For the first time in their much documented history, all four Beatles have gone into print with their autobiography of the band.

George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Yoko Ono Lennon have spent six years compiling the Beatles' autobiography - which will be published worldwide next month.

The 350,000 word book - titled The Beatles Anthology - comprises the detailed memories of each band member telling their own story. John Lennon's sizeable account in the book has been drawn from the scores of interviews he conducted before he was killed in 1980.

The book also includes the recollections of Beatles' producer George Martin, the late Derek Taylor - the Beatles' press officer - and their former tour manager, Neil Aspinall.

In this extract it is June 1966 and the band is touring Germany, Japan and the Philippines, a tour during which they feared for their lives.

George: We went back to Hamburg in June 1966, for the first time since 1962.

We played concerts in Munich and Essen first, then got on a train to Hamburg. It was the train that was used when the royal party toured Germany and it was very nice. We each had our own little compartment with marble bathtubs, really luxuriously decorated.

Hamburg had a good and bad feeling for me. The good side was that we were coming back to play after all our fame and fortune.

When we'd been there before we'd been playing dirty nightclubs to work our way up. The bad bit was that a lot of ghosts materialised out of the woodwork - people you didn't necessarily want to see again, who had been your best friend one drunken Predulin night back in 1960. It's 1966, you've been through a million changes, and suddenly one of those ghosts jumps out on you.

Paul: We had an old booking that had to be honoured. It was strange to see all our old friends in Hamburg. It was as if we'd mutated into something different and yet we were still just the boys. But we knew and they knew that we'd got famous in the meantime and that we shouldn't really be playing that sort of gig.

It was good, though. I remember it being a very crazy evening, very steamy. There was a lot of crying from our German gangster friends; nostalgia from the old days. I'm not sure how good a gig it was from a musical point of view, but it was quite nice to go back one last time.

Ringo: To this day Hamburg doesn't seem to have changed. In 1992 I played there and it feels just the same.

Every year or two I've always gone back and the Reeperbahn still has that feel about it. It' still thrilling for me. It was the most exciting place a 20-year-old could go - the red-light district of Germany - to play the nightclubs with all the booze and the pills, the hookers and the atmosphere. It was pretty incredible and great to be back in 1966.

George: John enjoyed going back. It was still hit and run though; everything was hit and run in those days.

The day after the Hamburg concert we had a flight to Tokyo, so we were driven straight out of the concert, out of Hamburg to a schloss - a big castle of a hotel - where we stayed the night. Then we were flown to Heathrow and put on the plane to Japan. Unfortunately, there was a hurricane hitting Tokyo and our plane got diverted to Alaska.

Ringo: Anchorage, Alaska, was like a cowboy town to us. It was really like a backwater. My only great memory of Alaska is that at the airport they have a huge, magnificent polar bear in a glass case.

George: I remember looking out the window on the flight in, and Alaska was incredible: mountains, lush green pine forests, wonderful lakes and rivers. As we were coming lower and lower and the lakes and trees were thinning out a bit, but when we landed suddenly there was a huge, bulldozed mess that Man had made in the middle of the lush beauty.

I thought: "Oh, here we are again. Mankind keeps giving us real tacky things until eventually the planet's covered in them." The nasty little hotels that they threw up - boxes made out of concrete. It was so obvious there in Alaska. Normally, they are absorbed into the city, but in the middle of a million acres of pristine forest they stick out a bit.

For me, caring about the planet probably began in a previous life. When I was a kid, I used to walk around on my own and I was very much in touch with nature and the sky and the trees and the plants and the insects.

We were there for about 12 hours. I've never been back, but I'd like to some day.

We went on to Tokyo.

When we came off the plane we were put in little 1940s type cars along with policeman dressed in metal helmets, like World War II American soldiers' helmets. We were driven in convoy into town and taken to the Tokyo Hilton where we were put in our upstairs suite and that was it. We were only allowed out of the room when it was time for the concert.

To get our own back on the people who weren't letting us out, we used to get them to bring tradesmen up to our suite. They would bring big boxes and trunks full of golden kimonos, jade, incense holders and little carved objects, which we would buy: "We'll show them! We wanted to go shopping."

The promoter was very generous. He gave movie cameras to Mal (Evans, Beatles roadie) and Neil (Aspinall) and he gave us Nikons. In those days a Nikon was a pretty good toy to have.

Everywhere we were going there was a demonstration about one thing or another. In America the race riots were going on when Beatlemania had come to town. In Japan there were student riots, plus people were demonstrating because the Budokan (where we were playing) was supposed to be a special spiritual hall reserved for martial arts. So in the Budokan only violence and spirituality were approved of, not pop music.

