Monthly Archives: January 2019

The BEATLES (The White Album)

Posted on by

1968 started with The Beatles in an unfamiliar place – the reaction to the TV broadcast of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ shook them, and the business interests they had so confidently agreed to take on were threatening to overwhelm everything. Shortly before Brian Epstein’s death, the commercial operations of the group and all the associated activities had been consolidated into an overarching organisation called Apple Corps, which turned out to be for the most part a better pun than it was a going concern. None of the four of them had any experience of, or much interest in, running a business – various businesses, to be more accurate – and all sorts of strange and unsustainable things were already being done in the name of Apple. The most visible parts of Apple were the record label, which eventually outlasted the band, mainly because EMI kept pretty much full control over the Beatles releases, and the boutiques, which created an enormous publicity storm, but made no money and were closed within a matter of months.

Being jointly responsible for Apple and its neverending roll call of staff and hangers-on didn’t suit the band, who were only really comfortable making music in the studio, and the lack of care and attention soon showed in the way Apple was running, with Magic Alex heading up an entire electronics division which produced nothing beyond an initially unusable studio in the office basement. Meanwhile, out in the real world, the flower power generation were quickly becoming the restive generation of revolutionaries as the ideal world promised by ‘All You Need is Love’ turned out to be a little less obtainable than that – the early months of 1968 turned the Vietnam War from a far-away sideshow into the most pressing concern of an entire generation as it became clear the it was unwinnable and more and more US teenage boys were being drafted to go and do no more than save face in a struggle few understood and even fewer bought in to.

The Beatles retreated, first into the studio where a few tracks were laid down, including at least one which would not see a release on a Beatles album until 1970 (‘Across the Universe’, which was given away to the World Wildlife Fund at the suggestion of Spike Milligan) and then to India, where perhaps the most famous Beatles jaunt of them all saw them seclude themselves in the Maharishi’s ashram where they were to spend three months qualifying as meditation gurus. It was, of course, not as simple as that, as various family members, Apple employees and assorted hangers-on joined the party, and the ensuing media circus meant that very little actual meditating took place. Instead, free – for the most part – from the pressures of the outside world, the last, and possibly greatest, burst of sustained songwriting in the band’s career took place, all pretty much out of sight of the great guru, who presumably thought they were all learning to live on a higher spiritual plane.

Or was trousering the cash left, right and centre while attending to the less spiritual needs with any number of young women who had come along for the ride – depending on who you believe.

In the band’s absence, the last single on the EMI / Parlophone label came out back home – ‘Lady Madonna’:

Incidentally, if you’re thinking that the visuals don’t match the audio, that’s because they’re actually playing ‘Hey Bulldog’, which we’ll get back to in a post or two.

‘Lady Madonna’ was as clear a signal as you could have that the psychedelic phase was pretty much over – it’s an irresistible bit of old-fashioned R&B, complete with ‘woo’s, although the B side ‘The Inner Light’ is another of Harrison’s sitar-heavy ragas. George had already spent time in India at the start of 1968 as he put together the soundtrack for the film ‘Wonderwall’. Again, I’ll be coming back to that.

Ringo lasted about three weeks in India, and Paul followed him home about three weeks later. John and George eventually returned as well, none of them having done enough meditating to qualify as ‘gurus’, but each with apparently an entire suitcase full of songs; easily enough for a new album or two. As soon as they returned, however, they all to a greater or lesser extent became embroiled in Apple Corps business, dealing with everything from disgruntled neighbours to board meetings held on board ship sailing round the Statue of Liberty. Another shop, called Apple Tailoring, opened on the Kings Road – it didn’t last long, either.

By the end of May, there was nothing else for it but to go back to Abbey Road and make a record. Almost from the first day, there was a palpable change in the atmosphere. The popular story is that because John and Yoko were inseparable at this point, having been together only for a matter of weeks, it was Yoko’s presence in the studio which upset the others. The truth is, of course, way more complex than that – each of the songwriters in the band now had a clear idea of the various directions they felt the band should be going next, and they all – even Ringo – had material ready to be worked on, but no consensus on what any of it should sound like. The tensions around Ono’s presence were a catalyst for the disagreements to become proper ‘musical differences’ and the long, painful gestation of the next album wasn’t helped by the fact that the two principal songwriters were not always prepared to work on each other’s songs, and less inclined to be polite or forgiving about it.

By the end of the sessions for the album, all four of them had appeared on a track which none of the other three played on, and a number of songs featured only three or two of them playing. To add to the general level of disharmony over the six months it took to whip the thing into shape, Geoff Emerick walked out late on, and even George Martin went off on holiday unnanounced in the middle of recording. All was not well on the good ship Beatles, and things were not helped by Paul’s engagement to Jane Asher ending messily, and John’s divorce from Cynthia.

And yet, in the middle of it all, at the end of July, a handful of top photographers spent the day with the band on what became known as the ‘Mad Day Out’ – all four of them seeming to enjoy a day in each other’s company, stopping traffic and combining for some memorable photographs – the official story is here, but seek out some of the other photos taken that day; they genuinely don’t look like a band in turmoil.

And they didn’t sound like one, either, if the next single was any indication. Written by McCartney for Lennon’s son Julian as the bitterness of the divorce started to affect him, ‘Hey Jude’ – the first official Apple release – surely stands out even among the staggering output of these four as one of the most instantly recogniseable and infectious songs of all time. Admit it, even if you’re tired of it, or find it corny and worn out, you’re singing along by the end, aren’t you:

That clip might be my favourite of all of these – from David Frost trying not to look too pissed off at the beginning, via McCartney’s casual improvised subvocalisation before he starts, to the chaos at the end as all these people find themselves pressed up against the Actual Beatles, singing along to a song they’ve never heard before. Lennon and McCartney exchange a few knowing looks, and you can read all sorts into those, especially given Lennon’s later belief that it’s a song as much about him as it is his son.

The B side of ‘Hey Jude’ is worth a mention, too, as it’s one of three versions of ‘Revolution’ which came out of the recording sessions – this one has no number, and is the sped-up, distorted version which Lennon wanted as a single release:

Meanwhile, as things dragged on and on and became less and less harmonious, Ringo became the first Beatle to actually properly quit the band. It took nearly two weeks to convince him to come back, although recording didn’t stop in his absence, and McCartney plays drums on the released version of ‘Dear Prudence’. Ultimately, only about half the tracks on the finished album feature all four of them, end even then , not all of them were recorded with all of them playing together.

So, recording was chaotic; there are 30 tracks on the album, all pulling in different directions, and there may not actually be a functioning band by the time it’s released. It’s a disaster, isn’t it?

