Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

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      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.’