HOW THE FAB FOUR TOPPLED THE USSR

HOW THE BEATLES ROCKED THE KREMLIN BY LESLIE WOODHEAD

All you need is The Beatles: Did they really bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union?

Did the Fab Four bring down the Soviet Empire single-handed? It’s a wonderful thought.

State communism may have resisted all the other blandishments of late-20th-century Anglo-American capitalism, not to mention the unceasing threat of mutually assured destruction, but to the second side of Abbey Road it had no answer.

According to Leslie Woodhead, though, there’s more truth to it than we might expect.

Woodhead is a distinguished documentary maker, winner of multiple awards, old jazz fan and tireless chronicler of life behind the Iron Curtain, who one day in 1962 went into a grotty club in Liverpool to film a new young band playing a couple of songs, for Granada TV.

Though it wasn’t his sort of music at all, he marvelled at their energy, their attitude and above all their tunes. (This book has eight ‘previously unseen photos’ of the band, all of them taken on that day.) To have heard them then, and watched subsequently as they changed pop music for ever, must have been wonderfully exciting.

Starting out: The Beatles in the Cavern Club

In the Soviet Union, life was as grey and unforgiving as Leonid Brezhnev’s face. Culture, such as it was, was centrally controlled by people who had no culture. Popular music’s job, according to Pravda, was ‘to fulfil serious social and political tasks’. Dancing was not on the menu, unless it was a waltz or a polka.

‘Officials compared rock music with earthquakes and tornadoes, blaming this “ape music” for delinquency, alcoholism, vandalism  and rape.’

In this, they were much in accord with disapproving older generations all over the world, although I doubt they would have appreciated the irony.

But you can’t stop the music. In the absence of available vinyl, rock ’n’ roll fans in the Fifties made illegal records by pressing the grooves onto X-ray film.

‘Records on bones’, they called them. ‘The sound quality was terrible, but the X-ray records felt like the real thing to rock-starved kids who could hear See You Later, Alligator on a shadowy image of some babushka’s lungs.’

When Woodhead was doing his national service in Berlin, he came across a couple of bedraggled teenage Soviet soldiers who had climbed over the fence to escape.

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