Arena Homme+ | The Husband Diaries
Photo: Richard Bernstein©The Richard Bernstein Estate Archive, from ‘Starmaker’ published by Rizzoli.
A wealthy, middle-aged bachelor once told me, apropos of nothing, he was saving homosexuality for his dotage. 'I'm saving The Beatles for mine,' I quipped.
It was a steamy season in London and the two of us were seated in the rotunda at BBC TV centre, smoking cigarettes and staring skyward towards the golden sculpture of Helios. It was halfway through the 1990s, two decades beyond the moment in which the BBC and The Beatles came together to make history. In the seismic year of 1966 satellite technology made it possible for television stations across the world - with the exception of the USSR, naturally - to transmit as one. The world's first global broadcast occurred the following year: each country participating offered up something local and cultural. For Germany it was Lohengrin from the opera house that Wagner built in Bayreuth. There was a concerto from the Met in New York, and Franco Zeffirelli filming Romeo & Juliet in Rome (Paul McCartney was considered for the lead.) Britain provided a film of the new town under construction in Cumbernauld, and The Beatles in blossoms and brocade, recording 'All You Need Is Love' in London. An awestruck world was watching, listening: There's nothin' you can do that can't be done.
Two months later the band's manager “Mr Epstein”, as The Beatles respectfully refer to him in the mighty documentary Get Back - recorded in 1969; released last year - died from an overdose. It was the season that everything changed. There was protest and progress in the mainstream; excess and absurdity in the margins. The Beatles had their excesses and absurdities too, throwing money at nutters, grifters and chancers: one minute the Maharishi; the next Michael X. Yet not quite descending to the 'bed-Ins' that took the Ono Lennons in to the Seventies. Epstein's death added to the lack of direction that dominates the Get Back film, recorded 18 months later. Paul McCartney is motivator, conductor, composer and much to the chagrin of his colleagues, a pushy pedant whose perfectionism deepened over the years along with his creative ambition. The four men are not yet thirty, and already they've covered ground way beyond their years as songwriters, musicians and working class northerners, in an era where pedigree remained a passport to success. McCartney still has the youthful zeal and vision he and John Lennon shared back in Liverpool. Lennon has Yoko Ono. Ringo Starr threatened to leave the band during the making of the White Album. In Get Back, George Harrison says he's quitting. With the silent and omnipresent Ono grafted on his side, it's as if Lennon has left the building: a vast hangar in Twickenham. McCartney appears to need the band more than anyone, to fulfil further visions. Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper, The Beatles are behind him. Abbey Road and Let It Be will be signed off soon. In the distance, and another decade, to those of us not yet Beatles aficionados or fans of McCartney, there will be 'Ebony & Ivory' and the Frog Chorus. Just as David Bowie had covered it all by 1979, with little need to do anything in the years that followed but sit back and wait for the world to catch up, so with Paul McCartney ten years earlier.
Paul...Paul...Paul. Paul was not dead, as the rumours had it, and as he would later point out John officially broke up The Beatles. Not only are the band members heading towards their thirties at this point, they are husbands and fathers. Other commitments; other loves. There's a moment in Get Back where Lennon says to McCartney 'it's like we're lovers'. The latter dismisses it with a disinterested 'yeah', but a nerve has been hit; something never spoken of, or once spoken of, not acted upon, or once acted upon and never spoken of has reared its head. Lennon keeps eye contact and is cocky, cheeky, pushing his luck as always. 'And then there were two,’ muses McCartney, when George disappears to Liverpool, Lennon goes missing, and only him and Ringo turn up to Twickenham for another rehearsal. The camera moves in, the crew and all bystanders are stationary. McCartney looks into the distance and appears to well up, as though tears are about to fall from eyes that remind me of those on the child in the painting on the walls of artless homes in the 1960s: 'The Crying Boy'. He holds back the tears. They will come years later, the day Lennon is shot. But for now, in January 1969, on a Monday morning in winter, all is not yet lost. The Beatles are not yet done. ‘It’s gonna be such an incredibly comical thing,’ McCartney announces, ‘in fifty years time - they broke up because Yoko sat on an amp.'
