Finale. Footnotes

Finale

People still haven't gotten over the Beatles yet.

Sean Lennon, 1998

I should be more modest, but I don't care now. The Beatles is over. It's a body of work. I can now stand back and say, 'That was great. '

Paul McCartney, 2006

It was a conundrum that would have taxed the wits of any messiah. What if the Second Coming wasn't enough?

Those who had watched the constantly surprising drama of the Beatles unfold were deflated when the stars walked off stage because they were no longer enjoying the performance. People who loved the Beatles' music had experienced a sense of the possible, a dream of companionship, unity and love. After the split, they still had the music and the memories, but the glow of nostalgia couldn't match the gleam with which the Beatles had floodlit the past.

If there was something painful about life without the Beatles – and there was, even the Beatles knew it – then it surely followed that only a reunion could ease the pain. In 1964 sick and disabled children had been wheeled to the group's dressing room, as if their holy presence could effect a cure. After the group broke up, everyday miracles were no longer enough: now the Beatles had the responsibility of carrying the ideals of the 1960s, tangled and battered though they were, into a future that had a very different vision of utopia.

Within the collective belief that the Beatles could transform reality and recreate the past, expectations were divided. There were those who wanted to be delivered back to the real or imaginary paradise of 1967. Others had more modest ambitions: they simply desired some momentary distraction from a life that had never quite matched the dreams of the 1960s. Built into both fantasies was the desire that the Beatles should carry their listeners to some other place, spiritual, political or merely emotional. Each person's vision of what a Beatles reunion might bring was subtly different; what never varied was the weight of hope and the crushing certainty of disappointment.

After the Anthology the world had to accept that the Beatles had reformed – and nothing had changed. Reality took the place of illusion. In 1980 John Lennon had insisted that the group could never be responsible for anyone else's happiness. It took 15 years, and the reunion that he insisted was impossible, for the world to realise that he had been right.

Second time around, there was no global sense of grief when the Beatles split. Indeed, the decision was scarcely noticed. If anything, there was collective embarrassment that so much hope had been placed on this incomplete, fallible and slightly ill-fitting group of men. The long-anticipated reunion records, 'Free as a Bird' and 'Real Love', slipped quietly out of memory, as if they had never been, nor ever should have been.

In any case the institution was being undermined by age and fate, as if the effort required to bring it together was now taking its toll. Cancer spread callously through the Beatles' community – no hollow metaphor, but a grim alignment of chance. Its first victim was Maureen Cox, in December 1994. The next was Linda McCartney, who unexpectedly burst into tears at an awards ceremony in 1995 and told her husband that without him she wouldn't be able to carry on. That December the reason for her distress became clear: she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. There followed the ritual of surgery, containment and fear, all too familiar yet jarringly new to everyone who endures it. There were occasional bulletins, all of them optimistic; sometimes she would appear in public, smiling as her daughter Stella launched her career as a fashion designer, or beaming confidently alongside her husband at a premiere.

The following year Derek Taylor – recovering alcoholic, long-term smoker, champion of the jazz cigarette – underwent major surgery for cancer of the oesophagus. He retained his stoic, cynical idealism. 'They tell me I can't smoke dope any more, ' he told me with a characteristic twinkle of the eye, 'so I'm just going to have to eat it instead. ' He died on 7 September 1997, robbing George Harrison of a loyal friend, Apple of its spokesman and talisman, and the world of a humane and witty soul who had epitomised the ideals of the 1960s social revolution.

Two months before Taylor died Harrison discovered a sizeable lump on the side of his neck. Geoff Baker, the McCartney aide who succeeded Taylor as Apple PR man, insisted that Harrison 'doesn't think he has cancer and is totally cool about it'. Talking himself deeper into trouble, he claimed, 'There's been no cancer scare, ' and, 'I'm not a lump person. ' Neither, it can be imagined, was Harrison, but the lump had to be surgically removed and examined, and was shown to be malignant. 'I'm not going to die on you folks yet, ' Harrison said in June 1998. 'I am very lucky because it didn't go anywhere – all it was, was a little red mark on my neck. ' He blamed cigarettes and claimed to be fully recovered. But by then he was aware of what might lie ahead, having attended the funeral of another cancer victim, his friend and hero Carl Perkins, in January; ^*40 and more recently a memorial service in London for Linda McCartney, who had died on 17 April 1998.

Her death was shrouded in confusion in which Geoff Baker played a part. It was announced on 19 April as if it had just occurred. Baker said she had died in Santa Barbara, California, but local authorities launched an investigation and discovered that no death certificate had been filed. 'There is an inference that there is something to be hidden, ' said a spokesman for the coroner's office. 'It does present the possibility of an assisted suicide or some other sinister-type thing going on. ' It transpired that she had actually died at a previously secret McCartney ranch in Arizona. 'It was a decoy, ' Baker confessed. 'It was nothing to do with the McCartneys. It was my decision. I said she had died in Santa Barbara because if I had said where she died it would have been overrun straight away, and they needed time because of their grief to come back in private. I am just trying to keep this family together. ' But his statement simply raised more questions, as the McCartneys had already returned to England by the time the announcement was made. What should have been reported as an agonising family tragedy had become a story about media manipulation instead.

There had been a recognisable shift in Linda McCartney's public reputation during her final decade: her skills as a mother (evident in the no-nonsense worldliness of her children) had long been acknowledged, and she had won widespread support for her campaigns against animal cruelty and in favour of vegetarianism. When she died, one reporter managed a final twist of the knife: 'The [Beatles'] demise was often attributed to her supposed ambition to record with Sir

Paul herself, ' wrote Mark Henderson in a cruel case of mistaken identity. But one of Britain's most conservative newspapers dubbed her a 'crusading vegetarian whose successful marriage defied all the doubters'. Her husband penned a tribute of heartbreaking honesty, to which the Daily Mirror responded, 'Nothing Paul McCartney wrote before was as beautiful and moving as the tribute to his late wife Linda. '

As his friend George Martin noted later that year, McCartney was sent headlong with grief. 'He is managing, but only just, ' Martin revealed. 'It's a tough time for him. He's so alone now. ' His wife's illness had shadowed him through 1997 and a succession of events that should have been celebrations. On New Year's Day it was announced that he had been awarded a knighthood. He claimed that his fellow Beatles now addressed him as 'Your Holiness', but that sounded like the invention of a PR man. Thirty-two years after the Beatles' MBE awards had sparked widespread controversy, this honour was eagerly anticipated and warmly welcomed. In April 1997 Sir Paul McCartney debuted his Flaming Pie album – his most exhilarating work in recent memory, which he attributed to the desire to create something that would match up to the Beatles' legacy. Almost as a matter of habit, he promoted the record by suggesting that the Beatles might yet reassemble to complete the third song they had left unfinished two years earlier, and at the same time he revealed the difficulties he had recently experienced in communicating with Harrison. In October he and his wife watched the unveiling of Stella McCartney's first collection. The following month he attended the Q magazine awards ceremony, pointedly walking out when his old nemesis Phil Spector made a speech. And then, as his wife's health declined, the widow of his former best friend chose to revive a family feud that seemed destined to outlive them both.

An apparent truce between the Lennons and McCartneys had endured for two years but collapsed when Ono commented on the respective merits of the two Beatles. 'I know Paul thinks he was leading them, ' she said, insisting that the Beatles' real leader was Lennon. 'The way John led the band was very high level, on some kind of magical level. Not on a daily level, like Paul said, 'Oh, I was the one who told them all to come and do it. I made the phone calls. ' John didn't make the phone calls. John was not on that level of a leader. He was on a level of a spiritual leader. He was the visionary, and that's why the Beatles happened. ' She added, 'Paul's put in the position of being Salieri to Mozart' – a craftsman forced to compete with a genius, in other words. After which Ono can hardly have been surprised that she was not invited to the memorial services staged for Linda McCartney in London and New York. But she did post her own tribute: 'Linda and I did not meet up and have coffee and muffins in a corner café, or anything like that. But we communicated. We communicated in deeds more than in words. When she was strong, I felt strong. ' And Ono also seemed to gain strength from Paul McCartney's weakness, as if the pair shared an eerie symbiosis. McCartney might have insisted in 1995, 'There are those who think John was the Beatles; that is not true and he would be the first to tell you that. ' But he was permanently at risk of sounding churlish and oversensitive, while the same rules did not apply to Ono, who was widely expected to be unreasonable and only evoked surprise if she appeared (as she often did) considerate and modest.

McCartney intended to set history straight, but his efforts were understandably impeded by his wife's worsening health. In October 1997 his friend Barry Miles published Many Years From Now, an authorised biography of McCartney centred around their mutual adventures in the

alternative London of the mid-1960s. The book was the apotheosis of the theme that McCartney had introduced a full decade earlier: he was the original avant-garde Beatle. Here was all the evidence to prove the point, but presented in such a defensive way that it begged criticism from those who felt that he ought to let history run its course and the facts speak for themselves.

