke up — let me introduce...

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