There never was nor could be another pop manager like Brian Epstein, the young record salesman from Liverpool who discovered The Beatles and with them changed the course of popular music and culture for ever.
When Brian took them on in 1962, no one could understand his faith in what seemed the weirdest of pop groups with their fringed foreheads, eccentric repertoire (from Chuck Berry to Fats Waller) and left-handed bass player whose instrument resembled a violin mated with a giraffe.
His declaration that one day they’d be ‘bigger than Elvis Presley’, then the ultimate pop superstar, was met with pitying smiles.
But he was way off beam: after only two years in his hands, they’d be bigger than any earthly instrument could measure.
Pop artists’ managers until then had been a nondescript bunch, known to the public – if indeed they were – for ruthlessly exploiting and defrauding their naive young proteges.
Brian Epstein (centre) with Beatles Ringo, George, Paul and John in 1963
Brian was of an utterly different stamp, with his immaculate tailoring, ‘BBC accent’ and old-fashioned insistence on honouring agreements and giving value for money.
Now his monumentally successful but hauntingly sad life has inspired a biopic titled Midas Man – after the mythical king whose touch turned everything into gold – which begins streaming on Amazon Prime next week.
The Beatles had prodigious raw talent and, in John Lennon and Paul McCartney, nascent songwriting genius. But it all would have stayed in the Liverpool pubs and Hamburg strip clubs if Brian hadn’t cleaned them up, put them into bespoke suits like his and given four hard-boiled Scousers an air of refinement they would keep even after prematurely losing him.
In The Beatles’ giant wake, he signed up enough young Liverpool talent to constitute a ‘Mersey Sound’ and elevate him from manager into mogul: Gerry And The Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer, the Fourmost and Priscilla White, a market stallholder’s daughter with a voice as carrying as a wartime air-raid siren, who was renamed Cilla Black.
Thanks to him, grimy Victorian Liverpool was transformed into Britain’s trendiest city and the salty Scouse accent that seems to grab its listener by the lapels became the last word in chic.
But The Beatles to Brian were a special, almost sacred charge. Though only six years older than the two eldest, John and Ringo, he always referred to them as ‘the Boys’, protecting and pampering them more like an indulgent parent.
They in turn called him ‘Eppy’, a very Liverpool subversion of his brisk executive aura. But their faith and trust in him were absolute: any piece of paper he put in front of them they’d sign without bothering to read it.
His peak as what nowadays would be called an influencer came in February 1964 when he took them to America to play to a nationwide television audience of 72 million. In that moment, a decade whose youthful creativity thus far had mainly been about films, the theatre and art, finally found its true essence and began to ‘swing’.
The numerous British bands fashioned in The Beatles’ image (ie the smartly suited, pixie-booted look fashioned by Brian) poured across the Atlantic after them in a cultural invasion that wiped out the whole existing generation of American popsters at a plectrum-stroke.
Young musicians from coast to coast discarded their crewcuts and Bermuda shorts to form foursomes with Beatle fringes and Beatle suits, singing tough-tender Beatle harmonies in faux-Liverpudlian accents. Without ever knowing it, all of those, too, were Brian’s Boys.
Yet despite this immeasurable boost to Britain’s economy and international prestige, he was to receive no public honour – nor even thanks. Today, John’s and Paul’s childhood homes are National Trust shrines and John even has an airport named after him. But Brian’s memorials are few and hard-won.
Only since 2012 has a blue plaque marked the location of his former office next to the London Palladium. Nor until 2022 did Liverpool get around to raising a modest bronze statue in the city centre near the site of his family’s NEMS electrical and record store.
Epstein with Cilla Black at her 21st birthday party in 1964 at the London Palladium
Pop manager Brian Epstein, the young record salesman from Liverpool who discovered The Beatles and with them changed the course of popular music and culture for ever
The reason for these long, cold-shouldering years isn’t hard to fathom. For Brian was gay in an age when male homosexuality was a crime punished by imprisonment and especially perilous in a macho northern city like Liverpool.
As the elder son of conservative Jewish parents, he suffered additional shame and guilt, especially since his taste was for much younger men far below his intellectual level who were all the more fatally attractive if they were straight.
He was therefore often reduced to cruising the city’s docklands after dark at constant risk from blackmail, roaming gangs dedicated to ‘queer-bashing’ and barely less vicious police entrapment.
Indeed, when he first saw The Beatles on stage at Liverpool’s Cavern Club – as it turned out, just a short walk from NEMS store – he fell headlong in love with John or, rather, with the tough street kid that the middle-class boy from suburban Woolton pretended to be.
And although hetero to the core, John wasn’t above ‘playing it a bit faggy’ as he put it, to gain extra advantages for his bandmates and himself. He would later hint at two sexual encounters with Brian while they were on holiday together in Spain – ‘once to see what it was like, the second time to make sure I didn’t like it’.
As Brian rose higher in the entertainment world, he met many major figures with permanent, low-key gay relationships but he, alas, never found one.
Quite the reverse, the greater his professional success, the more reckless and joyless were his casual affairs and the more entrenched his delusion that his ‘Boys’ suspected nothing.
Although I never met Brian, I was granted lengthy interviews with his widowed mother, Queenie, and his younger brother, Clive, for my Beatles biography, Shout!, published in 1981.