The process of revisionism continued in 2000 with the belated publication of The Beatles Anthology, an epic oral history of the group that would have appeared years earlier had its original editor Derek Taylor not been stricken with cancer. The difference was that here McCartney's views were often contradicted by his colleagues; while Many Years From Now was, quite rightly, the unchallenged verdict of one very opinionated participant. The person with the strongest claim to feeling diminished by McCartney's book was George Harrison, whose contribution to the Beatles was consistently underplayed. Yet the time for Harrison and McCartney to fight had passed.

As he recovered from his cancer treatment, Harrison distanced himself from his past and the industry it had created. 'In my heart I still am on a mountain in India somewhere, ' he said when required to do some Beatle business, 'and that suits me. . . It's hard to think of leaving the privacy and quiet of the happy life I have. ' As his wife Olivia recalled later, 'When I met him, his ambition was to have no ambition. And I think he achieved that. For the last five years he felt like that, actually. '

Yet still the industry claimed him back. In March 1998 he intervened to prevent the Beatles from forming a business relationship with Volkswagen – the gimmick was that they would receive $10 million for sanctioning a branded Beetle model. It was VW's second attempt at enticing the group, who had already rejected $5 million to authorise the manufacture of a White Album car. 'Unless we do something about it, every Beatles song is going to end up advertising bras and pork pies, ' Harrison complained, and the deal was quietly abandoned.

Two months later he unexpectedly appeared at the London High Court as the official representative of the Beatles. 'I got the short straw and was the one who had to go to court for Apple, ' he explained, grumpily shoving a press photographer. The case was triggered by Apple's belated attempt to regain control of the Star-Club tapes made in 1962 and first released in 1977. Since then the 1988 Copyright Act had been passed, and Apple's lawyers could demonstrate that the tapes were recorded when the group was under contract to EMI (Apple's partner in this action). Looking like a teddy-boy-turned-college-professor, Harrison gave a virtuoso performance in the witness box, delivering a rare history lesson in vintage Beatle lore while never hiding his contempt for the entire subject. 'Unlike the experts who wallow in Beatle trivia, ' he explained, 'I spend a lot of time getting the junk out of my mind through meditation, so I don't know or remember – I don't want to know or remember – every last detail, cos it was trivial pursuit. ' Countering the testimony of the man who'd originally made the tape, Ted Taylor, he described it as 'the crummiest recording ever made in our name' and said, 'One drunken person recording another bunch of drunks does not constitute a business deal. ' Impressed by his testimony, the judge ruled that the tape should be returned to Apple – though it was safe to assume that most interested parties had already purchased a copy during the previous 21 years.

Harrison continued to wage a private war on those who wished to take financial advantage of his name. He took a particular dislike to the sales of Beatles memorabilia held regularly in prestigious auction houses in London and New York. On one notable occasion a fan's scrapbook was sold, which included items collected from the Harrison family home in 1963, including corners of toasted bread left uneaten by the guitarist. 'That's total bullshit, ' Harrison retorted. 'I ate all my toast. I never left any. The madness is the people selling it, and the people actually buying it. ' In June 1999 he attended the private party for a charity auction of guitars from the collection of Eric Clapton. Harrison arrived late, clutching a tiny kids' guitar which he proudly placed alongside Clapton's valuable Fenders and Gibsons. But he exuded an aura of discontent that acted as a force field around him for the rest of the evening.

Harrison's obsession with privacy had long seemed like a fetish, but the events of December 1999 demonstrated that paranoia is sometimes justified. On the 23rd a young woman named Cristin Keleher broke into his home in Maui, the residence which he had been seeking to protect from outside gaze for nearly two decades. The Harrisons weren't present, so having triggered the alarm system Keleher tucked into a frozen pizza and waited for the inevitable police response. On the 30th she appeared in court and was sentenced to four months' imprisonment; it transpired that she had been stalking the Harrisons for several years.

As she answered the charge of trespassing, Harrison lay in a Henley hospital, undergoing emergency surgery. Around 3. 30 that morning he had been woken at his Friar Park mansion by the sound of breaking glass. 'There were security cameras by the main gates and the back entrance, ' his gardener Colin Harris explained, 'but in some parts of the grounds the fence was falling down. Anybody could wander in, and doors to the mansion were often left wide open in daytime. Security should have been a lot stricter. I knew someday somebody would get in there. '

Harrison ventured downstairs to investigate, wearing only pyjama bottoms, while his wife rang for help. There he was confronted by Mick Abram ('Mad Mick' to the British tabloids), a mentally disturbed young man who attacked him with a long kitchen knife. In an attempt to calm himself and Abram, Harrison began chanting the Hare Krishna Mantra – which Abram interpreted as the tongue of the devil, spurring him to further violence. As the blade slid repeatedly into Harrison's bony chest, he admitted, 'I thought I was dying. I vividly remember a deliberate thrust of a knife and I could feel the blood entering my mouth and hear my breath exhaling from the wound. ' His life was saved by the courageous intervention of his wife, who brought down a weighty lamp on Abram's head, knocking him out. 'I was terrified, ' she remembered, 'but it is one of those things that you just do in a heightened sense of awareness so that you can never really forget any of it. It was a freaky thing. '

The seriousness of the incident was deliberately underplayed by the Harrison family. He was quoted as saying of Abram, 'He wasn't a burglar and he certainly wasn't auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys. ' But like Ronald Reagan's celebrated quips after the attempt on his life in 1981, the remark was designed to suggest that Harrison had scarcely been touched by the assault. The reality was much less pleasant. As Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts explained,

I spoke to Ringo about a month after it happened and he told me exactly what went on, and it was horrific. George was stabbed about 40 times. It happened outside his bedroom on the landing. He would have been dead if he'd been lying in bed, he wouldn't have been able to fight. The papers did say that one wound punctured his lung, but a lot of the others were just as horrific. The man was slashing him everywhere. George's wife hit him again and again on the head with this brass lamp, but he just wouldn't stop. There was blood everywhere.

Surgeons were forced to remove part of Harrison's lung, and his wounds left him scarred and breathless. More damaging still was the psychological impact. When he returned home, he sat in his kitchen with Eric Clapton, turning over and over again the precise details of the attack. 'George was still very disturbed, ' Clapton recalled, 'and didn't seem to know where to go with his life. I could only use my own predicament with addiction as a reference, encouraging the potential use of some kind of support system. ' 'It changed him, ' one of his closest aides recalled. 'We all felt that. And we were sure that's why the cancer came back. He'd been looking so well, but after the attack he didn't have the strength left to fight. '

Through 2000 Harrison rested, worked sporadically on material for a new album and supervised the reissue of All Things Must Pass. It included a revised arrangement of 'My Sweet Lord', carefully omitting all the elements that had made the original record so commercial. It was a typically wilful gesture, infuriating yet strangely admirable, like the man himself. There were rumours that the Harrisons might abandon Friar Park, though their home in Maui was still the subject of litigation. More surreal was the suggestion that Neil Aspinall might retire as managing director of Apple and that Harrison might take his place – a bizarre option for a celebrity recluse to consider.

There was, it soon became apparent, no time for change and precious little time for life. In March 2001 Harrison underwent surgery to remove a tumour from his lung. The following month he came under the care of the Oncology Institute of Southern Switzerland while staying in a lakeside home by the Italian border. He met Paul McCartney briefly in Milan a few weeks later, but otherwise lived as privately as he had always wished, albeit with the knowledge that his illness was outpacing him.

If John Lennon's murder had provided the starkest possible exhibition of the perils of celebrity, Harrison's final months were, in their way, an equally cruel reminder. It was a savage irony that this most reluctant of public figures should be exploited, not once but twice, by those who cared less for his humanity than his fame. He issued a statement in early July 2001, claiming that he was 'feeling fine' and apologising for any concern felt by fans. But two weeks later Beatles producer George Martin was widely quoted as delivering a virtual death sentence: 'He is an indomitable spirit but he knows that he is going to die soon, and he is accepting this. ' When this appeared in print, the appalled Martin rang Harrison to apologise and deny ever making the remark. And he was right: his actual words were, 'He's been rescued many times. . . I guess he's hoping he's going to be rescued again. And I think he will. But he knows perfectly well there's a chance he may not be. ' This story was then twisted by a succession of editors into something more sensational. Harrison insisted that he was 'active and feeling very well', but the original story was what people remembered, even after Richard Starkey had visited his friend and announced that Harrison was 'fine'.