George Martin: It was upsetting. I remember when George was in Germany he got a letter saying: "You won't live beyond the next month". And when they went to Japan they had such heavy guards they couldn't move anywhere. The Japanese took those death threats very seriously.

Paul: People go to Tokyo to go shopping, but we couldn't get out of the hotel.

I once tried and a policeman came running after me. I did actually manage it, but he organised half the Tokyo police force to come with us. I had wanted to go and see the Emporer's palace, but the policeman wasn't too keen on the idea.

Neil Aspinall: John and I sneaked out of the hotel and Paul and Mal, too. I think the security got Paul and Mal, but John and I made it down to the local market and it was great. It was such a relief to get out. We were looking around and buying things, but then the police got us and said: "Naughty boys, come back with us."

Paul: In the hotel room we did a communal painting. We all started a corner of the piece of paper and drew in towards the middle where the paintings met. This was just to pass the time away. I've seen it recently. It's a psychedelic whirl of coloured doodles.

The way the Japanese had organised going to the gig was very efficient. They all had walkie-talkies at a time when you didn't often see those. They came for us at exactly the time on the schedule.

Ringo: The Japanese have a dedication to time. They would like us to leave the room at 7:14, get to the elevator by 7:15 and a half, and the elevator took one minute eight seconds to get us down to the car, and so on. We were expected to be prompt, but when they knocked on the door we would never come out. We'd totally wreck their timings and we'd see all these guys going absolutely barmy because we hadn't walked down the corridor at 7:14 and a third.

It was the way we had fun on the road, by having our own little side trips going on.

Paul: They had the seating exactly arranged in all the cars. Amazing efficiency that we'd never seen the like of in Britain. When we went to the gig they had the fans organised with police patrols on each corner so there weren't any fans haphazardly waving along the streets. They had been gathered up and herded into a place where they were allowed to wave, so we'd go along the street and there'd be a little eeeeek! and then we'd go a few more hundred yards and there'd be another eeeeek!

At the Budokan we were shown the old Samurai warriors' costumes which we marvelled at dutifully in a touristy kind of way: "Very good! Very old!"

We were more amazed to see the women leaping up out of the seats for the promoter because we'd never seen that in the West. The subservience of the women was amazing. They'd say, "Oh God, I'm sorry - was I in your seat?" I remember us getting back to Britain and saying to our wives and girlfriends, "I wouldn't want you to do that, but maybe it's a direction worth considering?" Promptly rejected.

We got into our yellow shirts and natty bottle green suits. The thing about suits was that they always made us feel part of a team. When we arrived we were in our civvies, but once we put those on we were the Beatles! - the four-headed monster. It was good for me that we all wore the same in that I really felt part of a unit.

Peeping from behind the stage to watch the place fill up, we saw police walk in from either side and fill the whole of the front row, upstairs and downstairs. After them the crowd was allowed to come in. They were very well behaved compared to what we'd seen of Western crowds, but they seemed to enjoy it.

There was a funny local group on stage before us. This was in the days when the Japanese didn't really know how to do rock 'n' roll, although they've got the hang of it pretty well. They sang a song that went, "Hello Beatles! Welcome Beatles!" Pretty naff in rock 'n' roll terms, but it was very nice of them to do it.

Neil Aspinall: The show was a bit weird. There were the jujitsu people who used the Budokan, so they felt it was their temple. This was the first time they'd had a rock band in there and they didn't like it. There were threats from them and so there were a lot of police around. The Japanese were very disciplined. There were 3,000 police for 10,000 fans.

Ringo: The audience was very subdued. If you look at the footage from the shows you'll see a cop on every row. They'd all get excited in their seats as we were playing, but they couldn't express it.

Neil Aspinall: For the first time in a long while the audience could hear. There was no loud screaming, which came as a surprise. The band suddenly realised they were out of tune and they had to get their act together.

The second show was pretty good - they had got it together by then - but the first one, in the afternoon, was a bit of a shock.

George: The audience were reserved, but they were up on their feet - or they tried to be. There were police all around the stadium with the cameras with telephoto lenses and anybody who stood up and looked like they were going to run towards the stage was photographed.

It was a warm reception, but a bit clinical, as Japan is.

Getting back to the hotel was the same procedure in reverse: do the show, back to our room and that was it. It was worked out like a military manoeuvre.

