Without gay Jewish Brian Epstein we would have no Beatles

If a great deal of Philip Norman’s latest biography feels very familiar indeed, there are good reasons for that. One is that the legend of The Beatles is perhaps second only to the gospels in Western culture as a received and endlessly repeated mythos. It’s nice to think this would have amused John Lennon, who inadvertently immersed the band in scalding water with an offhand remark – demonstrably true in Britain at the time, but which did not go down well in the US – that the band were “more popular than Jesus”. Another is that this is, by my count, the sixth time Norman himself has related it, and there are only so many ways you can tell the same story.

Indeed, Norman essentially has just the one way. That way is full of portentous foreshadowing of the “little did he know” school, and of eyebrows arched to emphasise some or other detail that may not always be quite as revealing as he thinks it is. But it is also thorough, authoritative, unrivalled in its tracking down of primary sources, and respectful. Not necessarily to its subjects themselves – he was at first slighting towards Paul McCartney before justly reconsidering, although he’s not alone in that – but to their right to be taken seriously. That may not seem in question now. But Norman’s 1981 book Shout! (which had its faults; McCartney himself referred to it as Shite!) was the first Beatles biography to give the group the care and attention routinely accorded to creative giants in, say, literature, art or theatre.

In a parallel world, Brian Epstein’s story might be set in one of those milieux. The future Beatles manager loved to draw and to design. His lifelong devotion to the stage saw him on course to be a considerable theatrical impresario had that life not proven all too short. Before that, he could have made a decent actor had he stuck to his course at Rada; but until he met The Beatles, he seldom stuck to anything. As it turned out, he would instead become a key figure in the history of pop music, and specifically in by far the most transformative pop music there ever was or probably ever will be, surpassing in significance any “higher” art form of its era. Yet even there, he remains under regarded and undervalued, a tragic, side-eyed sidekick. The Beatles’ triumph was wildly improbable. But there are only two people outside the band without whom it would have been absolutely impossible. Producer George Martin is one, and Epstein – maybe even more vital still – is the other.

Norman now seeks to give Epstein his due, and place him back at the centre of the narrative. One of the most infamous tales concerning the band and their manager involves Epstein, in the flush of their early success, wondering aloud what he should call the memoir he has been commissioned to write, and Lennon retorting, “Queer Jew”. Unlike many purported Lennon put-downs (he would never, for instance, have sneered at Ringo Starr’s terrific drumming), this one is real. Norman takes it as his starting point. These two facets of Epstein’s identity shaped his life for better and for worse.