Welcome to Nothing Is Real a podcast about the Beatles.

Everybody thinks they know the Beatles, but how much do we really know?

My name is Jason Carty.

My name is Stephen Cockroft.

And we're live on tape from Dublin and Belfast.

By the time the Beatles knocked it on the head in 1970,

they had written the template for the arc of the modern showbiz career.

The origin story, the rise, the fame, the they've made their Sergeant Pepper.

And amidst all of this, they were

pioneers in riding the wave of the media furority and the media apology. John Lennon never

used the phrase bigger than Jesus, but that's not the point, is it, Stephen? It isn't. You

have to be misquoted or quoted out of context, as prefabs, right, would say. And the point of this isn't that the Beatles weren't the first people to have a media frenzy.

You had the, you know, Hollywood Fatti Arbuckle media frenzies of the turn of the 20th century.

And in the UK, you had the Jerry Lee Lewis media frenzy.

I mean, they didn't invent tabloid, crazy journalism.

But what's good about the Beatles story is how they

approached it, how they kind of apologised, didn't apologize, stood by their words. How it unfolds

is a very 20th century media thing. It's a very 20th century story, I think, and yeah, it's how they

approach it. And I mean, to some degree, they use it

as a bit of a springboard for the next stage of their career. Yeah, they use it to stand on their

own two feet in a way when you kind of look at it all these years later. So we should probably

do a tiny bit of background as to what they were up to in

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