With a Little Help from Their Friends

A surprising, charming, and kaleidoscopic history of The Beatles, told through 100 people close to them

The story of The Beatles is more than just their omnipresent songs and their iconic albums. It’s more than the hair, the clothes, the generational defining spirit. It’s even more than Paul and John and George and Ringo. The Beatles wouldn’t be the Beatles without a little help from their friends.

These four legends didn’t change the world in isolation; their story has an incredible supporting cast of family, friends, managers, producers, publicists, ex-bandmates, fellow musicians, and more. These somebodies shaped the Fab Four through ambition, power, friendship, heartbreak, tragedy, intrigue, humor, lust, and of course, love.

Stuart Maconie’s With a Little Help from Their Friends is the epic story of the iconic band through the people who made them, from childhood days in Liverpool through the crucible of Hamburg and on to international superstardom. It’s a charming mosaic of a book, a fresh look written with deep knowledge and passion.

“Does the world really need another Beatles book? If it’s Stuart Maconie’s, the answer is a resounding yes! Too often, the Fab Four are portrayed as solitary, isolated geniuses, but it always takes a community to launch an artistic revolution, and these sublime, succinct, and insightful portraits of the people around the band—some well-known, but many obscure even to the most diehard Beatlemaniacs—entertain and enhance our understanding of exactly what it means to get by with a little help from our friends.”—JIM DEROGATIS, cohost of Sound Opinions and author of Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic