According to the Cambridge University Press website, ‘Cambridge Companions are lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods. All are collections of specially commissioned essays, shaped and introduced to appeal to student readers … Companions have colonised several fields within Humanities’ (http://multimediafluids.uam.elogim.com/features/companions/).

Music is one of those fields. Since The Cambridge Companion to Chopin was published in 1992 there have been 56 Music Companions, covering composers, genres and instruments. They, like the other Companions, ‘were commissioned to meet a demand from students who wanted reasonably priced critical books that offered a variety of viewpoints rather than a single, idiosyncratic voice’ and were designed ‘not only to offer a comprehensive overview of their chosen topic, but to display and provoke lively and controversial debate’ (ibid).

Popular Music has long had its own Companions (I should declare an interest here: I co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock and contributed an essay to The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music) and they have indeed been useful, as the press suggests, as teaching texts. I'm not sure, though, that the most recent popular music title, The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles, fulfils the usual brief. It includes excellent essays: Dave Laing on the Beatles’ formative years, Jerry Zolten on their studio practice, Walter Everett on their ‘free phrase rhythms’, John Kimsey on their cultural and commercial legacy. But as a whole it does not offer a comprehensive overview of the chosen topic, it is not obviously shaped to appeal to student readers, and it is highly unlikely to provoke lively debate.

The issue here is not so much any lack of quality in the other essays (earnest accounts of various Beatles’ works) than the nature of ‘The Beatles’ as a pedagogic field. This is the first popular music Companion to focus on a single act (there is a Companion to Bob Dylan, but that is published not under Music but, alongside the Cambridge Companion to Baseball, on the Philosophy, Religion and Culture list) and I presume CUP thought that there was by now a recognisable discipline of Beatle studies to which this Companion would be an introduction. The evidence from the book itself, though, is that there isn't such a field, for reasons which, while obviously not discussed in the book, are worth addressing here, not through a systematic critique of particular chapters but by reference to the way in which they illustrate in general the characteristics of most academic writing about the group.

In his introduction Kenneth Womack suggests that ‘this book is about the Beatles’ musical art’, but (with the notable exception of Walter Everett's) the essays on this art are descriptive rather than analytic, heavy on adjectives (‘lovely’ melodies, ‘innovative’ sounds, etc.) that are not further explained or explored. Lyrics, meanwhile, are treated as texts for solemn exegesis, read between the lines to reveal Lennon/McCartney's profound understanding of the human psyche, their contribution to contemporary political philosophy. No empirical evidence is offered that this is how Beatle songs have been interpreted; rather, the Beatles’ astonishing cultural- historical significance is assumed. We are told that the Beatles ‘altered the history of popular culture’ (p. 126) and ‘revolutionized’ pop music (p. 93); we are reminded that ‘the death of John Lennon was a defining moment of the late twentieth century’ (p. 224). Grand assertions, but just that – assertions not arguments.

My question here is not whether such claims are convincing, but how the supposedly academic approach to the Beatles in this Companion is different from that found in the vast number of non-academic Beatle books, memoirs and hagiographies. Most of the essays in this collection are, in essence, opinion pieces, based on an often impressive (if received) knowledge of the Beatles’ lives and works but not really presenting original research. The aesthetic and cultural judgements are much the same as those made familiar by workaday rock and pop writers. Academic Beatle studies on this evidence use the same sources as journalists, while being, on the whole, less illuminating, if only because journalism is better written.

The underlying premise that informs this book is that the Beatles were the dynamic force that changed everything – music, society, our very sense of possibility; a familiar enough belief but one that makes a scholarly approach redundant. The academic strategy should be to treat the Beatles like any other cultural phenomenon, as an effect of historical forces – social, technological and musical. This would have, in turn, a number of scholarly consequences.