Ringo: I hated the Philippines. We arrived there with thousands upon thousands of kids, with hundreds upon hundred of policemen, and it was a little dodgy. Everyone had guns and it was really like that hot/Catholic/gun/Spanish Inquisition attitude.

George: There were tough gorillas, little men who had short-sleeved shirts and acted very menacingly.

The normal proceedings in those days was that because the mania was everywhere, we didn't pull up at an airport and get off the plane like normal people. The plane would land and it would go to the far end of the airfield where we would get off, usually with Neil and our diplomatic bags (we carried our shaving gear and whatever in little bags), get in a car, bypass passport control and go to the gig. Mal Evans with Brian Epstein and the rest would go and do our passports and all that scene.

But when we got to Manila, a fellow was screaming at us, "Leave those bags there! Get in the car!" We were being bullied for the first time. It wasn't respectful. Everywhere else - Amercia, Sweden, Germany, wherever - even though there was a mania, there was always a lot of respect because we were famous showbiz personalities. But in Manila it was a very negative vibe from the moment we got off the plane, so we were a bit frightened.

We got in the car and the guy drove off with us four, leaving Neil behind. Our bags were on the runway and I was thinking: "This is it, we're going to get busted."

Neil Aspinall: The army was there and also some thugs in short-sleeved shirts over their trousers and they all had guns. You could see the bulges. These guys got the four Beatles and stuck them in a limo and drove off and wouldn't let them take their briefcases with them. They left them on the runway and those little briefcases had the marijuana in them.

So while the confusion was going on I put them in the boot of the limo that I was going in and said: "Take me to wherever you've taken the Beatles."

George: They took us away and drove us down to Manila harbour, put us on a boat, took us out to a motor yacht and put us in this room.

It was really humid, Mosquito City, and we were all sweating and frightened. For the first time ever in our Beatle existence, we were cut off from Neil, Mal and Brian Epstein. There was not one of them around and, not only that, but we had a whole row of cops with guns lining the deck around this cabin that we were in. We were really gloomy, very brought down by the whole thing. We wished we hadn't come. We should have missed it out.

Ringo: The Philippines was really frightening. It's probably the most frightening thing that has happened to me.

George: As soon as we got there it was bad news.

Neil Aspinall: They drove me to the end of a pier and I got out of the car and said, "Where are they?" They pointed: "There they are," and there was a big boat miles away in the middle of the habour. There were what seemed to be rival militia gangs. One gang had taken them and put them on this boat to meet some people who weren't the people putting on the show. It was all very strange. I never really understood why they got put on a boat.

George: We've no idea why they took us to the boat. I still don't know to this day. An hour or two later Brian Epstein arrived, really flustered, with the Philippine promoter, and he was yelling and shouting. Everyone was shouting and then they took us off the boat, put us in a car and drove us to a hotel suite.

The next morning we were woken up by bangs on the door of the hotel and there was a lot of panic going on outside. Somebody came into the room and said: "Come on! You're supposed to be at the palace." We said: "What are you talking about? We're not going to any palace." "You're supposed to be at the palace. Turn on the television."

We did, and there it was, live from the palace. There was a huge line of people either side of the long marble corridor with kids in their best clothing and the TV commentator saying: "And they're still not here yet. The Beatles are supposed to be here."

We sat there in amazement. We couldn't believe it. We just had to watch ourselves not arriving at the presidential palace.

Paul: I went out on my own in the morning to the kind of Wall Street area. I remember taking a lot of photographs because right up against it was the shanty town area. There were cardboard dwellings right up against this Wall Street which I'd never seen so well juxtaposed. I got the camera out: "Wow, this is good stuff!" And I bought a couple of paintings from the shanty town as presents to go back home and went back to the hotel to have lunch.

Everyone was up and about then and we were in our hotel room when they started saying: "You've got to go to the President's Palace now. Remember that engagemenmt?" We said: "No, no, no." The promotors, with those white shirts with lace that everyone in Manila seemed to wear, looked a little heavy to us. A couple of them carried guns, so it was a bit difficult.

We were used to each different country doing it their own way. They were starting to bang on the door: "They will come! They must come!" But we were saying, "Look, just lock the bloody door." We were used to it: "It's our day off."

We found out later that it was Imelda Marcos (with her shoes and her bras) waiting for us. Somebody had invited us and we (gracefully, we thought) had declined the offer. But there was the TV announcer saying, "the first Lady is waiting and pretty soon the famous pop group will be arriving". And we're going, "Shoot - nobody's told them!" We stuck to our guns and sat the rest of the day out in the hotel. We turned the telly off and got on with our day off.

