Jim O'Donnell - 'The Day John Met Paul'

What the book is about is fairly explanatory: it is an hour-by-hour account of arguably the most important day in music history - the day that a sixteen-year-old John Winston Lennon met a fifteen-year-old James Paul McCartney. The two of them would later become half of The Beatles, and would be the most successful writing partnership in music history to date.

Before the story even begins, however, there is a disclaimer from O'Donnell which states that some of the book has been dramatised. I had mixed feelings about this: of course, to write a book on just one day, some parts would have to be dramatised in order to drag them out, however I like to read a non-fiction book that is just that - non-fiction. Some of the dramatisation was too long, and too in depth. O'Donnell, for example, spent an entire three chapters (fifty pages!) waffling about how John and Paul had slept. However, the descriptions of a post-war Liverpool were quite moving, and really painted a picture in my mind of the city which I love, so there was some advantage to the ridiculous amount of description and fictionalisation included.

The Quarry Men, live at St. Peter's Church, 6th July 1957

This recording is from the day that John and Paul met. That means that Paul McCartney heard this.

The other thing that I didn't like about this book was that I didn't learn anything new from it. It took the few important and well documented parts of the day; for example what song Paul played to impress John (Eddie Cochran's Twenty Flight Rock), and dressed them up. I learnt absolutely nothing, and instead the book was more like a fairytale. It wasn't realistic in the way that it was written, and that was disappointing as it was a good idea: a book documenting the day that The Beatles arguably started? Fantastic! This book? Not fantastic.

Not to mention the inconsistencies with the aforementioned facts! O'Donnell writes that John Lennon's chequered shirt was blue (Paul McCartney remembered it as red!). Having just finished Colin Hanton's autobiography/biography, I found that this book was poorly researched and put together. How could anybody put a book out into the world which doesn't agree with what the eyewitnesses have written?

So overall, I will admit to enjoying the book to a minimal extent. Whilst I loved the descriptions of Liverpool and the romanticisation of the retelling of the day as a whole, there was too many problems with how the book was written, and how the author had not bothered to check facts. I wouldn't recommend it, and honestly it was one of the worst Beatle books I have read to date.