The Beatles' assistant worked to fix the lives of every one of the band members.
In 1960, Alistair Taylor was a newly married 25-year-old office clerk when he applied for a sales job at NEMS. He had never met Brian Epstein before, but the two men hit it off immediately. The sales job morphed into an offer to be Epstein’s personal assistant, and Taylor jumped at the chance.
Alistair Taylor was the assistant to Beatles manager Brian Epstein and a “fixer” for John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr (The Beatles named him “Mr. Fixit” for his ability to find solutions to their needs.)
He continued his work with the band after Epstein’s death and did all he could to make life easy for them. While he said he was close enough with each Beatle that he didn’t feel as though he was their employee, he was particularly friendly with McCartney.
Taylor worked closely with each of the Beatles during his tenure with the band. People frequently asked him and his colleagues which musician they liked best.
“Somebody once asked Mal [Evans], who was his favorite Beatle?” Taylor recalled in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “And he thought for a minute, and he said, ‘The one I was last with.’ I thought it was a fabulous answer, it’s what I wish I had thought of. But I was closest to Paul.”
He said McCartney made him feel more like a friend than any of the other Beatles. They vacationed together, and McCartney went to Taylor’s house when he had problems with his girlfriend, Jane Asher.
“Well, I mean, I never really thought of them as employers, to be honest,” he said. “They employed me, but they were great friends. Particularly Paul, because Paul used to come home with me sometimes, and he’d ring me up and say, ‘Look, come on up to Cavendish Avenue, you know, I’m fed up.’ We went on holiday where I used to go up to the farm [in Scotland] with him and Jane in those days. And I went on holiday to Greece with them.”
While Taylor considered McCartney a friend, he never spoke to him about his breakup with Asher. Taylor spent so much time with the two of them that he felt he couldn’t broach the subject.
“I never found out from that day to this why he broke up with Jane, and that’s the gospel truth,” Taylor said. “To be honest, I adore Jane to this day. She’s a super girl. It might sound strange, but I felt too close to both of them. It was just one of those things. Paul never talked about it, and I didn’t feel that I could ask him why.”
Taylor’s relationship with Paul led to one of The Beatles’ better-known songs. He asked the musician how he wrote songs. As McCartney gave him a lesson at the harmonium in his living room, he told Taylor to say the opposite of whatever he did. The song “Hello, Goodbye” came together from there.
“I’ve no memory at all of the tune,” Taylor said, per the book A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song by Steve Turner.
“You have to remember that melodies are as common around the Beatles as bugs in May. Some grow into bright butterflies and others shrivel and die. I wonder whether Paul really made up that song as he went along or whether it was running through his head already.”
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