The album is not a dead format. I’m very confident about that. I find it strange that people talk about the album as an archaism, as if technology has cruelly shackled us to buying collections of songs rather than just the ones we really want, and it’s taken the digital download to free us. This seems very short-sighted, but then much discussion of popular culture is, driven by the need to make bold statements about the death of this and that. It’s hardly an original observation to note that the 1960s saw a move from a market dominated by single tracks – with B-sides thrown in because the technology happened to work that way – to albums.
Artists and listeners alike chose the album because it offered possibilities that single tracks didn’t. There’s no doubt that digital formats have already changed the way that music is made, sold and heard, and will continue to do so: yet the idea that anyone still clinging to the album is living in the past is for the polemicists. The digital world should free artists and listeners to choose the format we prefer. As long as there are people who appreciate the art of good sequencing – which can make something great out of a bunch of tracks which, on their own, are mostly just good – there will be an audience for tracks lumped together into albums.
One of the key players in defining this art was George Martin. The Beatles didn’t work out the running order for their albums: they left that to Martin and most of the time he did a great job. You can read an account of the thought processes behind the sequencing of Sgt. Pepper in his book Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper, which is fascinating if you are me because, as I have said before, I am preoccupied with album sequencing.
Across The Beatles’ first three albums, Martin’s sequencing is pretty much faultless. However, Beatles For Sale seems to have been more of a challenge. It’s a peculiar collection of tracks, dragged in two different directions by The Beatles’ intensive touring. The original tracks are mostly the kind of low-key acoustic glumness often produced by bands who are a bit sick of being on the road. Meanwhile, the group hadn’t learned any new covers in ages because their short sets were stuffed with their own hits: the days of padding the sets were long behind them. Finding themselves in need of covers to pad out the album, they reached back into their repertoire and recorded stuff that went right back to their roots – including one each from their holy trinity of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly and a couple from the almost equally influential Carl Perkins. (The group knew the songs so well that rehearsals were unnecessary.) Also in contention was the breezy probably-should’ve-been-the-single ‘Eight Days A Week’.
As The Beatles never opened their albums with covers, the obvious thing to do was to put ‘Eight Days A Week’ in at the beginning and not care that it wasn’t representative of the rest of the album. However, Martin made the surprising decision to open with three songs which were not only some of the most downbeat the group had produced, but also ran contrary to the previous policy of explosive openers. Where the first three albums all kick off with urgent dancefloor-filling tracks, Beatles For Sale opens with a slow acoustic number, then a couple of mid-paced acoustic numbers. Perhaps the intent was to show off the group’s increasing maturity: the first three songs are all fine efforts. Yet the effect is undermined by the retro blast of ‘Rock And Roll Music’, which is a great rendition but feels like a backward step at this point – as does ‘Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey!’
Oddly, the only cover which offers something new is the much-maligned ‘Mr Moonlight’. Many have cited this as the worst song The Beatles released in the group’s lifetime. I strongly disagree: in my view all their Larry Williams covers are weaker, ‘Run For Your Life’ is rubbish and I think there’s more entertainment to be had from ‘Mr Moonlight’ than anonymous early efforts like ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret?’ And ‘Mr Moonlight’ points towards the future because it’s funny. Much discussion centres around whether it was supposed to be: I’m surprised anyone would even query it. Of course it’s supposed to be funny. Lennon’s overplayed lounge-singer delivery is full of mock sincerity, whilst McCartney’s comedy Hammond organ solo is inspired as it grotesquely swamps the track. (On the early take on Anthology 1, the Hammond is absent and the solo is played by Harrison on a slide guitar which flails outlandishly: this is very clearly meant to be funny, rather than actually good. Compare below with a ‘straight’ live version from 1962.) Comedy songs would briefly be the group’s self-stated new direction when working on Rubber Soul.
As with A Hard Day’s Night the album is dominated by Lennon, who sings lead on half the covers plus his three originals, shares the limelight with McCartney on their co-written ‘Baby’s In Black’ and ‘Eight Days A Week’ but then sings lead on one of McCartney’s contributions too. This partly reflects a songwriting slump on McCartney’s part which runs from ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ to ‘Yesterday’ – although it should be pointed out that what qualifies as a ‘slump’ for him included ‘She’s A Woman’ and ‘Every Little Thing’. (The last of these was totally unfamiliar to me when I first heard it, even though I’d been a huge Beatles fan for over a decade. It is superb, which made me feel slightly sad afterwards in the knowledge that there were no more great Beatles songs for me to discover.) Despite this, in retrospect it’s clear that McCartney was becoming inspired by the possibilities of production and a new way of working in the studio. ‘Eight Days A Week’ is the closest the group ever came to another ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ (which may be why it was issued as a single in America), but surpasses it as a production: the glorious marching fade-in is inspired and its sound is warmer, more relaxed and more confident.