At the start of October Harrison entered a recording studio for the last time, to tape a song entitled 'Horse to Water' with Jools Holland's band. 'He hadn't been well earlier in the year, ' Holland admitted, 'but he seemed much, much better. He seemed strong, and his voice was really strong. He'll continue to improve. ' Yet Harrison's lyrics had the dull ring of an Old Testament prophet confronting the apostasy of his nation from his deathbed. There was a verse about 'a friend of mine in so much misery', in which it was difficult not to recognise the haunted face of the bereaved Paul McCartney; another about an alcoholic; a third about a 'preacher' who 'warned me against Satan', the inference being that none of these apparent heroes had been able to find peace. When the song was copyrighted, Harrison assigned it to a new company: RIP Ltd 2001. It was a final stroke of black humour.

Within two weeks of that session Harrison's health had sharply declined. Aware that his struggle was entering its final weeks, he resigned as a director of Harrisongs, yielding his place to his wife, who soon succeeded her husband on the Apple board as well. The cancer had followed a familiar path, from his lungs to his brain; he was agonisingly thin and suffering hallucinations from his weighty intake of painkillers. He crossed the Atlantic for the final time, to try experimental radiation treatment at the pioneering clinic of the Staten Island University Hospital. Within a few days he was visited by McCartney. The two men, friends for more than 45 years but so often divided by the aftermath of their fame, spent their final hours together reminiscing about their shared past. 'We were laughing and joking, just like nothing was going on. I was impressed by his strength, ' McCartney recalled later.

A team was focusing high-density doses of radiation on Harrison's brain tumour in an effort to win him a few extra months of life, but according to an indictment filed several years later one medic was overcome by the lure of Harrison's fame. Olivia Harrison alleged in 2004 that the medic drove his children to the house that the Harrisons had rented, 'where [George] was bedridden and in great discomfort'. There the medic made Harrison listen while his son played the guitar, and then asked him to autograph the instrument for the boy. The frail musician refused: 'I do not even know if I know how to spell my name any more, ' he said. The medic allegedly told him, 'Come on, you can do this, ' placed a pen in Harrison's hand and helped him scrawl his name on the guitar.

Harrison abandoned the treatment and flew to Los Angeles for a more conventional course of radiotherapy. During the flight Harrison was so weak that he nearly died, but he clung to life for another two weeks. On 28 November, however, it was obvious that he was close to death, and his old friend Ravi Shankar flew to Los Angeles to visit him. Shankar's daughter Anoushka recalled, '[George] had a look that I'd never really seen before, so full of love and peace. He wasn't able to say anything with his lips, but his eyes were saying it. That house was just so full of love. '

The following day George Harrison died at 1. 30 p. m., in the presence of his wife, his son and fellow devotees of Krishna. 'George aspired to leave his body in a conscious manner, and that was a goal of his life, ' his wife recalled. His friend Mukanda Goswami said simply, 'He was a very spiritual person, who was unafraid to die. ' He passed from this world with the scent of incense in his nostrils, while his friends chanted the praises of Krishna. His body was covered with a yellow silk blanket, and sprinkled with rose petals and holy water. The official cause of death was less poetic: 'metastatic non-small cell lung cancer' accompanied by 'head and neck squamous cell carcinoma'.

There was none of the shock that had accompanied Lennon's death 21 years earlier; just a profound sense of regret that this complex and determined man had died at the age of 58. His son Dhani captured Harrison's spiritual nature: 'There was no urgency for him. Occasionally he'd get motivated, but not because he felt like he was going to die. He never sat and felt sorry for himself. He had no fears or worries left when he died. ' He would be missed, said Richard Starkey, for his humour and his generosity of spirit. Paul McCartney, who still remembered how a single misplaced word had haunted him when Lennon died, pronounced careful but heartfelt tribute: 'I am devastated and very very sad. He was a lovely guy and a very brave man, and he had a wonderful sense of humour. He is really just my baby brother. '

Harrison's body was cremated, and his family took his ashes to Varanasi in India, where the holy waters of the Ganges, the Yamuna and Saraswati meet. Olivia Harrison delivered a suitably spiritual requiem: 'We are deeply touched by the outpouring of love and compassion from people around the world. The profound beauty of the moment of George's passing – of his awakening from this dream – was no surprise to those of us who knew how he longed to be with God. In that pursuit, he was relentless. '

In a bizarre repeat of the aftermath of Linda McCartney's death, the media noticed a discrepancy on Harrison's death certificate – creating a five-day mystery that was solved when the real location of his death, a house in the Hollywood Hills that had been leased to Paul McCartney, was revealed. (The certificate listed Harrison's home as being in Lugano, Switzerland, presumably for tax purposes. ) By January 2002 'My Sweet Lord' was the best-selling single in Britain, and Olivia Harrison was preparing a lawsuit against a member of her extended family, whom she accused of stealing her husband's possessions and selling them the day after George's death. In July she held a private commemoration of her husband's life at Friar Park, attended by McCartney, Starkey and George Martin. And on 29 November 2002 – 'one year to the day', as the posters said – she organised the Concert For George at the Royal Albert Hall, at which many of his closest friends paid musical homage. Dhani Harrison, looking eerily like a reincarnation of his father circa 1963, remained on stage throughout. As Eric Clapton admitted, George Harrison would probably have said something like, 'Thanks very much, but I don't really want this. ' He would, Clapton added wryly, 'try to queer the pitch a bit. . . He could be very contrary. ' But the Harrison that was celebrated was the spiritual seeker, the master of subtle melodic shifts and deeply personal lyricism. Both of the surviving Beatles were there. Starkey almost upstaged the event: 'I loved George; George loved me, ' he declared confidently. By contrast, McCartney appeared uncertain, almost embarrassed – perhaps intimidated to be in the company of Harrison's closest allies. Anxious not to appear to be seeking the limelight, he performed with uncharacteristic restraint, though his emotion was clear to see. But it wasn't hard to imagine Harrison's cynicism as McCartney led the band into a soulful rendition of 'All Things Must Pass' – one of the songs that the other Beatles had refused to take seriously in January 1969.

Moving as the occasion was, the concert could only hint at the breadth of Harrison's character. 'George was the funniest man I knew, ' his widow declared. 'When he died, it was like, Oh, no, the party's over. ' With sly humour that her husband would have relished, she recalled, 'He didn't put up with any crabbiness, other than his own. ' In the years to come she and Dhani would oversee the repackaging of Harrison's albums, and Dhani would launch his own musical career, besides taking on the much-needed role of providing Apple with a link to the 21st century audience. 'My job description is being enthusiastic, ' the 30-year-old said in 2009.

No such obvious role was open to Richard Starkey. Alcohol and drugs had clouded his life in a comforting haze for two decades after the demise of the Beatles; then the effort to maintain sobriety and the habit of work filled his time. 'I've finally become everyone I used to hate! ' he joked to a friend in 1990. But there was a darker subtext. Once the Beatles had re-formed, to his great delight, and disbanded again; once his second or third album crafted with skill and without stimulants had been released and widely ignored by the public; once a proposed supergroup with Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard had failed to materialise; once he had launched a new record label (Pumkinhead Records) without any noticeable impact; once the fifth or sixth incarnation of his All-Starr Band had filled the same halls as its predecessor, what was left? 'Living sober was difficult, ' he recalled, 'I had to start again. ' But starting was no longer the problem; the challenge was to fill his life with something that was as much fun as partying and as exciting as being in the Beatles, and there were few things that were both legal and sober enough to qualify.

In public Starkey was still the lovable joker with the maudlin face; it's hard to imagine any of the other Beatles being easy-going enough to discuss the group's relative penis sizes, as he did on Howard Stern's show in 1998. His humour was natural and unforced: seemingly without effort he exuded charm and self-respect. But sometimes a sourer side of his personality became visible. It was there when he dismissed yet one more enquiry about the Beatles with a sullen refusal to talk about anything except his new album, which he must have known would be forgotten in weeks; and likewise when he told a newspaper in 2005, 'I have this thing about England, that they don't really love me enough. That's just how I feel. It's not a fact, it's just a feeling. ' Increasingly he carried that defensiveness with him, to the point where it became part of his psyche. In 2005, when McCartney performed 'Sgt Pepper' at the Live 8 concert with U2, Starkey complained, 'I was never asked to do it. He didn't ask me. It's too late now. It's very disappointing. ' The same spirit seemed to inspire his plan to make a documentary that would set the public straight about who he really was. In his heart he was still the child who had suffered when his friends were having fun, and who had spent several years confined in hospitals. No matter that the child now lived in Monte Carlo, with additional homes in Los Angeles, Colorado, London and, just for good measure, the traditional rock star mansion (17th century, of course) in Surrey.

