Rock reminiscences of an 80-year-old in 2036 (Ch 4)

 

Chapter 4

‘Sjoe, Gramps, that was a marathon bit of music-based reminiscing,’ says Tim, at 16 already almost a fully grown man.

‘But, as you said, you’ve only just begun.’

‘Yes, guys, this was the foundation upon which an empire of musical magic was built, and it was often not reflected in the hit parades, not even in the UK or USA.

‘I’ve just been checking out Bruce Springsteen, for example, and see that his first two albums had mediocre success, but even his breakthrough LP, Born To Run, from 1975, only reached No 3, or #3 as they prefer, in the US and No 17 in the UK. Yet without that eponymous hit single, which itself only reached No 23 on the Billboard Hot 100, who knows whether Springsteen would ever have honed his skills and got the breaks to turn him into The Boss, one of rock’s superstars of the next several decades? So much seemed to depend on good fortune, timing, and so on, in the pioneering days of rock music.’

‘So,’ says Tim, ‘let me guess who you’ll start your fully fledged investigation with. I mean, I think I know who I would choose as the band or individual who, for you, led the way to unlocking the outpouring of music which characterised those decades. And I know it isn’t Elvis, big as he apparently was in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s.’

‘Well, Tim, who, based on what I’ve said thus far, would you suggest I would choose as the catalyst for the rock revolution?’

‘It has to be the Beatles,’ says Tim.

‘Of course you’re right,’ I reply.

‘Brace yourself, kids, or teens, because this is where the fun really begins. You may think you know a bit about the Beatles, but even I was surprised at how much I didn’t know the more I read. I’ll break it down into a few manageable bites, starting with a summary, then going into the guts of each of the albums they produced during the seven or eight years that they ruled the rock roost.

‘Again, I am taking this from that infamous blog I worked on during the day in 2008 and 2009, while working as a night subeditor on the Herald. So I often worked about a 16-hour day. This is what I wrote back in 2008.’

***

At what age do you become a sentient, thinking individual? Probably from the time when, in retrospect, you can remember yourself in relation to events that happened to you. I can vaguely recall a first visit to the then Rhodesia in 1960, when I was four, and have far greater recollection of a second trip – this time by car as opposed to rail – to visit our relatives there in 1965.

But when it comes to music, it is the Beatles who made the first major impact on my young psyche. With two older brothers – a year-and-a-half and three-and-a-half years my senior – I was often hostage to what they did. And the eldest, Ian, was clearly a big music fan from well before his teens, because I think we started getting into the Beatles music almost from the moment it started happening. The vehicle for that was the radio, and later their 7-singles, which became a relatively cheap way of acquiring music in those days when tape decks and cassettes were not readily available. But it also was a question of pride. People wanted to own a bit of groups like the Beatles. They wanted to be part of what became known as Beatlemania, the wave of obsessed behaviour which beset fans around the globe wherever the Beatles performed. Of course they came nowhere near South Africa. Their music, however, was with us from the outset, and I must have grown up hearing those very first hits – From Me To You and I Want To Hold Your Hand – virtually at the same time as people in the UK and US were listening to them.

Any young person living today should do themselves a favour and acquire the full set of Beatles albums, from the very first, Please Please Me, till the final two, Abbey Road and Let it Be, which were recorded virtually simultaneously. They will discover a group who, over 10 years, from their formation in 1960 till they broke up a decade later, with little doubt had a greater impact on modern popular music and culture than any other artist.

But they would not have happened at all, in the way they did, had the groundwork not been laid in the 1950s by the pioneers of rock and roll in the US. And those men, by and large, were black. John Lennon and other youngsters growing up in Liverpool, and elsewhere in the UK, came under the influence of people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, whose records were entering the country through busy ports like Liverpool and London. So they started trying to emulate that sound, as the white boy, Elvis Presley, had done in the US in the late 1950s. What the Beatles did better than anyone else was to play so tightly, and with such strong attention to harmony, that their stage shows were often exact replicas of what they did in the recording studio. And of course their image as mop-topped, clean-cut young men with a sharp wit and incredible energy, captured the imagination of the youth worldwide. For the first time, the world witnessed screaming, hysterical teenage girls completely caught up in Beatlemania. It must have been terrifying. We were fortunate to miss it here in sunny old apartheid SA. But luckily we got the best of the Beatles through their hit singles, and later their many brilliant albums.

Anyone listening to those albums for the first time will be astounded at how the band developed. It started as a simple rhythm-and-blues/rock and roll band – in Germany they were apparently called white negroes – but as the decade unfolded, the combined genius of four gifted, and very different, individuals produced a body of work which – and I’ll make this comparison again and again – has to be compared to the legacy of the world’s great visual artists, from the likes of Rembrandt through to Delecroix and Monet, Manet, Van Gogh and Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. People will look back, as I am already doing now, long after all of us are dead, and marvel at how those four men, guided all the time by the “fifth Beatle”, their producer George Martin, conjured up so many brilliant songs, each executed with such precision and attention to detail.

And to think it may never have happened. Paul McCartney is reported to have said that if National Service in the UK hadn’t been scrapped when it was – as the group, the Beatles, was being born – it is unlikely they would have got together, since they were of varying ages. Indeed, their emergence depended a lot on chance encounters. They were only “discovered” by George Martin at EMI after failing to find another record label which would give them a trial. And it was another chance encounter which saw Brian Epstein become their manager, and lead their quest for a recording contract in 1962.

Martin was a producer who did “comedy records” and headed the Parlophone label at EMI. Martin wanted to hear the band and invited them to London’s Abbey Road studios for an audition on June 6, 1962. He had apparently not been very impressed by their demo recordings, but, according to Wikipedia, instantly liked them as people when he met them. “He concluded that they had raw musical talent, but said (in later interviews) that what made the difference for him that day was their wit and humour in the studio.”

And it is surely this, their collective sense of humour – a bit like an impromptu Monty Python sketch – which shines through even on their early albums when they are in effect often only doing covers of great ’50s rock and roll songs like Roll Over Beethoven (a Chuck Berry classic, though not a classical tune by any means) or Twist And Shout, a Lennon-McCartney song that is clearly a product of those early ’60s when in order to succeed in the genre the song had to have an obvious rock-and-roll or R&B feel to it – and be suitable for dancing. With Lennon and McCartney evidently having collaborated closely in composing virtually all their early hits, ably assisted by Martin, the Beatles in those early days seemed to roll along as a tightly knit unit. I know McCartney has gone on record as saying he would like to see all those tunes he mainly wrote with his name listed first in the credits – McCartney-Lennon – and I suppose he has a point. But, while McCartney was clearly the driving force behind much of the group’s success, I see the listing of Lennon first as a purely alphabetical arrangement which reads and sounds better than the other way round. Indeed, the bickering over who did what song is really irrelevant to the masses of Beatles fans, who, if they are anything like me, are more interested in the fact that four copiously gifted people were able to keep going at such a frenetic pace for 10 years during which they produced such a magnificent body of work. And, as the later albums started emerging, so too did the individual talents of the protagonists, with George Harrison, and to a far lesser extent Ringo Starr, also providing songs which will remain icons in the history of modern music.

Just how big were the Beatles? Wikipedia says they were the “best-selling popular musical act of the 20th century”. In the UK alone, says Wikipedia, they released more than 40 different singles, albums, and EPs (extended play records, somewhere between a 7-single and an LP) that reached number one. “This commercial success was repeated in many other countries: EMI estimated that by 1985, the band had sold over one billion discs or tapes worldwide.” They were also the top selling artists of all time in America based on US sales of singles and albums.

And they provided a stepping stone for the other bands constituting the “British Invasion” of the US in the mid-1960s. Wikipedia says they “helped to pioneer more advanced, multi-layered arrangements in pop music”, which was clearly thanks in large measure to George Martin’s genius. Of course they also had a major impact on the clothes and hairstyles of the youth and, through their commitment to peace, contributed in large measure to the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Even we in apartheid South Africa came under their spell – which just shows how strong it must have been. And that influence would continue well into the ’70s, thanks to the solo work of John, Paul and George and the legacy of all that great music from the Sixties.

