Chapter 1

The Beatles were such profoundly artistic people that they gave themselves massive licence to be their own artistic selves. That was how it was possible to sustain the group, because they could say or do harsh things to each other. They could reject things in songs that were corny, and come out with this most superb finished work. They had this way of dealing with each other's weaknesses so that only the strengths came through.

Apple press officer Derek Taylor

As early as 1963 journalist Stanley Reynolds suggested that the Beatles were 'about to fade away from the charts, to the Helen Shapiro hinterland of the 12-months wonders. . . it was a good exciting sound while it lasted'. And it did last, despite persistent murmurs in the same vein, provoked when a record failed to reach No. 1 or empty seats were spotted in the arenas that the Beatles had once filled with ease.

The nine-month hiatus after their final live show in August 1966 disguised a transformation in the Beatles' lives. In the late spring of 1967 they completed work on an album widely acclaimed as a landmark in twentieth-century music. Almost simultaneously, they embarked on a business scheme that began as an exercise in tax avoidance, and became a sketch for utopia. The Beatles had conceived a daring fantasy: the idea that four pop musicians might be able to reshape the capitalist system. They dreamed of a world in which creativity would flourish without the shackles of commerce; in which art and business could be joined in joyous union; in which society could be transformed not by the bullet or the ballot box, but by the Beatles, and the cosmic power of their name. Instead, they built a corporate prison which would sap their vitality and their willingness to survive, and prove to be inescapable long after the utopian fantasies had been forgotten.

In the summer of 1967, the Beatles were the princes of pop culture. Sgt Pepper, released in June, presented the era in miniature: gaudy, extrava gant, decadent, playful, solipsistic, alive. Only the closing minutes of 'A Day in the Life', with its threatening orchestral crescendo and atmosphere of surreal paranoia, greyed the technicolour pages of their dream. It was in just such innocent gaiety that the denizens of the counterculture lived that summer, in London, San Francisco and wherever the hippie trail might lead. It was possible, so misty-eyed veterans assure us, to wander up and down the Haight or the Kings Road, and hear nothing but the familiar melodies of Pepper, blasting joyously out of sync from every window.

If the young and privileged took comfort in their oneness, there was always the threat of pregnancy, a drugs bust, even (for young Americans) the arrival of a draft card. The flower-power uniform of bells, beads and body paint was a collective mask, the emblem of a conscious decision (in the most enduring cliché of the age) to 'Tune in, turn on, drop out. ' The hope was that, in congregating together, young people might create and preserve the fantasy of their choice, banishing forever the straight world of obligations and employment, marriage and maturity, their parents' crushing inheritance.

The Beatles, so pop commentator Tony Palmer declared, were 'the crystallisation of the dreams, hopes, energies, disappointments of a countless host of others who would have been Beatles if they could'. There was no resentment of their wealth or fame: their apparently effortless journey from proletarian drabness to aristocratic gaiety promised a similar transfiguration for their admirers. Where the Beatles led, millions were content to follow. Moustaches, kaftans, military tunics, cannabis, Indian ragas, flowers, universal peace and love: none of these was invented by the Beatles, but the group were the conduit by which the symbols of the age reached the outside world.

No longer available on the concert stage, the Beatles now existed in image alone, via the

promotional films that accompanied their single 'Penny Lane' and 'Strawberry Fields Forever', the peacock-rich cover of Sgt Pepper, the worldwide television premiere of 'All You Need Is Love' and the newsreel footage that captured them arriving at their recording studio, jetting to Greece or setting out for enlightenment with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Bangor. Yet there were less exclusive opportunities to glimpse one of these fabled creatures in the flesh.

Paul McCartney was the only Beatle not to have bought a mansion in the 'stockbroker belt' of gated villages and secluded estates southwest of London. His relationship with actress Jane Asher had provided an entré e into upper-middle-class London society, where he learned to mix with minor royals, businessmen and the theatrical elite. Besides his training in etiquette, the Asher family – in the shape of Jane's pop-singer brother Peter – introduced him to London's burgeoning world of alternative arts. He had gained a taste for modern drama and poetry at school, and relished the opportunity to patronise exotic galleries and theatres. Soon he was encountering beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, attending concerts of atonal and electronic music, quietly financing underground papers and events, and assisting the Indica Bookshop, run by Peter Asher's friend Barry Miles.

As McCartney soon discovered, celebrity status allowed him access to all areas of metropolitan life. He utilised the power of his name to meet prominent figures who would otherwise have ignored the ephemeral world of pop. 'Paul would do that a lot, ' Barry Miles said. 'He'd call people up and say, " This is Paul McCartney, would you like to have dinner? " Most people said yes. ' Among those he sought out was the philosopher and veteran peace campaigner Bertrand Russell. 'He saw Russell because he realised that he wouldn't get the truth about the Vietnam War from the London press, ' Miles explained. 'The thing to do was to go to the top, and as far as Paul was concerned, that was Russell. '

The polarising conflict in Vietnam was only one of the political currents preoccupying those who were prepared to engage with the outside world. There was the struggle for civil rights in America, global liberation movements seeking to overthrow colonial regimes, and apartheid in South Africa and its near-neighbour Rhodesia. Closer to home, the Beatles shared the common distaste among the young for censorship and the widespread contempt for the drug laws on the British statute books.

Their views were echoed by Brian Epstein, who had been managing the group since 1961 via his Liverpool company NEMS. But he was wary of letting political controversy endanger their appeal to the public. As their press officer Tony Barrow explained, 'Epstein asked the Beatles not to discuss their love lives, their sexual preferences, politics or religion with the media. But behind the scenes, the Beatles – particularly John and George – talked current affairs in general and topics such as Vietnam in particular. They were very much against war, having seen the results of bombing in Liverpool as kids. Talking about Vietnam at a press conference, as they started to do in 1966, was also a way of demonstrating to Epstein that they were beginning to resent being told what to do. '

Even McCartney realised the limits of the Beatles' power, however: 'What could we do? Well, I suppose that, at a Royal Command Performance, we could announce a number and then tell people exactly what we thought about Vietnam. But then we'd be thought to be lunatics. ' Or they might, as John Lennon discovered, become the subject of virulent fundamentalist hatred after expressing perfectly intelligent views about the relative popularity of religion and music. When the Beatles arrived in Chicago on their final tour on 11 August 1966, Lennon was forced to defend his comments that the group were 'more popular than Jesus'. So heated was the debate that nobody thought to ask the group about the political crisis uppermost in the minds of Chicago's citizens: the campaign against segregated housing led by the Reverend Martin Luther King. Interpreting their silence as indifference, radical black activist LeRoi Jones complained that the Beatles were the epitome of 'exclusive white. . . isolated from the rest of humanity'. He added, 'The Beatles can sing " We all live in a yellow submarine" because that is literally where they, and all their people (would like to) live. '

As if to prove Jones right, the Beatles embarked the following year on an expedition that symbolised their isolation from the real world. 'We were all going to live together now, in a huge estate, ' their past and future press agent Derek Taylor recalled. They initially set their sights on the windswept landscape of East Anglia, then a more attractive idea emerged: they would buy an island in Greece. Brian Epstein's long-time assistant Alistair Taylor was sent to the Mediterranean like a colonial governor seeking a winter retreat for a monarch. He returned to London with photographs of Leslo, a suitably idyllic setting for escapist millionaires, not least because it was surrounded by four smaller islands, one for each Beatle.

Three months earlier the democratic Greek government had been overthrown in a military coup, ostensibly to prevent any Marxist influences from corrupting the nation. The new regime tortured and executed its opponents with the minimum of judicial process. Nor did it overlook the young: the army colonels banned long hair, rock music and all criticism of their policies. Left-wing activists in Britain launched a campaign to dissuade tourists from holidaying in Greece. The regime unconsciously aided their efforts by deporting visitors who failed to achieve military standards of appearance and discipline. It was not, perhaps, the most promising of cultural climates for a group of young millionaires who lived by their own law. Yet the Beatles did not allow petty politics to impede their vision of nirvana. 'I'm not worried about the political situation in Greece, as long as it doesn't affect us, ' Lennon declared. 'I don't care if the government is all fascist or communist. ' Their more socially aware friends, such as Barry Miles, were shocked by their indifference. 'I was horrified, ' he recalled. 'As I remember it, Paul was faintly embarrassed by it all, but John wasn't concerned. ' Paul McCartney's political misgivings were, in any case, outweighed by more selfish concerns: 'I suppose the main motivation would probably be [that] no one could stop you smoking. Drugs was probably the main reason for getting some island. '

A few weeks earlier McCartney had confirmed that he had experimented with the psychedelic drug LSD, or acid. 'It seemed strange to me, ' George Harrison recalled, 'because we'd been trying to get him to take LSD for about eighteen months – and then one day he's on the television talking about it. ' Harrison complained, 'I thought Paul should have been quiet about it – I wish he hadn't said anything, because it made everything messy, ' not least by raising the question of the Beatles' roles as moral exemplars for their fans. McCartney dismissed the problem by telling the interviewer that if he was so concerned about the welfare of the young, then he shouldn't broadcast comments. In the time-honoured tradition of the British media, sensation won out over common sense.

