Please please Eric Krasker and buy his book on the Beatles. Not the one shown in the image, which has been available in France for a few years, but its updated English translation. Read on to discover how it took a Frenchman to shed fresh light on an old story ...
Out of the blue, an author contacts me with news of his new book on one of the most successful groups in pop history. The product of years of painstaking research, The Beatles – Fact and Fiction 1960-1962 promises fresh information and informed assessments on the band’s earliest years.
According to one fans’ site, Beatles Days, Eric Krasker’s book is a must for anyone who wants to know exactly how many songs the band recorded during their time as regulars at the Star-Club in Hamburg. Or the truth about the sacking of Pete Best, the drummer before Ringo Starr, and the death of the original bassist, Stu Sutcliffe.
It is already surprising that amid all the words and footage concerning the Beatles, there may still be gaps in our collective knowledge. Some fans, I suspect, will find it more surprising still that the man who believes he can answer such questions, and many more, has no direct connection with Merseyside or even the UK, but is French.
Oddly enough, it is precisely because Krasker is French, and the father of five children, that he was able to find time.
As a result of France’s generous social model, those children established the Kraskers as a famille nombreuse, a status bringing some useful advantages devised by a French government anxious to encourage bigger families. One of these concessions allowed Krasker to take sabbaticals from professional life after the births of his youngest children, and he used the time to pursue his simultaneous career. The family had to live on his wife’s salary, but he suffered no loss of seniority in his main employment; on the contrary, he was promoted just as the second of his books in his native language, La France et Les Beatles, was published in 2005.
Many people, remembering their own parents’ responses to the long-haired Liverpudlians who changed pop music forever, will identify with Krasker’s origins as an admirer of the Beatles. Born as the group was still largely unknown, he had to overcome his own father’s hostility. It took Dad, a professional accordionist, some years to soften his stance, though by the end of the 1960s he had added Lennon-McCartney songs to his own band’s repertoire.
The author and I met in Paris after the publication of his second French book. Now his first work, significantly updated with newly discovered material and further interviews, has finally appeared in English, and Krasker used his proven investigative powers to track me down and make sure I knew all about it.
My own enhanced knowledge of the group’s Hamburg era must await the book’s arrival. For now, Krasker proudly cites the thoughts of Brad Howard, the editor of Beatlology Magazine, who wrote to him: “Well, I finally finished your amazing book ... I am stunned at the number of documents that you have found – truly astonishing.”
I am also waiting for Krasker’s answer to a question of my own. Does his wife, Brigitte, still prefer the Rolling Stones?
* This is taken from my East West column in The National, Abu Dhabi. The headline was the idea of a clever Telegraph sub-editor at the time I interviewed Eric in 2005 (and who is, I have confirmed, my colleague again at The National). And don't doubt the enduring pulling power of the Beatles; a couple of glances at the The National's website tells me the column has been top of the Life section's hit parade for hours.
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