Looking for Mr Moonlight

While listening to Philip Norman discussing his new biography of Brian Epstein last night, during a recording of the Books Podcast at the Owl bookshop in Kentish Town, I started thinking not about the author’s revelations — for instance that the Kray twins had once expressed an interest taking over the Beatles’ management — but about the suggestion that Epstein had erected and maintained a protective wall around the group. On the way home I thought about it some more, and it began to seem clear that Epstein’s real impact was of a far greater, although less easily definable, kind. He may have been a deficient manager in certain important respects, accepting a poor (although industry-standard) recording contract with EMI in 1962 and failing to renegotiate it at the height of Beatlemania, and then royally screwing up the US merchandising rights to Beatle product (wigs, plastic guitars, etc), for which he gave away 90 per cent of the gross. When the producers of A Hard Day’s Night,…