Love and Let Die by John Higgs

History is a funny old thing. It’s basically just the road we’ve already travelled along, but every step of that journey can still have a huge influence on where we’re going and, without ever turning around, we do seem to have a dangerous capacity for retracing some of our very worst detours. The past is always there, waiting over our shoulder, ready to be reflected in the rear view mirror. It should really come with a warning, ready for when you decide to take a peek. Maybe something about some objects appearing closer than they actually are. Workplaces, pubs, and homes are, after all, crammed to the rafters with people declaring ‘it can’t be that long since such and such happened’.

Our fascination with nostalgia certainly hasn’t helped with the disconnected feeling of distance we all suffer from when it comes to the past. Neither, in many ways, has the popular retelling of our collective history. There are certain events which apparently now ‘everybody’ took part in. Jubilees, coronations, the birth of punk, the flashfire of disco, the Berlin Wall coming down. The Macarena plague that effected so many parties.

It’s a past that’s being written around us even now, ready for the next decade’s documentarians to start quoting. People will soon be talking about how we were all in The Queue, how we all bought way too much toilet paper and what we all did during our lockdown (even though not everyone was given the chance to lock down to begin with, let alone find any toilet paper on a supermarket shelf).

Watching people born in the 21st century try to navigate their understanding of the 1980s through the selective filter of a show like Stranger Things has been really interesting to me after actually living through that decade. It’s shown me that, if you want a decent, dependable, authoritative guide to history, you don’t necessarily want a look at where the TV and film studios are heading, panning for the next seam of box office gold. You also don’t want a bestselling tome by a professor who spent their youth either worshiping at the altars of other professors or rebelling against them. Nor do you want an encyclopaedia, with only clear and concise facts; or an autobiography, full of what might be considered the exact opposite – I’m looking at you, Charlie Chaplin.

You really need to find yourself a few sources. With some subjects, that’s an incredibly easy task. Take the subjects of the book Love and Let Die – James Bond and The Beatles. They’ve become such foundational pillars of our modern culture that there are already entire libraries out there, cataloguing the entirely of their story so far. You can buy multiple volumes on not just The Beatles, but the recording history of their every song, every films they made (or didn’t make), and collections of postcards they used to send to each other. You can also buy plenty of biographies on Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, plus biographies on Bond himself, along with stacks of glossy books on the making of the movies, the people who inspired the character and the men who have played 007 so far.

So, why then, would you feel the need to pick up a book that covers both of them? Thankfully, Love and Let Die has a secret weapon when it comes to that question - John Higgs. He’s a writer who prefers to lead you into a subject through the side door and sneak you past the pomp and ceremony of the accepted history to study the more interesting stuff. The collective tissue. The unexpected connections that linger in the margins of pop culture and modern mythology. Digging up the more unusual finds as he goes. Taking you to stories that lie just to the left of the more understood and repeated version of our past.

Previously, he’s taken on topics as wide as the KLF, William Blake and Watling Street. For Love and Let Die, he’s taken on The Beatles and James Bond, following them from their conception, through to their most modern incarnations and meanings. Along the way, as he dissects their often discussed evolutions, he finds fascinating links not just between their world and our current situation, but also between his two subjects as well.

Early on in the book, he positions The Beatles as a force for love and Bond as a force for Death. It allows him to really look at how Britain, after the second world war, began to suffer from a huge split in its psyche, with the establishment trying to cling to the idea of empire, whilst the growing frontiers of youth culture began to experiment with testing the boundaries of class, creativity and their own experiences of consciousness.

I found so many unexpected and fascinating stories in this book, which I don’t want to spoil for you here. To be honest, I didn’t even realise that the band and the spy appeared on our radar at the same time. I also loved the fact that Higgs doesn’t really pick a side in this fight. He doesn’t even position them as opposed to each other. Yes, okay, Connery’s Bond might’ve get a pop in about listening to The Beatles during Goldfinger, but let’s not forget Paul went on to write one of the great Bond songs, so clearly it wasn’t a case of Drinking Smoking Jimmy vs The Plucky Little Lads from Liverpool.

Both of Higgs’ subjects are treated equally and fairly. Yes, granted, there a lot of skeletons waiting in the expensive closets of Ian Fleming, but there are also fevered egos, heartbreak and all kinds of dark betrayal lurking in the lives of John, Paul, George and Ringo. He shies away from none of it. He doesn’t pull one single punch. Not that he’s hunting for sensationalism. Where he finds the more brutal truths, he studies their scars in order to tell you so much about how we went from the country we used to be, back in the black and white days of RP voices on the radio, to the strange and straining multicultural maze we are right tody.

So, yes, there are a lot of books on both The Beatles and James Bond. Some of them are undoubtedly biased in the favour of their subjects, a few bordering on being outright worshipful texts. Others are out to leave as many dents and scratches on the paintwork of a national treasure as they can. John Higgs, on the other hand, has taken those subjects and tested them through his own unique brand of alchemical thinking to find a way to take us on a page turning, fast paced, engaging trip through the second Elizabethan age.

Trust me when I say you couldn’t ask for better company, better scenery or a better hand behind the wheel.