It isn’t. In truth, ‘The BEATLES’ (yeah, I went there) is a fucking miracle. It’s a huge, sprawling beast of a thing, fully three times the length of their first album, and crammed from first track to last with more musical ideas than most bands manage in an entire career. Sure, it feels like there’s no coherent message; of course it sounds in places like there are at least two full solo albums chopped up and mixed in, and it does feature the only Beatles track which doesn’t appear to have any actual music on it (I’m coming back to that, too), but it just bloody works. You could even argue that the two best songs from it were left off and released as singles, yet I’m struggling to see what you would lose to include them, because there’s nothing here which is filler; nothing which isn’t the product of genuine geniuses at work. And, as I’ve said before, they don’t have to be working together to make great music- the mere fact that all these songs have to have everyone’s name on them means that you don’t bring in your second-best songs and hope to get away with them; you bring your A game. Every time.

And, yes, before you explode, there definitely are songs on here which don’t work, but I’d suggest that doesn’t make them filler; every single track on here, even the snippets of McCartney trying things out like ‘Wild Honey Pie’ or ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’ (sheesh, that’s a hard one to capitalise) are properly thought-out and crafted. They don’t really go anywhere because there’s no longer a band structure able to give them shape beyond the initial idea, but they’re definitely not throwaways; they’re a big part of what makes this album work in all its ramshackle glory. Since Lennon’s death, there has been a certain amount of received wisdom that McCartney’s tracks on here are weaker; this is in big part down to the interview John gave to Playboy just before he died, in which he gleefully went through the entire Beatles songbook, pointing out which songs had nothing to do with him and were therefore rubbish. But ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ was a huge hit, albeit for another band; ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ are stone cold classics – John Lennon, even more than a decade on, still bore grudges, and we’re allowed to make our own minds up about this stuff.

Beatles albums had always featured guest musicians – George Martin has a playing credit on ‘Please Please Me’ – but the full roll-call of musicians on here is indicative of the loose way it was all put together; Harrison gets Eric Clapton in, Yoko Ono gets a solo vocal line; even the Mike Sammes Singers feature prominently. It all adds up to an album which would, in any other hands, be all over the place, but just about fits together, producing surprise after surprise as it meanders through a band in turmoil without any really obvious signs of the discord reaching the majority of listeners.

It starts, of course, with the two tracks Ringo missed during his self-imposed exile, which has the unexpected effect of allowing it to start with two of the most well-known and loved tracks, then somehow kicking properly into gear when Ringo stomps us into ‘Glass Onion’. Side 1 may sag a little in the middle, but not by much – you’re either listening to one of the great Sixties pop songs, or marvelling at Lennon’s vitriolic takedown of rich Americans who hunt tigers. Then the side concludes with George Harrison’s first properly timeless classic and what is perhaps the strongest song on the whole thing. ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ is easily dismissed, but it’s in truth a complex and ever-shifting marvel of songwriting, with Ringo conducting us strictly through the shifting time signatures by just driving on in 4/4 time, forcing the song to fit itself around him.

Side 2 is full of songs too easily dismissed, but each of them (yes, even that one) has a level of craft and love which surpasses pretty much anything else out there at the time – ‘Blackbird’ is the obvious standout, but I find things to enjoy in all of them; Ringo’s first proper song with its retro feel and wild violin; ‘Piggies’ showing George could be just as angry as John; the bassline on the otherwise unremarkable ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’. Even ‘Rocky Racoon’ is a genuine attempt at yet another style – it may not linger in the mind, but it’s full of interesting ideas. Once again, it ends with a glorious double-header: the effortless genius of ‘I Will’ and Lennon’s genuine and heartfelt song for his lost mother.

Side 3 kicks off by getting properly back to basics – the whole band demonstrating how the battle-scarred and world-weary 1968 Beatles would treat a simple 1950s rock and roll song – it swerves between trying to sound like early Beatles and the amplified and distorted blues which was apparently taking over the world, and slides inevitably into ‘Yer Blues’ which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a John Mayall or even Led Zeppelin album. The rest of side 3 hinges very much on what you make of ‘Helter Skelter’, a song which has long had a life of its own. For me, it sits perfectly well between Lennon’s raucous songs and McCartney and Harrison’s more lyrical efforts. It certainly sounds like it had been recorded by a band which was pretty much unrecognisable from the one which recorded ‘Sergeant Pepper’ the year before, never mind the happy optimists of ‘She Loves You’. It may not have “invented heavy metal”, but it sure as hell contributed. Again, the side ends strongly, but it doesn’t really prepare you for what’s to come.

Side 4 is, of course, the side people will tend to skip – I’m not sure how many people make it all the way to ‘Good Night’ every time they listen. It all starts with the second of the ‘Revolution’ songs – ‘Revolution 1’ is simply an alternative take on the single version, with the drive and distortion missing. Then we’re in the full vaudeville / music hall swing with ‘Honey Pie’, which only works because it is played straight; it’s no parody. Then George takes us round the chocolate box while sounding about as modern as you can get. Either side of the “song” I’ll be coming back to, Lennon shows us two sides of his personality; playing with some of the elements of his more psychedelic period, and giving Ringo a straightforward lullaby which George Martin and the Mike Sammes Singers transform into something timeless and traditional; the first time you hear it, you imagine you’ve known it all your life.

All of which ignores the actual reason people just switch off early. ‘Revolution 9’ is way, way beyond anything they had tried before – all the studio trickery which had illuminated everything since ‘Revolver’ was loaded into eight minutes of avant-garde – well, avant-garde what, exactly? It’s too easy to write it off as self-indulgence; this kind of thing was a genuine musical movement at the time; McCartney and Lennon were both fascinated by what Karlheinz Stockhausen was doing in the name of classical music, and there is structure here; there is some kind of plot to it. It’s avant-garde classical music in its better parts, and random noise in others. It’s also something of a portrait of a world in turmoil; when everything is breaking down, perhaps this weird, distorted soundscape is the only appropriate response. There are also elements of such contemporary fashions as primal scream therapy, and the clearest indication – for those who were still listening – that Yoko Ono is now an enormous influence on everything which is happening. Heard in isolation, it perhaps makes more sense as a reaction to the music being made in the rarefied classical world, but I will say this – even after all these years, the simple cross-fade into ‘Good Night’ retains an unexpected emotional punch, as you stop having to concentrate and think, and just let the strings wash over you. I recommend not skipping ‘Revolution 9’, but I understand if you do.

Anyway, the bottom line is that this is a wild, sprawling, patchy, weird, eclectic and almost uncategoriseable album, and it sounds as urgent and modern now as it did fifty years ago. If ‘Revolver’ is the best Beatles album and ‘Sergeant Pepper’ is the most accomplished, ‘The BEATLES’ is probably the most influential, absorbing, maddening and freaky collage of disjointed sounds and attempts to wind each other up a band has ever committed to tape.

And it’s brilliant.

In spite of – perhaps because of – all its flaws.

