We who were there know that in reality it wouldn’t have been all jam However, there isn’t one that wouldn’t have been better if it had been recorded by the Beatles. Certainly there are lots of great records in this track listing. According to US musician Leon Russell, even George Harrison, the member most ambivalent about the Beatles’ specialness, had already made a tape of just such an album at the beginning of the 70s. It tells the story of every one of those songs and, this being the Beatles, and there being nothing about the group that is not interesting, every tale seems touched by serendipity. That means it contains everything from John’s Jealous Guy and George’s My Sweet Lord to Paul’s Maybe I’m Amazed and even Ringo’s It Don’t Come Easy. It proposes a double album made up of songs that appeared on their early solo records. The counterfactual second half of the book looks at the album that could arguably have followed, had they acted upon their plan to divide up the songwriting chores equally. He played all the parts John couldn’t, which was most of them.

When John decided he wanted to record The Ballad of John and Yoko as the new Beatles single, Paul didn’t object. More often than not the Beatles wrapped their troubles in work. In one passage the author wonders whether John really could have thrown a brick the 75 metres (246ft) it would have taken to break the front window of Paul’s home in St John’s Wood. Sometimes they expressed themselves more forcibly. When John Lennon said: “Yoko only wanted to be accepted as one of us,” nobody offered the obvious rejoinder. Nonetheless, as Rachel painstakingly shows in his account of how they worked in their post-touring years, they had an ability to operate under conditions of personal tension that would have buckled most bands. Once they plateau there’s fighting in the captain’s tower. As McCartney points out, when a band are on the rise all the members’ energies are consumed by the climb. In those days there were no bands with 40 years on the clock and therefore we had no expectation that this lot would continue. For 60s kids like me, it was neither a shock nor a mystery. The first half of Rachel’s book is spent anatomising the discontents that set in once their manager Brian Epstein died in 1967, feelings that the four of them seemingly had to explain in every single interview they did for the rest of their lives.

They know more about their story than I do because they’ve read a lot of the books.

Writers such as Daniel Rachel may be adults today but they’re nonetheless too young to have experienced the Beatles in real time. F or a baby boomer like me, 12 years old when the Beatles broke through in 1962 and a mere 19 when they called it a day in 1969, it’s curious to watch the love objects of my teenage years still being pored over by grownups more than 50 years later.

Daniel quinn books