The latter quality was in short supply at Kenwood, Lennon's mansion, where the musician filled the Beatles' more relaxed schedule by escaping from the barrenness of his everyday life into a maelstrom of psychedelic chemistry. If Lennon's acid intake was an attempt to find unreality, Harrison was more specific, greeting acid as 'a blessing, because it saved me many years of indifference'. Though more cautious about his intake than his colleagues, McCartney recognised that LSD could focus and enhance his creativity if used in moderation. While Lennon sought to dissolve his ego and Harrison to transcend it, McCartney strolled through the mid-1960s as the captain of his soul, powered by self-belief and artistic certainty.

Sexual intercourse was so freely available to the Beatles that it hardly counted as a motivating force. Neither did wealth: virtually no luxury or experience was beyond their financial reach. Even the most insecure personality would have been satisfied by the overwhelming fame shared by these four young men. If anything, their celebrity was now a curse, keeping them from the uncomplicated pleasures of ordinary life. So what remained to keep the Beatles hungry for experience and achievement?

Richard Starkey's outlook was the least complex of the four. He had experienced poverty, isolation and prolonged illness as a child, and he still took simple pleasure in the freedom that stardom had brought him. He developed a talent for photography, though his pictures were rarely seen outside the family. He channelled some of his vast income into a short-lived building company, but took its failure in good heart; he still had his wife, his growing family, his pool table and the lavishly stocked bar that he installed in his den. Life had already provided more than he could ever have dreamed of; even acid did little to expand his horizons.

LSD had a far more profound effect on George Harrison, providing 'the awakening and the realisation that the important thing in life is to ask, " Who am I? " " Where am I going? " and " Where have I come from? " All the rest is, as John said, " just a little rock 'n' roll band". It wasn't that important. ' This was said with the hindsight of almost thirty years, but as early as 1966, when pop's possibilities appeared limitless, Harrison reckoned that it seemed 'somehow dead'. He was also restricted by the persona that had been created for him by the media. 'They called him " the quiet Beatle", ' recalled his sister Louise, 'but that was because the first time they went to America, he had a really bad strep [sore] throat, and so he didn't say much at press conferences, and that image just stuck. It's interesting, though, because our mum and dad never allowed us to go out and play with the other kids; we went everywhere with them instead. ' A sense of isolation, and self-reliance, was built into Harrison's psyche from his early childhood, allowing plenty of space for his imagination to roam.

A chance encounter with Indian musicians on the set of the Beatles' movie Help! fired that imagination in a way formal education had never achieved. As a teenager, he had rejected

academia in favour of the guitar. He lacked McCartney's intuitive musicality but substituted effort for natural ability. In 1965 he bought his first sitar, and was widely responsible for introducing the languorous hum of Indian instrumentation to the pop audience. Eager to experiment further, he took sitar lessons from the maestro Ravi Shankar, who became a lifelong friend and guru. Perhaps more importantly, Shankar's brother Ravu gave Harrison a book in which he found the philosophy that would dominate his subsequent life: Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. This account of spiritual devotion, of miracles and meditation, of gurus and disciples, left an almost visceral mark. As Harrison described his reaction, 'Wow! Fantastic! At last I've found somebody who makes some sense. ' With naive enthusiasm, he read every Indian spiritual text he could find 'by various holy men and swamis and mystics, and went around and looked for them and tried to meet some'.

His sister Louise recalled, 'As kids, we were always encouraged to find out for ourselves what we believed in, and what was right and wrong. Our family were Catholics, but we always had a global outlook. We were spiritual, not religious as such. George didn't change as a person after he went to India; he was the same as he'd always been. But he became a passionate apostle for what he had found there, and was very keen to spread the word. ' Harrison's passion for all things Indian was revealed on the Beatles' albums, which now routinely included at least one excursion into ethnicity. Brian Epstein was relieved that the youngest member of the group – whose early efforts at songwriting had been ridiculed by Lennon, McCartney and producer George Martin – had finally found his mé tier. Unknown to Epstein or the wider world, however, Harrison was now comparing life as a Beatle with the way of the mystic, and finding his fame wanting. 'After what had happened [in India], ' he recalled, 'everything else seemed like hard work. It was a job, doing something I didn't really want to do, and I was losing interest in being " fab" at that point. ' He returned from India to work on the SgtPepper album, but remembered, 'It was difficult for me to come back into the sessions. In a way, it felt like going backwards. '

While Harrison was in India, McCartney basked in life as a man about town. In his well-cut jackets and colourful neckerchiefs, he paraded through society like a benevolent dandy, bestowing his bounty – a smile here, a few hundred pounds there – on every deserving soul who crossed his path. He had been raised to be kind, generous, polite and friendly, and that was precisely the impression he left upon those who enjoyed fleeting encounters with him at film premieres or in Chelsea salons.

McCartney was prepared to dabble in Eastern philosophy, as he was in musique concrè te or experimental cinema. Acclaim from his peers and from the public at large fuelled his creativity; his exposure to the avant-garde refined his vision. During the final months of 1966 he composed a traditionally melodic score for a movie, prepared electronic collages for his own amusement and schooled himself in the extremes of contemporary classical music. He was the golden boy of the British counterculture, limited only by the boundaries of his imagination. When Pepper took shape, it was in his image.

The apparent richness of McCartney's life contrasted sharply with the emptiness that haunted John Lennon. During the mid-1960s 'I went through a terrible depression, I was going through murder, ' Lennon revealed in 1969. His friend journalist Maureen Cleave penned a vivid portrait of his 'large, heavily panelled, heavily carpeted, mock Tudor house' filled with 'tape recorders, the five television sets, the cars, the telephones of which he knows not a single number'. She noted, 'He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England. ' And she found him curiously dissatisfied: 'You see, there's something else I'm going to do, something I must do – only I don't know what it is. All I know is, this isn't it for me. ' A few months later he said, 'I feel I want to be them all – painter, writer, actor, singer, player, musician. ' McCartney shared his curiosity, and carried it into his working life. For the moment Lennon's aspirations and activities remained painfully out of register. He would listlessly attempt to compete with McCartney's experiments in sound and vision, without ever quite believing in what he was doing. Occasionally, his labours would bear fruit: over several arduous weeks he channelled his confusion into 'Strawberry Fields Forever', while another burst of creativity produced the skeleton of 'A Day in the Life'. But his other contributions to the Beatles for the next six months were sporadic and forced. In the depths of his depression at Kenwood he had to recognise that the balance of power had shifted in McCartney's direction.

In an effort to imitate McCartney's lifestyle, Lennon allowed their mutual friend and gallery owner Robert Fraser to shepherd him through London's avant-garde. On 7 November 1966^*1, he was taken to the Indica Gallery, where a Japanese member of the experimental art group Fluxus was setting up her exhibition Unfinished Paintings. In a meeting that would assume mythological status, he spoke briefly with the artist, 33-year-old Yoko Ono, and established some form of rapport. Lennon wasn't the only enthusiastic visitor to the gallery: a few hours later film director Roman Polanski experienced Ono's work for the first time, exclaiming, 'This is the most beautiful apple I have ever seen, ' and, 'That is the very essence of a needle, ' when faced with exhibits comprising nothing more than an apple and a needle. Just over two weeks later Lennon and Ono met again at the opening of an exhibition by Claes Oldenburg at Fraser's own gallery, smiled and moved on. McCartney also met Ono that evening, and it was to his house that Fraser directed her when she sought a handwritten Beatles manuscript to include in a Festschrift for the composer John Cage. McCartney suggested she should contact Lennon instead, and the jaded Beatle and unsettlingly intense Ono struck up a distant, asexual friendship. ^†1

By spring 1967, when the Beatles were ensconced in EMI's north London studios, Yoko Ono had become a minor celebrity. Her FilmNo. 4, colloquially known as 'Bottoms', was refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Censors, sparking protests outside their office. The Times sounded surprised to discover that 'Miss Ono turned out to be an attractive young woman with long black hair and a soft, shy voice. ' This proved to be the last occasion on which Ono won praise for her appearance in the British press. Eventually, in August, her 'film of many happy endings' received its world premiere in London and was exhibited at private clubs. Its Fluxus-inspired concept – a parade of anonymous backsides, accompanied by amused comments from the participants – attracted much humorous comment and a little forced outrage. Ono added to the later by writing a humorous essay for the underground magazine International Times, to which both Lennon and McCartney subscribed. After lampooning male genitalia, she declared, 'Men have an unusual talent for making a bore out of everything they touch. '

Lennon slowly opened a channel of communication with this placid but strangely provocative woman. In September she was invited to watch the group recording McCartney's 'Fool on the Hill'. Two days later she launched a conceptual event entitled Yoko Ono's 13 DaysDo-It-Yourself Dance Festival. Postcards tumbled through the letter boxes of subscribers (including Lennon) every morning, bearing cryptic messages such as 'Draw a large circle in the sky' and (on Lennon's birthday) 'Colour yourself. Wait for the spring to come. Let us know when it comes. ' Lennon was alternately exhilarated and infuriated, but never bored.