Magical Mystery Tour

Posted on by

I started this, then changed my mind. Doing the US album throws the timeline off, so you’re getting the EPs instead…

Just because ‘Sergeant Pepper’ was finished didn’t mean anyone was taking a break – recording just carried on: Paul had an idea for a film, and there was an intriguing invitation to take part in the first ever global TV broadcast. A song would be needed for that, alongside the three or four already under way for the vague film project. The decision was taken to make the TV song as simple and easy to understand as possible for a wide audience who didn’t speak English, and just over three weeks after ‘Sergeant Pepper’ appeared, the Beatles were on everyone’s TV again with another new song. Sadly, there’s no easily available video of the live performance, which featured a cast of thousands in the studio and the band singing along to a backing tape, but the single is available:

As is its equally psychedelic B side ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’:

Just a pause to observe that when Lennon sings ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah’ in the fade out, it genuinely feels like he’s covering a classic from a different era of songwriting.

The actual summer part of the Summer of Love was actually fairly quiet, if you ignore Ringo becoming a father again. It wasn’t until the end of August that band activities started up again, with a trip to North Wales (presumably at George’s prompting) to commune with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. At this point, all four of them are open to the Maharishi’s philosophies, and a quintessentially late sixties week was planned. However, no sooner had they got there that word arrived of the death of Brian Epstein. Epstein hasn’t featured all that much in my recountings; he was most definitely not a creature of the studio, but he did pretty much everything else for the Beatles, promoted and defended them with a quiet ferocity, and was absolutely instrumental in getting them to where they were. The band reacted as if one of them had passed, and the entire organisation went into first mourning, then denial – meeting at Paul’s house to agree that they would look after their own interests from now on. Perhaps no-one could have replaced Epstein, and perhaps the band were already unravelling, but it definitely didn’t help that there was no-one giving direction.

They plunged back into recording, having decided that the best way to cope was to focus on getting this film made. Writing and recording happened quickly, as did filming, which was done more or less live while they trundled around in a bus, causing traffic chaos wherever they went. Just as in life, the film seemed to have no-one in overall charge and while the chaos produced some extraordinary music, the visuals could probably have done with some more work.

There was product to sell, and Christmas was approaching fast, so ‘Hello, Goodbye’ was released at the end of November, backed by one of the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ songs, ‘I Am the Walrus’:

The video (sorry, ‘promotional film’) was shot on 35mm film, and directed by Paul, and it not only looks as sharp as if it had been made last week, it features the four of them just being a band on stage – perhaps already prefiguring the more ‘back to basics’ route the music would take once they were done with the whole psychedelic thing.

And it really was nearly over – even choosing to relegate ‘I am the Walrus’ to the B side of the single suggested that the sound was moving on again, or perhaps someone pointed out that they were going to release ‘Walrus’ again in about three weeks. The six songs from the film all came out on a double EP at the beginning of December – it’s a lavishly put together thing, with a full colour booklet examining the film (as yet unseen, of course), and a tracklist which led with ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. In the US, the six film songs appear (in a different order) on Side 1 of the album version, and the five recent single tracks were collated on to side 2 – the result is an album which no-one in the band had ever intended, but which, mainly due to the presence of some of their best-known songs, almost feels like Sergeant Pepper II.

In the UK, you were restricted to the four sides of EP, which must have been a right faff to listen to: ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ and Paul’s latest pastiche ‘Your Mother Should Know’ on side 1; ‘I am the Walrus’ on side 2; ‘The Fool on the Hill’ and ‘Flying’ on side 3, and ‘Blue Jay Way’ rounding things off. In that format, I’m not sure you ever quite get to grips with the structure of the songs – Lennon’s wild and unrestrained celebration of acid trips and Alice in Wonderland should segue seamlessly into McCartney’s thoughtful and lyrical view of the fool; instead, you had to get up and change the record. I’m still fascinated by ‘Flying’ – I think it’s the only Beatles instrumental, and you can clearly hear where Pink Floyd came from in it, but I’m afraid that ‘Blue Jay Way’ lacks the variety we’ve come to expect from experimental Beatles songs – it’s a pretty banal lyric, and listening to it without narcotics drags a bit. With the right drugs, of course, it’s probably among the most meaningful and subversive songs of all “Wow, man – don’t belong. Far out…”

The album version wasn’t officially available in the UK until 1976, and didn’t crack the top 30 in what was a whole different musical landscape. It is, however, considered part of the official Beatles album catalogue now, making the re-release of these songs much easier than having to recreate a six-track EP. For me, the EP would get an 8; if the album had been an original UK release, I think it would get 9, but as it is, I’m not counting it, so I’m scoring the EP – it’s iconic and all, but the title track feels rushed, and both ‘Your Mother Should know’ and ‘Blue Jay Way’ sound like solo tracks rather than band efforts. Are the cracks beginning to show already?

The film premiered on the BBC on Boxing Day, and was met with huge audiences, but a resounding critical raspberry. There was, by and large, no issue with the songs, but the film itself appeared messy, unfocused and just plain silly. There’s no particular story to it beyond this vague idea that a traditional mystery tour (they were very popular in the days before everyone jetted off to Spain on holiday) would be more mysterious and more entertaining if presented by the Beatles. Mostly, though, it wasn’t. The lack of script allied to the general eccentricity of Ivor Cutler as the bus conductor left a lot of people scratching their heads. It did, however, introduce the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band to a wider audience (the name of the song they contribute to the soundtrack? ‘Death Cab for Cutie’). I haven’t seen it in a while, but I’m sure that its flaws have been softened a little by the passage of time. It was a suitably weird and wonderful way to see out the most cacophonous of years. 1968 would be a whole different beast…

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Posted on by

As soon as ‘Revolver’ came out, the band headed back to the US for another attempt at making stadium-sizes gigs work. It was not what you might call a success. The new songs didn’t make the set list because none of them was really suited to stage performance; the welcome in the wake of the album-burning parties was not what it had been before (Lennon’s sort-of apology appeared to mollify enough people for the tour to go on); and in spite of improvements in amplification, no-one – especially those on stage – could hear a note of what was being played. The band in any case were not particularly interested in these old songs any more, and the climax of the tour in San Francisco was greeted with a collective heartfelt sigh of relief, all four of them having – some more reluctantly than others – come to the conclusion that performing live was simply not possible any longer. The Beatles had existed solely as a live band for years, but once they had begun to get to grips with what recording technology could do for them, they moved on from that phase of their life with few regrets.

Eventually, I suppose, the screaming would have died down. Eventually, the technology would catch up with what a Beatles concert might have been. But by the time that had happened, the forces holding these four together had been overwhelmed by events and the passage of time. One of the things which perhaps gets overlooked when people talk about the second half of the Beatles’ career is that the end of touring was a psychological end to the band itself. From that point on none of them was really in The Beatles any more – they would get together and make music under the Beatles name from time to time, but without the tight bonds imposed by relentless travelling and performing together, they were able to go off and live their own lives, and that process started almost immediately.

