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All You Need Is Love: The End of the Beatles by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines review – from best man to muckraker

In this ‘director’s cut’ of their 1983 book, which Paul McCartney burned, a former Beatles employee and a music writer appear preoccupied with stirring up scandal around the band’s split

He became a close friend of all four – he introduced Paul to Linda and was best man at John and Yoko’s hastily arranged wedding in Gibraltar; he was also there in all the increasingly rancorous contractual meetings that, after Epstein’s drug-related death in 1967, made the end of the group inevitable. The authors’ interview with Epstein’s mother, Queenie, is brutally blunt about what is called ‘Brian’s problem’ Brown told this story, with the help of music writer Steven Gaines, in the 1983 book The Love You Make(at the time characterised by Beatles fans as “The Muck You Rake”). The interview with McCartney, conducted a month before the murder of Lennon, is instructive not only about the former Beatle’s state of mind a decade after the breakup, but also of the motivations of Brown and Gaines, whose lines of questioning are a clue to some of their preoccupations: the promiscuity of band members and their drug use, the behind-the-scenes tragedy of Epstein, the effect of the arrival of Linda and Yoko on John and Paul’s creative marriage – and above all the extreme acrimony over contracts and Apple business.

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