In another echo of McCartney's patronage of the arts, Lennon acted as sponsor for an Ono art exhibition, Yoko Plus Me: Half-A-Wind, in London. Entirely by accident, of course, Lennon's name appeared in the publicity for the show, despite earlier assurances that he could remain anonymous. Out of habit more than lust, he made a token pass at Ono after the exhibition opened, but Ono politely turned him down. As yet, no hint of scandal attended his involvement in her career, and Lennon (and McCartney) soon sponsored a second art show, by his college friend Jonathan Hague.

By then, Robert Fraser had introduced Lennon to the man he would describe as 'my guru', a young Greek inventor called Alexis Mardas, or as Lennon dubbed him, 'Magic Alex'. Derek Taylor, tongue very slightly in cheek, later described him as 'the genius who had arrived in England knowing only the Duke of Edinburgh and Mick Jagger'. Often dismissed in subsequent accounts as 'a television repairman' of no technical ability, Mardas had been recognised as a scientific prodigy as a teenager, and given the opportunity to study at a special academy, from where he was encouraged to travel around Europe to broaden his education. Perfectly mannered and utterly persuasive, he had amassed an impressive but ill-fitting set of acquaintances that stretched from the Rolling Stones to the exiled Greek royal family, and hence to other crowned and deposed heads of Europe. A keen follower of scientific innovation, he concocted inventions that might have been designed to attract the attention of the pop aristocracy: force fields that could prevent car crashes and repel burglars, or a camera that could take X-ray pictures. George Harrison, who was bitterly cynical about Mardas's abilities in later years, had the grace to admit that some of his inventions were 'amazing'. Lennon was willing to follow anyone who could carry him out of the mundane, and encouraged the other Beatles to offer Mardas financial support.

It was Mardas's good fortune to enter the Beatles' milieu at the very moment when they were seeking out methods of spending – 'investing' was the more hopeful term – extravagant amounts of money. Brian Epstein's inexperience as a manager perennially left him reacting to financial necessities, rather than anticipating them. He had explored a primitive tax-haven scheme in the Bahamas, but succeeded only in losing money there. Swiss bank accounts had been set up in the Beatles' names (though this was kept from the public, who preferred to think of their heroes as unassuming working-class lads at heart). But by late 1966 it was apparent to Harry Pinsker, the Beatles' chief contact at accountants Bryce Hamner, that immediate action was required if the musicians were not to face a potentially devastating tax bill from the British authoritises. 'I suggested to the boys, ' the punctilious Pinsker explained, 'that they bought freehold property and went into retail trading. ' Their reply, he recalled, was, 'We want to be like Marks and Spencer's. '

The Beatles had first been incorporated – as The Beatles Ltd – in 1963, when it became apparent to Epstein that their career might outlive the year. Within six months the company instigated its first lawsuit, against two manufacturers of unauthorised memorabilia based in Blackpool. The Beatles Ltd held the group's collective earnings, after Epstein's NEMS organisation had taken its 25 per cent. Without realising the implications, the Beatles had agreed a management deal with Epstein in October 1962 that not only guaranteed NEMS a quarter of their income for the next five years, but maintained that percentage on deals negotiated during that period. They had effectively signed away 25 per cent of their lifetime earnings from their recording contract with EMI – whether or not their relationship with Epstein survived. Other companies handled specific aspects of their career. Lennon and McCartney's songwriting interests were controlled by Northern Songs Ltd; their income from Northern passed into another holding company, from which Epstein claimed director's fees as well as his subsequent 25 per cent. The less substantial money accrued by Harrison's songwriting went into Harrisongs Ltd – run, like Northern Songs, by opportunistic publisher Dick James. Epstein formed Subafilms Ltd in early 1964 to handle the Beatles' movie projects. After Lennon published two books of cartoons and writings, he was encouraged to form a separate company to receive his royalties. And there were similar companies in the USA, not least Seltaeb Inc., the organisation that notoriously signed away the Beatles' rights to 90 per cent of the earnings from memorabilia sold in their name.

The intricacies of this financial web had long since exceeded Epstein's comprehension. Nor did it help that during late 1966 and early 1967 the Beatles' manager was undergoing a process of psychological disintegration, fuelled by his drug use, his chaotic sexual habits and his fear that by quitting live performance the group were slowly moving beyond his control. But Epstein did manage to negotiate a new recording deal in January 1967, whereby the Beatles promised to deliver 70 recordings in the next five years, and a guaranteed flow of albums until 1976 – either collectively or individually. (It is intriguing to note that the possibility of the Beatles splitting up was already built into this deal. ) At the same time, he tightened his grasp on his 25 per cent, ensuring that his cut was now enshrined in the recording contract.

Incapable of running NEMS with the efficiency that had once been his trademark, Epstein had recruited a partner, producer and entrepreneur Robert Stigwood, who soon showed signs of wanting to assume total control. The Beatles learned nothing of this until late August 1967, when Epstein's death from an overdose of sleeping pills first focused their attention on the contracts that they had signed.

It was Epstein's altogether more sober brother Clive who guided the formation of a company that would carry out Harry Pinsker's advice and save the Beatles from having to pay almost £ 3 million to the British government in income tax. Instead of being four individuals sharing their income in The Beatles Ltd, they would become employees of a new corporation, The Beatles & Co. They would each own a 5 per cent stake in the firm, the remaining 80 per cent being held by The Beatles Ltd – renamed Apple Music Ltd in 1967, and Apple Corps Ltd ('It's a pun, you see, ' McCartney said helpfully) in January 1968. The financial benefits were obvious. Their earnings were now subject to corporation tax rather than income tax (currently running at 94 per cent for such high earners as the Beatles), and they could claim back their personal living expenses from the company.

The first public acknowledgement of the new order came with a cryptic reference to Apple on the sleeve of Sgt Pepper. By then, the Beatles were beginning to realise that their company could become a plaything as well as a tax dodge. Alexis Mardas had been delicately telling Lennon about the technological breakthroughs that would be possible if only funding were available. He was added to the Beatles' payroll in August 1967, and by the end of the year he was installed as a director of Apple Electronics Ltd. Like a child at Christmas, Lennon was entranced by the wizardry of Mardas's inventions. Derek Taylor noted that Mardas 'remained the least challenged' of all the Beatles' aides in the years ahead; after all, he was Lennon's proté gé and – not to be understated in the year of acid – he was officially 'Magic'. Of all the Beatles, McCartney had the least interest in prolonging the Mardas mythology, but even he, thirty years later, conceded, 'We weren't being stupid, but we were probably overreaching. . . We were thinking this could happen in five years, whereas it's taken a little longer. ' By January 1968 Mardas had been commissioned to build new recording studios for both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and to purchase a factory to facilitate the mass production of his magical inventions.

Despite the close friendship he built with Harrison, Mardas was always Lennon's guru; the Beatle even acted as best man at his wedding. The next addition to the Beatles' circle fulfilled the guru's role for the entire group. Early in 1967 Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd had attended a London seminar in Transcendental Meditation, given by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Maharishi might have been invented to fill the spiritual chasm in the Beatles' lives: gentle and serene, a baby-like giggle never far from his lips, he exuded a beguiling mixture of wisdom and playfulness, supported by a devilish awareness of business opportunity. His devotion to the practice of meditation was total and sincere; so was his eagerness to reach out to the affluent young of the West. By studying the teachings of the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavadgita, the Maharishi insisted, his disciples would attain a truly fulfilled life: 'When society accepts it, social well-being and security will result, and when the world hears it, world peace will be permanent. ' Boyd was duly trained in the practice of meditation, and joyfully spread the word to her husband. The Maharishi returned to Britain in August 1967, and the Harrisons encouraged the other Beatles to attend his lecture. 'There was a collective consciousness within the Beatles, ' Harrison recalled of this period. 'I assumed that whatever one of us felt, the others would not be far out of line. ' The guru affected ignorance of their superstar status, and casually invited them to attend a course in Wales that weekend. It was there that they heard that Brian Epstein – the guru, if you like, of their early success – had died. It was, wrote Derek Taylor, 'the first crack in the marble of our wonderful temple of the mind wherein we would all dwell in perfect harmony'.