On their return from the US, they went their separate ways for an unimaginable three months. George (who may or may not have been on the verge of quitting at this point) went to India and properly learned the sitar; Paul went off to Kenya; Ringo went home and introduced himself to his family, and John, having spent some time making the film ‘How I Won The War’, went to an art gallery one evening and met the Japanese artist Yoko Ono…

Just before going in to the studio to more or less see what happened, Paul McCartney died, which must have been a blow.

As a measure of how much things had changed since the ‘Rubber Soul’ sessions, there was no pressure for an album by Christmas, and for the first time (it’s not clear to me exactly when this happened) an insistence that Capitol in the US would release whatever came out of these sessions in its entirety. The days of wildly varying releases on either side of the Atlantic were (almost) over, and with many of the external pressures removed, the band were able to retreat into Abbey Road and take as long as they needed to record something new.

The ‘taking as long as it took’ part did, of course, cause some problems, as by February 1967, EMI were getting very twitchy indeed about the lack of new material. To appease them, and perhaps aware of the fact that even a Beatles audience would eventually move on to something else, the band agreed to releasing two tracks from the new sessions as a double A side single.

Let me rephrase that: The Beatles decided to release what is surely the greatest 7″ single ever committed to vinyl, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ / ‘Penny Lane’:

(Incidentally, I think you can tell a lot about a person by which side they play first)

Notwithstanding the changes in sound evident on ‘Revolver’, these two songs mark an absolute shift in what ‘The Beatles’ actually is: gone is the clean-cut image still visible during the last tour, in its place are four grown-ups with facial hair and serious expressions – almost an entirely new band, and the music reflects and amplifies this change. Both songs are masterpieces not just of songwriting, but of production and execution. In keeping with the thesis that The Beatles isn’t really a band any more, there is so much going on in both tracks that you simply can’t picture the four of them standing together in a room bashing out either song. The end of the video (sorry; “promotional film”) for ‘Penny Lane’ makes this point eloquently as they ride their horses past their old stage setup.

If you don’t agree that it’s the greatest 7″ single of all time, surely you’ll concede that it’s the greatest 7″ single ever to be kept off the no. 1 spot by Englebert Humperdinck. It also helped build the expectation for the next album to heights which surely no album could possibly hope to meet. ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ didn’t emerge until June, and was released into a world which had moved on even from the apparent extremes of 1966 – there was a genuine shift in public attitudes to just about everything you can think of – long hair, mini skirts, women’s lib, flower power, hippies, the summer of love – all the things you’ve read about really did happen, and then the Beatles provided the soundtrack. No wonder it’s so revered…

And no wonder it became so divisive. It’s far more common for a neglected album to have gradually achieved classic status than it is for something so widely, almost universally, lauded on release to suffer a retrospective backlash; but that’s what slowly happened to ‘Sergeant Pepper’. Ten years after its release, when I was buying any and every new album I could lay my hands on, the received wisdom about the Beatles was that the only version of the band worth bothering about was the one Stuart Sutcliffe had been in; the early songs were fine, but everything from 1965 onward was – well, we used words like ‘pretentious’ almost as if we knew what they meant. It took me years to come back to this album, having suffered through all the ‘greatest album of all time’ lists which inevitably put it first because they had been written by people who were there at the time; people who really understood how seismic it was, and who perhaps didn’t view it as objectively as you might hope. If something really did change the way you looked at the world, it’s hard to then stand back and admit that, you know, ‘Revolver’ is actually a better album.

So, in the end, I think that it’s more important than it was great; had more significance in so many ways than some of its songs merit, and looms so large over the cultural landscape that it’s next to impossible to look at it dispassionately – you’re inevitably reduced to ‘well, I like it’ as the depth of your analysis because it really is impossible to unpick it from all the psychedelia, the cardboard cut-outs and the moustaches.

But I’m going to give it a go.

‘Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band’ is crammed full of some of the most iconic melodies, lyrics and sounds ever committed to vinyl. There’s not a dull moment, and never a point where you think ‘oh, they’ve done this before’. Everything about it is new and exciting, and if it has flaws, it’s probably in that not every experiment can possibly work perfectly every time.

One of the reasons the songs the Beatles wrote are so strong, so memorable and so successful is that whenever either Lennon or McCartney brought a song in for the band to work on, it had to pass muster in the opinion of one of the greatest writers of popular song who ever lived. It was even harder for George Harrison, who had to get his songs past both of them. For me, that process reached its apogee on ‘Revolver’, as everyone pulled together with common purpose; here they are all still trying to outdo each other, and the way they do it is no longer restrained by the limitations of guitar, drums and bass, and I’m trying not to be influenced by hindsight here, but I think there are moments from each of them which perhaps would have benefited from one or other of them saying ‘Hang on, just because we can, doesn’t mean we should’.

You know, I’ve started this next paragraph six or seven times now, and I’m still not clear what I’m trying to say, or even if it’s possible to say it. Trying to evaluate ‘Sergeant Pepper’ is like trying to describe a rainbow to someone blind from birth – it can be done, but rarely well; you can get into the technical details of how everything works, but you lose the majesty of it all in the intricate details, and in the end, you’re not sure if anyone is better off for the effort. If I could, I’d award it pink mouse out of ten, because that’s what we’re dealing with here – something which just doesn’t properly fit into the normal categories. It’s a rock album which features ragtime clarinet, fairground organs and calliope, a string octet, an orchestra playing atonally but to a structure, western and Indian classical instruments and musicians, various animal sounds, an alarm clock and a harp – all played by a fictional band.

And through all that chaos, weaving under and over the soundscape are thirteen (well, twelve, as one’s a reprise) perfect examples of the songwriter’s craft – each unique, each as different from what comes next as it is from what comes after. You may not like ragtime clarinet, or have no time for extended jamming on Indian instruments; you may find ‘Mr Kite’ twee or (and you’re wrong about this) ‘Good Morning’ insubstantial, but none of that matters, because all of those songs stand in service to a greater whole, an album which fifty years on still defies description. Of course there are weaker spots – not many, but I still contend ‘Revolver’ had none – but even in its excesses and its whimsy, ‘Sergeant Pepper’ is still pushing at boundaries which no-one even knew existed.

And, yes, you do have to talk about the songs eventually. Let’s get the contentious ones out of the way first: ‘Within You, Without You’ is, to my mind, the beating heart of the album. You can enjoy the whole thing while still thinking it’s too long, but most of the times I listen to it I find myself drawn in to it, partly by the words, which sum up what it was to be young in the summer of 1967 like nothing else. ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ is a musical masterpiece, but its also a little whimsical and slight. Nevertheless, it’s one of the core Beatles songs which everyone knows and loves, even if it’s not cool to admit it. Pretty much everything else just works, and then there are two of the five or six best Beatles songs of all.

