Beatles' press officer publishes memoir

Tony Barrow, the Beatles' original press officer, has just published his long-awaited memoir of his time spent with the group. The book, titled John, Paul, George, Ringo And Me chronicles Barrow's days with the band, from 1962 to 1968. Barrow maintains that John Lennon and Paul McCartney's songwriting partnership was the key to the group's success, recalling to the Liverpool Daily Post that, "Lennon was the loudest, but McCartney was the shrewdest." Barrow recalls George Harrison telling him that it was McCartney's vision for the band that led them to the top, adding that, "George said, 'I knew perfectly well that this was John's band and John was my hero, my idol, but from the way Paul talked, he gave every indication that he was the real leader.'"

Barrow recounts a particularly tense recording session in 1968 where Lennon's soon-to-be wife, Yoko Ono, was the victim of McCartney's biting Liverpool sarcasm when Lennon broke the group's long-standing rule that girlfriends and wives were barred from their sessions. Barrow recalled that, "Yoko couldn't keep her mouth shut. The first time, it was to convey some relatively trivial word of advice to John. The other Beatles looked around startled, stunned. The dead silence was broken by Paul (who asked) 'Did somebody speak? Who was that?' Of course he knew full well who had spoken."

Although Yoko Ono has had her share of personal problems with McCartney over the years, backstage at last year's Grammy Awards, she expressed her admiration of the group as a whole: "Well I think that the band was a great band, and each one of them had an incredible sense of humor, and also they were very pure, there was something very pure, and you know, you couldn't not like them, not love them... They were fantastic."