Having uttered some spiritual banalities fed to them by the Maharishi, who assured them that Epstein hadn't died, he'd just moved to another place^*2, the Beatles returned to London. There the implications of their 1962 contract with Epstein were spelled out to them: they were not managed by Brian, but by his company NEMS, which would now be jointly controlled by Stigwood and Clive Epstein. The Beatles felt a degree of family loyalty towards the Epsteins, but no personal bond with Clive. They had no affection for Stigwood: as an independent record producer, he had rejected the Beatles in 1962. And another recent recruit to NEMS, Vic Lewis, was also tainted: in 1957 McCartney had attended a rock 'n' roll show by Bill Haley in Liverpool, and was disgusted to discover that the first half of the performance would be given by Lewis's dance band instead.

There was an immediate announcement that 'no one could possibly replace Brian' and 'things will go on as before', mutually contradictory statements that signalled trouble ahead. For a while the Beatles imagined that Clive Epstein might be able to supervise the launch of Apple without having power of veto over their actions, but that compromise could never have held. The naturally conservative Clive advised caution; the Beatles interpreted this as lack of faith. 'He didn't believe in us, I suppose, ' Starkey complained. 'He thought we were four wild men and we were going to spend all his money and make him broke. '

The NEMS management deal expired in late September 1967, and the Beatles let it lapse. Instead, the four men decided that they would manage themselves and cast about for a suitable accomplice. It was at this point that Neil Aspinall, the trainee accountant who had become their road manager and personal assistant in 1961, broke one of life's cardinal rules, 'Never volunteer. ' 'I said to them, foolishly, I guess, " Look, I'll do it until you find somebody that you want to do it. " ' Aspinall could appear sullen in the company of the Beatles, but his wit was as quick and scathing as theirs, and he enjoyed a particularly warm relationship with Lennon, while being trusted implicitly by all four. 'Neil was indivisible, ' as Derek Taylor recalled. Aspinall rapidly discovered that the Beatles knew nothing about their financial and business obligations: 'We didn't have a single piece of paper. No contracts. The lawyer, the accountants and Brian, whoever, had that. Maybe the Beatles had been given copies of various contracts, I don't know. I know that when Apple started I didn't have a single piece of paper. I didn't know what the contract was with EMI or with the film people or the publishers or anything at all. So it was a case of building up the filing system, finding out what was going on. ' It was only now, for instance, that they discovered NEMS was entitled to 25 per cent of the Beatles' income from record sales in perpetuity.

It was a moment for taking stock. Instead, the Beatles impulsively launched their business empire. A maze of new companies was established in London: Apple Electronics, boasting a scientific laboratory in Boston Place; Apple Music Publishing, run by former car salesman Terry Doran in Baker Street; Apple Retailing, which established a boutique below the publishing office; Apple Tailoring, funding the creations of designer John Crittle; and, after a few uncomfortable weeks squatting at NEMS, a corporate office for Apple Corps Ltd in Wigmore Street. Neil Aspinall's fellow road manager Mal Evans rapidly found himself called into service: 'We had a meeting to set up Apple, and we were all sitting round this big table eating sandwiches and drinking. Paul turns round to me and says, " What are you doing these days, Mal, while we're not working? " " Not too much, Paul. " He says, " Well, now you're president of Apple Records. " Thank you very much! '

All four Beatles were insistent that Apple should be run by their friends, regardless of their talents or experience. Fortunately, some of their choices had the group's best interests at heart. An early recruit was journalist and PR man Derek Taylor. He had ghost-written a newspaper column for George Harrison and an autobiography for Brian Epstein, and survived several turbulent months in 1964 as the group's press officer. Impossibly charming and possessed of a dry wit, Taylor had escaped his Fleet Street roots and moved to California, where the hardened hack of pre-Beatles days became the acid-fired doyen of Hollywood pop publicists.

I was a wild 1960s counterculture figure in California, and George felt that they couldn't run Apple without me. We had always been friendly and now that – in the phrase of the day – we were on the same trip, he had to have me there. There might not have been an Apple as we knew it if I hadn't come back, and it might not have been as mad. I had a phone call from all four Beatles, asking me to join, but it was probably George's idea. He said, 'We want you to come back and run Apple. ' John said, 'I've asked Neil to run it. ' And Paul said he'd asked Peter Asher. It never occurred to me to say, 'Well, if all these different people have already been asked to run it, why are you asking me? ' It was that acid summer: it was a time of complete trust. I know now that we were foolish. We didn't come to any terrible harm, but when I look back at how we trusted everything would work out all right, it was folly. LSD did that to you.

The film is about the predicament of people [who] are trapped inside an image and a wealth machine which simply cannot express what they really feel.

Review of Magical Mystery Tour, Guardian 1967

On Boxing Day 1967 the Beatles' first self-produced, self-written, self-directed movie was premiered by BBC-TV. Shot in sumptuous colour, it was unfortunately screened in black-and-white. Magical Mystery Tour blended surreal imagery, avant-garde photographic techniques and jokes borrowed from English end-of-the-pier variety shows. Keith Dewhurst in the Guardian applauded its 'poetry beyond professionalism' and concluded that 'it redeemed in retrospect days of shallow rubbish', but his was a lonely voice. So vitriolic was the general reaction of the press that McCartney felt he had to apologise for having failed to meet the public's expectations.

Magical Mystery Tour was effectively a McCartney creation: he had devised the concept, supervised the filming, and been the only Beatle dedicated enough to endure the editing process. The film's reception introduced an unfamiliar sense of vulnerability into the group's morale, and threatened the unchallenged leadership that McCartney had assumed over the previous 18 months. 'John used to say, " I'm the leader of this group! " and we used to say, " It's only because you fucking shout louder than anyone else! " ' McCartney noted thirty years later. 'Nobody cared as much as he did about being the leader. ' It was precisely that Lennon no longer seemed to care, about the Beatles or anything else, that had allowed McCartney to seize control. 'Paul was always courageous, ' Derek Taylor recalled. 'In a way he was braver than John. ' In 1967 he masterminded the group's assumption of new identities on the Sgt Pepper album and the development of Apple into a commercial empire.

'Paul wanted to work, ' reflected Beatles/NEMS press officer Tony Barrow; 'John hated to work.

He had a MTV-level concentration span. He got bored very quickly, and pushed things aside, whether it was a song or a business deal. Paul was a much more methodical worker. He liked the discipline of coming into the office every day. ' Lennon would be shaken by fits of passion, for Magic Alex or against men in suits, and would then subside into an inertia that bordered on depression. McCartney never quite lost control of his emotions. As Barrow noted, 'John was the noisiest of the four, and so he was accepted as being the leader. But it quickly became obvious that Paul was the most persuasive of the Beatles, and the one who wielded the real power with Brian Epstein. John would make a lot of noise, but not get his own way. Then Paul would go in and persuade Brian that what John had suggested was the right thing to do. Paul was very shrewd in the way he handled relations, both inside and outside the group. '

But now Brian was dead, and the buffer between Lennon and McCartney had been removed. In any case, the relationship between the two men was built upon shared recognition of Lennon's supremacy. 'I always idolised him, ' McCartney admitted in 1987. 'We always did, the group. I don't know if the others will tell you that, but he was our idol. He was like our own little Elvis. . . always someone for us to look up to. ' Elsewhere, McCartney revealed that he lived for those occasional moments when his idol would acknowledge his talent: 'He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest. So whenever he did praise any of us, it was great praise indeed, because he didn't dish it out much. If ever you got a speck of it, a crumb, you were quite grateful. '

McCartney's comments suggest that even at the height of his creative fulfilment he could still be deflated and undermined by Lennon. He seemed to require public affection more than his older partner, and even that reward could feel empty if it wasn't supported by Lennon's approval. Nobody else could ever have made him admit, 'I have always quite enjoyed being second. . . You're still up with number one. Number one still needs you as his companion. ' Everywhere else in his life, McCartney demanded first position: from his lovers, from his employees, from the audience whose desertion might render his life meaningless. But subservience to Lennon gave him a sense of worthiness that he couldn't find elsewhere.

