meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Nothing Is Real - A Beatles Podcast

Nothing Is Real - Episode 14 - The Mark Lewisohn Interview, Part 1

Nothing Is Real - A Beatles Podcast

Beatles Pod

Music

4.8677 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2019

⏱️ 56 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Mark Lewisohn is the world’s leading Beatles historian and writer. He is currently touring Hornsey Road, an in-depth 2-hour presentation about the Abbey Road album. As every Beatles fan knows, he is also in the middle of the “30-year project” that is All These Years, the definitive Beatles biography. In the first of two parts, Mark talks about Hornsey Road, and how he went from the pen pals section of The Beatles Book to talking himself out of a job as Paul McCartney’s official biographer. Live on tape from Dublin, it’s Nothing Is Real.

Follow us on Twitter:

@BeatlesPod

Facebook Group: http://tiny.cc/NIRFBG

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/nothing-is-real-a-beatles-podcast.

Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/nothing-is-real-a-beatles-podcast.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to Nothing is Real, a podcast about the Beatles. Everybody thinks they know the Beatles, but how much do we really know?

0:12.6

I'm Jason Carty. I'm Stephen Corkroft, and we're live on tape from Dublin. When we started the podcast, if you go back and listen to our introductory episode, we speculated from time to time we would have special guests. And we didn't realize back then that our first guest would be the one and only Mark Lewison. Hello, Mark. Hello. And welcome to the Nothing Is Real Studio Penthouse. If you're listening to this podcast, you already know who Mark Lewson is, I hope, but on the off chance you don't, he's the world's leading expert and historian about The Beatles, publishing his first book on the subject, The Beatles Live in 1986 and going up to his most recent publication in 2013, The Beatles, All These Years Volume 1, tune in, the first of a projected three-volume biography on the band, volume, in its unabridged form covering up to the end of 1962

0:54.5

after the release of their debut single.

0:56.6

And Mark is currently on tour with Hornsey Road,

0:58.8

a two-hour show about the Beatles Abbey Road,

1:01.4

which is what has brought him to Dublin this weekend.

1:03.8

And Abbey Road is just coincidentally celebrating its 50th anniversary at the minute,

1:07.3

and it also happens to be at number one this weekend.

1:09.9

Open brackets, not number one in Ireland, but number one in the proper UK charts. I've checked. And it

1:16.9

deserves to be at number one, which is incredible after 50 years. So maybe we'll start a bit with

1:20.7

Hornsey Road. How come you're doing this at this time?

1:26.9

Once tuning came out, I started to receive offers to invitations to do lectures,

1:33.0

principally in America at colleges, universities and so on. And it's nice to be asked to do those

1:40.3

things. And like everybody else, I need to put food on the table so every once in a while I

1:46.6

would say yes to an invitation I pick and choose them but when I do a presentation they take a lot of work

1:52.4

and I don't do anything half-heartedly ever so as you spend weeks putting something together

1:59.7

you begin no matter how much the fee might be, you begin to resent spending so much time on it.

2:05.6

Even though I can spend as much or as little time as I like, but once you start out to do something well, it can take time.

2:11.6

And so I did a white album talk last November for the 50th anniversary at a seminar, a symposium in

2:19.7

Monmouth, New Jersey. And it took quite a long time to put together, and I was beginning to resent

2:25.1

it. Not that that was their fault, but it was my own. And when I got back to England,

2:31.2

it's a long story of this, but when I, quickly, when I got back to England, I went out for dinner with some people, and one of them was a man from Phil

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Beatles Pod, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Beatles Pod and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.