You’re Paul McCartney. So how come you’re still getting het up at a fictional version of you being marginally smaller than a fictional version of John Lennon?

There has been a lot of discourse and conjecture surrounding Sam Mendes’s forthcoming Beatles biopics. Some of this is logical (will people really turn out to see four near-identical films on the same day?), some creative (what animal did they have to shave to make John Lennon’s Abbey Road beard?). At every turn the film has been examined and factchecked and cross-referenced against testimonies from the band’s actual hairdresser.

But until now the remaining Beatles have managed to keep fairly quiet about the whole thing. Last year Ringo Starr mentioned that he’d sat down with Mendes to rework a scene he wasn’t happy with, and Paul McCartney has praised the guitar playing of Paul Mescal, but it appeared that no real red lines had been crossed. Until now.

Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp paid £10k at auction for Epstein’s address book. He then used it to co-author a thrilling account of the swinging 60s – and an intimate portrait of a tormented man whose life was unravelling

The email from Sotheby’s might easily have gone unread. Despite his deep appreciation for the musical heroes who came before him, Gary Kemp is not a collector of rock memorabilia. But there, among the auction lots, was something that caught his eye: a 160x100mm black Twinlock binder that once belonged to the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein.

The listing detailed 57 pages containing 404 entries, many handwritten by Epstein himself, cataloguing the social and business network of the Liverpudlian impresario in 1967, the year of his death. Kemp immediately recognised this was much more than simply an address book: it was a who’s who of 60s London at its swinging peak, from David Bailey and David Frost to most of the Rolling Stones. “I just thought, ‘I’ve got to have this. I’ve got to hold it,’” he says. “It’s got DNA on it.”