As the junior member of the Beatles – 'Paul was always eight months older than me, and he's still eight months older' – George Harrison sometimes displayed resentment towards his more successful colleagues. But he drew consolation from their willingness to share his explorations of Indian spirituality. When the Beatles travelled to the Maharishi's retreat in Rishikesh early in 1968, he took personal responsibility for their devotion. 'George actually once got quite annoyed and told me off because I was trying to think of the next album, ' McCartney revealed. 'He said, " We're not fucking here to do the next album, we're here to meditate! " It was like, " Ohh, excuse me for breathing! " You know, George was quite strict like that. ' And in those moments McCartney felt hurt and bewildered that the natural order of Beatles hierarchy – John, Paul, George and Ringo – had been disturbed.

Harrison's obvious admiration of Lennon did not mean that he felt inferior to his older colleague. 'After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship, ' he explained. 'That I was younger or I was smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John. Paul still says,

" I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger. " That's an illusion people are under. John and I spent a lot of time together from then on, and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death. ' This conviction allowed Harrison to transcend any petty aggravations in his dealings with Lennon and concentrate on what he saw as their mutual understanding.

Harrison and Lennon were certainly the two Beatles most prepared to immerse themselves in the spiritual waters of Rishikesh. Starkey famously returned home first, weary of his self-imposed diet of baked beans and his wife's aversion to the subcontinent's array of insect life. McCartney followed, having set his own limit – a strict four weeks – on the expedition from the outset. As he admitted later, he 'wondered what was going to happen with the other guys. For a week or so there I didn't know if we'd ever see them again, or if there ever would be any Beatles. ' Even Starkey, normally the least imaginative and most level-headed of the quartet, was now philosophising like a mystic about 'the greater plan' that governed life 'with a pattern and a reason for everything you do'. Like the Christian conundrum about the extent of free will in a God-directed universe, his statements demonstrated a blend of fatalism and blind faith: 'I think that when you're born, there is a very complex pattern that is planned out for your whole life. . . The major decisions are yours, but if you decided to do one thing, then everything that happens to you because of that decision has been planned out in advance. I never worry about what's going to happen in the future, and I never plan too far ahead, because I know that things are planned to happen, whatever I do. '

In the face of such acceptance, at home and abroad, McCartney could only trust his own instincts and continue to shape his own future – and, he hoped, that of the Beatles. While Lennon and Harrison were away he was free to impose his will on the fledgling Apple organisation. He told Derek Taylor that Apple should exhibit 'controlled weirdness'. This chimed with Taylor's own mental state: 'I was completely out of control. I was as free as a bird, and if this thing was going to be weird, then it was going to be weird. But it didn't take me many hours to realise that Apple was not a dream world. ' At the end of Taylor's first day in the office McCartney turned to him and said, 'You've been pretty obnoxious. It must be living in America that's done it. ' As Taylor realised, 'I was still an employee and the boys were still the bosses – especially Paul, the bossiest of the bossy. But still one's optimism survived. '

In India the two remaining Beatles were sucked into a drama about the Maharishi and his supposed preference for sexual rather than spiritual relations with his young female disciples. 'To tell you the truth, I think they may have used it as an excuse to get out of there, ' McCartney reasoned. Lennon stormed home like a child who'd been promised Christmas and instead found himself at the dentist. Harrison refused to allow the squabbles in the Maharishi's camp to shake his faith in the power of meditation or the allure of the East.

Delaying his return to Britain by visiting Ravi Shankar allowed Harrison to distance himself from what was happening in London. 'I had very little to do with Apple, ' he insisted. 'I was still in India when it started. I think it was basically John and Paul's madness – their egos running away with themselves or with each other. ' At the heart of the madness, Derek Taylor became aware that

The Beatles weren't together: they didn't know what they wanted out of Apple. What Paul wanted was a publishing company, a record company, the Apple shops. I'm not sure that he wanted Apple Electronics and Magic Alex. John was the big sponsor there, but George liked Alex and Paul didn't dislike him. I don't know what Ringo's idea of Apple was. But back then I still saw the Beatles as one tight unit, one for all and all for one. I didn't realise the tensions underneath, until George came back from Rishikesh and reacted with real horror to what was going on in the building, particularly in my press office.

The legendary excesses of Taylor's hospitality, with the finest dope and whisky on offer to guests, paled alongside the magnitude of Apple's ambitions. Every week a new company was incorporated under the Beatles' umbrella – Python Music Ltd, Apple Publicity Ltd, Apple Management Ltd, even a financial subsidiary based in Jersey. There should also be, Lennon and McCartney decided, an Apple School, and their Liverpudlian pal Ivan Vaughan – responsible for the pair's first meeting, in 1957 – was recruited to mastermind this unlikely venture.

The most innocent of Apple's schemes was to solicit music, poetry and art directly from the British public, thereby evading the bureaucracy that had delayed the Beatles' rise to stardom. Paul McCartney conceived a series of advertisements which suggested that anyone with unheralded talent should send their wares to Apple's office in Baker Street. 'If you're a singer, sing for us, ' McCartney wrote. 'If you're a writer, write for us. Send us tapes and picture. ' The company's ethos was simple: 'WITH THE EMPHASIS ON ENJOYMENT'. Apple's reward was a torrent of packages containing tapes and manuscripts, few of which were ever opened, let alone enjoyed. 'It was a good idea to help the world, ' Taylor said twenty years later, 'but you should do it quietly, and not try to save the whole world at once, because then you end up breaking your promises. What on earth made us think that we could pull off this stunt of opening the doors to the world? After all these years of the Beatles shopping in Harrods after hours, suddenly we threw all that out of the window and said, " Here we are, come and get us! " '

While the deluge descended upon Baker Street, Lennon, McCartney and a retinue of retainers – Taylor, Mardas, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans and Ron Kass, who had been recruited to lend Apple Records a more professional edge than Evans could provide – flew to New York on 11 May 1968 to proclaim Apple to the New World. McCartney had already set the tone, declaring, 'Instead of trying to amass money for the sake of it, we're setting up a business concern at Apple – rather like a Western communism. ' The Beatles' motives, he claimed, were purely altruistic: 'We've got all the money we need. I've got the house and the cars and all the things that money can buy. ' No mention of the Beatles' tax burden was allowed to intrude on this idealistic scene.

In New York McCartney said that they wanted 'to see if we can't get artistic freedom within a business structure; to see if we can create things and sell them without charging three times our cost'. His comments betrayed a stunning naivety about the distribution network whereby art and artefacts reached the public, but also an almost Christ-like willingness to lay down his wealth and be as one with his audience. Lennon's message was more direct: he wanted to avoid the

inevitability of creative people having 'to go on their knees in an office, begging for a break. . . You don't even get there, because you can't get through the door because of the colour of your shoes. ' His perception of himself as a persecuted outsider would become entrenched over the years to come.

Taylor remembered the New York trip as 'a mad, bad week. . . frenetic with promises, explanations and small silver packages containing something called speed, which made me talk very quickly and which was probably methedrine'. McCartney liaised with a local photographer named Linda Eastman whom he had met in London the previous summer. The American media buzzed with Apple-related news: of the possibility that the Rolling Stones might join the company when their current contract expired; of the film soundtrack that George Harrison had recorded; of the enticing projects optioned by Apple Films; of the 72-track recording studio that Alexis Mardas would build in their newly acquired London HQ in Savile Row, at the heart of the city's tailoring district; of the 47 territories around the globe in which Apple had been trademarked. As a corporate ad boasted that week, 'A is for Apple: Beatles Film, Television, Electronics, Retail, Records, Publicity. ' As an aside, Lennon trailed his intention to 'package peace in a new box'. Ending war, reshaping capitalism, rescuing artists, reinventing education: there were no limits to the Beatles' hubris and hope.

'Basically, it was chaos, ' Harrison recalled of this era. 'We just gave away huge quantities of money. It was a lesson to anybody not to have a partnership, because when you're in a partnership with other people you can't do anything about it (or it's very difficult to), and at that point we were naive. Basically, I think John and Paul got carried away with the idea and blew millions, and Ringo and I just had to go along with it. ' Harrison's estrangement from his older colleagues had been captured on celluloid a few months earlier when the Beatles filmed promotional clips for their single 'Hello Goodbye'. While Lennon and McCartney cavorted like ecstatic lovers, Harrison glowered through the entire shoot. Had he heard his comrades' extravagant rhetoric in New York, his sense of distance could only have increased.

