As Peter Jackson’s new documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back is released, my own two cents’ worth on the loveable mop-tops.
I remember the first time I heard their second single, Please Please Me, in January 1963. I was fourteen, in the dining room, listening to Pick of the Pops on what was then the BBC Light Programme. The combination of the harmonica intro and the cascading harmonies – although derivative of the Everly Brothers – came as a revelation. It felt… new and significant. I loved it and went straight out next day and bought it.
Mindless loyalty is a crucial ingredient of pop fandom. Like so many boomers, I chose to worship The Beatles and contrived to convince myself that Paperback Writer and I Feel Fine were actually good records. Through the sixties I bought every album as it appeared. But in 1977, when I slimmed down my record collection before moving to Dublin, I sold all my old Beatles records: LPs, EPs and singles.
Why? Because I never played them. Too many of the early songs were just plain dull; too many later songs were either fillers or mere novelty items like Yellow Submarine and Lovely Rita.
Later, I wondered if I’d done the right thing. But around 1985 my flatmate, a hi-fi freak, brought home a repressing of Beatles For Sale. I sat down to listen to a record that had meant a lot to me twenty years previously… and really, it was even more dull and plodding than I remembered. More recently, I considered buying the fifty-year anniversary remastered Sgt. Pepper; but then I listened through on YouTube… and decided that I really could live without it.
Almost all the way through the sixties there were better British bands than The Beatles: The Kinks, The Rolling Stones and The Who made better singles. The thing is, though, The Beatles were magic in a way that nobody else managed. They are important less for the music than as a cultural phenomenon that reduced thousands of teenage girls to hysteria and offered middle-class boys like me a new way of looking at the adult world – for better or worse.
I still have a copy of Abbey Road, and I do listen to it: by that time, Ringo had turned into one of the great rock/pop drummers; and it’s a beautifully made record, despite several duff tracks.
Along the way, were there any truly great songs? Only one, I think: She’s Leaving Home. Interestingly, although dating from 1967, it is most keenly evocative of the previous decade that had, of course, defined the lads themselves.
(The title of this post is from a song by Captain Beefheart, “Beatle Bones ‘n’ Smoking Stones” on his 1968 album Strictly Personal)
Donald Hounam 