‘She’s Leaving Home’ is a miracle. It’s so simple yet so harmonically complex, with the voices of the parents and the narrator weaving through a melody which never allows you to get lost in the story. It’s a sketch and a movie script all in one, and is easily the best song on here but for the final one. ‘A Day in the Life’ defies both description and superlatives. Presented after the imaginary band have taken their leave, it seems to say “this is us; this is what we’ve been doing while all that was going on”. From an early age, I knew that you could do anything with music, because I’d heard the Beatles do it in this song – you could mash two different songs together; you could make an orchestra do things which almost didn’t sound like music at all; you could make a sound on a piano (three pianos, I later discovered) which somehow never faded; you could say those things and make it all sound mystical and magical, and you could make a pop song last over five minutes and still leave us wanting more.

I like much of the music I like because ‘A Day in the Life’ taught me that there were no boundaries if you didn’t want there to be.

After this, rock albums were around forty minutes long; after this, you printed the lyrics on the sleeve somewhere; after this, you could play what you wanted and express yourself the way you wanted, and people would listen, people would give you record contracts. Great bands were driven on to produce their own masterpieces, and solve the problems of playing in huge arenas; bands devised light shows and costumes, used or even invented entire new musical technologies, grew their hair and lived in communes, and they did it all because ‘Sergeant Pepper’ showed them how.

Musically, it’s a shade behind ‘Revolver’; as a significant moment in the history of the music we all take for granted now, it’s off the charts.

Oh, and the apostrophe? just like the original album, I’ve done it both ways. Which is right? A splendid time is guaranteed for all, and that’s all that matters.

Revolver

Posted on by

1966 is widely, and rightly, seen as a pivotal year for the Beatles, and for popular music generally. ‘Rubber Soul’ had stirred things up, and bands everywhere were rising to the challenge – it’s surely no coincidence that the Rolling Stones’ 1966 album,’Aftermath’ contains, for the first time, only Jagger / Richards songs – which meant that whatever came next was also going to have to be a raising of the bar. It’s therefore not so surprising that the period between ‘Rubber Soul’ coming out in December 1965, and ‘Revolver’ in August 1966 was mainly taken up with recording sessions rather than globe-spanning tours. Record companies still hadn’t quite shaken off the ‘singles make money’ model, but they had enthusiastically embraced the ‘albums make even more money’ idea, and the band weren’t exactly heartbroken that their main source of income was no longer playing hundreds of concerts a year.

There was a plan to tour Japan and the Philippines in the early summer, but before that, the band were free to explore Abbey Road Studios and figure out just what else they could do with all the toys now at their disposal. Make no mistake, while this was a time of incredible change in songwriting and music-making generally, the technology was keeping pace. ‘Please Please Me’ had been recorded in mono on two tracks; ‘Revolver’ had two four-track machines, as well as any number of technical innovations, including the now-ubiquitous, but invented on the spot for this album, ADT, or automatic double tracking. ‘Revolver’ ensured that popular music would never sound the same again – you could use tape to create sounds no-one had heard before; you could make pianos sound like guitars, and vice versa; you could record a Beatles song on which the only trace of an actual Beatle were the voices. There were new amps and new instruments, and – crucially – a new young recording engineer called Geoff Emerick, who was up for anything the band could throw at him.

Outside, the atmosphere was as fevered as it was in EMI Studio 3. This was the year of Swinging London, of Carnaby Street, Biba and Mary Quant as well as the World Cup and the shift of the working man’s sport into the national consciousness. For the first time, the notion of ‘celebrity’ being something other than the record of Great Men doing Great Deeds took proper hold; until the mid-sixties, pop stars could cause a passing sensation, but otherwise the great and the good were bound up with the doings of the upper classes and royalty – to be a famous fashion designer, you had to have dressed the Queen – that had all changed, and apparently in the blink of an eye. The image of London went from sober businessmen in pinstripes with bowler hats and tightly-furled umbrellas to hip young people with outrageously loud and colourful clothes, wild haircuts, no hats at all, and a Beatles album under their arm. All eyes were on London, and as the artists and musicians came to perform, to see and be seen, the Beatles were right there in the middle of it all – hanging out with Bob Dylan, attending exhibitions and avant-garde plays; taking all the trendy drugs, and using all of it to construct an album unlike anything ever attempted before. Without the pressure of touring, the band gave expansive press interviews, in which they would expound at length on all the philosophical and creative ideas which were going into their music, as well as making the odd comment which would come back to bite them.

Meanwhile, in the US, Capitol records had a bit of a dilemma. Sticking rigidly to their policy that UK albums were just too damn long for the American attention span, they still had a pile of offcuts which had never appeared on an album over there. Oh, and they had ‘Yesterday’, which had been an enormous hit single, but its absence from ‘Help’ was beginning to look more and more like a mistake. There needed to be another album to take up the slack, and they called it ‘Yesterday And Today’. It was the twelfth Beatles album released since early 1964, and – ignoring all the controversy about the cover, which I’m coming to – it’s a decent compilation covering everything from ‘Help!’ to ‘Revolver’. If by some mad chance you ever get a chance to grab a copy, you should – it’s full of cracking songs, including three from the as yet unreleased ‘Revolver’ which Capitol had already decided weren’t going on the US version. This madness is about to stop, but of all the butchered albums released in the first three years of Beatles releases in the US, the one which had the butchered babies cover is the one worth bothering with.

The original cover of ‘Yesterday and Today’, which can only have been approved by a madman, is indicative of a definite change in how the band wanted to be perceived, and that change in attitude came with attendant risk. Lennon’s interview with Maureen Cleave in which he compared the band’s popularity to the decline in Christianity sparked outrage and record burning parties when it was published in the US; the cover of ‘Yesterday and Today’ featuring raw meat and dismembered dolls, was hastily replaced with something more anodyne; even the trip to the far east was not without its problems as the band – deliberately or otherwise – stood up Imelda Marcos and left in a hurry when people started protesting. Being in the Beatles wasn’t all sunshine and happy tunes any more – if it had ever been – they were in the spotlight, they didn’t want to be seen as the loveable moptops any more, but the new, more grown-up path was trickier to navigate than anyone expected, and – just as they’d appeared to be in control of everything, they discovered that this entity they’d inadvertently created had a life of its own, and there was no reining it in.

Fortunately, there was always the music. Prior to ‘Revolver’ coming out, there was the now customary advance single: ‘Paperback Writer’:

‘Paperback Writer’ and its fantastic B side ‘Rain’ didn’t just whet people’s appetites for the new album, they surely raised expectation levels to a place they could never hope to exceed. Yet, we’re dealing not just with The Beatles, but with 1966 Beatles. ‘Revolver’ isn’t just better than you’d hope from the single, it’s so much better that it’s on another planet.

