Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

of some of my music,’ Stravinsky explained. ‘This suggested the idea that I should compose something whose length should be determined by the capacity of the record.’ Hence four movements of under three minutes, each of which fit snugly on one side of a 10-inch, 78 rpm disc.¹⁸ Composers were also willing to cut their own work to fit the limitations of a record. In 1916, Edward Elgar reduced the score of his Violin Concerto to fit four 78s; an uncut performance would easily last more than twice that length.

      The performance offered by musicians may also change from a concert recital to a recorded version. The visual texture of a live performance may have to be somehow recreated in the listener’s mind by the introduction of vibrato and other resonances. The conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt believes that ‘if you don’t see the musicians . . . you have to add something which makes the process of music making somehow visible in the imagination of the listener.’ The timing may also change, not least the gaps between movements or other dramatic pauses. A silent musician in a concert hall may provide drama to proceedings by wiping a bow or brow, or damping percussion; on CD this would be dead air. In becoming tighter, a performance may become less broad, and the rhetorical effect reduced.

      When the Beatles returned to Studio 2 after lunch they recorded ‘A Taste of Honey’, ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ and ‘Misery’. Then there was another break for supper, and in a marathon evening session between 6.30 and 10.45 p.m., for which they would have been paid overtime, they recorded ‘Hold Me Tight’, ‘Anna (Go To Him)’, ‘Boys’, ‘Chains’, ‘Baby It’s You’ and ‘Twist and Shout’, most of them in one or two takes.

      ‘It’s amazing really how creative we could be in those circumstances,’ George Martin said in 2011, reminiscing with Paul McCartney about their time in the studio. McCartney replied, ‘I say to people now, “10.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m., two songs”. And you would just remind us about halfway through the three-hour period, “Well, it’s just about enough on that one, chaps, let’s wrap it up.” And so you learnt to be brilliant, he said modestly, in one-and-a-half hours.’

      ‘But I was under pressure because I got so little time with you,’ Martin remembered. ‘You were running all over the world, and I would say to Brian [Epstein], “I need more time in the studio.” And he said, “Well, I can give you Friday afternoon, or Saturday evening,” and he would dole out time to me like giving scraps to a mouse.’¹⁹

      Nothing was wasted. Every song recorded on 11 February 1963 was used on the album, which was called Please Please Me. To the 10 new tracks were added 4 songs already recorded as A- and B-sides for two singles (‘Love Me Do’/‘P.S. I Love You’ and ‘Please Please Me’/‘Ask Me Why’).²⁰

      And then Monday, 11 February 1963 was over. The first LP from what would become the biggest and greatest and most influential band in the world was ready for remixing and then a release 39 days later. In a few years, the recording of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ would require more than two dozen takes over five weeks. But the entire first album, excluding the singles, had taken just one day.

      Mark Lewisohn, on the other hand, is taking rather longer to tell the story of that album and all the others in the Beatles’ phenomenal seven-year recording history (only seven years – one has to pinch oneself every time one thinks of that). Lewisohn is the author of All These Years, a forensic and compelling account of the Beatles and their world. It may turn out to be a 30-year project. It was planned as a three-volume endeavour ending in 1970, but the author is now considering a fourth to accommodate solo projects and the aftermath.

      ‘It was a stab in the dark,’ he says. ‘When I began in 2004 it was originally going to be a 12-year project, but . . . insanely bad judgement on that score.’ The publication dates of the three volumes were once planned as 2008, 2012 and 2016. ‘So this year ought to be seeing the conclusion of the series.’ The revised timeline now suggests volume two in 2020 and volume three in 2028. ‘And if I do a fourth one it will be into 2030-something.’ When we met in 2016, Lewisohn was 57; a fourth title will take him well into his 70s. ‘The usual parallel that Americans make is the series of books by Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson,’ he says. ‘He still has one to do and he’s 80-something, so he has a battle against time.’²¹

      Lewisohn works from home in Berkhamsted, an ancient market town in Hertfordshire. When he sits at his desk he almost disappears among the books, music papers, tapes, boxes, filing cabinets and the rest of the gear, by far the greatest amassment of Beatles documents in private hands, so that a visitor has only one spot of four square inches to rest a cup of tea. Lewisohn’s laptop is perched on a stand so as to free more space beneath it. And then there is the noise in his mind. ‘It’s like plate-spinning at the circus,’ he says of the parallel timelines. In Volume One, ‘there are simultaneous events happening in London, Liverpool and Hamburg, but in Volumes Two and Three the number of plates will multiply. While I’m off telling the Beatles’ impact in Indonesia or New Zealand or Argentina, I could lose the readers with what’s going on in London or Liverpool or anywhere else. I know that I’m stacking problems for myself all down the line in terms of weight of material and how to assimilate it all.’