There was a British gentleman in an online music group that I belong to who signed his posts, “Nothing is Beatleproof.” That is to say, whatever it is, you can always connect it to the Beatles, kind of like the Kevin Bacon parlor game.
This is the (partial) premise of Love and Let Die by John Higgs. (Pegasus Books, 400 pp. $28.95). The subtitle really tells the story, though: “James Bond, The Beatles and the British Psyche.” Higgs endeavors to intertwine 007, the Fab Four and Britain’s bent in such a manner that it forms a cultural / geopolitical / sociological history of the 1960s and beyond.
In the first several chapters, Higgs riffs, in essence, on Hugh Grant’s speech from Love, Actually, in which his character lauds England as the “country of Shakespeare, Churchill, The Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter, David Beckham’s right foot. David Beckham’s left foot, come to that.”
As for the Beatles, much of the information contained in Love and Let Die is available elsewhere. However, Higgs outdistances any other writer when it comes to making connections between the Liverpool lads and Bond, not to mention every other damn thing in the world.
When Elton John asked Yoko about selling a herd of prize cattle, assuming that she had turned a tidy profit, he found that the actual reason for sending the bovines packing was “all that mooing.”
Initially, this is an interesting exercise. But as the pages pile up, it gets tiresome. At one point, I began to think of those “documentaries” concerning alleged hidden messages in The Shining. Sure, Christopher Lee is one of the actors on the cover of Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run album, and he appeared in a James Bond film. This is just one of dozens of historical intersections that Higgs points out in the text.
Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, doesn’t fare well in this telling. Higgs makes a fine case for the argument that Bond was an avatar for Fleming, an “aspirational fantasy at its most alluring.” This state of affairs later caused problems for the Bond movie franchise, since Fleming was misogynistic, fascistic and sadistic. Oh yeah, and a virulent racist.
Higgs has written a couple of books on the English poet William Blake, so that explains several Blake quotes which show up in Love and Let Die. He is also evidently well-versed in both Freudian and Jungian psychology, which accounts for his examination of Thanatos, Freud’s “death drive” theory and its application to the Bond canon, specifically with regard to the way every woman who sleeps with Bond ends up dead.
The portion of the book describing John Lennon’s post-Beatle life is illuminating. Higgs presents evidence that the agreed-upon story — Lennon becoming a “house husband,” baking bread and raising his new son Sean while leaving the business dealings to Yoko Ono – is, in the vernacular, horseshit. According to Higgs, Lennon was in a severe depressive state during this period, not leaving his bedroom for days at a time, drinking heavily and maybe doing heroin.
And what about Yoko? Higgins is even-handed in his treatment of the oft-maligned Beatle spouse, but he does get in some digs regarding her diva-like nature. When Elton John asked Yoko about selling a herd of prize cattle, assuming that she had turned a tidy profit, he found that the actual reason for sending the bovines packing was “all that mooing.”
John also zinged John and Yoko for their conspicuous consumption, which forced them to purchase a number of apartments in New York just to store their acquisitions. In a parody of “Imagine,” he wrote to the couple: “Imagine six apartments / It isn’t hard to do / One is full of fur coats / The other full of shoes.”
Everyone seems to have a favorite Beatle, and in Higgs’ case that would be Paul McCartney. Higgs generally excuses McCartney’s vapid musical output of the 1980s, though he does skewer the ill-advised musical film Give My Regards to Broad Street, noting that the London’s Broad Street Station “closed down two years after the film came out, probably out of embarrassment.”
Higgs also allows McCartney (through quotes from other sources) to grouse about Lennon’s perceived sainthood following his passing. To wit: McCartney complains that people spoke about his colleague “as if he were Martin Luther Lennon.”
As this examination of the Beatles, Bond and Britain comes to a close, Higgs shifts into a geopolitical mode, providing much information on Marxist ideology, Soviet propaganda and Vladimir Putin’s ongoing strategies to undermine the West. It is well written, but at times Higgs’ prose resembles that found in a term paper, including the occasional analytical overreach. He asserts, “To credit the Beatles as a significant factor in the fall of the Soviet Union might sound like hyperbole to Western ears, but it is an argument that fits well with communist thought.”
Maybe Higgs misses the larger point. When it comes to the Beatles and James Bond, it might be best to kick back, avoid overthinking and just enjoy. However, obsessive hardcore fans of either the Beatles or Bond will probably eat it off a stick, saying, “Oh yeah, that’s right!” again and again. After all, nothing is Beatleproof.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
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