It's over fifty years later and I'm watching the documentary Get Back - nine hours of film condensed from director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 60 hours of footage, by Peter Jackson. It's as if a dream has returned decades after it first appeared. A dream I never had. A surreal and intimate fantasy. One made more fantastical by my own state. Morphine is flowing through my body, keeping pain at bay. I drift away, in and out of sleep, as The Beatles play. I was saving these boys for my dotage. One of the things you’ll need to address before the long night descends and the lights go out; like watching The Godfather or reading the Bible in its entirety. I was saving The Beatles for later. When I'm sixty-four? Not, exactly. Ridiculous as it sounds I've discovered them at sixty-one years of age.
I was born in 1961, as they were gearing up for success. Lennon and McCartney shared a love of music and a senses of loss; each of them a teenager when their mother died.
Eight years later, at the time of the filming, I was eight years of age. My brother was back at home with his Beatles and his Stones. Eight years older, with the photographs from the White album exhibited on a chimney breast in his bedroom, alongside Elvis in leathers from the '68 special, the Manchester United team from the same year, and the fading image of a triumphant 1966 England World Cup squad. It's all too soon for me. My time will come when pop is dominated by men in make-up and platform boots. Bowie in the charts. Mott singing: 'Is it all concrete all around, or is it in my head?' Back in 1969 The Beatles are preparing for a final live performance on the roof of Apple HQ on Savile Row. My mother worked as a typist at a tailor’s along the road before I was born. In 1969, her mother cleans mornings and evenings at the Society of Aircraft Constructors opposite the Apple Building. Many of those rooms have gone, along with many of the people that occupied them. As George put it when he went solo: All things must pass.
Wikipedia informs me that Harrison has been dead over twenty years. Lennon was assassinated over forty years ago. And then there were two. If the bullet hadn't taken out Lennon would cancer have got him too, long before his time? As it did Harrison (58), and my brother (38). This is not cancer, although the GP did fly to that extreme initially, to warn me of the worst case scenario. I reigned her in, being someone who tends not to believe the worst until the worst is confirmed. The diagnosis is not yet official but the shortlist includes gall stones, a narrowing of the bile duct, and an auto immune disease that could result in hepatitis or cirrhosis of the liver. The flare-up started as the film got going, when George tells Paul he likes his beard. The pain settled between the heart and the spleen, accompanied by a dull ache in the shoulders and neck. Immobile, with every movement an obstacle course, there was nothing to do but focus on the Beatles exchanges until the ambulance arrived. The crew wired me up and tested for cardiac problems, finding nothing abnormal enough to be concerned about. It was a question of pain management to bring about sleep. Whatever gets you through the night. ‘You know this is heroin?’ a member of the crew confided, as he handed me the Oramorph. I found this oddly comforting. Like when I was told there was lard in McDonalds milkshakes and ants in cochineal. So, like John Lennon - if the rumours are true - I spent the nine hours of the Get Back documentary on heroin.
Two years ago a more familiar ailment, a harsh kidney stone pain, left me wide-eyed and legless. One of many stones during my adult life removed by surgery. This particular sequence of events was staged days before Covid descended on the masses, and the shutters came down. During that period and over the months that followed, I experienced something entirely new. Myself and a neighbour formed a band, with the name of Husband. A year or so later, and several songs later, self-penned and otherwise, we were the subject of an essay in Arena Homme+ entitled ‘Sick Notes’. The text was accompanied by an image of myself seated in a bath. Suit and tie. Fake fag. Wet pants. In the essay I point out that I’d never sung or played an instrument. My only attempt at songwriting occurred in 1975, when I accompanied an older boy and his song lyrics across the river from south London - Is that Camberwell all around or is it in my head? - to a Savile Row publisher. We couldn’t play, sing or read music. In fact, I could barely read and speak. My forlorn mate gathered his well-thumbed sheets of foolscap and we crossed the road to the Apple building. Five years after the Beatles break-up it survived as a recording studio. We scanned the dense graffiti that coated the portico of Apple HQ like an ancient text. The love, the heartbreak, the longing of fans, most of whom expressed their anger at Yoko and their adoration for Paul….Paul….Paul.
