Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Howard Sounes

halfway that the Beatles had been to the plane already and gone.’ As the KLM jet climbed into the safety of international air space, the Beatles felt relieved to have got out of the country in one piece. Then they blamed Brian. When they stopped in New Delhi, the band informed Brian they wouldn’t tour again once they’d fulfilled the rest of their summer engagements. Epstein took the news badly.

      ‘What will I do if they stop touring?’ he asked Peter Brown. ‘What will be left for me?’

      For her part, Imelda Marcos looks back on the Beatles’ now-notorious visit to Manila with regret. ‘I feel sorry that it had to happen in the Philippines during our time,’ she says. ‘I’m sure the Beatles were not there to humiliate the President and the First Family and the government.’ She and Ferdinand continued to like Beadles’ music, and she has followed Paul’s career with interest. ‘It was a sad miscommunication. But you can be sure that the Filipinos are very sensitive to music and any great music is always appreciated by Filipinos. Even to this day they love the Beadles and I do, too.’*

      THE LAST TOUR

      Home again, Paul enjoyed a summer break in advance of the release of Revolver. The sleeve of the new LP featured artwork by Klaus Voormann: a collage of photos and Beardlseyesque drawings of the boys, John watching Paul through slit eyes. As the album was played and admired, widely considered an advance even on Rubber Soul, the Beatles steeled themselves for what would be their final live shows: a short, late summer tour of the United States, starting in Chicago on 12 August 1966. The cloud of ill-fortune that had followed them from Germany to Japan to Manila now turned black.

      Earlier in the year, John and Paul had given in-depth interviews to one of their pet reporters, Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard, in which they let their guard down to an unusual degree. In his profile, Paul came across as a pretentious young man bent on self-improvement. ‘I don’t want to sound like Jonathan Miller,’ he told Maureen, referring to the polymath intellectual,

      but I’m trying to cram everything in, all the things that I’ve missed. People are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great, and I must know what people are doing … I vaguely mind people knowing what I don’t know.

      Paul criticised the US for the plight of its black citizens, contrasting their struggle for Civil Rights with life in dear old England, ‘O sceptred isle!’ he said, misquoting Shakespeare,* as he often did. It was a habit that could make him appear pompous when reported in print, but may only have been meant playfully in conversation. ‘He was a relentless tease,’ recalls Cleave.

      The journalist’s subsequent interview with John Lennon at Kenwood resulted in one of the best-observed profiles of the musician ever published. Cleave found John in many ways unchanged since she had first met the band at the start of Beatlemania, still peering down his nose at her, ‘arrogant as an eagle’. Kenwood was more a giant playpen than home: a suit of armour named Sidney in one corner, a gorilla suit in another; one room set out with model racing cars; another with blinking light boxes John had bought as Christmas gifts but forgotten to give away. Although he shared this house with a wife, son, staff, and a cat named Mimi, John lived like a millionaire teenager, staying up half the night playing with his toys, watching TV and reading Just William books; not knowing what day it was when he got up. ‘He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England,’ Maureen observed, which was not something one could say of Paul.

      Like his partner, John enjoyed pontificating, and religion held his interest at the moment. ‘Christianity will go,’ he predicted portentously. ‘It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right.’ Paul had expressed similar irreligious sentiments to Maureen, saying he leaned towards atheism, but Paul would never have been so injudicious as to say: ‘We’re more popular than Jesus now,’ as John did in his interview. ‘I don’t know which will go first – rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary.’