Ringo: Personally, I didn't know anything about Madame Marcos having invited us to dinner. But we'd said no and Brian Epstein had told her no. John and I were sharing a room and we woke up in the morning and phoned down for eggs and bacon (or whatever we were eating in those days) and all the newspapers because we always liked to read about ourselves.

We were just hanging out in our beds, chatting and doing whatever we were doing and time went by so we called down again: "Excuse me, can we have the breakfast?" Still nothing happened, so we put the TV on and there was a horrific TV show of Madame Marcos screaming: "They've let me down." There were all these shots with the cameraman focusing on empty plates and up into the little kids' faces, all crying because the Beatles hadn't turned up.

Neil Aspinall: The Beatles didn't do that sort of stuff for anybody. They wouldn't get involved in politics and they wouldn't go to the palace.

After it was all over and they hadn't turned up and people were going barmy, we asked Brian what had happened and he said: "I cancelled it. You weren't supposed to go there."

It turned nasty in the Philippines. I didn't eat for three days. They would bring up food that was terrible. Even if it was Cornflakes for breakfast, you'd pour the milk out and it would come out in lumps. They had given you sour milk. I remember once ordering dinner and it came up on of those big trays with the rolled lid on it. I rolled back the lid and Ohhhhh! Just by the smell of it I knew we couldn't eat it.

Paul and I sneaked out there as well. We must have been very brave or very naive. We got in a car and drove for miles. It was like Manhattan for five minutes and then a dreadful shanty town for a long way out to some sand dunes. We bought a couple of pictures, sat in the sand dunes and had a smoke, then drove back to the hotel with everybody freaking out (especially the security): "Where have you been? How did you get out?"

Although people kept saying it was a failure in the Philippines, the Beatles did two gigs to a total of about 100,000 people (after the Marcos thing). The fans had a really good time. They really enjoyed it. There were still thugs about, organising things (nothing to do with the army), but they seemed to be organising the fans rather than us.

George: Again, we had a big problem with the concert. Brain Epstein had made a contract for a stadium of so many thousand people, but when we got there it was like the Monterey Pop Festival. There were about 200,000 people on the site and we were thinking: "Well, the promoter is probably making a bit on the side out of this." We went back to the hotel really tired and jet lagged and pretty cheesed off. I don't recall much of what happened after that until the newspapers arrived.

Paul: The next morning someone brought in a newspaper and on the front it just said in massive letters: "Beatles Snub President". Oh dear! Well, we didn't mean to. We thought, "We'll just say we're sorry."

We were scheduled to leave Manila that morning and as we were leaving the hotel everyone was a bit nasty at reception, so we had to scuffle out as if we hadn't paid our bill.

Ringo: Things started to get really weird: "Come on! Get out of bed! Get packed, we're getting out of here." And as we got downstairs and started to get to the car - we really had no help - there was only one motorbike compared to the huge motorcade that had brought us in.

George: It was "Beatles Snub First Family" - that's how they decided to present it. It was quite likely it was the promoter or the agent who had done a deal; brown-nosing Mrs Marcos, probably. She was later quoted as saying: "Oh, I never liked them anyway - their music is horrible!"

The whole place turned on us. We had people yelling and screaming when we tried to get to the airport. Nobody would give us a ride. We couldn't get any cars. There was nothing available.

Finally somebody managed to get a car or two and they put our baggage in one and we got in the other. We were driven to the airport. Two things were happening simultaneously: there were all the government officials or police, who were trying to punch us and yelling and waving fists at us, and then underneath that were the young kids who were still around doing the mania.

Neil Apsinall: They were really putting obstacles in our way. When we were on the way to the airport, a soldier kept sending us round and round the roundabout until in the end I told the driver to pull over.

Paul: We got down to the airport and found they'd turned the escalators off. So we had to walk up the escalators. All right, let's get out of here then if that's what it's going to be.

Behind a huge plate glass window, the sort they have in airports, on the taxi rank outside there were all the Filipino taxi guys banging on the window and we're all going gibber, gibber.

Neil Aspinall: Nobody would help us with all this equipment and so we started using the escalators and then they stopped. So we had to lug all the stuff up the stairs and once we got it all up the stiars the escalators started to work again. The Beatles were going to Delhi and the equipment was going back to England. So at the check-in desk we kept saying, "OK, that's doing to Delhi", and they kept putting it on the pile that was going to England. In the end Mal jumped over the counter and sorted it all out for us because nobody was going to do it.