Yet already McCartney was showing signs of being overwhelmed by the demands of the empire he had created. As Derek Taylor lamented, 'The weirdness was not controlled at the start. You can't control weirdness, anyway; weirdness is weirdness. ' And weirdness was now seeping into McCartney's private life. He was notorious among Beatles aides as, in one's description, 'a cocksman', but that was simply a facet of his fame. What threatened his long-standing relationship with actress Jane Asher was her insistence on pursuing her own career, even if this entailed lengthy engagements in the United States. Having come close to ending their affair, McCartney overcompensated by asking Asher to marry him. Yet this show of commitment did nothing to quell his restlessness.

Lennon's problems were more existential, as his lifestyle was more extreme. In India meditation had freed his imagination. 'I wrote 600 songs about how I feel, ' he noted. 'I felt like dying, crying and committing suicide, but I felt creative. ' Restored to family life, however, he retreated into his familiar gloom. 'I spent years trying to destroy my ego, ' he recalled the following year. Jet-lagged after the flight from New York, he medicated himself with anaesthetic doses of LSD and marijuana. Still afloat on some level of consciousness, he experienced an epiphany. 'I'm Jesus Christ; I'm back again, ' he told his friend Pete Shotton. 'I've got to tell the world who I am. ' He called an emergency meeting of senior Apple staff, invited McCartney to witness the second coming and made his revelation. There was a stunned silence, before Lennon's friends politely welcomed their messiah to the planet. 'I've never been frightened by insanity or eccentricity, ' Derek Taylor recalled, and Lennon was certainly teetering between those two states.

Restored to a degree of normality after a night's sleep, Lennon shuffled morosely around his spacious home while Shotton attempted to distract him. Cynthia Lennon was out of the country, and her husband hoped that some novel female company might brighten his mood. Shotton no doubt expected his friend to order in some models or aspiring starlets, but instead Lennon announced, 'I'll call Yoko. '

Since his sponsorship of Yoko Ono's art exhibition, Lennon had maintained discreet communication with the artist and film-maker. He had been intrigued and entranced by intelligent, articulate, assertive women in the past – journalist Maureen Cleave, folk singer Joan Baez, actress Eleanor Bron – but he had never sought out those qualities in a lover, let alone a wife. 'The Beatles were, and probably still are, typical northern male chauvinists, ' Cynthia Lennon reflected. 'The Beatle wives were supposed to be on constant call, but not to get in the way of their husbands. ' An art student herself, she had briefly attempted to emulate her husband's passion for heightened creativity: 'I remember once that I painted a psychedelic design on the front of a cabinet at home, and then I came down the next morning to find that John had covered it over with posters. After that, I gave up. '

Ono would never have conceded so easily. 'She has a tendency to think of men as assistants, ' Lennon joked shortly before his death. Both of her husbands – Japanese pianist Toshi Ichiyanagi and American artist Tony Cox – had begun as equal partners and then discovered that they were expected to support her creativity rather than their own. Despite separating in 1967, Cox and Ono continued to work together. On Boxing Day that year, as the British public prepared to sample Magical Mystery Tour, the couple were in the Belgian city of Knokke. A festival of experimental cinema was in progress, but the organisers refused to allow Ono's Film No. 4 to be shown because it contained nudity. As a protest against this timidity, the French anarchist Jean-Jacques Lebel staged a satirical beauty contest to elect 'Miss Exprmnt'. The participants – Ono and Cox among them – danced naked in public, and were promptly arrested. Scotland Yard's International Division was enlisted to investigate Ono's activities in Britain. The artists were tried in absentia and sentenced to three months' imprisonment – though only if they were foolish enough to revisit Belgium.

For more than a year Ono had been concentrating her artistic efforts on Britain. 'The English people were very kind to me when I first arrived in London, ' she recalled. 'I found the English so poetic and sensitive; I felt like, Oh, it's my kind of people. So I felt I didn't want to go back to New York. And the press was extremely kind to me – until one of their boys got together with me. '

Besides contributing to occasional celebrations of the Fluxus movement, Ono gave public performances of what she dubbed Music of the Mind, where she would appear on stage hidden in a large black sack (Bag Piece), allow audience members to snip away her clothing with scissors (Cut Piece) or invite them to leap from a stepladder (Fly). She staged concerts in universities and arts centres, offered 'a Perception Weekend with Yoko Ono' in Birmingham, and participated in the mostly conceptual Antiuniversity of London, offering a course entitled The Connection, which attempted 'to connect people to their own reality by means of brain sessions and ritual'. Occasionally, she reprised one of her early experiments in sonic collage, which she had formulated earlier in New York and Japan. Her instrument was her voice, which she used fearlessly as a means of communicating pain, pleasure and the unhindered expression of pure emotion. In February 1968 she appeared as a guest artist at a London concert by the free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, squawking and squealing while Coleman's band improvised in her wake.

Among the underground elite Ono was a celebrity. Her Fluxus comrades were suspicious of her uncanny knack of attracting publicity and undoubtedly jealous too, but nobody dared to question her ferocious commitment to her work or the energy she devoted to the cause of constant creativity.

Although some chroniclers have chosen to portray Ono as a monomaniac who relentlessly pursued Lennon for his wealth and fame, there is little evidence that she regarded him as anything other than that most valuable of assets for any experimental artist, a wealthy patron. She was nowhere near as innocent of his fame as she liked to suggest, but as she admitted later, 'I didn't find a lot of sympathy for, or interest in, rock music in the avant-garde scene that I was in. Quite the opposite, in fact. There was quite a pride in not becoming part of the rock scene, because it was too commercial. Fluxus was the furthermost experimental group of its time, and rock was just. . . ' She waved her hand in a gesture of contempt.

Once established, the rapport between Ono and Lennon remained fluid and intense. She supplied him with a steady stream of schemes, manifestos and concepts that were dazzling in their simplicity and power, and Lennon responded in kind. As the Beatles were preparing their Indian expedition in February 1968, he allowed himself to envisage taking not only his wife, but also Ono, as an intellectual companion.

At Kenwood three months later Ono arrived in a taxi, Shotton paid the driver (Lennon, like the Queen, never carried cash) and the two artists muttered small talk until Shotton took the hint. At which point the Lennon/Ono mythology takes over, and we have only their word for the oft-told story that they retired to Lennon's home studio, recorded their first experimental music (subsequently released as the Apple album Two Virgins) and made love at dawn. 'It was beautiful, ' Lennon always insisted. 'I was such a snob at the time, ' Ono admitted decades later, 'and I thought [ John's] contribution to Two Virgins tended towards not being abstract enough, the sounds that he made – it was more vaudeville, I thought. ' Familiar with a milieu in which collaboration was commonplace, Ono failed to sense that anything unusual had occurred. Lennon felt like a prisoner reprieved from the gallows.

The next morning he told Shotton, 'This is it. This is what I've been waiting for all my life. Fuck everything. Fuck the Beatles. Fuck money. I'll go and live with her in a fucking tent if I have to. ' Even allowing for poetic exaggeration, his liaison with Ono seems to have marked an epochal moment in his life. Aside from her erotic charms (and sexual imagery filled his songs for the next year, from 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun' to 'Come Together'), Ono liberated Lennon's creativity. 'She had a galvanising effect, ' Shotton confirmed. 'She wasn't just the love of his life; she convinced him he was an artist, which he'd always wanted to be. You could even say that Yoko brought John back to life. ' The effect was mutual.

Lennon had maintained a healthy scepticism towards experimental art, not least because it was McCartney's area of expertise. Though he never reached Harrison's level of cynicism – 'Avant-garde is short for haven't got a clue' – he harboured an innate distrust of any art that imposed a distance between its creator and its audience. He instinctively felt dishonest when masking his emotions behind wordplay or surrealism (as on the deliberately obtuse 'I Am the Walrus'). What was remarkable about Ono was the accessibility and directness of her work. Her concepts were simple to grasp: you either accepted or rejected them. Moreover, Ono believed that creativity was a way of life, not a matter of waiting for inspiration. Under her influence, it was no longer enough to produce art: Lennon had to become an Artist, whose every act would betray his ethos and emotion.

First there was another betrayal to enact, as he allowed Cynthia to discover him and Ono in the kitchen at Kenwood. For a few days he avoided further confrontation by pretending that his marriage could be saved. Then, having encouraged Cynthia to leave the country for a recuperative holiday, he escorted Ono to the opening of a theatrical adaptation of his own books. 'Where's your wife? ' reporters shouted at him. 'I don't know, ' he replied, which wasn't strictly true, as he had paid for her to visit Italy, where she read reports of his public appearance with Ono and was then visited by Alexis Mardas, who told her that Lennon wanted a divorce on the grounds of her (non-existent) adultery. Lennon eventually relented, and admitted his own offence to speed the process of legal separation. It was not one of the most courageous episodes of his life.