In 1966, the Beatles reached a rarefied place where none had gone before, and made music so indelible that the only way I can describe it is like this:

With many albums, there’s a run of songs which just works – the first three tracks, or that run from the middle of side one to about ten minutes into side two, or the last couple of tracks which just make you want to listen to them over and over again. ‘Revolver’ has a run like that. It lasts from the false count-in at the start of ‘Taxman’ to the final fading looped note of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Words really aren’t adequate to describe ‘Revolver’ – it exists as an experience; a place in time and space all its own. You wouldn’t change a note, even of the songs which might not work on their own, because to do so would upset the delicate, intricate balance of what it surely one of the very, very few perfectly realised records.

What struck me listening to it in preparation for doing this is the sheer overwhelming strength of the melodies. Of the 14 songs on here, roughly 14 of them have standout, still singing them fifty years on, melodies. You might be lost in the wonder of Eleanor Rigby, only to glance at the track list and realise that the incredible tune which is ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ is up next. Every song is like that; almost all of them scurry out of the way at the end, ushering in something equally amazing – there’s not a wasted minute; not a track on here which you could improve. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay it is that, after having listened to it for most of my life, I can still find new things in it, I can still catch myself laughing out loud at the sheer joyful audacity of it, and I can listen to and think about the way ‘For No One’ works and how it compares and contrasts to ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ and be caught up in my own contemplation right up until the moment when that French Horn breaks into my reverie and the hairs on my arms are standing to attention. Only genuinely great music can do that.

There’s so much to say about all of it that I could easily write a post on each track, but let me instead point you to someone who really knows what he’s talking about. You should watch the entire thing, but I’ve (at least I hope I have) cued this up to the part where Howard Goodall talks about ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and tries to explain how the tunesmiths responsible for ‘Love Me Do’ only four years before created one of the timeless classics with no formal training; just a natural instinct for what would work.

There will be individual songs to come better than some of the individual songs on here; there will be long stretches of Beatles albums which perhaps reach heights loftier than ‘Revolver’ does, but there won’t be anything which is consistently, unarguably better than all of it. If you have the opportunity to demonstrate to someone – as I did with my children – what was so special about the Beatles, you could of course plough through all the singles in order, and they’d get the idea, but if you really want to know the full breadth and depth of this extraordinary band, just sit down with their most extraordinary album.

Rubber Soul

Posted on by

Almost as soon as the ‘Help!’ movie hit the theatres of the world, the Beatles set off on what is up there in the top five or ten most iconic tours by a band ever. Personally, I’d put it at number 1, but there will be arguments for the Rolling Thunder Revue and at least one of the Zeppelin tours, and so on. But I need only mention two of the venues on that tour to begin to explain why it’s so significant. On August 15th and 16th 1965, The Beatles played Shea Stadium in New York, and on the 29th and 30th, they played the Hollywood Bowl. If you’re in this thread, you’ve seen at least some of the Shea Stadium footage, and it’s nuts.

On the first night, there were 56,000 people crammed in, with the band barely visible on a puny-looking riser in front of the pitcher’s mound. Even without the screaming masses, the sound was pitiful – no-one had ever considered the logistics of amplifying a band’s sound enough so it could be heard in the back row of an outdoor stadium with an audience the size of a mid-sized town all screaming at them. The only way to properly hear what it had sounded like was to tune in to the Ed Sullivan show in September and watch the recording. Sound at the Hollywood Bowl was better, partly because it has a great natural acoustic, and partly because even at the back of that vast auditorium, you’re still close enough to be able to identify which Beatle is which. The live album, partly made up of tracks from the 1965 shows, is worth a listen, as is – and I know I’m repeating myself here – the soundtrack to Ron Howard’s documentary.

Mercifully, the band – revelling in the level of control they had gradually acquired – chose to spend the rest of the year writing and recording songs rather than playing inaudible concerts in larger and larger venues. The result is not only the 14 songs on ‘Rubber Soul’, but the double A side single released on the same day, ‘We Can Work it Out’ and ‘Day Tripper’:

In some respects, this is the first actual Beatles album. Everything which had gone before was either a mixture of originals and covers at the record company’s request, or film soundtracks. In America, the situation was even more dire, with a dozen albums floating around with the band’s name on them, but with little or no input from the people who actually made the music. ‘Rubber Soul’ changes all that. The band (and I’m not being naive here, they were absolutely on a deadline to have something out before Christmas) went in to Abbey Road deliberately to make an album; something few, if any, rock bands had ever done before. Everything about this is on their terms now, from the cover to the running order, to the instrumentation and arrangements. George Martin is a co-conspirator in it all, but he’s no longer calling the shots; all four Beatles are in full control now. The result is something which is so obviously epoch-making now that its hard to even imagine how it was received at the time. The genius of it is that there’s enough of the old way of doing things left that everything new is coming from a familiar place: the regulation 14 tracks? All present and correct. The publicists blurb and general clutter on the back of the sleeve? Absolutely. Roughly 15 minutes of music on each side? Well, there are a couple of slightly longer songs, but pretty much, yes. It looks like an LP record from 1963 did, but it sounds like the future.

Consider the front cover. The stories about it are well-worn; the elongated image the result of the cardboard it was projected on to falling over, the proto-psychedelic logo the result of nothing more than a graphic designer trying to replicate the shape of the sap of a rubber tree when it is tapped; even the decision to leave the band name off – hugely controversial, of course, but by the end of 1965 you’d have been hard pressed to find any sentient being in the world who couldn’t tell you who those four were, even in a distorted image. But the name of the band isn’t the only thing missing from the front cover. Gone, too is the near-ubiquitous white bar at the top. This isn’t, by a long chalk, the first album not to feature it – even ‘Beatles For Sale’ hides the white part – but after this, it’s impossible to imagine a serious rock album which featured the record company and the band name in a dead space at the top of the cover image, unless it was being done in a knowingly ironic way. ‘Rubber Soul’ changed the way we bought albums because it was no longer enough to simply flick through the bins without really seeing the whole sleeve; now you had to stop and look at each one individually; you had to pay attention to the design to figure out what you were looking at, and you had to pull the thing out of the stack to flip it over if the name of the band wasn’t in a prominent position. It may not have been deliberate, but for the next 20 years, spotty herberts in record shops had a way of looking for new albums, and that happened because ‘Rubber Soul’ changed how albums worked.

And all this before we hear a note of the music.

Now, in keeping with the previous posts, there should be a mention of what was happening in the record stores of North America. Capitol had filled the gap between ‘Help!’ and ‘Rubber Soul’ by releasing six singles at once – essentially, they had reclaimed the rights to all that early stuff which had originally gone out on Vee-Jay, and decided that it was about time they made some money from them. So, just as the band were turning the musical corner, their US record label were turning the clock back. Not content with that, they decided that ‘Rubber Soul’ just had too many tracks on it, and pulled four of them – including ‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Nowhere Man’ – adding ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ and ‘It’s Only Love’. The result is an album which millions of people love, but which definitely isn’t the one the Beatles had in mind. To be fair, opening with ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ and ‘Norwegian Wood’ is effective, but to me it totally misses the point of the original running order.