In one of the biggest gaffes in musical history, Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1962 approached a senior Decca Records A&R executive called Dick Rowe for a recording contract. He reportedly turned him down with the immortal words: “Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr Epstein.” Oops!

With Epstein employing amazing marketing strategies in the US, by the time I Want To Hold Your Hand was released in early January, 1964, Beatlemania in the States was rife. The record sold a million copies in 10 days. So when the Fab Four arrived at JFK on February 7, 1964, they were totally amazed at the hysterical reception they received from fans. A record-breaking 73 million viewers – about 40% of the US population at the time – watched their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9. Incredibly, during the week of April 4, the Beatles held the top five places on the Billboard Hot 100, something that has never been repeated. They had a further 7 songs at lower positions, with a total of 12% of the chart comprising Beatles songs. Bizarrely, they were blissfully unaware of their popularity in the US, and on arrival at JFK initially thought the crowds were there to greet someone else!

Another milestone event occurred on August 15, 1964, when the Beatles performed the first stadium concert in the history of rock. They played for a crowd of 55 600 at New York’s Shea Stadium – and later admitted they could hardly hear themselves because of the screaming and cheering. Small wonder they later gave up live performances.

They did their last concert for paying fans at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966. Sadly, only half the concert, which lasted just under 35 minutes, was recorded, due to a technical mishap. They then concentrated on recording music, with their epochal eighth album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, being produced after a 129-day recording session at Abbey Road studios from November 24, 1966.

In yet another first, on June 25, 1967, the Beatles became the first band to be globally transmitted on television, with some 400 million people watching their segment of the first-ever worldwide TV satellite hook-up, a show called Our World. The Beatles were transmitted live from Abbey Road studios, with their new song All You Need Is Love recorded live during the show.

Abbey Road was the last album they recorded – in the summer of 1969. When they finished I Want You (She’s So Heavy) on August 20, it was the last time all four would work together in the same studio.

While Lennon announced his departure to the rest of the group on September 20, 1969, he was persuaded not to say anything publicly. The final Beatles recording sessions were on January 3 and 4, 1970, and produced their last new song, I Me Mine, for the Let It Be album. Lennon wasn’t present. McCartney publicly announced the break-up of the band on April 10, 1970. It was like there had been a death in everyone’s family.

As a measure of just how popular the band still is, 450,000 copies of Anthology 1 were sold on its first day of release on November 21, 1995, the highest volume of single-day sales ever for an album.

Then in 2000, when the compilation album,1, comprising almost every number-one single they had from 1962 to 1970, was released, it sold 3,6 million copies in its first week and more than 12 million in three weeks worldwide. This made it the fastest-selling album of all time and the biggest-selling album of the year 2000. The album also reached number one in the United States and 33 other countries. And as long as George Martin and Paul McCartney are around, they are going to continue exploiting that rich legacy.

But how did it all begin? While the story of the Beatles’origins is part of rock legend by now, for those who, like me, kind of never really cared, it is perhaps worth a little diversion back in time, to 1957, a year after I was born, when Lennon formed a skiffle group called The Quarrymen while he was at the Quarry Bank Grammar School. Wikipedia says he and the band met a guitarist called Paul McCartney at a church fete in Woolton on July 6, 1957. At the time of writing, that’s just over 50 years ago! It was to be a meeting, as we have seen, which changed the shape of modern popular music forever. On February 6, 1958, another young guitarist, George Harrison, saw the group perform at another hall in Liverpool. McCartney knew Harrison, who was just a year younger, because they travelled to the Liverpool Institute on the same bus from their homes in Speke. In March that year McCartney, says Wikipedia, insisted Harrison join the Quarrymen as lead guitarist. Lennon evidently thought he was too young. Lennon’s art school mate Stuart Sutcliffe followed as a bass player.

