A Hard Day's Write

I am a fan of Beatles’ music. I have all their recordings including vinyl and CD LPs, EPs, 45s, DVDs, bootlegs. I even have a few LPs on cassette tape that I acquired when my sister abandoned that format. I also have most of their solo artist recordings.

My collection includes a few rarities… not that I collect rarities; I bought the stuff at the time the stuff was released and some of the stuff became rare over the years. Who would have thought?

Over the years, I have bought and read a lot of books about the Beatles’ lives and music. I am more interested in their music, but most of the books concentrate on their lives.

I received a late Christmas gift from my sister on Saturday, a book titled A Hard Day’s Write by Steve Turner, which is “a lavishly illustrated, rollicking account of the real people and events that inspired the Beatles’ lyrics.”

It is the third edition of the book originally published in 1994. I don’t how I missed it until now, but it is very good and I have been reading it whenever I had free time this past weekend. It is easy reading; you can pick the book up anytime and time-permitting, read the story about a particular song or a particular album.

The book only covers songs written, recorded, and released by the Beatles; it does not cover songs they did as solo artists, although a few of those (like “Teddy Boy”) slipped in as demos by way of the Anthology albums.

Each chapter covers the songs by album (the British versions) starting with Please, Please Me and ending with Anthology 1-3. The Live at the BBC and Anthology album chapters only cover the songs on those albums that did not appear on their earlier albums, whereas the other chapters cover all the songs on each album written by the Beatles.

I recommend the book to any Beatle fan who wants to know more about their music.