OK, I can avoid this no longer. It is the first properly essential rock album, and while you could swap the two single tracks in for a couple of the more ‘old style Beatles’ tracks (and have hours of lively debate trying to agree which two should go), you shouldn’t, and here’s why:

‘Rubber Soul’ is a statement; a profound and deliberate statement of intent by a band who have understood just how much power they now hold, and who could have churned out pop songs until even their bank managers were complaining that it was all too much. Instead, they now had the power and the freedom to properly explore just what they were capable of. Several (but not as many as you might think) bands who came after them tried the same trick, only a tiny handful managed to improve as they went on experimenting, and only this one changed the world while they did it. It’s a horrible cliche, but everything really did change after this, and it changed two minutes and 37 seconds into side one of ‘Rubber Soul’ when George Harrison picks up Lennon’s guitar melody at the start of ‘Norwegian Wood’ on an instrument no-one had properly heard before. Today, you’ve heard it a million times, you know what’s coming and you hum along without giving it a second thought. In early December of 1965, you heard that for the first time and if you didn’t think ‘What the actual fuck is going on?’ it’s only because you’d lost the power of coherent thought altogether.

So powerful are so many of these songs that it’s easy to overlook the handful of less well-known ones – ‘You Won’t See Me’ with it’s alternating stress pattern between the lead and harmony vocals; ‘The Word’ prefiguring the summer of 1967 without anyone noticing; ‘What Goes On’ featuring a first writing credit for one Richard Starkey (“about five words”), and ‘If I Needed Someone’ proving that George was as interested in the structures of Indian music as he was in learning how to play the sitar. Yet all the way through the album you are never more than a couple of minutes away from a riff, chorus or lyric which is etched into the cultural consciousness of the entire world: ‘Drive My Car’ gives us a way in, sounding like a familiar Beatles song although with more going on than before, including the ‘beep beep’ line which was the Radio 1 traffic jingle when I was a lad. ‘Norwegian Wood’ is an entire essay all to itself (I’m pausing only to note that once again, everything you knew about this band and popular music has been stood on its ear in a gnat’s hair over two minutes); ‘Nowhere Man’ pulls the curtain aside on Lennon’s inner turmoil while entertaining us with a gloriously catchy melody; there’s ‘Michelle’, ‘Girl’, ‘I’m Looking Through You’, and then…

If ‘Yesterday’ is the song which Paul McCartney will be remembered for above all the others, then ‘In My Life’ ought to be the same for John Lennon. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to it; how often I’ve hummed along without really thinking about it, and how much more it has meant to me as I’ve grown older – how someone so young could capture that exact feeling so clearly, so succinctly, is beyond me. Oh, and it’s also the track I wheel out whenever I hear the ‘Ringo was an average drummer’ line – just listen to the way he controls the whole song, just behind the beat when he needs to give Lennon space, and gently encouraging him through the emotional honesty of it all. Can you hear the edits in the sped-up piano interlude? Yes, and I don’t care. It’s easily in my top five Beatles songs, probably my top two. Genius needs no explanation; no apology.

There will – astoundingly – be better albums to come, but nothing matches this for sheer impact. To be able to reach this level of craft and consistency just three years after blasting through the recording of ‘Please Please Me’ in a day is almost supernatural. You know how people say The Beatles were the greatest band of all time? This is why.

Help!

Posted on by

The Beatles needed a holiday. United Artists needed a film. What better way to resolve these issues than by combining the two? Surprisingly, given what we’ve seen so far, there was no touring at all between the end of the run of Christmas shows and June, when they set off to tour France, Italy and Spain. in the meantime, they spent time making a film, and in Ringo’s case, getting married. The relative restfulness of this period allowed them not only to recharge the batteries, but also to spend time crafting new songs. Filming was scheduled for places the band had never been to, although the demands of scheduling meant that Bermuda was not a whole lot warmer than the Alps, in spite of the summer wardrobes.

If you’ve never seen ‘Help!’ I recommend it, although with some caveats. It is relentlessly daft, and – let’s be honest – not very well acted. There was more than enough budget, so not only was it filmed on location, it was – gasp – in colour! The story is ridiculous and owes more than a little to the Marx Brothers, while the boys are definitely channelling the Goon Show, although most of their acting is being done through a haze of pot smoke. Famously, they were all pretty much off their faces for the whole thing, and part of the reason it’s a bit patchy is that Dick Lester was left to make the best of whatever takes he could salvage from the general giggling and silliness. Oh, and if you are going to watch it, you should be aware that Leo McKern, John Bluthal, Eleanor Bron and a host of other perfectly respectable British actors spend the entire film in odd, only just this side of offensive, parodic Indian accents. No-one notices or comments because, hey, it was the Sixties.

Other notable elements – Lennon had been out in the Alps for a couple of weeks before filming started, and he can more or less ski; the others, not so much. He also shoehorns in a pretty blatant piece of product placement, ostentatiously reading his own book ‘A Spaniard in the Works’. There’s also a scene in an Indian restaurant (more stalwart Brits playing the staff, although without even bothering to try the accents) in which George Harrison is introduced to the sitar. We’ll be hearing more of that.

Meanwhile, things had been pretty quiet on the record-releasing front, even in America, where only one album, ‘Beatles VI’ came out between the start of the year and the release of ‘Help!’. Confusingly, it was the seventh Capitol release, and the ninth overall (and we still haven’t got to the one with the famous cover). It is, as with most of the previous releases, a cobbling-together of bits which hadn’t yet seen the light of day in the US, including ‘Bad Boy’, which was only released in the US, for some reason. The only activity in the UK charts were two EPs, called, with startling originality, ‘Beatles for Sale’ and ‘Beatles for Sale 2’. There was no new music on either, and but for the continued churning out of press releases, you might have been forgiven for wondering if all was well in the world of the Beatles.

The first new material since ‘Beatles For Sale’ appeared in April – ‘Ticket To Ride’ shot to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. I haven’t been doing B-sides, but I do think this one is worth your time – ‘Yes It Is’ is a significant musical departure in that it’s in an unusual time signature and features some astoundingly complex three-part harmonies:

As a taste of what was to come, the two tracks cranked Beatlemania back up to where it had been, but also indicated that perhaps the rest had done its job, in that they were clearly creating terrific songs again. With the film and album completed, and pausing only to collect their MBEs (awarded, among some controversy, for services to exports) they set off around Europe. The next (and perhaps most famous of all) tour was lined up for August, but that will have to wait…

Meanwhile, as you’d expect, the ‘Help!’ album in the US is – exactly as ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was – a different beast from the UK version. Released by Capitol (no idea what happened to the UA licensing deal), it features only the seven soundtracked songs and excerpts from the orchestral score by Ken Thorne, which means that there are orchestral versions of some of the ‘Hard Day’s Night’ songs, plus a cheeky rip-off of the James Bond theme. Of course, this means the ‘Help!’ in the US does not feature the UK album’s most famous song.

