BEATLEMANIA
robes created by a Dutch design collective calling themselves The Fool. They also covered the building’s exterior with a psychedelic mural which caused such outrage among other Baker Street traders that it had to be scrubbed off, removing a potential tourist attraction to rival Sherlock Holmes. Managed by John’s old school friend,
former policeman Pete Shotton, the boutique lacked any retailing expertise and quickly turned into a shoplifters’ paradise. After a few months, the Beatles terminated it by giving away its entire stock (after themselves taking first pick.) Late in 1968 came the move to 3 Savile Row, which had formerly belonged to the bandleader/impresario Jack Hylton and was purchased for what was even then a bargain £500,000. From day one, a crowd of female fans clustered around its front steps, whatever the weather, monitoring every arrival and departure and erupting into demented screams if it happened to be a Beatle.
George, the least
fan-friendly of the four, ungraciously dubbed them Apple Scruffs. But they wore the name with pride, even producing their own newsletter headed Steps, 3 Savile Row. To begin with, the house’s vibes (a favourite Apple word) seemed all good. Paul, a born producer and A&R man,
‘Go away and do it’.” Art connoisseur Paul came up with the name Apple and a logo inspired by the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte’s 1966 painting Le Jeu de Mourre (The Guessing Game) of a pristine green Granny Smith with Au revoir written across it. In a Lennonesque pun, the organisation’s full name was Apple Corps, pronounced “Core”. Schizophrenically, as it took shape,
its four bosses were in India, studying transcendental meditation with their guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, being taught the futility of earthly possessions at one moment and signing business contracts the next. The organisation began modestly with
a publishing company, Apple Music, on the upper floors of a building in Baker Street. Its ground floor then became an Apple boutique, the first in a projected chain, selling hugely expensive hippy
another childhood friend of John’s, who’d first introduced him to Paul at a church fete in 1957.
The first serious bruise on that shiny
green skin was John’s public affair with Yoko Ono, a Japanese-American conceptual artist, and the revelation that he’d left his wife, Cynthia, and small son, Julian, for her. Such was his obsession with Yoko that he insisted she should be at his side every minute of the day, even in the recording studio where no Beatle wife or girlfriend had previously been allowed to set foot. Yoko in effect replaced Paul as John’s creative soul-mate. In November 1968, Apple Records
From day one, a crowd of female fans clustered around the front steps, monitoring every arrival and departure and erupting into demented screams if it happened to be a Beatle
reluctantly released their first album together, a melange of electronic noise recorded at John’s house while Cynthia was away in Greece. Ironically titled Two Virgins, its cover was a photograph of the couple full-frontally nude. The public were bewildered by what had come over former cuddly mop-top Beatle John while the British Press portrayed Yoko as a witch who’d cast a spell over him. Then John and Paul,
that formerly indivisible entity, were reportedly at loggerheads over the choice of a manager to replace their visionary
took charge of the record company with its Apple-logo-ed label, working with Peter Asher, the brother of his then girlfriend, Jane Asher, and formerly one of the pop duo Peter and Gordon. Apple Records put out the Beatles’ controversial but hugely successful double White Album and scored an international No.1 single with Those Were The Days by Mary Hopkin, whom Paul had spotted on the Opportunity Knocks television show. Every week, it seemed, the media
excitedly reported the opening of yet another Apple division, invariably run by some friend or protégé of this or that Beatle. There was Apple Tailoring, Apple Films (whose TV debut, Magical Mystery Tour, was their first-ever flop), Apple Electronics, headed by John’s assiduous courtier “Magic Alex” Mardas, and Zapple, a spoken-word record label for avant-garde poets and writers. There was to be Apple Foundation for the Arts and an Apple school, run by Ivan Vaughan,
first one, Brian Epstein, who’d died of a drugs overdose in 1967, aged only 32, when Apple was still on the drawing board. The need was sharpened by a letter from their accountant warning: “Your finances are in a mess. Apple is in a mess.” Paul’s candidate was New York entertainment lawyer Lee Eastman whose daughter, Linda, happened to be the new girlfriend with whom he’d recently replaced Jane Asher. John, backed by Yoko, wanted Allen
Klein, a tough New Yorker of dubious reputation who’d previously managed the Rolling Stones. John had reportedly enlisted George and Ringo’s support in Klein’s favour and Paul, marginalised and embarrassed — for Lee Eastman was soon to become his father-in-law — had walked out of Apple and gone to ground with Linda on his farm in the Scottish Highlands. With that, the tone of Apple’s media coverage changed from indulgent amusement at the Beatles’ “Western Communism” to censure of their naivety and muddle-headedness and rumours of how they were being ripped off by everyone around them. I was 26 and, in three years of national
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