I’m currently reading Craig Brown’s entertaining ‘biography’ ‘One,Two, Three, Four: The Beatles In Time’. I haven’t checked to see whether the pre 1963 stories in Brown’s book are in Mark Lewisohn’s ‘Tune In’ but I suspect they are. And, of course, we’ll have to wait and see whether the stories from 1963 onwards are included in Volume 2. (Craig Brown’s research is not on a par with Lewisohn’s as he re-tells the story about Dave Dee being the trainee cadet who was at the scene of Eddie Cochran’s fatal car crash in 1960 and states that Gene Vincent was killed in the same crash. He wasn’t of course, dying in 1971.)
Anyway, I digress. One story that fascinated me was about Paul McCartney judging a competition to mime Brenda Lee’s ‘Let’s Jump The Broomstick’ on Ready Steady Go in late 1963. He picked out 14 year old Melanie Coe as the winner and presented her with the ‘Please Please Me’ LP. Four years later Melanie became pregnant and left home to live with the father, a croupier, in Bayswater. Shortly afterwards, an article appeared in The Daily Mail – ‘A-Level Girl Dumps Car and Vanishes’ – about her distraught father searching for her, saying “I cannot imagine why she should run away. She has everything here. She is very keen on clothes, but she left them all, even her fur coat’.
Paul saw the headline in The Daily Mail and was inspired to write ‘She’s Leaving Home’ which was included on Sgt Pepper. He had no idea that it was the same girl who he picked out on RSG a few years earlier.
Melanie heard the song after it came out in late May, 1967, by which time she had moved back in with her parents. She said: ” I didn’t realise it was about me. I found the song extremely sad. It obviously struck a chord somewhere. It wasn’t until later, when I was in my twenties, that my mother said, “You know, that song was about you”. She had seen an interview with Paul on the television and he said he’s based the song on this newspaper article. She put two and two together.”
If a film could be made on such thin foundations as ‘Yesterday’ you’d think that this fascinating story could be turned into a movie too.
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jazzjet says
As a postscript, before working as a croupier, Melanie’s older boyfriend had worked in the motor trade.
eddie g says
This story featured as a One Show film a few years ago. Seen the clip a few times now and I reckon the overly dramatic brunette was clearly robbed. Macca obviously fancied the Jane Asher lookalike who gave a half-assed performance before eventually leaving home.
mikethep says
Thought exactly the same thing.
Blue Boy says
‘You keen on budding Brenda Lees are you?
Oh yes
I bet you are….’
John Walters says
Enjoying the Craig Brown book, but surely just an “amuse – bouche” before Mr. Lewisohn’s volume two arrives.
mikethep says
I think probably an amuse-bouche is all I want or need. I ran out of puff about halfway through with Lewisohn, I have to say – put it down and never picked it up again.
I loved the Brown though, so much so that I gave it to both my sisters for their birthdays. The gadfly technique that worked so well his Princess Margaret book works equally well here. And it’s funny…
John Walters says
I’ve luxuriated in every minute detail of Lewisohn’s book ( both the 800 page “short” version and the 1600 page epic ).
I was truly shocked by Brown’s account of the savage beating of Bob Wooler. It will be interesting to see what Lewisohn makes of it in the next volume (2023 I hear – groan ! ).
slotbadger says
I’m really enjoying 1234, have the audiobook narrated by Paul McGann and Kate Robbins. The latter’s accents are spot on, whether Marianne Faithfull, Princess Marge (natch) or Thatcher. McGann has developed odd approximations of each Fab for his parts, but still, its all very enjoyable and I didn’t know this story of the ‘She’s Leaving Home’ girl.
I was recently talking to Mark Lewisohn about Astrid’s death and asked him what he thought of 1234, his reply: “I’ve bought it, only skimmed it, hate it.”
dai says
Kate Robbins being Macca’s (2nd) cousin of course.
slotbadger says
Yes, funny little coincidence, that!
I’m just back from evening dog walk and listened to another hour of the audiobook. Aside from a detailed examination of Eleanor Rigby, we seemed to have skimmed pretty much over ‘66 and fetched up in the Sgt Pepper sections (Day In The Life huffy orchestra musicians, John off his tits on acid).
dai says
Appalling story (that Macca read the Daily Mail)
Rigid Digit says
4000 holes in Blacburn, Lancashire also came from it’s pages – probably not the copy though
Abergavenny Thursday says
Brown’s book is just a curated mish-mash of facts, half-truths and fibs from existing Beatles biographies, with occasional forays into unamusing fictional asides. He isn’t a Beatles aficionado and the book is next to pointless. A publisher’s dream though, one for the Waterstones window display.
mikethep says
Harsh. If by ‘aficionado’ you mean ‘expert’, you’re right, as he admits. It doesn’t pretend to be a work of original scholarship – we have Lewisohn for that. But he’s certainly a fan. I can only repeat that I loved it.
Gatz says
I haven’t read the Beatles book but I thought it was based on the same premise as his excellent Princess Margaret book, a collective portrait based on people’s diary entries with a bit of editorialising. If so it doesn’t claim to be the true story, just what was perceived to be the story at the time by those present which is a very different thing.
Vulpes Vulpes says
I think the OP kind of starts from that premise (“entertaining ‘biography’”). The book is hardly pointless if it flogs books from Waterstones window display. If all we tolerate in bookshops are tomes of learned minutiae, we’ll just hasten the disappearance of such establishments altogether. Bring on the entertaining biographys alongside the Dan Drowns and the Lee Childs, and sell a few copies of doorstop forensics along the way.
jazzjet says
Agree absolutely. There are enough relatively ‘unknown’ (or obscure) episodes in the Beatles story included in the Brown book (unless you’re an obsessive like Mark Lewisohn) to make it an enjoyable read. The Bob Wooler story, although unpleasant, is an example.
garyt says
This story supports Lewisohn’s assertion (on the Word in Your Attic webcast thingy) that THe Beatles’ story is the greatest of all time due to the dazzling amount of connections, coincidences etc in their story. He illustrates this with the story that the man who invented the ‘Toppermost of the Poppermost’ slogan, which the Fabs used as part of a morale boosting chant in the early days, was the same guy that later rejected them after their Decca audition.