Until now, no hint of the Beatles' exotic love life – the teenage conquests on tour, the casual infidelities – had appeared in the press. As Lennon noted in 1970, the media had a vested interest in letting the circus continue, as male journalists were often able to exploit the girls who had not made it as far as the Beatles' beds. The group's public image remained impeccable: Lennon and Starkey had married their teenage sweethearts (both of whom were pregnant at the time); Harrison had secured that talisman of the age, a blonde model; and McCartney was linked with one of Britain's most talented actresses. Ono's arrival punctured the illusion that the Beatles were eccentric but still dependably decent. Not only was Ono a married woman consorting with a married man, she was linked in the public imagination with nudity, she didn't match up to English conventions of beauty and, worst of all, she was Japanese at a time when that was virtually a synonym for the extreme cruelty inflicted on prisoners of war little more than twenty years earlier. Many British people who would have regarded themselves as tolerant made an exception for the Japanese, who were widely felt to be slitty-eyed, merciless and sadistic. 'I can understand how they felt, ' Ono admitted in retrospect. 'It's just that I was totally naive about all that. '

When Cynthia Lennon saw Ono and Lennon in June, some of those stereotypes were inescapable. She remembered Ono 'beside him in the chair, shrouded by her hair, her face set in an expressionless mask', the epitome of the inscrutable oriental. Moreover, 'I barely recognised John. It had only been a few weeks since we last met, but he was thinner, almost gaunt. . . He was quite simply not the John I knew. It was as if he'd taken on a different persona. ' Mrs Lennon asked the question that would soon be repeated around the world: 'What power does she have over him? '

Lennon would have welcomed the idea that he had taken on a different persona. He had thrown himself headlong into Ono's concept of art. They had staged a simple show, Four Thoughts, at the Arts Lab in London, and then clashed with the curators of Coventry Cathedral when they wished to contribute to an exhibition of sculpture within the cathedral precincts. As adulterers, they were forced to plant their symbolic acorns ('This is what happens when two clouds meet') outside consecrated ground. Lennon was using Ono's language in Ono's medium, his own ego submerged in hers. 'It brought out the child in him again, ' Pete Shotton said of their relationship: both the child who sees the simple truth behind adult concealment, and the child who does as his parent asks. Ono was seven years older than Lennon, but age mattered less than character: for all her girlish inarticulacy in public, she had a core of steel and the courage of self-belief. Cynthia Lennon drew an obvious parallel: 'Aunt Mimi. John had grown up in the shadow of a domineering woman – it was what he knew and was most familiar with. . . Yoko offered the security of a mother figure who always knew best. ' For Lennon, Aunt Mimi had represented security after the disappearance of his parents, but also rejection of the rebellious rock 'n' roller and satirical artist he became in his teens. Ono, by contrast, offered direction and approval; and Lennon reacted as if he had miraculously found his way home.

As the part-owner of his own (still dormant) record company, Lennon wanted to celebrate his love in public. He told EMI that he planned to launch Apple Records with an album of the tapes he had made with Ono. He was reminded that he had signed an exclusive recording deal with EMI. The album could appear under Ono's name alone, or under a pseudonym (Lennon suggested Doris and Peter). Still functioning mentally in the world of Fluxus rather than the Beatles, Ono said that she would prefer the record to appear in a signed limited edition for their friends. But she regretted that it would not find a wider audience 'because the message is going to be so beautiful that it could light up the world'.

The other Beatles had become used to Lennon's volatility, the abrupt changes of direction, the near-manic descent from exhilaration to despair, the competitiveness that could spill into open combat. 'They always had a very healthy rivalry, ' recalls press officer Tony Barrow, 'but it turned vicious, more barbed. They always used to take potshots at each other, and at us. John vented his spleen with everyone, in and out of the group. They were like brothers: they had fierce fights, but they still loved each other. But in the late 1960s brotherly love went out of the window. '

Brotherly love in the widest sense was what sealed the partnership between Lennon and McCartney. Lennon might be the more aggressive and sarcastic of the pair, McCartney the more subtle, but as long as the partnership held, the Beatles could continue. Now, on 30 May 1968, the group reconvened at Abbey Road Studios to begin what proved to be a six-month process of chaos and creation. The result was a double album entitled The Beatles (alias the 'White Album'), which was their most diverse and, arguably, most rewarding work: a kaleidoscopic collage of reckless eclecticism which also operated as a history of 20th-century popular music, from vaudeville to the avant-garde. But the music, which sounded so zestful and anarchic, was the product of sessions so dispiriting that they sapped the Beatles of their collective identity.

Many factors combined to disturb the sessions. George Harrison was still convinced that Western music paled alongside the glory that was India. In addition, he resented being treated like an errant pupil by Paul McCartney. 'It was essential for me, ' McCartney insisted. 'Looking back on it, I think, OK. Well, it was bossy, but it was also ballsy of me. ' Yet his parental attitude, intended to benefit the music, left its scars. One observer reckoned, 'Ringo would rather have quit the band than go through Fat-Face McCartney's daily torture trip, ' and Harrison only survived because 'he enjoyed teasing Paul'. In August Starkey left for two weeks, unwilling to face the pressure of constant sniping from McCartney and the heightened tension among his three closest friends. Recording engineer Geoff Emerick, who had worked with the Beatles for five years, also walked out ('the atmosphere was poisonous'), while producer George Martin – who had rarely missed a session until then – opted to take a prolonged holiday.

The tone was set at the first session, in May. Lennon arrived desperate to record 'Revolution', his commentary on the recent student protests in Paris. With him was Yoko Ono, silent and enigmatic. 'I remember being very freaked out, ' Starkey recalled. 'The four of us had been through a lot together and we were very close, most of the time. We were very possessive of each other, in a way. Wives and girlfriends never came to the studio. That was when we were together. So Yoko came in. And that was fine when we all said hello to her, cos she was with John. But then she was sitting in the studio on his amp. ' The amplifier assumed mammoth proportions in the other Beatles' minds. 'It was fairly off-putting, ' McCartney said. 'You wanted to say, " Excuse me, love, can I turn the volume up? " We were always wondering how to say, " Could you get off my amp? " without interfering with their relationship. ' The inference was that Ono was disturbing McCartney's intimacy with Lennon. 'It was our careers, ' he insisted. 'We were the Beatles, after all, and here was this girl. '

'This girl', the one McCartney called 'love', began to assume that Lennon's entourage was also working for her. 'She was soon treating me like a servant to order about, ' Shotton recollected. 'That's when it got hard. She rubbed lots of other people up the wrong way. ' McCartney complained that Ono continually called the group 'Beatles' rather than 'The Beatles': 'We said, " The Beatles, actually, love". ' It's tempting to imagine Lennon recognising McCartney's annoyance and goading Ono to say it again just for the pleasure of seeing anger flash across his colleague's face. Yet Ono picked up no hint of antagonism from McCartney. 'Paul has been very nice to me, ' she confided to her tape recorder in May 1968. 'I feel like he's my younger brother or

something. I'm sure that if he had been a woman or something, he would have been a great friend, because there's something definitely very strong between John and Paul. ' That empathy would soon be put to the test.

'Suddenly we were together all the time, ' Lennon said, 'sort of in a corner mumbling and giggling together, and doing Two Virgins, and there were Paul, George and Ringo saying, " What the hell are they doing? What's happened to him? " And my attention completely went off them. Now, it wasn't deliberate. It was just that I was so involved and intrigued with what we were doing. I understand how they felt. '

It suited Lennon's friends to blame Ono for the disruption. Harrison believed that 'she didn't really like us, because she saw the Beatles as something that was between her and John. The vibe I picked up was that she was a wedge that was trying to drive itself deeper and deeper between him and us, and it actually happened. ' Shotton agreed: 'Unfortunately her possessiveness and jealousy or insecurity, call it what you will, meant that she couldn't bear to see John enjoying a close rapport with anyone but herself. ' He witnessed her mutating 'from being a timid little mouse into a tiger, insisting on being with John at all times'. McCartney said, 'It was like we were her courtiers, and it was very embarrassing. '

Ono's account was very different. She recalled that Lennon was desperate to possess every moment of her day. 'If I go to the bathroom, he was upset that I closed the bathroom [door]. Is there anything going on in there that he should not know? ' She insisted that it was Lennon's decision that she should come to the studio, not once but every day from May 1968 until the final Beatles session 15 months later. 'I was just trying to sit there quietly without disturbing them, ' she says. 'John always wanted me there, and if I was not there, John might not have gone to those sessions. ' What frustrated her was that she was not asked to participate in the sessions: 'I'm a composer. I want to make my own music, and I'm just sitting there. ' Lennon told a record company executive that Ono ignored small talk: 'You must understand that she communicates through the canvas. If you want to talk with her, you have to take out a paintbrush and make a sketch. If you knew her inner self, this would make sense to you. ' The Beatles could have tried to establish an artistic rapport with Ono, but this strategy would have been fraught with difficulties. She recalled that if she accidentally sat too close to one of the other Beatles, especially McCartney, Lennon would immediately pull her aside and demand to know what was going on. He was scared that the other Beatles might seduce her away, while they simply wanted her to leave.

