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   CLUB SANDWICH 83

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Club Sandwich 83 Miles retrieves his tape recorder for a Many Years From Now interview session

MEET BARRY MILES

            Barry Miles is better known as Miles, the name he has used since 1961. A leading advocate of American "beat" culture, Miles was a co-founder of the Indica enterprise in London in 1966, running the bookshop while John Dunbar ran the art gallery. (Miles' book-dealing has continued since the Indica closed, and he still buys and sells rare volumes.) As a co-founder of the newspaper International Times Miles was at the forefront of the 1960s "underground" scene in London, and knew the Beatles well at this time. At their invitation he ran Apple Records' experimental sister label Zapple, and when this closed he moved to the USA for about five years, writing for Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy. Miles worked closely with the writer William Burroughs, cataloguing his archives, and with Allen Ginsberg, for whom he catalogued recordings and assembled a definitive, 16 volume set of the poet reading his own work. Miles also produced some new Ginsberg recordings and, back in England, a hit single for the punk band the Adverts. While working at the NME Miles wrote the first article on the Clash, then he left to become editor of the London listings magazine Time Out and edit rock books. He moved back to New York in the early 1980s to write Allen Ginsberg's authorised biography, and now, following the Paul McCartney book, he is writing a biography of Jack Kerouac, to be followed by an account of events at the Beat Hotel in Paris.

BARRY MILES IN HIS OWN WORDS

            "It was back in 1989 that I proposed to my agent a book on Paul, and he replied that it had to be authorised or there was no point in doing it. Having spent years working for the NME I knew how hard it was to get an artist's permission to do anything, but I wrote a letter to Paul and he just called up and said 'Yes, great idea, let's do it'. Out of the blue, this was - I hadn't seen him for years and years and years.
            "My idea was to focus the book on the London scene, based on a book about Gertrude Stein called Charmed Circle which put her in the centre and then, through her friendship with Picasso and everybody, explained the art scene, and through other friendships explained the literary scene, the contemporary music scene and so on. I wanted to do this with Paul because he was ideally positioned in London in the mid 1960s: he knew all of the actors and playwrights - he met Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker and all the rest of them and went to a lot of first nights - and through me he met quite a lot of contemporary composers - Cornelius Cardew, Luciano Berio and so on, as well as the Fugs and the Mothers of Invention. And through Robert Fraser he knew all the artists - Robert not only represented Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton but knew all the others too. Paul went to a lot of art openings. I was hoping to make it into more of a literary biography, something a general reader would want to read.
            "I think Paul realised that I was the ideal person to do a book about his involvement in the 'underground' scene because I was there at the time and I was a writer. I went to many recording sessions and met most of the people that he was meeting. I saw quite a lot of Brian Epstein and knew Paul's dad and some of his other relatives - I was more than just one of the people he knew around the clubs.
            "Because this was in 1989 Paul was in the middle of rehearsing for the World Tour, so I went up to Elstree, every day for two weeks, to watch him rehearse and have little chats when he was free - which wasn't very often because he had 200 other people who needed his time too. But there were times when we were able to chat, and we agreed to go ahead with the book. Then he went on tour for 18 months so that was kind of a false start. In the meantime, I went through 25,000 press cuttings that post-date the Beatles, looking for any references to the past, a little fact here or there that I'd not seen him say before, or since. To be honest, though, I used very little of this in the finished book.
            "Over five years, from 1991 to 1996, I recorded 35 interviews -with Paul, and then, when the book was written, we went through the text together, going over the manuscript paragraph by paragraph. The longest bit was doing all the songs, but I think he enjoyed this and I certainly felt that it should be done, for posterity. I had all of John's quotes, from whenever he'd said something about a song, but I didn't show them to Paul and he didn't read them until after, when we compared who had remembered what. And there were very few occasions when they remembered something differently. They were both honest about each other's contributions. The songs alone took about nine interview sessions.
            "Several aspects of the book please me greatly. The first is that John Lennon appears throughout. There was quite clearly an incredible relationship between John and Paul, both in terms of friendship and creativity. Paul constantly refers to John and his genuine friendship and love for the man comes through. And they were great friends - I saw them together lots of times and had dinner with them on a number of occasions and they had a really, really close friendship. Even if they hadn't been famous you could have recognised it instantly, just by looking at them - they were really old mates together. When I was planning the book I thought that there might be a chapter on their friendship but it didn't work out like that at all - there was no need for a chapter because John is right there, on every page. This book tells you a lot more about John and Paul than any other book has done.
            "I'm also pleased about how much information I was able to get on India, because this is a passage in the Beatles' story that was overlooked at the time and regarded as a sort of cranky thing. In fact, Paul still believes in meditation and George Harrison remains a close chum of Maharishi. They never rejected it at all, it was taken on board and it stayed there - like most things with the Beatles, they absorbed, rather than tried and rejected; they take their bit and carry on. And of course they wrote so many songs in India - it was a tremendously creative period.
            "The descriptions of the flats and houses is something that I like. Not everybody is interested in that but I'm the sort of person who likes to go and see Dostoevsky's house and see the desk Dickens wrote at. So to try and describe the rooms that some of these songs were composed in was definitely worth doing. And, in a sense, this has been proven by the National Trust buying Paul's old house in Liverpool, which occurred just as I was finishing writing the book.
            "Another section I like is the period when Paul and Linda were in New York, just before the Beatles came to an end. It's a time that few people know about, when they went up to Harlem and stayed on Manhattan in Linda's flat. I've read very little about this in any other book.
            "The book essentially winds up when the Beatles break, in 1970, so this is not a full-length biography, it's only about a very short period. There is a lot about Liverpool but it tends to be in the context of songs which arose from the Liverpool experience. If I had been writing a proper literary biography then I would have gone into Liverpool much more because, of course, childhood is very important in peoples' lives. In fact, this is not really a biography at all, in the full sense of the word, because it's about a part of someone's life, not the whole. So I prefer to call it a portrait, or a portrait of a period."