In 2008 his persona began to attract public criticism for the first time. He was offered the opportunity to act as the mascot, effectively, of his hometown's reign as European City of Culture. 'We never let Liverpool down, ' he told the local paper, and the same message inspired the title track of his Liverpool 8 album. Banal though it was, reducing his history to humourless doggerel, 'Liverpool 8' allowed him more TV exposure than he'd been given in years. But his once well-attuned aerial for the public mood was failing him. On a TV chat show he announced that there was nothing about Liverpool that he missed – a mild enough comment but still considered undiplomatic from the mouth of the city's unofficial cultural ambassador and enough to trigger a backlash from Liverpudlians. Two weeks later he walked off the US TV show Live With Regis and Kelly after being asked to perform an abridged version of 'Liverpool 8'. More bad press resulted. Record company officials let slip that they were puzzled by the frequency with which Starkey muttered the phrase 'peace and love'; one counted twenty obsessive repetitions during a one-hour business meeting. His unkind fate was that he was now more newsworthy for his minor lapses of judgement than for his talent and charm.

He was scarcely the only celebrity who felt exploited by being asked for signatures that would appear within hours on the auction site eBay. But when his patience snapped, he was unwise enough to advertise the fact on his website. In November 2008 he posted a 40-second video message that aroused global derision. Speaking into a camera so close that he seemed to be inside a box, Starkey lectured his fans in a strangely monotonous voice, 'warning' them 'with peace and love' that he was too busy to sign any more autographs. As he repeated his catchphrase for the fifth time in this brief clip, it was difficult not to wonder whether he was undergoing some kind of psychological distress. Paul McCartney supported his friend, saying that Starkey was simply 'speaking his mind'. The following year the two men performed several songs together in Las Vegas, eliciting cries of 'Beatles reunion' from the press. It was Starkey's natural turf. As producer Don Was noted, his most enduring legacy wasn't his fame, but his musicianship: 'He had a completely different approach to rock 'n' roll drumming that has influenced everybody who came after him in a major way. '

In the wake of Linda McCartney's death in April 1998 at the age of just 56, Paul McCartney's all too visible grief demonstrated that fame was no defence against sadness. He was bereaved in a world that expected its heroes to suffer in public, and he fulfilled that role, and his private duty, in exemplary fashion – leading two poignant memorial services and then completing an album of his wife's music. He made a disguised return to public life that October, to promote his second collaboration with producer Youth under the name of the Fireman – a ruse that allowed him to explore uncharacteristic musical dimensions. An album of rock 'n' roll standards in Linda's memory, an exhibition of paintings, an orchestral album and A Garland For Linda, a performance of classical pieces, completed an 18-month cycle of remembrance. By December 1999 nobody questioned the propriety of staging a much-hyped performance at the replica Cavern Club in Liverpool.

McCartney was annoyed in March 1999 when he was romantically (and wrongly) linked with a textile designer. Two months later he attended an awards ceremony and was introduced to Heather Mills – a one-time glamour model who had lost a leg in a collision with a police motorcycle and had since become an outspoken charity campaigner. By November the British press were speculating that McCartney and Mills were lovers, and in January 2000 he was formally introduced to friends as her boyfriend. In March McCartney confirmed publicly, 'We are an item. ' He told a reporter that he still spoke to his late wife, and that she approved of his new partner. Meanwhile, Mills' carefully erected public face began to crumble: as early as June 2000 press headlines read, I HAD TO TELL PAUL I WAS ACCUSED OF BEING A HOOKER.

McCartney proposed to Mills in July 2001. Nearly a year later hotel staff overheard a passionate argument at a Florida hotel. 'I don't want to marry you, ' McCartney is alleged to have said, before flinging her engagement ring out of the window. The following month the pair were married at Castle Leslie in Ireland. Their daughter Beatrice was born in October 2003, though leading British tabloid newspapers confidently announced that she was 'a boy'. ^*41 But in late April 2006, two months after the couple visited Canada to protest against seal hunting, they announced that their marriage was over: 'Having tried exceptionally hard to make our relationship work given the daily pressures surrounding us, it is with sadness that we have decided to go our separate ways. ' The Beatles family gathered round: Olivia Harrison and Barbara Bach took McCartney's daughters Stella and Mary out for lunch in London; Yoko Ono pleaded for the press to allow the McCartneys some privacy.

When McCartney and Jane Asher ended their engagement in 1968 there was a brief flurry of excitement in the press, and then the subject was discreetly dropped. The public had no knowledge of his affair with Francie Schwartz until she published her account in Rolling Stone magazine several years later. No investigative reporters were detailed to pry into the previous life and loves of Linda Eastman – or, for that matter, the more universally mistrusted Yoko Ono.

Thirty years on, the media focused relentless attention on McCartney and Mills. Both had calculated that they could channel this prurient interest to their own benefit; celebrity was not just their past but the product they were selling. Neither imagined that they might not be able to control the circus. Mills had embellished her personal history with the same recklessness with which the media promoted its modern heroes. McCartney had employed PR man Geoff Baker, and many before him, to shape reality. But both McCartney and Mills suffered from a cardinal sin in the ruthless arena of 21st-century fame: naivety. They trusted that they would always be loved; that McCartney, as a national icon, was impervious to criticism; that Mills, as a tragic victim, was beyond reproach. Their downfall was not emotional or psychological – there are millions of divorces every decade in Britain alone – it was tactical, and they were quickly given a stern lesson in the cruelty of the global media machine.

There was an initial buzz of excitement and sympathy when the couple met, and the bereaved superstar was comforted by the courageous victim. But slowly the mood changed. Mills was barely older than McCartney's children, and the media exploited every possible rift between them. She was described as a gold-digger, targeting McCartney for his fathomless wealth; he was portrayed as a foolish old man, beguiled by the attractions of a woman young enough to be his daughter. Since he had been deserted by John Lennon 30 years earlier, his survival had centred on his relationship with Linda Eastman, his public image and his music. Now two of those struts had collapsed, and the third was made almost irrelevant by the petty drama of his private life. In 2003 he released Chaos and Confusion in the Backyard, one of the most effective solo albums in his catalogue, but it was quickly buried beneath the debris of his marriage.

When the pair separated, Mills accused McCartney of unleashing a witch-hunt against her and responded with a string of ever more shocking tales of degradation and abuse. By October 2006, for example, it was being claimed that McCartney had stabbed Mills with a broken glass, attacked her in a drunken rage, assaulted her when she was pregnant, mocked her disability and refused to let her breast-feed their daughter, telling Mills, 'They are my breasts. ' McCartney maintained a dignified silence and let journalists find their own methods of puncturing Mills' reputation. As the stories grew more outlandish, however, it was inevitable that some of the dirt would tarnish his image. It was but a short step, after all, from the Mills camp's claims about McCartney's alleged bad behaviour to the unsubstantiated rumours about his sexual preferences that were the subject of amused speculation in media circles. No matter how ridiculous the accusations – and most of them were laughable – McCartney was damned if he answered them and equally damned if he didn't. Years of careful handling of the media were erased as it became possible to allege almost anything about one of Britain's most famous celebrities, in the knowledge that he would be unable to respond.

It was difficult not to feel that Mills had been naive in the way she had handled herself, her marriage and her past. Yet even if the cruellest tabloid allegations were true, there was something shocking in the way that she became the repository for every ill-concealed impulse of hatred against women – not least from other women, many of whom seemed to relish her transformation into a global scapegoat, like the crowds who gathered to watch mediaeval witch burnings. Mocked, battered, belittled, hated, Mills had little option but to retire into the self-justification that was her least attractive public face, and thereby toss more wood onto the pyre.

The denouement was a divorce hearing held behind closed doors in February 2008. A month later Mills arrived at the High Court to hear the judge award her an estimated £ 16. 5 million from McCartney's billion-dollar fortune. After throwing a glass of water over her ex-husband's lawyer, she pleaded for the full judgement not to be made public, but it was too late to argue for privacy. Inevitably, the press focused on the judge's verdict that Mills was 'a less than impressive witness' who had been 'not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid'. But for McCartney it was a hollow victory. Throughout his career he had carefully satisfied the demand for knowledge about elements of his private life while retaining strict barriers around the rest, thereby allowing himself the sanity of existing – to some degree, at least – beyond the view of the world. Now everything was laid bare, as if he'd been photographed naked by a paparazzo: the homes in Beverly Hills, Long Island, Somerset, Essex and Merseyside; the £ 32 million collection of 'artefacts'; the £ 36 million pension pot; even the security arrangements at his various residences.

