Talk:Alistair Taylor

B-class
I have rated this as B-class. With some more prose and references, it could be a GA. andreasegde 23:07, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

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BetacommandBot (talk) 05:02, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Can someone definitively sort out the Raymond Jones / Alastair Taylor / Brian Epstein problem?
Wikipedia seems to have three different accounts of how Epstein got to know about the Beatles.

1) Raymond Jones ordered a record which got Epstein interested. See My Bonnie.

2) Alastair Taylor pretended that a 'Raymond Jones' had ordered such a record, in order to get Epstein interested. See this article as it currently stands.

3) Epstein already knew about the Beatles as they were in the Mersey Beat newspaper that summer. See Brian_Epstein.

The various accounts can also be found in Bill Harry's article (the editor of Mersey Beat).

Epstein himself wrote that account no. 1 is the case. Taylor initially said that no. 1 was the case, but later claimed that he had made this up and that no. 2 was true. As for No. 3, that is asserted by Bill Harry here.

This needs someone to put a bit of detachment and scholarship into it if we are to get to the truth. There really is a Raymond Jones, as tracked down at http://www.beatlesbible.com/features/raymond-jones-interview/. The interview with him sounds extremely plausible, Raymond does not come across as a man seeking to profit out of his connection, and of course it is backed up by Epstein himself - who met Jones and spoke to him while writing his autobiography. How likely is it that a real Liverpudlian called Raymond Jones, of the right age, would emerge and claim that he was the one, if the story had been totally made up? But it also seems absurd that Epstein didn't know of the Beatles' potential if, as Bill Harry pointed out, the Beatles had featured on the front page of Mersey Beat months before the alleged record order.

Actually the only account that doesn't inspire confidence is Alastair Taylor's, given that he changed his story to No. 2, after initially saying (publicly) that No. 1 was the case. So (if it can be backed up in an independent source, as Wikipedia doesn't allow original research) I think that Taylor's account should be dismissed.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts. I don't have the expertise to follow them up, just pointing out that there is an inconsistency between different Wiki pages about how the Beatles came to Epstein's notice. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Asnac (talk • contribs) 20:27, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I've made a change to this article to acknowledge properly the different account given by the 'real' Raymond Jones. asnac (talk) 07:37, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I personally think that No.2 is the most probable. As Taylor explained in this interview : "...I knew we would sell lots of copies, so I made out the order form and paid the deposit from my own pocket in the name of Raymond Jones, one of our regular customers...". So there is a real Raymond Jones, but the order was made by Alistair. Alexcalamaro (talk) 13:49, 5 September 2020 (UTC)