The Beatles without THESE people simply might not have been The Beatles

When Stuart Maconie was a toddler, his mother took him to see the Beatles perform at the ABC cinema in Wigan. It was October 1964, two days before Harold Wilson narrowly won the general election and the beginning of John, Paul, George and Ringo’s meteoric rise to global stardom. “I have a vague, blurry, impressionistic sense of four guys in black suits and the noise of screaming,” the writer and broadcaster tells the Daily Express. “But maybe I’ve embroidered that, having been told the tale down the years.”

He was only four years old to be fair but, nonetheless, for Maconie, now 63, it was the start of a deep relationship with Britain’s most famous band that has endured to this day.

Over the intervening years, this affable Lancastrian has championed myriad styles of music from soul and alternative rock to classical and avant-garde. He has written for multiple music magazines and national newspapers, including this one, and has been a presenter and DJ for BBC Radios 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Live and 6 Music. Phew!

But throughout it all, the Beatles have been a reassuring constant in his life. Like many children of the Sixties, Maconie grew up with the Fab Four as the aural backdrop to his youth. Born in the Merseyside town of Whiston (then Lancashire) in 1961, he was brought up in Wigan.

He says of the Beatles: “I guess I’m roughly contemporary with them. I was born the week they first went to Hamburg. I saw them aged four. They were the soundtrack to my childhood. I was only a child but I was very aware of them being around. They are woven into the warp and weft of our nation’s story.” Maconie insists he admires all four Fabs. “But, just like the girls who screamed at them in the Cavern, you have to have a favourite,” he admits.

In his case, his greatest respect is reserved for McCartney. “I’m very much Team Paul,” he says. “He’s extraordinary – a complete force of nature. I believe he might actually be the most musical human being who has ever lived. People say, ‘Well, what about Mozart or Bach?’ The thing is McCartney writes oratorios and he wrote Helter Skelter. He wrote Yesterday and he writes experimental musique concrete.”

Maconie has met Macca three times and seen him play several times as a solo artist. As regards the other three, that night in 1964 is the only time he saw them live.

Now he has directed his love and enthusiasm for Liverpool’s most famous sons into a new book called With A Little Help From Their Friends. It’s an intriguing work that focuses not on The Beatles themselves – after all, as its author admits, more than 2,000 books about them have already been penned – but rather on the “kaleidoscopic cast of supporting players” who influenced them and helped shape their story. All the obvious characters are included, each given an individual profile – the close family and friends, their wives and girlfriends, their manager Brian Epstein, their producer George Martin, their guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and former band members who fell by the wayside, such as Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best.

But there are also dozens of less obvious bit-part players, without whom the story of the Beatles might well have pivoted in a completely different direction. There is Ivan Vaughan, for example, the mutual friend who first introduced 15-year-old Paul McCartney to 16-year-old John Lennon at the Woolton village fete in the Liverpool suburbs on July 7, 1957, when the Quarrymen were playing. Without him, the Beatles might never have existed at all.

Then there’s Raymond Jones, a Cavern Club regular who walked into Brian Epstein’s Liverpool store NEMS in October 1961 and asked for a single called My Bonnie that a band called the Beatles had recorded in Hamburg. A week later, Epstein, his interest piqued, visited the Cavern to check out the young band for the first time. There’s also Astrid Kirchherr, the German photographer who was instrumental in creating the unique Beatles’ look by persuading them to switch from greased-back Teddy Boy haircuts to distinctive mop tops.

Then there are groupies, roadies, engineers, artists and session musicians. And writers, DJs, PRs, designers, film directors, Svengalis and assorted hangers-on. It’s fascinating. Maconie notes how Imelda Marcos, the wife of the president of the Philippines, shaped the band’s destiny by instructing her henchmen to rough them up after they refused to play a private concert for the infamous couple.

It was an unfortunate incident that persuaded them to quit touring, concentrate on studio work and ultimately produce the groundbreaking Sgt Pepper album.

Then there’s 15-year-old Marsha Albert, who, before any Beatles songs had hit the airwaves in the US, wrote to her local radio station in Washington DC requesting that the DJ play this new Liverpool band she had heard about. Intrigued, said DJ managed to wangle a copy of I Want To Hold Your Hand from a British flight attendant, playing it on rotation. A month later the Beatles were number one across America.

Maconie may be a Beatles superfan but not to the detriment of the myriad other musical genres he espouses. Currently he presents shows on BBC Radio 4 and BBC 6 Music, entertaining his loyal listeners through his deep knowledge and infectious enthusiasm. As a younger man he played guitar and sang in a couple of bands – one a punk-pop outfit called Les Flirts, the other the Young Mark Twains. He still has a collection of guitars in his office but plays “purely for fun”.

He now lives with his wife Eleanor – who for many years worked in special school education – in a suburb of Birmingham called Bearwood. He also has properties in Salford, close to the BBC’s Media City, and in north Cumbria. The latter enables him to indulge his other favourite hobby – country walking.

In his spare time he will often strike out across the Lake District, the northern lakes being his favourite area as there are fewer visitors to share the trails with. He has hiked up all 214 Wainwrights – the hills mostly above 1,000ft high, named after famous fell walker Alfred Wainwright.

“I didn’t set out to do it in a macho way but one day I sat down and realised I’d done about 30,” he says. “Then I thought, ‘Why not do them all because that would be a really good way to see all the Lakes?’”

For five years Maconie was president of the British walking charity Ramblers, which campaigns for better access to the countryside. He hopes that one day England will follow Scotland in guaranteeing the public the right to roam unfettered, even across privately owned land. “With an enlightened government and enlightened farmers and landowners, I could see that happening,” he says. “After all, ramblers are not going to damage or destroy the land. They’re not that kind of people.”

In between all that hiking, he always comes back to the music. He doesn’t own as many vinyl records and CDs as he used to – his collection sadly depleted by a burglary – and he says he is slightly ashamed that pretty much everything he plays nowadays is through a streaming platform. But his office remains something of a shrine to The Beatles.

To research his new book he collated a library of around 100 books on the band and he’s pretty sure his attic still contains hard copies of all their studio albums. He says he’s not the collecting type but, in the age of digital music, some things are sacrosanct.

“The Beatles’ canon is popular music’s most extraordinary body of work,” he writes in the conclusion to his book. “For variety, innovation, significance and popularity, nothing and no one can touch it.”

Along with Shakespeare, Premiership football, the Royal Family and perhaps Harry Potter, the Beatles remain foremost among the country’s most important cultural exports, reinforcing Britain’s place in the wider world, he insists.

“They are right up there with Shakespeare as an abiding cultural influence. And I say that as someone who loves Shakespeare. The Beatles were the first band to play a stadium, the first to include a lyric sheet, the first to use any number of studio techniques now taken for granted, the first to introduce non-Western instruments into pop, as well as chamber arrangements, feedback, tape loops, music concrete.

“Their influence has been colossal and enduring.” It’s an influence that has shaped all of us. None more so than the toddler who first saw the Beatles at the ABC cinema in Wigan all those years ago.

• With A Little Help From Their Friends: The Beatles Changed The World. But Who Changed Theirs? by Stuart Maconie, (HarperNorth, £20) is out now