George: It seemed like forever at the check-in desk. We eventaully got into the departure lounge, which was a huge room, but then the thugs appeared again - the same people with the short-sleeved shirts who had been shouting at us as soon as we had got off the plane when we arrived in Manila.

There were a number of them coming up to us, pushing and screaming, "Get over there!" They forced us back and then another one would come around the other way, doing it again: "Get over there!" I was trying to keep my eye on all the people, keep moving ahead of them to stay out of their way. It was all really negative. I saw a couple of Buddhist monks and went and hid behind them.

Ringo: There was chanting, with people hating us all the way. They started spitting at us, spitting on us, and there's the famous story of John and me hiding behind these nuns because we thought, "It's a Catholic country, they won't beat up the nuns."

Paul: There was a group of nuns in the corner of the airport and when all the fisticuffs broke out we went over to the nuns. It was rather a nice little shot, nuns and Beatles in the corner. They didn't actually protect us, they just stood there looking a bit bemused. Whenever they moved, we moved the other side of them.

John: When they started on us at the airport, I was petrified. I thought I was going to get hit, so I headed for three nuns and two monks, thinking that might stop them. As far as I know I was just pushed, but I could have been kicked and not known it.

"You treat like ordinary passenger, ordinary passenger," they were saying. We said: "Ordinary passenger? He doesn't get kicked, does he?"

I saw five in sort of outfits who were doing it, all the kicking and booing and shouting.

That was Brian's cock-up. Because he'd had the invitation given to him and declined it and never told us. It was terrifying.

Paul: We were quite frightened. Most of the aggression (luckily for us) was directed towards our people. One of them got thrown down the stairs violently. But mostly it wasn't overt, though they were annoyed.

We felt a bit guilty, but we didn't feel it was our cock-up. Now, knowing more about the regime, what I think is that they had ignored our telling them we weren't coming: "Let them just try and not come - we'll make it difficult for them."

Neil Aspianll: I'm sure nobody got badly hurt, but that was because we didn't fight back, so we got pushed and shoved. We knew not to fight back.

If we had fought back it could have been very bad. It was very, very scary and nothing like this had ever happened before - and nothing like it has ever happened since.

George: Finally they announced the flight and we boarded the plane - and that was the greatest feeling, just to be on that plane. It was a sense of relief. Then the plane sat there.

Eventually, there was an announcement on the speaker saying, "Will Mr Epstein and Mr Evans and Mr Barrow (Tony, who was our press agent at that time) get off the plane?" They all had to get off and they looked terrified.

Mal went past me down the aisle of the plane breaking out in tears and he turned to me and said: "Tell Lil I love her." (Lil was his wife.) He thought that was it: the plane was going to go and he would be stuck in Manila.

The whole feeling was, "Hell, what's going to happen?"

Paul: When we got on the plane, we were all kissing the seats. It was feeling as if we'd found sanctuary. We had definitely been in a foreign country where all the rules had changed and they carried guns. So we weren't too gung-ho about it at all.

Tony Barrow had to go back into the lion's den and they made him pay an amazing airport leaving Manila tax that I think they just dreamed up. Strangely enough, I think it came to the same amount as the receipts for the trip.

George: We sat there for what seemed like a couple of hours. It was probably only 30 minutes or an hour, but it was humid and hot. Finally they reboarded, the front door closed and the plane was allowed to leave. I felt such resentment against those people.

Paul: I remember when we got back home a journalist asked George: "Did you enjoy it?" And he said: "If I had an atomic bomb I'd go over there and drop it on them."

It was an unfortunate little trip, but the nice thing about it was that in the end, when we found out what Marcos and Imelda had been doing to the people - the rip-off that the whole thing was - we were glad to have done what we did. Great! We must have been the only people who'd ever dared to snub Marcos. But we didn't really know what we were doing politically until many years later.

Ringo: We had fantasies that we were going to be put in jail because it was a dictatorship there in those days, not a democracy. You lose your rights in a dictatorship, no matter who you are. So we weren't going to get off the plane. That was my first and last time in Manila.

Neil Aspinall: I'm sure it made the band think hard about touring. It might have been one of the last nails in the touring coffin.

George Martin: When they got out of the country they said, "Never again. This is it." They said to Brian then that they would not tour again. Brian said, "Sorry, lads, we have got something fixed up for Shea Stadium. If we cancel it you are going to lose a million dollars."

Oops. They did do Shea Stadium.

John: No plane's going to go through the Philippines with me on it. I wouldn't even fly over it.

We'll just never go to any nut-houses again.

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