The Beatles: All These Years

With the world’s foremost Beatles authority, Mark Lewisohn, speaking at Beverley Literature Festival on Friday 9 October.

So what do we know of the Beatles’ visits to Yorkshire in the course of their stratospheric career?
Records show The Beatles played four times in Hull – Majestic Ballroom, 20 October 1962 and 13 February 1963 and the ABC Cinema, 24 November 1963 (at the peak of Beatlemania) and 16 October 1964.

They also played in York (four times), Scarborough (twice) and Doncaster (five times).

It was after the second of their visits to Hull that George Harrison drove the Beatles’ van into the Burton’s factory fence in Goole, which required him to return to the town for a court hearing on the charge of driving without due care and attention.

Mark Lewisohn is planning his own road trip to visit the spot of the crash with his host at this year’s festival, writer Nick Quantrill, who is himself a keen Beatles fan.

Mark says:

“The Beatles visited this area many times and I like to see the places they went because it helps me visualise them when I’m writing the history.”

“I’ll certainly be writing about George Harrison crashing the Beatles’ van in Goole during the icy cold winter of 1962–63, because it’s an anecdote representative of their lives at that time, dashing all over the country in their Ford Thames 800, sometimes arguing about who’d be doing the driving.”

“A few days after the Goole incident they heard that Please Please Me, their second single, had reached number 1 in the charts – their lives were moving fast.”

This Friday, Mark will be introducing the first part of his definitive three-volume biography of the Beatles – a book, like its subject matter, to stand the test of time and the most ambitious and compelling popular culture biography ever written.

Ten years in the making, based on decades of original research, hundreds of new interviews and unrivalled access to archives, Mark paints a vivid picture of that crucial and less-known early period – the Liverpool and Hamburg years – and the story of a hungry rock and roll band, when all the sharp characters and situations take shape.

The Beatles: All These Years takes place on Friday 9 October at 3pm at the East Riding Theatre.
For information and how to book, visit www.bevlit.org.