For anyone who regarded the continued creativity of the Beatles as more important than the happiness and security of one of its members, Ono's incursion into the recording process was a tragedy. At a stroke it destroyed the delicate, battered but still viable working relationship that had seen the Beatles through six years of unimaginable pressure and success. In the studio there was a hierarchy, with Lennon at its peak. But each Beatle had an equal vote and could speak his mind. Now there was an unspeaking fifth body in the room, her face shadowed by her raven-black hair. Her silence and unwavering expression of mild boredom rang like a damning verdict in the other Beatles' ears. Her body language sang disapproval as her lips remained tightly closed. ^*3 They could endure scathing ridicule from each other, but this constant display of apathy was unbearable.

The most essential line of communication within the Beatles ran between Lennon and McCartney, and now that was interrupted, in both emotional and physical terms. McCartney felt judged, excluded, rejected. 'We could recognise [their love], ' he admitted, 'but that didn't diminish the hurt we were feeling by being pushed aside. ' His partnership with Lennon was non-sexual, but it ran deeper than anything he had experienced with a woman. It underpinned his self-belief and his status in the world. Seeing Lennon focus on Ono rather than him was as devastating as it would have been for Cynthia Lennon to witness the couple making love. Ono later dismissed the Beatles' attitude towards her as archetypally male: 'I didn't know about all this macho trip that they were on. '

McCartney's response was impulsive, almost childish. Within a week he had seduced an American woman named Francie Schwartz, who was working in the Apple office, and brought her into the studio to balance Yoko Ono's presence. This power play soured the working relationship between the group. 'We were trying to take photographs for The Beatles Book when they were recording " Revolution", ' recalled the magazine's publisher, Sean O'Mahony, 'and the atmosphere was terrible. It was the only time when we were really made to feel uncomfortable, particularly by George, who looked very unhappy and obviously didn't want us to be there. ' O'Mahony was surprised to see Schwartz and Ono with the Beatles. 'Wives and girlfriends weren't usually allowed in the studio. My first thought when I saw Yoko was that she must be a girl from a Japanese pop magazine. I didn't imagine for a second that she could be with John. '

McCartney may have hoped to shock Lennon into recognising that women weren't welcome in the workplace, or simply show his colleague that he wasn't the only Beatle with a new girlfriend. But his show of petulance was also an admission that his relationship with Jane Asher was dying. In mid-June 1968 he flew to Colorado, where Asher was working, and spent his 26th birthday in her company. Two days later he was in Los Angeles on Apple business, where he was joined by Linda Eastman. Back in London he renewed his liaison with Schwartz, making no effort to conceal her when Asher returned home. The actress discovered Schwartz in the bedroom she'd been sharing with McCartney, stormed off and requested her mother to remove all her belongings from the house. Then she used a television interview to announce that their engagement was over, and never spoke in public again about Paul McCartney. If their paths crossed in future, they would be civil, but any sense of intimacy had been destroyed forever. 'Paul was absolutely devastated, ' Apple aide Alistair Taylor recalled. 'Jane's departure shattered him. It was the only time I ever saw him totally distraught and lost for words. He went completely off the rails. '

His misfortune was that he replaced Asher with Schwartz, an intelligent and literate woman who later penned an autobiography in which her relationship with McCartney provided the climax to a chronicle of sexual entanglements. She claimed that he demanded to know exactly where she was 24 hours a day; expected her to work full-time for Apple, cook, clean and score dope for him, and still be available on demand as a lover; and reserved the right to vanish without warning and sleep with other women. 'He was petulant, ' she wrote, 'outrageous, adolescent, a little Medici prince, powdered and laid on a satin pillow at a very early age. ' He became antagonistic towards the other Beatles and their songs, and after a session would often 'drink hideous Scotch–coke combinations, throw food at the dogs and cats, drop his clothes in a path from the door to the bed, and ignore me completely. '

The jilted Beatle hid this allegedly emotionally charged behaviour behind his customary facade of bonhomie. In his effort to distance himself from Lennon and Ono, he refused to participate in the recording of an experimental sound collage entitled 'Revolution 9'. Its assembly of effects tapes, 'found' sounds and random musical elements was an extension of the music that McCartney had been making at home for years and demonstrating to an envious Lennon. The avant-garde had been his London playground; now Lennon was claiming it as his own and choosing to collaborate with a genuinely alternative artist instead of McCartney. One can only assume that his only defence would be to deny his own past, to pretend that he had always found these experiments banal and pretentious, and to banish the avant-garde from his own repertoire for years to come.

In the midst of this turmoil McCartney invited Lennon and Ono to live with him and Schwartz in his home close to Abbey Road Studios while the Lennons' divorce was finalised. 'When John came over, ' Schwartz recounted, 'all he could talk about was how much he loved Yoko. That disturbed Paul. In spite of John's obvious happiness, Paul stifled his jealousy with not-very-cute bursts of crap. ' Schwartz remembered Lennon and Ono discovering an envelope on the mantelpiece one morning, addressed to them but not bearing a postmark. Inside was a single typewritten sentence: 'You and your Jap tart think you're hot shit. ' While they stood there in shock, McCartney entered the room and said, 'Oh, I just did that for a lark, ' and smiled. As Schwartz recalled, 'That was the moment when John looked at Paul as if to say, " Do I know you? " It was over, it was completely and totally over at that moment. They may have been able to work together, but it was never the same. ' Soon afterwards Lennon and Ono moved into a central London flat that was being rented by Starkey.

The venomous atmosphere inevitably affected the Apple office. Derek Taylor said, 'I don't think I ever hated anyone as much as I hated Paul in the summer of 1968. ' He remembered McCartney gathering the staff together and saying, 'Don't forget, you're not very good, any of you. You know that, don't you? ' Neil Aspinall was still struggling to make sense of the Beatles' legal commitments and maintain some form of control over Apple's daily operations. 'Neil would come to my room in Apple in the middle of the day and collapse on the sofa and sit staring and staring, ' Taylor said. 'He tells me now it was fear. '

Essentially, Apple was a record company, with a global launch scheduled for late August. Although the Beatles were still contracted to EMI, they had been granted permission to use the Apple logo on their future releases, to maintain the fantasy of independence. The initial batch of singles was released on Aspinall's wedding day. 'There were only a few of us at Apple who knew anything about the record business, ' Taylor admitted. 'The Beatles certainly didn't. When they were struggling, they just knew it as something that said no to them, and then when they were big, they knew it as a thing that didn't know how to say no to them. ' Taylor hyped the first Apple records with typical elan: '[The Beatles] are confident and cheerful and the human condition will be thrilled by the coming results of their willing and enduring Beatle bondage. Unhampered by the pressures of world stardom, entranced by their opportunities, stimulated by the blossoming of Apple, they will give all of us new wonders to soothe our pain. '

As he wrote, Lennon and McCartney's estrangement was widening, Harrison preferred to lose himself in meditation rather than interact with his colleagues, and Starkey had chosen to abandon the group entirely for two weeks. But Apple's debut releases included the Beatles' best-selling record to date, 'Hey Jude', an anthemic McCartney song that glowed with optimism after a summer that had burned with anxiety and rage within the group and in the troubled world beyond. McCartney's production of a sentimental folksong, 'Those Were the Days', for teenage singer Mary Hopkin was equally successful, and when the Beatles' white-sleeved double LP was finally completed late in the year it surpassed the sales and receipts of any album in history. It didn't matter that, as Lennon complained a few weeks later, 'All of us were dissatisfied [with the album]. As a Beatles thing, as a whole, it doesn't work. ' Taylor spun the yarn that the four Beatles were 'firmly united one for all and all for one as the Beatles. . . administering the Happy Apple complex of companies in London'. And the world wanted to believe him.