Snub me do: man who lost the Beatles (2024)

For 50 years, Dick Rowe has been blamed for the biggest blunder in rock music history: he turned down the Beatles. But new evidence suggests that it was not his decision at all — someone else was to blame.

Although Rowe was definitely the man who told the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, that he would not sign the Beatles to his Decca record label in 1962 because “guitar groups are on the way out”, a witness now says the person who vetoed the band was Rowe’s assistant, Mike Smith.

Pete Best, the Beatles’ original drummer, was still with the band at the time (he was replaced by Ringo Starr later that year) and says: “Everyone . . . says it was Dick Rowe who turned