At the heart of Sympathy for the Devil, there’s a real-life spy exchange. In April 1964, a young, idealistic British lecturer visiting the Soviet Union with his wife Barbara stumbled into the arms of the Soviet intelligence services, the KGB. What exactly Gerald Brooke was doing in Russia remains a bit of a mystery, to me at least. All we know for sure was that he was carrying some anti-Soviet leaflets. He was arrested, charged with “subversive anti-Soviet activity on the territory of the Soviet Union” and sentenced to five years’ detention, including four years in the Soviet Union’s notorious labour camps.

The arrest of a British citizen was a huge embarrassment to the British government. To make matters worse, the public were outraged at the detention of an “innocent” citizen, especially when reports filtered back – deliberately fed by Soviet sources – that Brooke was in poor health. By 1969 Prime Minister Harold Wilson was under pressure to find a way to bring him home. And one of the MPs who was most vociferous in her calls to get Brooke repatriated was the strident young Margaret Thatcher, in whose Finchley constituency the lecturer and his wife lived.

Wilson’s opportunity came in the summer of 1969. Eight years earlier the British intelligence had captured the notorious Portland Spy Ring. For years, the Portland Spy Ring had paid and blackmailed naval officers to provide documents about the  ships and weaponry. The documents were passed to a house in Ruislip, where the occupants, Morris and Lona Cohen, aka Peter and Helen Kroger, either transmitted or smuggled them back to the Soviet Union. Busting the ring was one of the biggest coups of British post-war counter-intelligence. The Soviets were remarkably loyal to their spies, and always keen to get them home. As a consequence the fifties and sixties were punctuated by several high-level spy exchanges – as celebrated in the Steven Spielberg movie Bridge of Spies. In 1962, the American pilot Gary Powers had been swapped for the KGB’s Rudold Abel. In 1964, MI6 spy Greville Wynne was traded for Gordon Lonsdale, the mastermind behind the Portland Spy ring. In 1969, the Soviets offered to exchange Gerald Brooke for Morris and Lona Cohen.

Desperate to get Brooke home, Harold Wilson agreed. But unlike all the other spy exchanges, this was a totally asymmetrical one. There were howls of protest against Wilson’s apparent weakness. He had capitulated to Soviet pressure, howled politicans and the press. The Cohens were major figures; Brooke was a nobody.

Or was he?

Researching Brooke, I came across one small article in The Sunday Times that hinted that Brooke was a far more heavyweight figure than British intelligence was admitting to. That was the spark that set my imagination going for Sympathy for The Devil. You’d have to read the book to find out what my own theory about Brooke is.

But after 1969, Gerald Brooke disappeared back to obscurity again. He was born in 1935, so would be in his 80s now.

I’m curious to know what happened to him. If anyone knows, please get in touch!

EDIT. I’ve had several readers get in touch to update me with news about Gerald Brooke – including former students. He is alive and well. Many thanks for those who contacted me.

 

 

 

A Song from Dead Lips features the groupies known as The Apple Scruffs. In this article originally written for Rolling Stone, I add a bit of background to the story of the legendary 60s pop fans.

She came in through the bathroom window.

No. Really. She did. Emma Eldredge, a 63-year-old retired nurse from Gloucester, England, is remembering the time she broke into Paul McCartney‘s London house in early 1969 and stole a pair of the great man’s trousers. “I just did it to have a look,” she says, matter of factly.

There are Beliebers, One Directioners, Miley Cyrus’s Smilers and Beyoncés Beyhive. There have been Blockheads and Duranies. But there will never, ever be any group of fans as legendary and as sweetly original as the Beatles‘ most devoted admirers, the Apple Scruffs.

Because not only did the Apple Scruffs follow the most celebrated and innovative musical foursome that pop music has produced, they helped keep the band sane. During the sad last days of the Beatles, there was always the constant, devoted enthusiasm of the Scruffs, lurking outside the band’s doors. “In some strange way,” recalled Beatles press officer Derek Tayor before his death in 1997, “the Scruffs helped the Beatles by becoming a sort of daily interface between them and the world.”

The Apple Scruffs were a tiny but intense group of (mostly) young women who gained their name from the thick coats and sweaters they wore against the London cold, and from hanging around the Georgian doorstep of 3, Savile Row, London, the address of the Beatles’ Apple headquarters. This was their meeting place, from the late sixties up to the Beatle’s disintegration and even beyond. Even their names have become semi-legendary over the years: among the circle were the ringleader Margo who later became the Apple tea-girl, Sue-John, the Lennon fan, so called to distinguish herself from other Scruff Sues, Tommy – the gay Brooklynite – who loved the band, but, he told his fellow Scruffs, “not in that way.”

In my novel, She’s Leaving Home, I re-imagine the Scruffs as part of a murder investigation. In real life, the worst crime they were involved with was petty burglary. The 20 or so members had a more prosaic existence that revolved around a strict routine. Each day they would congregate at Savile Row, try and figure out what the day’s schedule for the Beatles were and then head off to wherever they thought the Beatles would be. In the words Carol Bedford, a Scruff who wrote a 1984 memoir Waiting For The Beatles, “And they did this all year, not just a couple of weeks while on holiday.”

Remember, this was long before Facebook and cellphones. The best, fastest method of communication they could hope for was London’s expensive and unreliable red phone booths.

From their gathering point at Savile Row, the Scruffs would jump on a tube train or the 159 bus that took them towards Abbey Road Studios, in search of their prey.

There the studio’s technicians often only discovered that the band were about to arrive when the Scruffs started congregating, waiting for the foursome to knock off so they could wave at them, photograph them, share the news. “We would stay out till four or five in the morning,” recalls Eldredge. “It would be so cold. . .”