So how did they get their name? Wikipedia says the Quarrymen became Johnny and The Moondogs, Long John and the Beatles, The Silver Beetles, and finally, on August 17, 1960, they became simply The Beatles. Wikipeida says there are “many theories as to the origin of the name and its unusual spelling”. Lennon is “usually credited” with having come up with it as a combination of “beetles” – in recognition of Buddy Holly’s band The Crickets – and the obvious music-based word, “beat”. Lennon is also said to have later jokingly observed that it was a joke – Beat-less. Cynthia Lennon later said the name was arrived at during a drinking session, and if you turn the name around you get “les beat”, “which sounded French and cool”. Lennon, in typically zany style, also told Mersey Beat magazine back in 1961 that the name “came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, ‘From this day on you are Beatles with an A’”.

Anyway, by early 1960, the band, sans Ringo, was a going concern. And that summer they were “hired to tour the north-east of Scotland as a back-up band with singer Johnny Gentle”, whoever he was. One Tommy Moore was recruited as a stand-in drummer. And when the tour was over, on their way back to Liverpool, their van ploughed into a stationary vehicle. Only Moore was seriously injured, losing some teeth and needing stitches. Poor bugger. Being quite a lot older than the rest, he followed his girlfriend’s advice and left the band – set to become the greatest show on earth – and went back to work in a bottling factory as a forklift truck driver. Eina! Ouch! Eish!

Drummers are often considered necessary incidentals in rock bands. Not necessarily musical, they have to have lots of energy and be able to keep a beat. Norman Chapman only lasted a few weeks before being called up for National Service. Fortunately, conscription was not extended, because, as stated earlier, McCartney believes if any one of the Beatles had been caught in its web the band would not have happened. Booked to play in clubs on the notorious Reeperbahn in Hamburg, Germany, they now needed a new sticks man. So on August 16, 1960, McCartney invited Pete Best, whom he’d seen playing with The Blackjacks, to join the band. The Beatles had also played at the Casbah Club, a cellar club operated by Best’s mother, Mona, in Liverpool’s West Derby. The Beatles’ “unofficial manager”, Allan Williams, said Best played “not too cleverly”, but was “passable”.

So there they were, in Hamburg, West Germany, 15 years after the end of the Second World War and at the height of the Cold War, with the menacing threat of the Soviet Union to the east always no doubt present. They played in the Indra and Kaiserkeller bars – most unlikely sounding places for a bunch of Merseyside Poms. But it was here that they honed their skills, playing “six or seven hours a night, seven nights a week”, according to Wikipedia. By the end of the year, most had been hounded out of the country. First Harrison was deported for lying about his age. Then McCartney and Best started a small fire in living quarters they were quitting for better rooms. They were charged with arson and deported. With the rest of the band gone, Lennon and Sutcliffe joined them back in Liverpool in December of 1960. On March 21 the following year, 1961, they played their first concert at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, before returning to Hamburg in April. There, says Wikipedia, they were approached by singer Tony Sheridan to perform as his backing band for recordings he was doing for the German Polydor Records label. My Bonnie was released on October 31 and appeared on the German charts as by Tony Sheridan and The Beat Brothers. This, however, says Wikipedia, was “a collective name used for whoever happened to be in Sheridan’s backup band at any given time”. The US press took notice, and early in 1962 Cashbox cites My Bonnie as being the debut of a “new rock and roll team, Tony Sheridan and the Beatles”.

Then it was time for another would-be Beatle to depart, on the brink of massive fame. Wikipedia says Sutcliffe decided to stay on in Germany when the band returned to Liverpool, “so McCartney took over bass duties”. And that was surely a masterstroke, given the pivotal role which McCartney’s bass was to play in the future. But still the Beatles’ German gigs continued. Their third stay in Hamburg, says Wikipedia, was from April 13 till May 31, 1962, at The Star Club. And it was during this time that they learnt that Sutcliffe had died from a brain haemorrhage.

At this point, clearly, The Beatles were still a struggling outfit playing long sessions at club gigs wherever they could find them. Then enter one Brian Epstein, manager of the record department at the North End Music Store (NEMS), his family’s furniture and music equipment store. In 1962 he took over as The Beatles’ manager, and “led their quest for a recording contract”. It was during this quest that that senior Decca man turned Epstein down with that infamous “guitar groups are on the way out” error of judgment. But EMI, it seems, were almost equally out of touch. Wikipedia notes that three EMI record producers, contacted via marketing executive Ron White – Norrie Paramor, Walter Ridley and Norman Newell – all “declined to record The Beatles”. EMI’s fourth staff producer could not be contacted because he was on holiday at the time. His name was George Martin.

