Scott Meslow begins:

The first time 007 crossed over with the Beatles ranks as one of the rare times in the spy’s 60-year history in which he comes off as uncool. In 1964’s Goldfinger, Sean Connery drops a one-liner that has aged about as well as the flat champagne he would no doubt refuse to drink. “My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done, such as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit,” smirks Connery to a blonde bedmate. “That’s just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!”

At the time, this line was intended to reveal 007’s sophistication. A worldly, debonair man like himself might put on some jazz to set the mood, but he’d never bother with anything as crass as “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” But like so many things about James Bond, his taste in music has evolved with the times—to the point that Paul McCartney was tapped to write and perform “Live and Let Die” less than a decade after Connery slagged off the Beatles.

But wait! There’s more from Tobias Carroll:

Pop culture was forever changed on October 5, 1962 — twice over. That was the date on which The Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do,” hit record stores in the U.K. It was also the date on which the first James Bond film, Dr. No, began its theatrical run.

It’s out of that unlikely convergence that John Higgs began working on his new book, Love and Let Die: James Bond, the Beatles, and the British Psyche. Higgs has written about subjects as varied as Timothy Leary, William Blake and the concept of monarchy — and his breadth of knowledge suits the limitless permutations of his subjects well.

For Higgs, both James Bond and The Beatles provide a way to examine questions of masculinity and class — along with how audiences’ perceptions of both have changed in the decades since that fateful day in 1962. We spoke with Higgs about the genesis of his book, Ian Fleming’s writing routines, and the ubiquitous nature of Christopher Lee.

InsideHook: When did the idea first come to you to look at the areas in which — culturally speaking and biographically speaking — the Beatles and James Bond dovetailed in unexpected ways?

John Higgs: It was more the moment that I realized that the first Bond film and the first Beatles seven inch came out on the same day. It was one of those days when you just got a bit distracted and you’ve gone down a Wikipedia hole and you find yourself on the Wikipedia page of Dr. No. We’ve all been there, surely. And I just saw that the release date was the fifth of October, 1962.

I’m enough of a Beatles nerd to think, “No, that can’t be right. Surely that can’t be right.” I checked. Once I saw that it was true that the first Bond film and the first Beatles single, came out on the same afternoon, something about putting the two of them together just started to reveal so much about each other. They’re both so familiar, but the moment you bring them towards each other it’s like a dialogue. All these views on masculinity or class or you know culture in general just started blowing out of them.

I was very interested in how you used both to talk about masculinity. You have the individual masculinity of the members of the Beatles, but also James Bond — both as written by Ian Fleming and portrayed on film — and Ian Fleming himself. How did you deal with that in both the collective and individual senses?

I think it was more a case of how they differed and ho they clashed. When young men were growing up after the Second World War, growing up on war comics, there was a sense of masculinity where you had to be brave and strong and good at fighting, and that was what made you a man. And then came that weird realization that that really wasn’t what the girls wanted at all — they were screaming at these somewhat feminine-looking hairy guys who were singing openly about emotions.

For a lot of boys and men, suddenly there were options. There were choices to be made — did you want to be the brave, strong, good at fighting, emotionally closed off type of man, or was what the Beatles were offering more fun? It seemed like there was a better life than that way.

In a lot of cases, that idea of masculinity also relates to class — whether it was the working-class origins of the Beatles or Fleming’s more aristocratic background. And then that gets complicated as well, as the members of the Beatles became wealthy and Sean Connery, who had a working-class background, became the definitive cinematic Bond.

It’s one of those things you’d rather slightly tiptoe around, but when you have a story like this, you can’t just ignore it. In the book, I mentioned something that the writer Hanif Kureshi wrote about — how when he was growing up in school, he was taught that the Beatles were a hoax. His teacher told him that there was no way that those four lads from Liverpool weren’t from the right families, they didn’t go to the right schools; there was no way they could be making music that was self-evidently better than all the right people.

Hanif Kureshi really perceptively noted that he understood that his music teacher had to believe that conspiracy theory because otherwise it would take too much else away. It went right to the heart of his, sense of identity and his worldview, his belief system. That, in particular, highlights to me just what a blow to the English class system the brilliance of the Beatles was. It was something that I don’t think has ever been the same since, to be honest.

After the Beatles, you get things like Monty Python constantly mocking the upper class, with “The Upper-Class Twit of the Year,” where it’s just a joke. So yeah, the Beatles are responsible for a lot of change. I do think that is an important one. …

To shift directions a little, how did you decide what to include and not include in the book? In terms of James Bond, for instance, you covered Ian Fleming’s books and many of the films, but not things like, say, the Bond novel Kingsley Amis wrote after Fleming’s death.

With the book, I had to have my own parameters and decide if I was going too far. I decided to just stick to to the main characters, just Fleming and the character of James Bond and how he evolved on screen.  How he changed in the books was less interesting to me, I think, because it was more faithful to the novels and things like that, whereas the Bond on screen, which is the Bond that most of the culture knows, was changing a lot more as men were changing.

I mean, if I didn’t have a deadline, I could still be writing it. The Beatles alone are infinite. You never run out of things to say about the Beatles. And once you’ve got something like Bond and the Beatles, those huge cultural touchstones, it was a case of selecting what I could say that hasn’t really been said about them.  …

In Love and Let Die, you cover a handful of figures who were in both the Beatles and Bond worlds — especially Christopher Lee. Did you find that any of the people who overlapped in the Beatles world and the Bond world had anything in common?

Nothing other than a remarkable ability to have been the right place at the right time — to be at the really exciting edge of things. Christopher Lee’s life was just extraordinary when you look at how he lived and everything that happened to him. It would be amazing if he didn’t meet people like the Beatles and James Bond at the same time.

Certainly, once you get to the 1970s, the individual Beatles are very much accepted parts of the celebrity system. You read so many accounts in memoirs — like when Ringo and Maureen [Starkey Tigrett] split up they had just gotten back from Roger Moore’s house; things like that. Whether it was anything that unites those people, I’m not entirely sure.

The interview didn’t mention this, uh, tribute before “Help”:

And someone decided to create a Beatles/Bond scene:

As it happens, “Live and Let Die” is my favorite 007 movie due in large part to the soundtrack …

… and in part due to modifying the usual car chase thing with chases involving, as you can see in the trailer, a double-decker bus, an airplane, and boats. Plus a bad guy with an inflated opinion of himself.