First it would make us rethink the Beatles historically. The issue is not how they made history but how they focused it, became the axis through which the various cultural changes now understood as ‘the sixties’ were experienced and embodied. One of the important points that Laing makes in his opening essay is that the Beatles were both a 1950s and a 1960s group, in terms of what they thought musicians could be. Their career was unusual not because of their genius but for specific institutional reasons. No act following them would have the same disjunctions between live and studio activity, between being musical mercenaries and original artists, between localised and globalised fame, between pop and rock stardom. Their story is unprecedented (and unrepeatable) not because of their musical skills but because of their historical moment. Much of what they did (and what was done by Brian Epstein, George Martin and all the other people seeking to manage their careers) was therefore necessarily accidental (or improvised), but always on the basis of what was already understood as well as what was now becoming possible. It is for this reason that the Beatles’ history is so difficult to write, and it is that difficulty that students need to understand. What the Beatles became was shaped by their experiences, but these experiences cannot be explained by what they became.

The second thing students need to understand is the context in which the Beatles’ music was made and in which it made sense. There is surprisingly little in this Companion on the commercial processes through which Beatles’ music became Beatles music, on how and why this was different in Britain and the USA and what effect this had (and still has) on how people understand the Beatles on different sides of the Atlantic. And the question of reception: who listened to the Beatles, how and why, and in what ways differently in different countries is not discussed at all. But the most important context for the Beatles’ musical creativity was other music makers. I would argue that the most significant clues to understanding Lennon/McCartney's sensibility as songwriters was not their originality or creativity (always tricky terms in popular music) but, on the one hand, what Harold Bloom called in another context the anxiety of influence and, on the other hand, the fact that their art was always fundamentally collaborative. How did the Beatles’ listening habits change during their careers? Who were their collaborators? Who learnt what from whom and how were musical decisions actually made? Jerry Zolten's essay is an admirable introduction to an analysis of the Beatles’ studio experience but is not properly followed up. Why should we regard Paul McCartney's late 1960s interest in Stockhausen as any odder than his late 1950s conviction that he could be an American rock ’n’ roll star? How can we teach our students now, in 2011, to hear the Beatles’ music as strange rather than familiar, but strange in ways that can then be explained?

This requires a degree of methodological self-consciousness that is lacking in nearly all the essays here. Few of the authors seem to ask themselves what should be their starting question: what kind of research object are the Beatles? What sort of research problems do they pose? I know that I have the prejudices of a sociologist here, but it seems apparent to me that we have to understand the Beatles, if only to begin with, as a social construct, the meaning of whose music is now encrusted (as John Kimsey does show entertainingly) with more than 50 years of sales patter, critical discourse, public mythology and, alas, academic cliché. Beatles’ study must be from this perspective a kind of archaeology: it is the investigation of how the meaning of the Beatles became sedimented, but involves too uncovering the traces of other musical trails, other ways of telling the Beatles’ story.

I read The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles alongside two old journalistic Beatle books. Jim O'Donnell's The Day John Met Paul is an ‘hour by hour account of how The Beatles began’ and undoubtedly one of the oddest of all Beatles histories, a painstakingly researched reconstruction of exactly what John Lennon and Paul McCartney did and felt on July 6 1957, from the moment they woke up in the morning to the moment they fell asleep at night. The book is entertaining (not least for the ways in which the American author gets 1950s English culture slightly wrong) if flawed (O'Donnell's account of John and Paul's sense of themselves that day is necessarily speculative and by default assumes a sense of destiny that can only be retrospective), but it is salutary reading for an academic for its total commitment to banal detail. Shawn Levy's Ready, Steady, Go! Swinging London and the Invention of Cool is similarly interesting for its glimpses of the everyday. In his book the Beatles are not Liverpudlians but non-Londoners, visitors who have to find a place in a developing scene. One setting in which they obviously did feel at home was Alma Cogan's flat, where they mingled with other showbiz folk. Levy (p. 148) conjures up a striking picture, ‘John Lennon dropping in on the Cogan ladies on a slow night at the Ad Lib and getting inveigled into a game of penny poker with Mel Torme and Roger Moore over sandwiches and tea’.

Such vignettes are important for our understanding of the Beatles not because they have any particular consequence for the group's ‘musical art’ but because they remind us that the Beatles were professional musicians – were in show business – in a particular place and at a particular time. To write about the Beatles as if this weren't so, as if they can be re-sited in some academic musicological canon or journalistic hall of fame in which their career transcends its social construction is to excise from Beatle studies everything that makes their story so fascinating.