Epstein was able to get Sid Coleman, who ran EMI’s publishing arm, to listen to the early Beatles demo tapes, and Coleman suggested he take the tapes to Martin, who, Coleman explained, “does comedy records”, and headed the Parlophone label at EMI. Martin had not been much impressed by the demo recordings, but nevertheless invited the band for an audition on June 6 of that year at London’s Abbey Road studios. While conceding they had raw musical talent, says Wikipedia, Martin was most taken by their wit and humour. But he did not like Best, who he later said was unable to keep time. Best, a good-looking lad and popular among fans, refused to adopt the “distinctive hairstyle” as part of “their unified look”, and was sacked by Epstein on August 16, 1962, “under direction of the band members”. Richard Starkey, at the time the drummer for a top Merseybeat group, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, was immediately recruited. Known as Ringo Starr, the Beatles had met and performed with him previously in Hamburg. Indeed, Wikipedia notes that the first recordings of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr together were made back in October 1960 – done privately in Hamburg while acting as a backing group for singer Lu Walters. While Martin had hired a session drummer for the Beatles’ first EMI recording session on September 4, 1962, Starr played in their second session on September 11.

And the lads were not set for instant wealth, even if they became relatively popular. Wikipedia says their recording contract was fairly standard. They would be paid one penny – shared between the four of them – for every single sold, and half a penny for those sold abroad. In their publishing contract, each writer would get 50% of gross monies received. But first they had to record something worth selling. And things didn’t start auspiciously, with their first session on June 6 failing to provide a releasable recording. The next sessions, however, produced the group’s first minor UK hit – Love Me Do, which reached No 17 in the UK, and topped the US singles chart over 18 months later. But isn’t that a great debut song? Love Me Do is unmistakably the Beatles, not just some early fumbling effort by a band that would become great. It was a great track. And of course then the Beatles’ sausage-machine-like production line, oiled by Martin, kicked rapidly into overdrive. They “swiftly” followed up with their second single, Please Please Me, and three months later their first album, also Please Please Me, had been recorded.

Their first televised performance was on People and Places, which was transmitted live from Manchester by Granada Television on October 17, 1962. And the marketing vehicle was soon set in motion, with The Beatles Book, a monthly magazine devoted to the band beginning publication in August 1963. It would run through 77 issues till the end of 1969, says Wikipedia.

Incredibly, the US up till the advent of the Beatles had been virtually infertile soil for British acts. Initially EMI-owned Capitol Records, Parlophone’s US counterpart, wanted nothing to do with early UK hits Love Me Do, Please Please Me and From Me To You in the States. This says Wikipedia, though adding that “citation is needed”, was “partly because no British act had ever yet had a sustained commercial impact on American audiences”. A small Chicago label, Vee-Jay Records, reportedly issued the singles in a complex deal over the rights to another performer’s masters, and Please Please Me was first heard on US radio in late February 1963. But it seemed to fizzle. In August 1963, the Philadelphia-based Swan label released She Loves You “which also failed to receive airplay”. One gets the feeling the US was reluctant to unleash this great band on its youth, for fear of the whirlwind this would generate. In fact, the first reaction when the US youth saw the band was … laughter. Wikipedia says Dick Clark’s television show American Bandstand showed the Beatles performing She Loves you, and US teenagers laughing when they saw the lads’ haircuts. Even top radio deejay Murray the K, who played She Loves You on his record revue in October 1963, was met with an “underwhelming response”, says Wikipedia. But it would only be a matter of time before the floodgates opened. Wikipedia says a clip of the Beatles was shown on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite on December 7 1963, and this led to a teenage girl in Washington, D.C. requesting a Beatles song on a local radio station. The station duly obtained an imported copy of I Want To Hold Your Hand to play for her “to an overwhelming response”. Capitol Records’s hand was forced, and it released the song ahead of schedule on December 26. As interest in the band grew, on January 3, 1964, a “grainy film” of the band playing She Loves You was shown on the late-night Jack Paar Programme, “building excitement”, says Wikipedia, “and setting the stage for their first American television live appearance a few weeks later on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 4, 1964”. After keeping the tide at bay, the floodgates were opened, and the British Invasion was launched.