The saga took a savage toll. Throughout his courtship, marriage and divorce McCartney had worked, as he always will. He'd staged massively successful world tours; organised the Concert For New York City after the 9/11 disaster; made records, issued DVDs, published a children's book, exhibited paintings, raised money for charity and offered his familiar thumbs-up to a million photographers and fans. Yet through it all the world was more interested in whether he had really demanded that his estranged wife return three bottles of cleaning fluid to his home, or whether he was so addicted to marijuana that he could barely function without it. After decades of youthfulness, he suddenly aged faster than his years, and took steps to repair the damage which merely accentuated the changes. Like a fading Hollywood star, his face was a strange combination of youth and age, his hair a shade removed from nature's palette, his skin both tight and sagging. When he publicised Liverpool's Year of Culture in December 2007 he was wearing an almost bouffant approximation of his 1963 Beatle cut and appeared slightly dazed. In interviews his voice sounded restricted and slightly strangled. A month later it was reported that a 'spokesman' had confirmed that McCartney had recently undergone an operation for a coronary angioplasty, to improve his blood circulation; then McCartney countered that the supposedly official tales were 'completely untrue'. For a man who was reported to be facing a major health crisis, he was certainly energetic: during 2007 and 2008 he was linked by the overexcited media with a dazzling list of women, among them Rosanna Arquette, Sabrina Guinness, Renee Zellweger, Christie Brinkley, Natasha Marsh, Elle Macpherson, Lulu, Tanya Larrigan and Nancy Shevell, who became his regular companion. Understandably, he remained silent about his relationship with Shevell, though that didn't prevent others talking. But as a woman who was not only dignified but rich, she was perceived as a suitable candidate for McCartney's affections.

After Linda McCartney's death there was a partial truce in the battle of wills with Yoko Ono. 'It's normal in any business relationship, ' Ono explained in 2000. 'Sometimes he gets upset, and sometimes I get upset. I'm not as vocal as he is in the world about it, but I do get upset. Also, I'm sure that in the case of Paul there's that feeling that I'm the woman who took away his partner – it's like a divorce. ' But the two parties continued to squabble over their joint legacy. In late 2002 McCartney prepared his fifth live album in twelve years, Back inthe US – its title deliberately evoking the Beatles, just as his previous release, Paul Is Live! , had done. ^*42 He chose to repeat what he had done on Wings Over America more than 25 years earlier, and credit the Lennon/McCartney songs – his songs – to McCartney/Lennon.

Ono chose to be violently offended by this effectively meaningless gesture; a spokesman called it 'absolutely inappropriate'. (The spokesman clearly hadn't seen copies of the earliest Beatles records, which were indeed credited to 'McCartney/Lennon'. ) If her response was designed to rile McCartney, it succeeded, as he reacted like a disgruntled adolescent. 'Why do I care? ' he asked himself rhetorically. 'I don't know. I've given up. I'm not going to bother with it. It's very unseemly for me to care, because John's not here and it's like walking on a dead man's grave. I was talking about him as if he were here, and he's not. ' His sense of injustice was reasonable: after all, why should Lennon pass into history as the primary composer of 'Yesterday' and 'Hey Jude' when they were entirely McCartney's work? 'It's actually just a very little request, ' he said, 'and it makes me look stupid. ' Starkey agreed with the latter sentiment: 'I think the way he did it was underhanded, ' he said of McCartney's gentle rewriting of history. 'He's wanted to do it for years. I thought he should have done it officially with Yoko. ' But that was based on the unlikely assumption that Ono would ever allow the change.

In a more charitable mood Ono revealed keen insight into those who were left behind by Lennon's death – not just McCartney, but Cynthia and Julian Lennon as well. 'This is like a drama, ' she said in 2005. 'Each person has something to be totally miserable about, because of the way they were put into this play. I have incredible sympathy for each of them. ' Yet she had a way of expressing solidarity that could still pierce the heart: 'My perspective is that it is probably very hard to be Paul McCartney. There's a certain kind of insecurity that famous people have. And he has more than other people because he's more famous, probably. ' McCartney paid constant tribute to his fallen companions during his 21st-century live shows, performing 'Something' in honour of Harrison and 'Here Today' for Lennon. But at an intimate in-store show in California 27 years after Lennon's death his persona cracked open wide, to reveal the pained, abandoned man within. In front of no more than 200 people McCartney gently began a solo rendition of 'Here Today', the letter he'd never had the chance to send to his best friend. As he acknowledged Lennon's absence, his voice faltered and broke as he choked back tears. It was a moment of naked reality almost unmatched in his career, a gesture of love and pain, and a wound that could never be healed.

Like McCartney, Ono channelled her emotions into constant activity. Much of her work was sensitive, and generous to Lennon's fans; some was more selfish. It seemed churlish, for instance, when she reworked Lennon's promotional videos from the period when the pair were separated. Songs written during his relationship with May Pang were now accompanied by footage of Lennon and Ono as if those magical lovers had never been parted. Even more regrettable was her treatment of Lennon's Walls and Bridges album, a true artefact of the Pang era. Reissued in 2005, the disc now bore artwork that merged Lennon and Ono's faces. If reversing a songwriting credit was 'absolutely inappropriate', what was reversing an artist's intentions?

Some detected foul play at work in 1998 when the release of Julian Lennon's Photograph Smile coincided, to the exact day, with Sean Lennon's flimsy debut album. 'Julian was devastated, ' his mother recalled. 'He knew it couldn't be a coincidence that he and his brother had been pitted against each other so blatantly. ' Sean had hip associates (Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys) and garnered critical acclaim; Julian sounded like Paul McCartney in his melodic prime, but was distinctly unfashionable, and his album suffered by that unbalanced comparison. He did not issue another record for the next decade, feeling that the industry was stacked against him; while his step-brother continuing to attract media attention. It didn't hurt that Sean Lennon had developed McCartney's knack for attracting press controversy to sell a record – alleging that his father used to beat him, for example, or had been killed by a US government hit man.

Ono knew what she was doing when she bracketed Lennon's oldest son with McCartney in her roll-call of victims. Lennon was commemorated when Liverpool's airport was renamed in his honour; McCartney had the knighthood but not the civic recognition. At the Q Awards in 2005 Ono carved another wound in McCartney's reputation: 'John would say to me, " They always cover Paul's songs, they never cover mine. " I said to him, " You're a good songwriter, it's not June-with-spoon that you write. " ' Friends said that McCartney dreaded what would happen if Ono – one of life's natural survivors – outlived him.

'It's the kind of a challenge that a warrior likes, ' Ono said of her responsibility as Lennon's executor. 'I would really like to see his work is properly communicated. ' But the nature of that communication became increasingly controversial. In an astute article in 1995 rock critic Paul Du Noyer wrote,

You have to wonder if this is what the future will look like: all our yesterdays, digitally magicked into the soundtrack of all our tomorrows. Music will never grow old – not because it is timeless, but because it will get cosmetic surgery whenever the market is ready to buy it all over again. And a company like Apple Records, which I used to imagine as the custodian of a legacy, becomes instead an incubator for endlessly refined Beatles material, perhaps in media we haven't even dreamed of.

It was an uncannily accurate vision.

As early as May 1997 Richard Starkey was promising digitally enhanced editions of the Yellow Submarine and Let It Be films, plus CD releases of the un-Spectorised Get Back album and EMI's Live at theHollywood Bowl concoction. The first of those projects emerged in 1999, when Apple authorised the DVD release of Yellow Submarine alongside a 'new' Beatles album, Yellow Submarine Songtrack – nothing more than a compilation of the songs featured in the film. But the marketing campaign did allow Apple to license a new range of YellowSubmarine collectables – a Pepperland globe, baseballs, T-shirts, boxer shorts, even a lava lamp, all embellished with the images of your favourite cartoon pop stars. 'I don't think it will add any more [to the legend], ' George Harrison said. 'It just keeps what is already there going, it just keeps it ticking over. But all of that really had nothing to do with us. It was like we were just put there as playthings for the rest of the world. '

The least commercially minded of all the Beatles, it was Harrison who conceived the project that would occupy Apple for the first years of the new century. He had become close friends with Guy Laliberte, owner of the Cirque du Soleil franchise. He suggested that the Cirque should design one of their spectacular fusions of circus, dance and music around the Beatles' catalogue. 'In typical Apple fashion, it began with a lot of discussion, ' said Giles Martin, son of the newly knighted Sir George. His father was recruited to supervise the musical content of the show, which slowly began to take shape in the years after Harrison's death. 'I knew I was the only one who could do it with any degree of credence, ' Sir George said. His son added, 'Apple wanted this to be the best show it could be, and Neil [Aspinall] made it clear that they didn't want to do anything where they sanctioned other people singing Beatles songs. '

Cirque du Soleil's show, entitled Love, debuted with a gala premiere at the Mirage, Las Vegas in June 2006, attended by two Beatles and two Beatle widows ^*43. It promised to capture 'the spirit and passion behind the most beloved rock group of all time. . . underscored by aerial performance, extreme sports and urban, freestyle dance'. To accompany the astonishing visuals, Martin pè re et fils created a collage of Beatles music influenced (as Giles Martin admitted) by The GreyAlbum, an underground mash-up of samples from the Beatles' White Album and hip-hop tracks by Jay-Z. ^†6 The Martins began by preparing a 15-minute demonstration of what their techniques could create. 'Ringo thought it was fantastic, ' Sir George said, 'and he said to me, " George, you can do anything you like as far as I'm concerned. " Paul said, " Yeah, really great, but you know you can be more adventurous. " I thought, Blimey, I thought we had been pretty adventurous anyway, but he gave us carte blanche to do even more. Olivia [Harrison] liked it, she didn't make any comments. Yoko liked it, but said she was a little concerned that what we had done with John's work wasn't quite right. ' Although Sir George Martin was ostensibly in charge of the project, hearing problems restricted his involvement, and the Love album (issued in November 2006) was effectively compiled by Giles Martin and engineers at EMI. Paul McCartney said, 'The album puts the Beatles back together again, because suddenly there's John and George with me and Ringo. It's kind of magical. ' The record briefly caught the global imagination but was as ephemeral as confectionary, melting to leave an unpleasant, chemical aftertaste.

