THE ONE AFTER 9:09

"Loved it. Loved the writing. Loved the story."

    “Anyone who grew up loving rock n’ roll and the Beatles will love The One After 9:09. Tony Broadbent skillfully captures a phenomena and the heartbeat of an entire generation.

    The One After 9:09 rocked. I rolled. And I dug it!”

        Robert Dugoni | #1 Amazon and New York Times Bestselling Author | My Sister’s Grave | 15 October 2015

A terrific book

    Just finished Tony Broadbent’s remarkable novel, The One After 9:09: A Mystery With A Backbeat. It’s about the early days of The Beatles, and it’s a terrific book…a fascinating book…as I read it I kept hearing the music in my head. Read it!.

        Janet Dawson | Reader | USA | 9 October 2015

Enjoyable romp for nostalgia seekers | ★★★★

    An enjoyable if overlong romp through 1961 Liverpool, a City on the cusp of a consumer explosion as everyone wants to become a rock star. The story is mostly told through the eyes of a wannabe musician, Spike Jones, a slightly lost soul seeking an identity after the loss of his dad, and through him we get some idea of the sights, sounds and thinking behind an era. Real characters (not just the stars like Rory Storm, but also Rex Makin, legendary solicitor) populate the novel, and real locations - Pete Best's mum's cafe the Casbah features prominently. 

    There is some enjoyment to be had spotting the words of the lyrics entering the prose: the words of "Yesterday" and "Money (That's What I want)," for instance, and at least one anachronism, "I'll tell you what I want .... what I really really want." Here is an author enjoying himself.

    And why did he put in the unexplained reference "Vivat haec Sodalitas?" A bet with a former student of the Collegiate? Anyway, an enjoyable romp for nostalgia seekers, which will do for a headline for this review.

        John Grimbaldeston | Reader | UK | 3 October 2015

A Labour of Love, Gratitude and Affection… | 

The One After 9:09: A Mystery With A Backbeat | 

Plain Sight Press, 2015

    The mystery in the sub-title concerns the story related in Beatles-manager-to-be Brian Epstein’s autobiography A Cellarful of Noise about how he was first alerted to the Beatles existence by one Raymond Jones coming into the record department of his family’s furniture store and asking for 'My Bonnie', the record they made in Germany with singer Tony Sheridan. Tony Broadbent has been working on this novel for a decade and when he started it, it was widely thought that this Jones feller was a fiction.

    The surmise of The One After 9:09 is that Raymond Jones got his historically significant namecheck in A Cellarful of Noise because of services rendered in other circumstances in the Beatles and Brian’s rise to world domination, and the novel, among many other happenings along the way, gives one fictional explanation of what might have occurred.  Subsequently a perfectly real (and more mundane – no offence intended), a reasonable actual Raymond Jones has been found (see The Beatles Bible) but that should in no way take away from the invention of Tony Broadbent‘s weaving of what is real and what is not in the early Beatles/Epstein tale.

    So, 1961, Beatles established as Liverpool’s top group, excess in Hamburg, Pete Best on drums, groups a-plenty, Teddy Boy gangs, promoters’ fierce rivalries, Brian Epstein’s paranoid homosexual misadventures, his ‘bigger than Elvis’ vision, the fight to manage ‘the boys’, the struggle to get a recording contract, enter George Martin, enter Ringo.  All pretty much as reported in the sources Tony Broadbent extensively acknowledges.  

    It’s weird: early on Tony pitches a fixer called Terry McCann straight into action, which I thought was an unfortunate coincidence – Minder and all that.  So I check him out and first mention in the search engine is him attending Cilla Black’s funeral; and he’s not the only one prominent in the story was there.  (Fortunately, keeping the corn at bay, Cilla does not appear in the book.)

    If you want a lively dramatised potted history up to the recording of Please, please me, and how it all felt, then The One After 9:09 is not a bad place to start.  Into all this enter invented teenager Raymond ‘Spike’ Jones – ‘Spike’ from Milligan in The Goons – art school drop-out (same place as Lennon), sometime muscle, admin assistant (bill sticker et al), private eye’s camouflage stand-in at The Cavern (looking out for Epstein), bass guitarist, friend of the Beatles, general man on the scene, and romantic seeker and finder of true love with his judy (not her name).  The several narratives are delivered patchwork as events enticingly unfold, split-screen fashion.  The coffee bars, the pubs, the clubs, the backstreets of Liverpool the backdrop to the action with 'scousisms' and period vernacular aplenty, and lines and phrases from Beatles lyrics worked, with a nod and a wink, into the prose – the actual One After 9:09 quote is a beaut.  Some of the Beatles’ wit could have come out of A Hard Day’s Night, and though some of the fuller passages of dialogue – spelling out dilemmas and options – are a bit strained, I think Lennon’s character, his edginess, is particularly well done.  Raymond Chandler’s advice to writers hitting a plot wall – have a man enter the room with a gun in his hand – might be at play with the appearance of a gang of tooled up red bandana’d Teds more than once.

    I’m not going to say it’s a great book – I think Tony’s Creeping Narratives, crime thrillers set in post-war and 1950s London, featuring cat burglar Jethro, The Smoke and its successors, are more satisfying conventional genre novels – but it’s an intriguing and entertaining one, the mix of fact and fiction a fascinating exercise.  

    There were times when reading I forgot it was written by an old mate.  It had me eagerly reading on – even when I knew the score as far as the Beatles story went, tension even in those first meetings with George Martin.  

    That The One After 9:09 is a labour of love, gratitude and affection is evident throughout.

    A specific afterthought, one that keeps cropping up generally in all sorts of contexts lately: What if homosexuality had not been illegal when Brian Epstein was a young man?  How might popular music history then have been changed?

        David Quayle | Pop Culture Curator | ​Lillabullero | 

Tintinnabulation In A Humanist Key | Blog Post | UK | 16 September 2015 

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