The US, having driven their British rulers out in 1776, was suddenly being recolonised, in the nicest possible way. Well at least that’s what the teenagers felt, especially the plethora of youngsters who would set to work during the 1960s to emulate this wacky group of Liverpudlians. Those small labels, Vee-Jay and Swan Records, capitalised on the rights they had secured to those early singles and reissued the songs, all of which reached the Top 10. They also released numerous albums comprising those early tracks, one of which the Beatles shared with The Four Seasons. But Wikipedia says it has been claimed that when they took on Capitol/EMI to secure full US contractual rights to the Beatles, this contributed to their eventual demise. Needless to say, those early Vee-Jay/Swan albums are today highly sought after. Yet for the next few years, it seems, the US market was hard done by. Wikipedia says different editions of subsequent Beatles albums “with fewer songs per album” were released in the US by Capitol Records. It was only when Sgt Peppers came out that the content was identical in both the US and UK. This pattern was retained for the remainder of their albums.

Epstein obviously knew the US was the market to crack, and once he had persuaded a major label to release their albums, and Ed Sullivan to feature them on his show, it was only a matter of time before the inevitable would happen, and a new word would enter the English language: Beatlemania.

With I Want To Hold Your Hand released on Boxing Day, 1963, it was soon being played on several New York radio stations, selling a million copies in 10 days. When Sullivan hosted the band on February 7, 1964, as noted earlier, about 40% of the population of the United States – some 73 million people – tuned in to watch. Phenomenally, again as noted earlier but it’s worth repeating, by April 4 the Beatles held the top five places on the Billboard Hot Hundred, with a further seven songs in lower positions. This meant they occupied 12% of the chart.

No doubt due to apartheid, they gave South Africa a miss when they embarked on their first tour outside the US and Europe in mid-1964. This took them to Australia and New Zealand. In Adelaide, Australia, reputedly the largest crowd ever to greet them turned up at the Town Hall – over 300 000 people. Bizarrely – and I’m sure they would have turned it down later in their careers – in 1965, on instructions from the Labour government, Queen Elizabeth II bestowed the MBE on the Fab Four, sparking a conservative backlash. Back in the US, as noted, on August 15 that year they performed at the first stadium concert in the history of rock, according to Wikipedia. A crowd of 55 600 packed Shea Stadium in New York for the event, which is well documented in the Beatles Anthology documentary. With the sound coming through the stadium’s public address system, and hordes of teenagers screaming hysterically, the band conceded they were unable to hear themselves play or sing. Nevertheless, the songs seem as tight as ever when heard on the Anthology documentary. However, the group was clearly growing disenchanted with the rigours of touring, dealing with Beatlemania and performing live.

Also documented in Anthology was their narrow escape from the Marcos dictatorship in the Phillipines in July 1966, where they inadvertently offended first lady Imelda by turning down a breakfast invitation. They ended up fleeing to the Manila airport without police protection, with Epstein being forced to hand over all the money they had made on the tour. They flew home to a storm caused by comments Lennon had made in March, when he told British reporter Maureen Cleave that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now”. He was just being brutally honest, his views endorsing my belief that rock music did indeed become a de facto, thought totally unorganised, “religion” for the younger generation. The right-wing backlash in the US was massive, and again is recorded in Anthology. While I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I notice that Wikipedia says that the backlash spread to apartheid South Africa. “Towns across the United States and South Africa started to burn Beatles records in protest.” Small wonder the band wouldn’t touch this part of the world with a barge pole. But in a typically Beatles, though admittedly apocryphal story, the Beatles are reported to have responded that “they’ve gotta buy ’em before they can burn ’em”. Lennon is reported to later have apologised for his remarks ahead of their last US tour.

The end to touring was to mark the beginning of their most productive years – in the recording studio.