There are no Husband fans. Why would there be? This is an old band in a young industry, making music and composing songs in their dotage, in the years when pensions and funerals should be their concerns. That’s not to say such issues are not reflected in the songs of a band that at least have the zeal and youthful enthusiasm of one just starting out, but without expectation or ambition; without the belief that they will, at this age, produce anything new, original or unique. We’ve seen a lot and heard a lot more. Mr P is an accomplished guitarist, and Mr R an accomplished bassist. They’ve been in bands before. Mr H, almost half our age, and young enough to be our child, heard us rehearsing at the local cricket club and asked to join. I asked his name and he pointed to the badge pinned to the company fleece, both items the property of Budgens, where he’d finished a shift. Like each of the Beatles Mr H is a multi-instrumentalist. He became the drummer in Husband for a short time. His exit was not due to artistic differences or drugs. No suicide. No overdose. It was simply that his soap-making business took off. And so we still await our Ringo, but we’d settle for a Pete Best. Meanwhile the songs amass, and many of them to do with bachelorhood or being single, celibate and barren. Never Married, Mind That Child and London Particular (‘All that I hold dear/is with me here/In these two rooms/At the top of these stairs’). Mr P and Mr R are husbands and fathers. As a barren, single, celibate I veer towards the Cyril Connolly argument that the pram in the hall is the enemy of promise. Marriage, relationships and children can stifle creativity and break up bands (Yoko didn’t need to sit on an amp, her presence was enough to add to the growing division). Many will be prepared to prove me and Connolly wrong, but others are in agreement. In ‘Of Marriage and Single Life’ the philosopher Francis Bacon writes: ‘Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit to the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless man’. The Beatles are the exception rather than the rule. But they broke up. They went solo and sang silly love songs about family holidays and bringing up baby. They wrote simple songs about big issues, as if we hadn’t had enough of silly protest songs. ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’. ‘Give Peace A Chance’. Or just give up.
As a group of men in middle age at a cricket club or rehearsal studio, where no wives and children fly, Husband have the chords and notes The Beatles had to hand, if not the talent, skill, vision and genius. But also, perhaps a belief they shouldn’t be harbouring this late in the day: There's nothin' you can do that can't be done. No silly love songs. No silly protest songs in an age where change is as evident as in the season when Mr Epstein overdosed. In hindsight, an innocent time when men only took the knee to propose, and only women had cervixes. Excesses and absurdities are now in the mainstream. The pastimes of those that labour under the delusion they’ve inherited the mantle of those that fought for civil rights, gay rights and women’s rights. Posh young graduates pull down statues. Posh old people glue their faces to tarmac. All in the name of ‘protest’. A notion as crass as the ‘luxury’ communism of Twitter regulars, living lives defined by the spoils of capitalism. Their ‘activism’ is simply another form of consumption and shorthand for a certain status. They lack the commitment or the conviction of their forebears because their freedoms are such they don’t need it. Unlike those back in the old USSR on the streets of St Petersburg attacking their government, or on the streets of Kyiv, defending theirs from attack. You don't know how lucky you are, boy.
All you need is love. This was the message Paul McCartney said he felt the Beatles offered in the 1960s, and what he took from that experience. Well, love and money: ‘Now give me money, (That's what I want)’. In the last of a number of interviews with David Frost a year before his death in 2013, McCartney recalled how as a lad he looked around Liverpool and decided what those people needed, what those streets needed was money. In the pursuit of this and in the writing of the songs that delivered it, McCartney and the rest of the band broke the rules without bothering to learn them. When someone described The Beatles as anti-materialistic, McCartney corrected them: ‘That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, “Now, let's write a swimming pool.’ Imagine no possessions, indeed.
McCartney is 80 this year. Husband are two years old. The former will be playing Glastonbury this summer. The latter play for themselves and plant their songs online. Such is the nature of the age; of their age. Songs in praise of bachelorhood; songs that anticipate illness and loss. Sick notes. Soon I’ll watch Get Back again. Without the pain; without the drugs. I missed so much, coming in and out of consciousness, as the words and the songs of those young Beatles infiltrated my dreams. Then it was morning. Just another day. I woke up to the sound of music. McCartney seated at a piano. Greasy long black hair and beard. His attire reminiscent of the gear my brother was wearing at the time. That check maxi coat. Those pinstripe flares. Lennon in dirty hippy plimsoles. George and Ringo in dandy frills - a throwback to Carnaby Street circa Sergeant Pepper. Paul…Paul….Paul…ready for his close-up: ’Let it Be’. Moist eyes staring up at the camera; the eyes of ‘the crying boy’. A lament for his late mother. Long before he lost John….George….and Linda. Sometimes, love is all you need