“What fascinated me most was how they got their information,” Derek Taylor once said. “Often they knew more about where the boys were they we did. It was often a process of abstraction and deduction with them. Sherlock Scruffs they were. They’d use some infallible female intuition to work out whether the boys were recording at Olympic or at Trident, AIR or Abbey Road. Very clever.”

“Sometimes the Apple office workers would tell us what was going on and we”d take it from there,” recalls Eldredge, at the time scrimping together a living as an 18-year-old nanny. As a working girl, she was the exception. Most had quit their jobs so they could devote all their time to chasing the Beatles.

“Oh hello girls, busy day?” Ringo would quip, sarcastically as he walked up the stairs to the Apple office.

The American fans, who had flown over to live in London, were richer, had better clothes and cameras and were naturally resented. “We didn’t like the Americans much,” Eldredge admits. “And of course, Linda Eastman was an American, and we didn’t like her.”

Because for most, Paul McCartney was The One. A few were George girls. Sue John, the Lennon fan, was the exception. “Although all the girls liked John, they were also frightened of him,” wrote Bedford, recalling that Lennon was usually the most brusque of the four. “He never really knew how to deal with the girls. Or thought he didn’t.” When news broke that McCartney married Linda, the Scruffs gathered outside his Cavendish Avenue house, weeping profusely.

The most famous single moment of Scruff history occurred that day when several of them went to hang out at the McCartney’s house. Discovering Paul wasn’t in, they played, for a while, on the Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes McCartney had installed in his garden, until one of them – possibly a girl called Chris – spotted a ladder and an open window.

McCartney would later immortalise the break-in with an Abbey Road song, “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”

Once they were in, the Scruffs ransacked the house. Apart from the pants which Eldredge purloined, and which the Scruffs took turns wearing. Eldredge also recalls one stealing a tape of the song “The End.” Other girls took Linda’s photographs. The fans were shocked when an infuriated McCartney demanded the more precious items back. When the girls asked how they knew it was them, McCartney answered, “A real burglar would have taken more expensive things.”

That was a rare moment of crossing the line. For the most part, the Beatles were curiously fond of these oddball, intense, misfit fans. In 1970s the Scruffs formalised their existence by creating what they called “a freemasonry” with their own membership cards. For a while they produced their own magazine. Like the Beatles they had created their own world. Derek Taylor described them as “very Zen.” When the rain poured down outside, he would invite them in. But the Scruffs preferred to stay outside, in their own world. “The strange thing was they were happy there. They didn’t want to be on the inside.”

Most of all, they acted as a kind of balm for the Beatles during their most punishing days as the four most famous people on the planet.

On his 1970 solo breakthrough All Things Must Pass, George Harrison, in some ways the most bruised of all during the break up, wrote a sweet little song, called simple enough, “Apple Scruffs,” in which he explained how much the presence of these extraordinary fans meant to the Beatles.

 You’ve been stood around for years / Seen my smiles and touched my tears/ How it’s been a long, long time/ And how you’ve been on my mind, my Apple Scruffs

In the fog and in the rain / Through the pleasures and the pain /On the step outside you stand /With your flowers in your hand, my Apple Scruffs.

The plot of A Song from Dead Lips revolves around the murder of a young woman who turns out to be one of the “Apple Scruffs”, a group of hardcore fans who were hanging around the group that year.

1968 was a troubling year for The Beatles. At the same time as London’s students were rioting against the Vietnam war in Grosvenor Square, The Beatles were in India, trying to connect with their inner selves in Rishikesh with their guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

With the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ aura of invincibility started to crack. The Apple Boutique in Baker Street closed within a few months of opening. John Lennon had ditched his wife Cynthia for a strange Japanese artist called Yoko Ono.

With his discovery of heroin, his songs were becoming increasingly introspective, increasingly about what writer Ian MacDonald called “the revolution in the head”, not the revolution on the streets.

In an era in which bands still knocked out records in a couple of weeks, it was to take six months to record their next album. Between May and October 1968, The Beatles laid down would become known unofficially as The White Album.

When John Lennon recorded Revolution 1 for their The White Album he encapsulated the band’s unease about events that year outside of EMI’s studios. Which revolution were they part of? Where they part of the revolution at all? Where they “in” or “out”?

The sleeve to their previous album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been designed by Peter Blake. It was brash, exuberant and colourful. The Beatles‘ sleeve was also designed by a great British pop artist, Richard Hamilton. But in contrast to the exuberant colourful sleeve of Sergeant Pepper’s, this was a plain white square. A baffling blankness.

In an era in which fans attempted to decode every lyric, every glance, every piece obscure symbolism, seeking some instruction from the heroes of the cultural vanguard, The Beatles was a strange, sometimes incoherent statement. The gods were no longer so sure of themselves.

A House of Knives features real-life art dealer Robert Fraser.

Few figures have had a bigger influence on the 20th century British art scene than Robert Fraser (1937-1986). He was the man who linked the world of Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake to The Beatles, and the man who gave The Rolling Stones their bohemian credibility through his ultimately destructive relationship with Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg who were living at his flat at the time A House of Knives is set. He was also the man who hosted the John Lennon and Yoko Ono exhibition You Are Here and who gave Gilbert & George their first show. His life was explored in the excellent book Groovy Bob, by Harriet Vyner. I was delighted to discover that that book was also edited by my editor at Quercus, Jon Riley.

Fraser’s life was also the subject of a recent exhibition at Pace Galleries, A Strong Sweet Smell of Incense.