August 29, 1966, marks the last time they performed live in concert before paying fans. The show, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, lasted only 35 minutes, with the 30-minute tape used to record it running out midway through the last song. After a three-month break, they returned to Abbey Road Studios on November 24, 1966, to begin work on arguably the most definitive album of the era. It would take 129 days of recording sessions to produce their eighth album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released on June 1, 1967. But, despite the success of this album, and the Beatles’ global exposure as the first band to be shown around the world via satellite, in that show – watched by 400 million – called Our World, problems were brewing. On August 27, 1967, manager Brian Epstein – who was the driving force behind their early success – died of an overdose of sleeping tablets. He was just 32. Suddenly, the band lacked a steadying business brain. Then came the widespread criticism of their TV film, Magical Mystery Tour. Not surprisingly, they looked for some form of escape, and found it in transcendental meditation, which became a big “thing” in the late 1960s hippie era. The Anthology documentary traces their sojourn in Uttar Pradesh, India, in early 1968, where they studied under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Back in London, Lennon and McCartney then flew to New York to announce the formation of Apple Corporation, a supposedly “altruistic business venture”, according to Wikipedia. But the band still had much to contribute, and by mid-1968 they were back in the studio recording yet another seminal work, the double album that became known as the White Album. But did Paul play drums on the album? Yes, evidently Ringo at one staged walked out on the band, which led to Paul recording the drums on Back In The USSR. While McCartney’s attempts to dominate weren’t appreciated, neither, says Wikipedia, was the presence of Yoko Ono at Lennon’s side “through much of the sessions”. Harrison’s difficulties in getting his own songs used on Beatles albums added to the growing sense of estrangement. And when McCartney suggested that the father of his wife, Linda Eastman, manage the Beatles, he found himself isolated, with the others preferring Allen Klein.

Coming out of the Colloseum cinema in East London after watching the matinee of Let It Be, the wind was howling and I was momentarily blinded by some dust. I walked slap into a pole holding a traffic sign. The Beatles were also being jolted into oblivion, and their final live appearance was a fractious, surreal affair on the rooftop of the Apple building in Savile Row, London, on January 30, 1969. Footage of this “happening” was included in the film. And, while many years later people would probably marvel at the fact that they had witnessed the last live Beatles performance, the cops at the time were not amused. Wikipedia says while they were playing, the cops were called out due to noise complaints. The band was asked to end the performance.

And so to their final album, Abbey Road, which was recorded in the northern summer of 1969. “I want you! I want you so bad, it’s driving me mad, it’s driving me mad.” On August 20, 1969, the Beatles got together for the last time to work on this song, I Want You (She’s So Heavy). While Lennon had already told the band he was quitting on September 20, 1969, he did not go public. Lennon, however, did not attend the final Beatles recording sessions on January 3 and 4, 1970, which yielded their last song, I Me Mine.

It took American producer Phil Spector to bring the whole thing to a messy end. In March, 1970, says Wikipeida, he was given the Get Back session tapes. McCartney was incensed when, instead of a “stripped down live studio performance”, he gave the songs his “wall of sound” treatment. McCartney was especially upset at how The Long And Winding Road turned out and tried to halt release of the song. Ever the self-publicist, however, he announced the break-up of the Beatles on April 10, 1970, just a week before releasing his first solo album, McCartney. He had even included pre-release copies of the album along with a self-written interview explaining the end of the Beatles when he made the announcement. Meanwhile, on May 8, 1970, the Spector-produced Let It Be was released, followed soon after by the film. The acrimony continued even as the Beatles folded, with McCartney filing a lawsuit on December 31, 1970, says Wikipedia.

It was then a case of seeing which of the four had the best backlog of songs to make his solo career a success. Lennon’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band came out in 1970 and McCartney’s Ram in 1971. But the stand-out album for me was Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, also from 1970. All three would play prominent roles in rock’s evolution during the 1970s, with McCartney’s group Wings racking up success after success, Lennon producing some memorable solo albums, and Harrison exploring new frontiers in the company of the likes of Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan. When in 1971 it was found that Allen Klein had stolen £5-million from the Beatles’ holdings, Lennon admitted to McCartney that they should have opted for Lee Eastman as manager. This, says Wikipedia, helped to mend their personal relationship. A jam session featuring the two was recorded in 1974 and was bootlegged as A Toot and a Snore. Neither was to know it would be the last time they would record together. I was in an army sick bay in Kimberley with shingles when I heard that Lennon had been shot and killed by Mark David Chapman in New York on December 8, 1980.

