You Never Give Me Your Money is a book by author and music journalist Peter Doggett about the break-up of the English rock band the Beatles and its aftermath.[1] The book was published in the United Kingdom by The Bodley Head in September 2009,[2] and by HarperStudio in the United States in 2020.[3] In the UK, it was subtitled The Battle for the Soul of The Beatles, while the subtitle for US editions was The Beatles After the Breakup.
You Never Give Me Your Money discusses the events leading up to the Beatles’ break-up in April 1970, starting with the death of the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, in August 1967.[4] It tells of the confusion inherent in their Apple Corps business enterprise and how, within a year, the company’s precarious financial position attracted the interest of Allen Klein,whose managerial appointment further divided the band members.[5]
Doggett documents the myriad lawsuits that began with Paul McCartney’s 1971 action in London’s High Court to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership and extricate himself from Klein’s control,[6] and from 1973 onwards saw John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr reversing their position on Klein and becoming embroiled in litigation with him in courts in London and New York. Following Lennon’s death and a lawsuit against Capitol Records in the 1980s, the surviving Beatles unite to realise a common purpose in protecting their financial interests.[4] The book also documents the highly successful Beatles Anthology project in the 1990s and other legacy-related campaigns.
In his author’s acknowledgments in You Never Give Me Your Money, Doggett says that he actively researched for the book over “one intensive year” but otherwise drew on his 30-year experience as a music journalist.[7] When writing the book, Doggett drew on many interviews, including with Beatle wives and family members such as Yoko Ono, Cynthia Lennon, Louise Harrison and Mike McCartney, Apple insiders Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall and Alistair Taylor, and musical associates such as George Martin, James Taylor and Leon Russell.
In his acknowledgments, Doggett also lists Tony Barrow and Alexis Mardas, among others, and highlights Klein’s colleague Allan Steckler as “an invaluable last-minute discovery … with an intimate grasp of the Apple/ABKCO relationship”.
Throughout 2010 and 2011, Doggett maintained a blog dedicated to discussing the book and items related to the Beatles. In a post written in July 2010, he said that he had set out to write You Never Give Me Your Money without any bias towards any one of the former Beatles but that during the writing process, “I felt saddest and sorriest for Paul McCartney – even while I was highlighting things that he might have done and said differently.” Adding that some customer reviews on Amazon had claimed he showed favouritism towards, variously, Lennon, Harrison or Starr, yet none identified “any special sympathy” for McCartney in his text, Doggett concluded: “[It] just goes to prove that the book you’re writing, and the book you THINK you’re writing, can be two very different things.”[10]
According to Beatles historian Erin Torkelson Weber, You Never Give Me Your Money depicts the four former bandmates with equal weight given to positive and negative aspects of their characters and actions. She says that, in keeping with a general trend in Beatles literature, it challenges the hagiographic image of Lennon established by Philip Norman’s book Shout! in 1981, yet without “gloating over Lennon’s struggles” in the fashion of Albert Goldman’s 1988 biography. Similarly, according to Weber, Doggett criticises the manner of McCartney’s attempts to revise the band’s history, describing some of his actions as “graceless”, yet he “acknowledges the legitimacy” of McCartney’s claim.
