Norman also had first-hand knowledge of the Fab Four up his sleeve from his years as a correspondent for the Sunday Times.

the definitive biography – comprehensive, intelligent, sensitively written and exhaustively researched', it is based upon a formidable body of secondary materials.

Shout! was no faltering start to this biographer’s burgeoning career.

Not a pop person but a major, towering presence in his century.” Considered together, his biographies published between 1981 and the present provide much more than an insight into a handful of rock stars, they offer an alternative cultural history of the 1960s and 1970s. Or again, in terms of his John Lennon: The Life (2008): “I suddenly thought, he really deserves a book … a real biography, as if he were John Keats or Mahatma Ghandi. As Norman put it in relation to his first biography, Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation (1981), ‘I was tempted to set down a marker in a field where the overwhelming majority of books were shoddily produced paperbacks, retelling the same facts in half-literate prose’. Some critics talk of the novelistic qualities of Norman’s biographies and this, along with the sheer scale and detail of many of his books, flies in the face of commonsense assumptions about his subjects as light entertainment. He brings to the subject a great depth of knowledge and a critical detachment that raises his writing way above the level of most rock band biography, usually a nightmare of unattributed anecdote and gush. Writing in the Guardian, Fiona MacCarthy says of Norman: The latter, Norman tells us, was wearing spectacles by his early teens, 'not because he needed them, but in homage to Buddy Holly'. One of the most respected rock biographers of a generation, Norman has also published influential biographies of two other musical icons whose careers effectively book-end the prime years of the Stones and Beatles: Buddy Holly, and Elton John. He has spent the last thirty-odd years of his career telling and re-telling their stories, not because he’s a scratched record, but because he sees the story of these two bands as what he terms ‘one single epic story’. Philip Norman is perhaps best known for his biographies of two the biggest bands to come out of the 1960s: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

John lennon the life philip norman