Love was far from being the only 21st-century fantasy built around the Beatles. The TV channel VH1 screened Two of Us, a fictional recreation of a meeting between Lennon and McCartney in 1976. It was made by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had last featured in the saga as the director of the Let It Be film. Broadway briefly hosted Lennon, an Ono-approved musical that was greeted as a theatrical catastrophe. More entertaining than either was the 'discovery' in 2003 of a Beatles reunion tape supposedly made in Los Angeles in 1976. A memorabilia dealer claimed to have the only recording of this hitherto undocumented session. He listed the songs that the Beatles had recorded, the titles of which were so banal that they dampened any sense of excitement: 'Happy Feeling', 'Back Home', 'Rockin' Once Again', 'People of the Third World' and 'Little Girl'. Needless to say, there was no reunion; yet it was testament to the Beatles' endless power to command publicity that such stories were widely reported as news.

In the absence of any new tapes, EMI and Apple concentrated on the old. In 2000 they released 1 (known to insiders for months beforehand as Project X). 'The Beatles are still saving the industry's ass, ' one retailer noted as this compilation of hit singles sold 18 million copies around the world. Inevitably, this success prompted rumours that the Beatles would re-form for a world tour, until the extent of Harrison's illness was revealed.

The industry could continue just as well without him. By 2002 McCartney was boosting the imminent arrival of a DVD transfer of the Let It Be film and a fuller and more accurate representation of the January 1969 sessions than Phil Spector had achieved. Let It Be. . . Naked – an album but, significantly, no film – duly appeared in November 2003. Lacking either the historical accuracy of the original Get Back album from 1969 or the production finesse of Spector's edition, it was accurately described by the New York Times as ' Let It Be with a fig leaf ' – a pointless and faintly insulting product, widely ignored by the public. When 2003 passed without the appearance of the long-anticipated DVD, there were rumours that McCartney and Starkey were blocking its release because it showed the Beatles in a bad light. The story wasn't true, but it was easy to believe when the financial potency of the Beatles' brand clearly outweighed the interests of their fans or their creative legacy.

Perhaps inevitably, the most satisfied consumer of the Beatles in the 21st century was the legal profession. In September 2003 Neil Aspinall's Apple Corps launched its third and, they hoped, final assault on its American near-namesake. Far from distancing themselves from the music business, as they had promised in their previous settlement, Apple Computers had launched the iTunes system of music downloads and the pioneering MP3 player, the iPod. Apple was now synonymous in the public mind with music – but not the Beatles' music, as Apple Corps refused to make its wares available for download. By 2003 it was hard to find anyone under the age of 40 who even knew that the Beatles owned a company named Apple, so total was the computer firm's domination of the marketplace.

The early skirmishes took on a familiar pattern. Apple Corps functioned as a record company again by reissuing the CDs it had prepared during the previous court battle, and Apple Computers continued to astonish the world with its technological innovations. Analysts predicted a truce, whereby Computers would be forced to pay Corps a royalty on all their music-related activities, and the Beatles' music would then appear on iTunes. Apple boss Steve Jobs complained, 'We can't reach an agreement, and the courts could drag on for years. . . The whole thing is unfortunate, because we love the Beatles. ' For Apple Corps, Geoff Baker commented, 'We have no plans at the moment to go online. ' The inference was plain: what did the timeless Beatles care for such a fly-by-night novelty as the digital download?

The first battle ended in victory for the Beatles, who won the right for the case to be heard in Britain. By September 2004 informed insiders were predicting that Computers would gracefully admit defeat and deliver the largest compensation payment in legal history. Eighteen months later the case finally reached the High Court. Neil Aspinall played the digital ingé nu: 'I am computer illiterate, ' he testified. 'I don't even know how to turn one on. ' Confronted with the information that the Beatles' own website used Apple Computers software, he pleaded ignorance. Apple Computers' QC said poetically that 'even a moron in a hurry' could tell that his clients were not trying to masquerade as the Beatles – but that was hardly the point, as the issue at stake was the agreement the two sides had made a decade earlier.

Informed observers universally expected Apple Corps to win the case. But when Mr Justice Mann delivered his verdict on 8 May 2006, he first rejected many of the arguments put forward by Apple Computers and then awarded them victory, on the grounds that they were not using their apple logo on the music they were selling – because it did not exist as a physical object. Many commentators sympathised with Neil Aspinall's stunned response: 'With great respect to the trial judge, we consider he has reached the wrong conclusion. ' Aspinall immediately launched appeal proceedings.

The two sides achieved an out-of-court settlement in February 2007, but the terms of the ceasefire were startling: Apple Corps agreed to cede ownership of all the Apple trademarks to Apple Computers, who in return would license the relevant names back to the Beatles' company. Forty years after it was founded and launched as an alternative to the capitalist system, Apple Corps now only existed by permission of a corporation – which, it could be argued, had kept closer to the Beatles' original philosophy than the group had done themselves.

One more problem remained. For several years EMI and Apple had – once again – been involved in litigation about royalty payments and ownership of copyrights, fighting the same tired battles that they had been waging for nearly 30 years. But within a month of the Apple vs Apple settlement, it was announced that the Apple vs EMI contest was also ending out of court, with undisclosed consequences. It was perhaps telling that Paul McCartney had chosen to end his contract with EMI – which had endured unbroken in the UK since 1962 – and look for album-by-album deals elsewhere. Now it seemed that all the pieces were in place: the two Apples, EMI and the music. Since the departure of Allen Klein in 1973 Neil Aspinall had been fighting the Beatles' cause in courts around the world. Now all the existing legislation had been concluded, and it was time for Aspinall to reap the commercial benefits.

Instead, the unthinkable happened. On 4 April 2007 Apple Corps issued a brief statement about the departure of Neil Aspinall, who had been with John, Paul, George and Ringo for a spectacular forty-plus years, during which he played an indispensable role for the four. He was there since the inception of the band in Liverpool and has meant so much to the Beatles' family for all these years and still does. However, he has decided to move on. Apple as a whole, and each member of the company, wishes him great success in whatever endeavour he chooses to pursue in the future.

It read like corporate gloss, disguising a forced departure. There was no suggestion that Aspinall had been sacked, but there were strong whispers that he had been placed in a position where he felt unable to continue.

Perhaps he had merely chosen to rest at the age of 65, after a lifetime in the Beatles' service. Paul McCartney insisted, 'Neil was great. Neil was our mate for a long, long time, and nobody could replace Neil, because he was so special, he still is, he's a great guy, but he'd been wanting to retire for quite a while. ' That explanation was too simple for the conspiracy-minded. It was suggested that one or more of the Beatles (or their widows) had grown impatient at the delay in making the group's music available for digital download. A team of independent accountants was said to have been employed to calculate exactly how much money Apple could have made if he had been more open to technological innovation. In his defence, Aspinall could legitimately have claimed that he was only acting as the servant of his masters, and that they employed him to say no. Others wondered whether Aspinall might have viewed the settlement with Apple Computers as a disaster, and chosen to fall on his sword like a disgraced Roman general.

Another widely believed theory was that Aspinall had come under extreme pressure from the Beatles' other representatives to squeeze maximum return from the group's name. This seemed to be supported by comments from former Apple press officer Geoff Baker, who had been sacked by McCartney for 'unstable' behaviour. ^*44 'I fear for the integrity of the Beatles' legacy without Neil, ' Baker said. This scenario envisaged a world in which their image and music would be licensed to anyone who had money in their fist, regardless of artistic or commercial consequences.

