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Of all the intellectuals who disliked the Beatles, none did so for so long, or with such passion, as Anthony Burgess.

‘I have normally only to see a photograph of the Beatles to start shivering with ague,’ he wrote in The Listener on October 1963. ‘… Obviously the phenomenon will last as long as the money: there’s certainly plenty of that to be made. But what, in God’s name, are we going to do about these children, with their screechings as in orgasm, their distorted faces, their cutting-off of the higher centres?’

In 1968 Burgess was interviewed by Tony Palmer for his celebrated documentary about contemporary pop music, All My Loving. In the Crush Bar of the Royal Opera House, Burgess railed against youth culture in general, and the Beatles in particular:

‘I remember an old proverb which says: “Youth thinks itself wise, just as drunk men think themselves sober.” Youth is not wise; youth knows nothing about life. Youth knows nothing about anything except a mass of clichés which, for the most part, through the media of pop songs, are just foisted on them by middle-aged entrepreneurs and exploiters who should know better.’

The same year, at the age of fifty-one, Burgess published a novel, Enderby Outside, in which his anarchist hero Enderby nurses a hatred for Yod Crewsy, of Yod Crewsy and the Fixers, who has just made a movie in the Bahamas, and received an MBE in the Birthday Honours. Crewsy is now being enrolled as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature: ‘There were cheers. The guests of honour had come at last, embraced and worshipped from their very entrance. Hogg stopped mixing to have a good look at them. They were, he thought, about as horrible in appearance as it was possible any four young men to be.’ The four of them ‘were vulgarly at home, punching each other in glee and then doing a kind of ring-a-roses round the prime minister’.

Crewsy is a plagiarist, fraud and solipsist, as well as a terrible poet. To an adoring audience, he reads a few lines of one of his poems, adding, ‘Don’t ask me what it means; I only wrote it. No, serious like, I feel very humble. But I put them poems together in this book just like to show. You know, show that we do like think a bit and the kvadrats, or squares which is what some of you squares here would like call yourselves, can’t have it all their own way.’

Marvin Lichtner/Contributor

Burgess’s loathing of the Beatles continued long after they disbanded. ‘The words of their songs, pathetic when compared with Cole Porter, are so vapid that psychedelic meanings have to be imposed on them,’ he complained. He particularly scorned those of the intelligentsia, like Kenneth Tynan, who promoted their ‘twanging nonsense’ over Wagner and Beethoven: ‘Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself. For this they stink to heaven.’

As he grew older, Burgess prayed that there would be a special circle of hell set aside for the Beatles, in which they would be bound to ‘a white-hot turntable (45rpm for ever and ever) stuck all over with blunt and rusty acoustic needles, each tooth hollowed to the raw nerve and filled with a micro-transistor (thirty-two pop stations blaring through all eternity thirty-two worn flip-sides into their sinuses), an eternal Ringo battering the tympanic membrane’.