Monoray snaps up oral history of The Beatles by Brown and Gaines

Monoray has acquired All You Need Is Love: The End of the Beatles – An Oral History by Those Who Were There by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, a new book exploring the final years of the Beatles through “elucidating, contradictory, confounding and fascinating” interviews never heard or published before.

Jake Lingwood, publisher, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Emma Fingleton at Trident Media. The book will be released on 11th April 2024.

The book is predominantly based on interviews conducted with The Beatles’ inner circle in 1980 and 1981 by Brown and Gaines. They used a small portion of their interviews in a previously published book, The Love You Make (Macmillan/Penguin), but kept the rest as a "closely held secret" Monoray said. 

The transcripts, spanning over 100 hours of conversations with the band and their inner circle, cover interviews with key figures including Yoko Ono, Brian Epstein, Alex Mardas, May Pang, Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Harrison Clapton and Maureen Starkey, as well as Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison. John Lennon died while the book was being written. 

Brown has been an intimate Beatles insider since their early days in Liverpool, was best man at Lennon and Ono’s wedding, and is mentioned in 1969 track The Ballad of John and Yoko: “Peter Brown called to say, you can make it okay, you can marry in Gibraltar near Spain.” He was formerly chief operating officer of Apple Corp, the Beatles’ financial empire.

Gaines is the New York Times bestselling author of Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons. His journalism has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times and New York Magazine, where he was a contributing editor for 12 years.

Lingwood said: “As someone who’s read the vast majority of books about the Beatles, getting an early look at All You Need is Love sent shivers down my spine. Because of Peter’s role with Apple, the access that he had was completely without limitation. And the portrait that emerges of the Beatles and their inner circle, is so fresh and immediate that reading it feels almost transgressive. Everybody is talking entirely without a filter, so they are not only honest but wonderfully indiscreet about themselves and their opinions of each other. There honestly is no Beatles book like it. It’s an essential addition to the canon and sheds a huge amount of light on why the group came to an end.”