Over tea at Liverpool’s once-grand Adelphi Hotel, Queenie told me of his erratic childhood and adolescence, how he’d attended eight expensive private schools without gaining a single qualification, been discharged from his military National Service under mysterious circumstances and nurtured vague ambitions to be a couturier and an actor before yielding to convention and going into the family business, seemingly for good.
His father, Queenie said, had never come to terms with his sexuality but she’d received nothing but kindness from those she tactfully called ‘Brian’s people’.
George Harrison and manager Brian meet Princess Margaret at a film premiere in London in 1964
This access to his family was invaluable to Shout! but now I feel is the time to give him a full biography in a more tolerant sexual climate where ‘queer’ is no longer a hate-word but a proud cultural label – and Brian’s many torments have made him something of a hero to the LGBT community.
I also have revelatory new material about his last unhappy days after The Beatles voted to give up touring and concentrate on making studio albums, beginning with their masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
No longer having them to protect and pamper created a void that Brian’s by now numerous other artists could never fill.
He developed an extreme gambling addiction, often losing thousands at baccarat in a single night at Mayfair’s plush Clermont Club, and became increasingly reliant on drugs and alcohol.
During the August Bank Holiday weekend of 1967, the height of the so-called Summer Of Love, he was found dead at his Belgravia home of a supposed barbiturates overdose, aged only 32.
‘Then we’re f****d,’ John said on hearing the news – and he was right. Ahead for The Beatles lay two rudderless years, punctuated by flops rather than continuous hits, ending with their appointment of an out-and-out crook, Allen Klein, as their manager, and their subsequent breakup. And among their employees, as disaster followed disaster, the same nostalgic words would often be heard: ‘Brian would never have let it happen.’
The new biopic, Midas Man, is not the first attempt to put this unique figure in pop history onto the big screen. As a result of Shout!, I was myself commissioned to write scripts about him by two different producers. The first project soon fell by the wayside but the second seemed a certainty since it already had Jude Law attached to play Brian.
My script would necessarily have omitted the discovery I’d made while researching Shout!: that two suicide notes, possibly drafts for a single one, had been found at Brian’s bedside. They were never referred to at the inquest, which concluded he’d died from an accidental overdose of barbiturates mixed with brandy.
When I mentioned this to Queenie and Clive Epstein they begged me to keep it to myself, for in Judaism suicide is a sin. I can still hear their voices together on the telephone, saying ‘Please, Philip… please, Philip.’ They were good people who’d already suffered grievously, so I agreed.
Eventually, financing the film proved so difficult that Law grew too old to play Brian, so it was abandoned. I thus felt a special interest in Midas Man, despite its misconceived title – for Brian’s golden touch tragically failed him in the end. The film’s backstory has been problematic: it began shooting in 2021 but has undergone several lengthy hiatuses and three changes of director.
One must say at once that it has a brilliant performance by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Brian despite being dark and vulpine where his character was pale and mousy.
Otherwise, the casting is gimmick-ridden to the point of absurdity. American talk-show host Jay Leno plays Ed Sullivan, whose CBS variety spectacular broadcast The Beatles to that 72 million in 1964. Which would be fine if only Leno could act. Eddie Izzard is Allan Williams, their shambolic first manager, who as far as I know, never favoured stockings and suspender-belts.
For anyone even glancingly familiar with their story, this will be a painful watch. Unimportant minor characters, such as a Decca Records marketing man named Beecher Stevens, have cameo roles, while crucial ones like Bill Harry, who first introduced Brian to Liverpool’s music scene, don’t appear at all.
For me, the most telling detail is a list of producers, executive producers and associate producers almost as numerous as the cast.
They will doubtless all have been Beatles fans whose constant arguments over Fab Four trivia must account for the movie’s overall flat and filleted feel.
All biopics inevitably bend facts and reshape events, but this one simply leaves most of them out.
Brian’s most epic moments with his Boys – the mayhem of Beatlemania, the furore over John’s ‘more popular than Jesus’ remark – are just monologues to camera by Fortune-Lloyd with a background of news-footage.
In the same way, his covert sexual encounters are portrayed as brutal collisions that erupt suddenly out of nowhere with no attempt to show any human dimension. If I belonged to the LGBT community, this film would be top of my cancellation list.
As The Beatles, the cast look their part. But Jonah Lees’s John, Blake Richardson’s Paul, Leo Harvey-Elledge’s George and Campbell Wallace’s Ringo are given little chance to sound like them.
Since permission to use Lennon-McCartney songs has clearly been refused by The Beatles’ Apple corporation, they’re able to perform only one of the band’s cover versions. I was pining for more. A bit of Little Richard or Carl Perkins, costing a fraction of Jay Leno, would have blasted the whole thing awake.
But my biggest issue was with the set designer, whose motto throughout seems to have been ‘Think small and shabby’. The record department that Brian ran before his Great Discovery was an expansive and impressive place where Liverpool teenagers could experience what he proudly advertised as ‘The Finest Record Collection In The North’.
In Midas Man it’s like someone’s small front room with a few album covers randomly strewn about. Altogether it looks cheap. Something that could never have been said of Brian Epstein.
Philip Norman’s George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle is published in paperback by Simon & Schuster, £12.99.