Divorced from the film, what does ‘Help!’ the album sound like?

Well, put yourself in the place of someone who has been waiting anxiously since December to see if the bubble has burst, or if they’re back on form. ‘Ticket to Ride’ had been promising, but could they really still do it? Drop the needle on side 1, and all doubts are banished with that extraordinary explosion of sound. It may have been a genuine cry for help, but the decision to dress it up in the clothes of the early songs gives it a life all its own; it’s only after you’ve learned all the words and are singing along at the top of your voice that you begin to hear what it’s actually about.

As with ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, the first side is the film soundtrack, but it covers even more bases, from Harrison’s sound experiments to Lennon’s direct channeling of Bob Dylan. The skiffle of ‘Another Girl’ leads directly into two more Beatles classics, after which..

After which we flip it over and drum our fingers impatiently while Ringo gets the only just bearable ‘Act Naturally’ out of the way. Most of the rest of side 2 is not as well known – partly because they’re not in the soundtrack, and didn’t get the exposure, and partly because they are utterly overshadowed to the point of obscurity by one of the greatest songs ever written.

‘Yesterday’ is problematic only because you’ve heard it so often that you’re numb to its charms, so I’d recommend taking it out of its context here, strapping on some decent noise-cancelling headphones and trying to listen to it as if you’d never heard it before. It’s properly spine-tingling, and the most clear indication there has yet been that this is so much more than just a pop group. Paul McCartney is, of course, the only Beatle on the track – the decision to add just a string quartet was a brave one, but it marks the beginning of the understanding among all of them that the needs of the song would come first, and is just another step on the elevation of The Beatles to something no other band has ever achieved. Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed it clocks in at two minutes and six seconds. There are songs which haven’t even cleared their throat in that time.

Before moving on, reflect on the fact that ‘Yesterday’ was recorded in the week McCartney turned 23.

Seriously, 23.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, go back and listen to just the run from ‘It’s Only Love’ to ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’. Brilliant, aren’t they? You can skip ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’; it’s disposable and only there to appeal to the US market. And ultimately, for me, the two covers are the reason this doesn’t get full marks. In fact, I’d suggest that with a bit of thought and some rearranging of the track listing, this could have been as perfect as the next couple of albums – but as it stands, it’s pretty damn close, because it sounds like 1965, and there’s really only one other album which does that.

Oh, and one other fun fact – the four semaphore signs on the front don’t spell ‘H E L P’ as you might expect, but ‘N U J V’ because it looked better. The US cover has them in a different order…

Beatles for Sale

Posted on by

Following the release of the Hard Day’s Night albums, everything just got cranked up a notch or two more. A significant proportion of the remainder of 1964 was spent on the road – not, as had been the case only a year before, slogging round the ABCs, Gaumonts and Music Halls of the UK, but all over the map, including Australia and New Zealand, and a month in the US consolidating their popularity there while on at least one occasion, refusing to go on until the audience was desegregated. The Beatles generally flew everywhere, but air travel wasn’t what it is today – a trip to Australia required stopovers and one can only imagine the level of exhaustion they were all permanently living with.

It bears pointing out that a Beatles show, largely inaudible to the audience over the screams in any case, was pretty much unchanged from their ‘variety bill’ days – you got about 30 minutes of music, and that’s your lot. For many people, the price of admission basically covered being in the same room as the band while their underpowered amps struggled to make themselves heard over the racket the fans made. Having said that, they were a terrific live band, and if you’ve not seen Ron Howard’s documentary ‘Eight Days A Week’, I highly recommend it – he and Giles Martin managed to extricate the music from the general feverish yelling, and a lot of it sounds as good as you’d hope.

There is another radical change coming, and it was at least partly driven by the band meeting Bob Dylan. Not only were they famously introduced to Bob’s herbal relaxant of choice, but they all – Lennon in particular – were made aware that there was more than one way of going about this music business thing. Dylan was in some ways the antithesis of the Beatles at this point – serious music for intellectuals and Beatniks, as opposed to pop music for teenyboppers, but both realised that there was a lot more overlap than there appeared on the surface. It’s around this time that the Beatles stopped wearing collar and tie to every event, and properly let their hair grow out. It’s after meeting Dylan that they begin to explore more abstract lyrics and more complex music, while Dylan began to work with a band, electric instruments and started dressing a little less bohemian. The meeting has acquired mythical status over the years, but there’s a reason for that.

For all that they had already been worked into the ground, there was a need, on both sides of the Atlantic, for some new product to sell. Capitol kicked things off with the sixth Beatles album of the year, ‘The Beatles Story’. As if to prove that people would buy any old tat with the Fab Four on it, this was not an album of songs, but a spoken word telling of the story so far. A couple of weeks later, some of the songs from ‘Beatles For Sale’ came out on “Beatles ’65” – it didn’t include ‘Eight Days A Week’ for some reason, but did include the UK non-album single, released to promote the new UK album, ‘I Feel Fine’, complete with that feedback sound which seemed to mark a change in the way the band used the studio:

George Martin had noted the year before that there seemed to be a ‘bottomless pit’ of new songs, but the truth was that at the end of 1964, there was very little left in the tank for anyone. As a result, ‘Beatles For Sale’ remains that one album you can’t quite remember; the largely unloved runt of the litter whose cover you can never quite picture clearly, unlike all the others. It sold – as they all did – in vast amounts, but I doubt it’s the first one anyone reaches for when they feel like some early Beatles.

Which is a shame, because there’s some great stuff on here – it’s a proper transitional album, with songs like ‘No Reply’ and ‘I’m A Loser’ adding proper storytelling to the established Beatles song structure, and several of the songs exploiting minor keys and mournful lyrics; I think you can hear all the way through it hints of what’s to come, and if you compare it to the bright pop music of 12 months before, it’s clear just how far everything has come. Of course, the reason it’s not as successful in retrospect is that its padded out with filler, and not particularly good filler – ‘I’ll Follow The Sun’ is promising, but it really does sound like what it is, which is very early McCartney trying to figure out how to write a ballad, and the covers, which are only there because EMI wanted something out in time for Christmas, are plodding and uninspired for the most part – McCartney’s tortured vocal on ‘Kansas City’ works, as does Harrison’s slightly anxious sounding one on ‘Everybody’s Trying to be my Baby’, but they had grown out of covering Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly, and their hearts aren’t in it.

Its title is shameless; it might just as well have been called ‘Some Beatles Product’, and it marks the first time a Beatles album isn’t an unqualified improvement on the one which came before it. However, it really does need to be taken in context – this is the last gasp of an utterly drained band who had spent the previous twelve months conquering the known world – pretty much unknown in the USA at the start of the year, they ended it having had seven albums and at least eighteen singles in the charts, many of them number ones, and having set several records which still stand. 1964 was utterly insane and given the run of albums they are about to embark on, we can forgive one which doesn’t quite land.