The collapse of the Beatles saw the release of a flurry of compilation albums, though only one, The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, their only live album, was sanctioned by the band members. It was produced by George Martin.

The acrimony continued even after Lennon’s 1980 death, with only Harrison and Starr (along with Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono) turning up for the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. McCartney cited “unresolved difficulties” with Harrison, Starr and Lennon’s estate, says Wikipedia.

The Beatles Anthology series of television documentaries ensured that the legend lived on into the 1990s. Released in tandem with it were a couple of Lennon’s unfinished demos, with the remaining three – now seemingly reconciled – combining to produce a full Beatles sound. Free As A Bird (1995) and Real Love (1996) were included in the Anthology CDs. Having caught the documentary series on local TV – miraculously – I do feel the DVDs are a must for any self-respecting Bealtesphile. And, according to Wikipedia, the Anthology collections of CDs from 1995 and ’96 each consist of “two CDs of never-before-released Beatles material”. And that man Klaus Voormann, who knew the lads in their Hamburg days and later performed with Harrison at the Concert for Bangladesh – as well as designing the Revolver cover – directed the Anthology cover concept.

Obviously to have made the impact they did, the Beatles had to be pioneers. Harrison, for instance, became interested in Indian music and bought a sitar in 1965. This he played on the song Norwegian Wood (The Bird Has Flown) which, says Wikipedia, is the first instance of such an instrument being used on a rock record. After then studying the instrument under Ravi Shankar, he used it on other songs, such as Love You Do and Within You Without You. With the help of Martin and other technically gifted staff at EMI, the Beatles used various sound effects, unconventional mic placements, automatic double tracking and vari-speed recording, says Wikipedia. They used other instruments that were “unconventional for rock music at the time”, such as string and brass ensembles, the swarmandel, tape loops and “early electronic instruments including the Mellotron, which was used with flute voices on the intro to Strawberry Fields Forever”.

While both Lennon and McCartney moved the group towards psychedelia in the mid to late 1960s, it was Lennon, notes Wikipedia, who in typical fashion rebuffed all attempts at pretentiousness, saying once that “avant garde is French for bullshit”. Nonetheless, he and McCartney were known to experiment with all the latest electronic equipment. Interestingly, while I had long credited Martin with providing the orchestral scores for some of the group’s best songs, it seems Lennon and McCartney were themselves pioneers in this regard. Wikipedia says starting with the use of a string quartet on Yesterday (arranged by Martin) in 1965, the Beatles pioneered “a modern form of art song, exemplified by the double-quartet string arrangement on Eleanor Rigby (1966), Here, There And Everywhere (1966) and She’s Leaving Home (1967)”. And, who would have guessed, but Wikipedia says the pair’s interest in the music of Bach, of all people, led them to use a piccolo trumpet on Penny Lane and that Mellotron on Strawberry Fields.

But, as with several other groups to be examined later, the band returned to their bluesy roots later in the decade on songs like Yer Blues and Birthday from 1968 and Don’t Let Me Down from 1969.

And they certainly did not let us down. It is a moot point as to whether they could have sustained the group any longer, given that each individual seemed to be desperate to go his own way and do his own thing. But few would deny that those glorious eight or nine years of recording produced arguably the most memorable, and influential, music of the 20th century. To have grown up at the time this was all happening was, I suppose, like being present when any epoch-making event occurs. Our lives were shaped and changed completely by the impact of the Beatles, and all the other wonderful talents which flowered in their wake.

But let’s take a trip down memory lane, as opposed to Penny Lane, and look at each of those albums. As I said, I was about seven years old when the first Beatles number one hit single, From Me To You, burst upon the scene in1963. It was to set the stage, style and standard for the avalanche of hits to come. Each is a nugget in the history of modern music.