Aspinall's place as director and company secretary of Apple Corps, and CEO of its subsidiaries Apple Charity (UK) Ltd and Apple Washington was taken by Jeff Jones, a former executive at Sony Records. There he had supervised the restoration of the Miles Davis archive, a project which had won almost universal applause. Beatles fans noted his pedigree and looked forward to all the heritage CDs and DVDs that they assumed Aspinall had been hiding from the world. Less heralded was the rise of a chartered accountant, Garth Tweedale, who had helped Harrison to sort out the HandMade Films debacle and now assumed many of Aspinall's financial responsibilities within the Beatles Group of Companies. Meanwhile, day-to-day activities continued to be monitored by Aspinall's loyal second-in-command Jonathan Clyde, another Harrison proté gé.

In 2007 McCartney promised that the Beatles' catalogue would soon be available from iTunes. But it was only in 2009 that the first crack in Apple's wall of silence was audible. More than a decade after their release was first described as 'imminent', the entire catalogue of Beatles CDs was scheduled for reissue on 9 September. Pundits speculated about the millions that Apple had lost by delaying these releases. Even then, there was no immediate confirmation that the group's music would be available for digital download; Apple was said to be considering the merits of exclusively marketing the music itself without the assistance of its American namesake. EMI and Apple were, as ever, reported to disagree, this time about the precise percentages that each party would receive from sales of downloads. In either case, the appearance of the CDs ensured that the Beatles' remastered music would soon be available for free on unofficial file-sharing sites.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the reissue campaign was that it coincided with the release of a Beatle-branded edition of the computer game Rock Band. The project represented the triumph of youth – in the form of Dhani Harrison – over the natural conservatism of Apple. He had succeeded in persuading the Apple board that the Rock Band project would not only be extraordinarily lucrative, but would also consolidate the Beatles' reputation amongst those too young to remember Lennon's death, let alone the first flush of Beatlemania.

There was a tragic aftermath to the coup within the Apple boardroom. Neil Aspinall had talked happily to friends about working on his autobiography, but soon after his departure from Apple he discovered that he was seriously ill. On 24 March 2008 he died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. One of his final visitors was Paul McCartney, who was reported to have paid for his treatment. Two weeks later Aspinall's funeral service was held close to his home in Twickenham. Neither of the surviving Beatles attended: Stella and James McCartney represented their father; Barbara Bach stood in for Richard Starkey. Aspinall's onetime adversary, Allen Klein, outlived him by little more than a year, dying in July 2009.

With Aspinall's death, the final link between the Beatles and the tight-knit organisation that had guided them through the 1960s was severed. Sir George Martin was enjoying well-earned retirement. The other men who had safeguarded the Beatles and their legacy – Brian Epstein, Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor – were gone. In their place were chartered accountants, entertainment and copyright lawyers, management consultants, wives, children and the prospect of the ever-present, apparently indestructible Yoko Ono guiding the Beatles deep into the 21st century.

McCartney, Starkey, Ono and Olivia Harrison now controlled a financial empire so complex that it boggled the imagination. Every year their lawyers and accountants advised them to form new companies, to cross-collateralise their tax burden, to shift their source of revenue from one jurisdiction to the next, all in the interests of empire-building and careful guardianship of their wealth. But occasionally someone would remember that the Beatles had once been a pop group, glowing with joy, lust and animal excitement, who had imagined in the late 1960s that they could remake the world in their own image. Now the dream was over, as John Lennon had predicted, and money could still not guarantee them satisfaction or love. Meanwhile Lennon himself had been canonised as a prophet of peace, his song 'Imagine' accepted as a secular hymn, his image wielded by politicians and charities as a symbol of untarnished idealism. All trace of the Lennon who recklessly pursued his freedom from the Beatles in 1969, and recognised salvation in the form of Allen Klein and heroin, had effectively been erased.

Given a second chance, the Beatles might have plotted a different course out of the Beatles and into their separate lives. Instead, their history is tinged with regret and recrimination. As Derek Taylor noted more than twenty years ago, 'Nothing should have ended that way, should it? ' Yet while the story of the Beatles is doomed to end in anticlimax, their music inhabits another, more enduring realm. It survives as the vivid symbol of a golden past, an immediate trigger of nostalgic joy even for those too young to qualify for nostalgia. It breathes youth, hope and possibility, though we know that its creators proved, after all, to be merely mortal, not the protagonists of fairy tale or myth.

The music needs no mythology: it is both timeless and a staggeringly accurate document of the age from which it came. It is more magical than Magic Alex, more powerful than Allen Klein or the Eastmans, more acerbic than Lennon's wit, more refreshing than McCartney's charm, more solid than Starkey's backbeat, more spiritual than Harrison's psyche; greater, ultimately, than the men who created it or the empire they built around it. The soul of the Beatles turned out to reside not in the boardroom of Apple Corps or the bank accounts of four multimillionaires, but in the instinctive, natural grace of their songs. Their collective genius created something that not even money could destroy.

1. A final glimpse of unity, during the filming of Magical Mystery Tour in September 1967. Thereafter it was difficult to force the four men into the same frame, let alone expect them to smile.

2. The Lennons, Harrisons and Jenny Boyd, leaving London in search of spiritual regeneration,

February 1968. Lennon couldn't dream up a convincing reason why Yoko Ono should accompany them to India.

3. Revolution in the studio, June 1968: Paul McCartney with Francie Schwartz, while Yoko Ono carries the can for disrupting the Beatles at work.

4. John Lennon with his past and future collaborators, at the Yellow Submarine premiere, July 1968, before Ono and McCartney realised that their roles were mutually incompatible.

5. A rare moment of harmony at Apple, 1969: Harrison soon lost patience with the Beatles' utopian dream.

6. The Beatles on their Apple rooftop, 30 January 1969: making a self-conscious show of togetherness for an invisible global audience.

7. New York swagger and Liverpudlian loyalty: Allen Klein and Neil Aspinall, the two men entrusted with running Apple.

8. The Plaintiff and his wife leaving the London High Court after launching a lawsuit against his three closest friends, February 1971.

9. Two Beatles, one widow, two sons: the Fab Five are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1988.

10. The Montagues and Capulets stage a brief ceasefire, as John Lennon posthumously enters the same institution, 1994.

11. There can be no Beatles reunion, George Harrison once declared, 'as long as John Lennon remains dead'. But desperate times provoke desperate measures, as this March 1995 photo proves.

Footnotes

^*1 Convinced that 9 was his lucky number, Lennon rewrote history to place this meeting on 9 November, and all subsequent chroniclers have followed suit.

^†1 One biography of McCartney, by Christopher Sandford, quoted a source claiming that McCartney and Ono had sex when she arrived at his London home. Though it would add delicious spice to the subsequent history of the Beatles and Apple, there is not the slightest shred of evidence to support this accusation.

^*2 In Eric Idle's recasting of the Beatles' myth, All You Need Is Cash, their manager Leggy Mountbatten tragically moves to Australia.

^*3 The scenario only altered when Ono mumbled quietly into the portable tape recorder that she used as a diary. While the Beatles recorded, she confided her sense of insecurity, and her erotic fantasies about Lennon, to her tape. One recording, completed in private, ended with Ono masturbating to orgasm.

^*4 So was anyone who owned the album. US shops that stocked it were raided; thousands of copies were seized at Newark Airport; and an antique dealer in Doncaster was convicted of staging an indecent exhibition after he placed the cover in his shop window. Police were concerned by the fact that his shop was close to a primary school. In Canada an MP decried the importation of 'foreign-made pornographic material'.

^†2 During her hospital stay, Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was finalised. She claimed to have phoned her husband to discuss the settlement. He told her, 'There's nothing to talk about. My final offer is £ 75, 000. That's like winning the pools. ' She eventually received £ 25, 000 to purchase a house and £ 75, 000 maintenance for herself and their son. A further £ 100, 000 was placed in a trust fund, to be shared by Julian with any subsequent Lennon children. Cynthia Lennon remained bitter about the settlement, though her counsel acknowledged that Lennon had made 'generous and proper provision' for his wife and child, who were also allowed to keep 2 per cent of the shares in the music publishing company Northern Songs.

^*5 As late as the mid-1970s People magazine referred to Eastman as 'the Park Avenue groupie'.

^*6 One of the ironies of this reading of Beatles history is that three months after he invited Klein into the drama Lennon was still quite confident that the group would last forever. 'Wait and see, ' he said in April 1969. 'We'll be around, we'll be together when we're 60. But we won't be following each other around like sheepdogs. '

^*7 Jagger's girlfriend at the time, Marianne Faithfull, insisted that Jagger wanted Klein to take over the Beatles, in the hope that he might then lose interest in the Stones.

^†3 'No allegation was made of failure to pay any tax, ' Klein explained in 1971, claiming that the problem related to paperwork that had inadvertently not been filed by 'a member of my staff ' between 1959 and 1962.

^*8Besides its symbolic importance, the Plastic Ono disguise had financial implications: Lennon earned a higher royalty rate than he would have done with the Beatles.

^*9 Unbeknown to Klein, Lee Eastman was keen to negotiate his own deal for the GetBack film, and was entreating senior Apple staff to back his efforts rather than Klein's.

^*10 The Beatles were giving up less from this deal than it might seem, as Klein agreed that the 5 per cent of North American royalties, around three quarters of total global revenue, would come from his commission rather than from the Beatles' pockets.

^*11 Lennon and McCartney were contractually bound to the company until 1973, and almost all of their Beatles copyrights are still held by Northern.

^*12 Surviving tapes of Starkey composing in the mid-1960s illustrate the limits of his songwriting talent: two guitar chords and melodies borrowed from Johnny Cash country hits.

^*13 This was probably the only occasion on which Harrison and Starkey saw the film before its release in 1970. At this stage it still included footage of Ono jamming with the three-man Beatles on the day of Harrison's departure. Discreet pressure ensured that the clip was removed, but both Harrison and Starkey later talked as if it still featured in the final edit.

^*14 Karma Productions was the Canadian company promoting the Toronto Peace Festival; the song may have been a subtle message to them.

^*15 According to Mal Evans, McCartney was inspired to write the song not by his late mother, whose name appeared in the final lyric, but by a vision he had experienced during meditation of Evans walking towards him, saying 'Let it be, let it be. ' 'Mother Malcolm' became 'Mother Mary' for public consumption.

^*16 Spector claimed that it was McCartney who recommended Hewson for the job. He also informed the Beatles in April 1970 that he thought this song would be a more appropriate title track for their album than 'Let It Be'.

^*17 Taylor left at the end of the year, to pursue a career as an executive at Warner Brothers Records.

^*18Repeating a ruse that had worked perfectly with Paul McCartney, Klein took out ads for the final Rolling Stones album issued under the deal, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, which claimed that the band were 'an ABKCO-managed company'.

^*19 Carol Bedford, Waiting for the Beatles, Blandford Press, 1984

^*20 In an era clouded by legal controversy, it was perhaps inevitable that Harrison's contribution, 'It's Johnny's Birthday', should spark the threat of a lawsuit when it was included on All Things Must Pass later in the year. Harrison had 'borrowed' the melody of the 1968 Cliff Richard hit 'Congratulations', and was forced to give its authors due credit. More costly accusations of plagiarism would soon follow.

^*21 While he was in New York, Harrison signed over more than £ 650, 000 of Apple money to Klein, as management commission.

^*22The two men were photographed together around that time, in a line-up of dignitaries in New York. Eastman looked correct, Ivy League-attired and slightly pained; Klein resembled a man who'd just stumbled in from his neighbourhood bar.

^*23 To make room for the concerts in his schedule, Harrison abandoned his production work for Apple band Badfinger, and was replaced by Todd Rundgren, who recalled, 'He didn't finish any of the songs, though he was perfectly willing to take the credit for the songs that I finished. '

^*24 Leon Russell recalled that Harrison still felt nostalgic enough about the Beatles that summer to compile an album of the best cuts from their recent solo work, to play to friends in his car.

^*25 Lennon rarely displayed respect for Linda McCartney. Earlier that year, he had written her a vicious letter, attacking her 'petty little perversion of a mind' and 'insane family'.

^*26 The opening coincided with Lennon's 31st-birthday party, celebrated with a drunken evening of song featuring Phil Spector, Allen Ginsberg and Richard Starkey. 'Spector insisted on making fun of Paul McCartney's songs, ' recalled Steve Gebhardt, another guest at the party. 'But John didn't really want to go along with it. '

^†4 Not everyone in Lennon's life was treated so sensitively. He did not inform his ex-wife Cynthia or son Julian that he had moved to New York. When she tracked him down, she was only allowed to speak to Ono. Lennon did not see Julian for another three years.

^*27 The single wasn't released in Britain for another year, because Northern Songs refused to recognise that it had been co-written by Ono. Lennon ordered thousands of 'War Is Over' T-shirts to be printed, Allan Steckler recalled, 'but we couldn't sell them, so they rotted in the office'.

^*28 The record was not, as Lennon believed, the Beatles' 1962 audition for Decca Records but a collection of early BBC radio performances.

^*29 Wiener's dogged persistence secured the release of hundreds of pages of secret government documents relating to surveillance of Lennon and his friends.

^*30The set also featured the delayed Live Jam album. Allen Klein was forced to negotiate with EMI/Capitol for Lennon to take a reduced royalty rate on the package, in return for which the company agreed that it wouldn't count as a Beatles album in contractual terms. Klein's caution was well founded: the set failed by some distance to reach the 500, 000 sales that would have triggered the royalty increase. When considering Klein's reign as manager, Lennon never gave him credit for this attention to detail.

^*31Blindman also afforded Klein a cameo role, as a sharpshooter alongside Beatles aide Mal Evans.

^*32 Ironically, it was McCartney who collected the publishing royalties from Lennon's cover of 'Peggy Sue' on the Rock 'n' Roll album. Another song, 'Bring It On Home to Me', benefited Allen Klein. 'I don't care who gets the money, ' Lennon said bravely.

^*33 Mintz's career path, from radical DJ on 1960s underground radio to apologist for celebrities such as Paris Hilton, is a paradigm of the surreal metamorphosis of pop culture over the past 40 years.

^*34 Lennon wrote diary entries throughout his final years, and the manuscripts – removed from Ono's apartment after her husband's death but later returned to her – have been seen by at least two biographers, Geoffrey Giuliano and Robert Rosen. Neither dared to quote from the text, instead coyly paraphrasing Lennon's accounts of his sexual fantasies (he was apparently perturbed by an erotic dream in which George Harrison had performed fellatio on him) and depression. From the sketchy accounts that have been published, Lennon appeared to turn to his diary in times of crisis, thereby giving an unbalanced account of his daily life.

^*35 As an adult, Sean Lennon recalled that his father had once shouted so loudly in his ear that he required medical treatment.

^*36 There was a strange addendum to Lennon's affidavit: that week the New York Parks Department was approached by an unknown organisation asking if it would be possible for the city to prepare a feasibility study for a Beatles reunion concert in Central Park. The details are lost in time; all that remains is this tantalising fragment of a rumour, which might have been nothing more than an attempt to justify Lennon's sworn testimony.

^*37 Not entirely immune. A collection of pseudonymous reminiscences by Hollywood prostitutes, You'll Never Make Love In This Town Again by Robin, Liza, Linda and Tiffany (Pan Books, London, 1996), contained a lurid account of Harrison being serviced by 'Liza' while strumming happily on his ukulele. In the cover blurb, Harrison's name was bracketed with the likes of Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty as one of 'Hollywood's users and abusers'.

^*38 Harrison's mood darkened considerably during this period. On one drunken occasion he ended up in the office of Warner Brothers Records promotion head Bill Fowler. Spotting a framed photograph of Fowler with Lennon and Ono taken two days before Lennon's death and clearly a prized artefact, he reached for a marker pen and defaced it with speech bubbles and humorous, sometimes sexist comments. To his credit, he phoned the next day to apologise.

^†5 The sequence featured in his DVD documentary From Rio to Liverpool, although it was accompanied by McCartney claiming that he had written a sizeable proportion of 'Help! ', a song that Lennon had always proudly asserted as entirely his own work.

^*39 In fact, McCartney had to wait until 1999, when he was accompanied by his daughter Stella wearing a T-shirt with the message 'About fucking time'.

^*40 Coincidentally, Apple inaugurated its own charity on the day Perkins died. Its work has never been publicised, but one beneficiary was a cancer hospital in Manchester.

^*41 The Daily Mirror's story was traced back to a joke by McCartney's brother Michael, teasing the newspaper for its obsessive interest in the couple.

^*42 Besides its Abbey Road cover photograph, the title referred to the 'Paul is dead' media hype of 1969.

^*43 The same quartet gave a dull 'reunion' interview to TV host Larry King.

^†6 Apple and EMI prevented The Grey Album from being released commercially, but thousands of copies were distributed via file-sharing sites.

^*44 Baker replied, 'If I'm unstable, maybe that's because somebody had driven me to that. ' But by March 2006 Baker was telling the press that he was actually sacked for his cocaine addiction: PAUL FIRING ME KEPT ME ALIVE was one headline. A year later Baker was back in the PR game, selling a new band while 'confessing', FOR 15 YEARS I LIED FOR MACCA. And in 2009 he was once again to be seen in McCartney's company.