Yet the track which most clearly anticipates the sound of Help!, Rubber Soul and Revolver is tucked away as the penultimate track of side two – which is traditionally where Martin would bury weak tracks. His opinion of ‘What You’re Doing’ may have been influenced by memories of the recording process, which was longer than usual and may have caused some friction in studio. However, the song developed significantly during recording and this would soon become their standard way of working: in that sense, this obscure song is one of their most important recordings. The subtly distorted guitar and the peculiar drum-pattern would both be put to use on future tracks, and are the clearest sign that the group was keeping a step ahead of the competition. Yet with the track buried where it is, it’s possible that nobody actually noticed.
However, Martin’s biggest sequencing mistake was the final track. The first two Beatles albums had closed with raucous soul covers; the third had closed with a subtle, haunting Lennon number. The fourth signs off with ‘Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby’, some undistinguished echoey country noodling with a half-decent Harrison vocal but little else to recommend it. This would be the first in a sequence of three Beatles albums with rubbish closing tracks – an inexplicable lapse from a man whose judgement on these things was usually so good.
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
Beatles For Sale (1)
People never ask me why I spend so much time absorbing information and ephemera about The Beatles – they just let me get on with it. But it’s a shame they never ask because I do, as it happens, have an answer, which is that The Beatles are such a complex cultural phenomenon that I’m happy to have their story explained to me over and over again, from as many perspectives as I can find. It’s a story that involves several extraordinary and unlikely collisions, such as the considerable and perfectly complementary talents of Lennon and McCartney; the group finding one of the very few pop managers in Britain who wasn’t a shameless crook, and a record label run by a man willing to take them seriously as songwriters, who also happened to be a resourceful producer with peerlessly keen judgement; and, most of all, the collision of the group with their times.
Once The Beatles had exploded into the national consciousness, they demonstrated an ability to both respond to the expanding possibilities of pop music and expand those horizons themselves. This is now often taken for granted: when one looks at a list of 1960s UK number-one albums it seems clear that The Beatles maintained a very high level of commercial success for their entire career. Yet what is less well documented – and I would absolutely love to be pointed towards a source for information on this – is the degree of ‘churn’ in their audience. What proportion of the people who bought Please Please Me also, four summers later, bought Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? Had they all grown up with the group, or had some of them drifted away and been replaced by new fans? The stereotypical early-Beatles fan was a teenage girl; the stereotypical late-Beatles fan was a twentysomething dopehead. Yet their audience was so massive, it must have contained a wide range at all times. What was the real make-up and how did it change?
When we look back at The Beatles’ story, it seems to be leading up to the inevitable peak of Sgt. Pepper. Yet it wasn’t just modesty that led Lennon, in 1963, to comment that ‘We’ll be lucky if we last three months’. Nobody had ever been this big or had such a free hand with their career, but by mid-1964 they were at the point where most artists who’ve enjoyed huge, dramatic success go into decline. In America they were still a novelty but the British audience could easily have tired of them (compare with their stablemates Gerry and the Pacemakers, who faded as the year wore on). There was no template for what The Beatles were doing and no clue where to go next. Before them, artists sometimes switched genres (such as Dean Martin’s country albums, released under the brilliant moniker of Dean ‘Tex’ Martin), but was there anyone who really developed over the course of a career? I’m not sure, I don’t know enough about 1950s music – but it does seem like most artists turned up, did their thing, and when people got bored of it they bought something else instead.
Elvis Presley evidently considered that the best way to keep his music career afloat was to make it a spin-off of his rubbish movies. With his interest in production, Buddy Holly might have bucked the trend but his death rendered his career a brief, thrilling zenith, like so many of his contemporaries. Today, it’s generally accepted that credible musicians try to develop, avoid repeating themselves and, where possible, innovate. That’s partly a model adopted from other creative disciplines and it’s partly a response to pop’s desire for novelty, but it’s also become the model because it’s what The Beatles did.
Which brings us to Beatles For Sale. Often downplayed as a relatively weak album churned out by a tired group, I think it’s actually one of their most important records. Heard from the perspective of the first three, this is the first time they throw their audience a curveball and the audience had to decide whether to stick with them or drop them for something else. I think it’s the first time since the start of their recording career that they add new influences to their sound; the mix of rock’n’roll, R’n’B, country, American pop and soul had been in place since their debut, but here we see the first (admittedly superficial) fruits of their obsession with Bob Dylan. We also see their first, tentative production experiments.
What this might have meant to their audience at that time isn’t clear, and almost certainly nobody guessed where they would take it next, since The Beatles themselves probably didn’t know: they were probably just trying to keep things interesting for themselves. I’m sure listeners some took it for a decline or simply an unwelcome departure, and decided this was as far as they went with The Beatles. Probably few but the most ardent fans would have counted this as their favourite Beatles album up to this point. But it would be interesting to know if it won them any new fans.
Beatles For Sale was the last ‘proper’ Beatles album I owned a copy of (discounting Anthologies, compilations etc, and also Yellow Submarine which I didn’t own until I bought the recent boxset, but was deeply familiar with on account of having been obsessed with the film when I was 17) and I wasn’t expecting much from it. Yet it’s ended up being one I return to surprisingly often, partly because I’ve heard it fewer times than the others, but partly because – unlike A Hard Day’s Night – it feels like the beginning of the Beatles I love. Track-for-track it’s a weaker record than its predecessor, but I love it for its shonky eclecticism, its sense of The Beatles drifting in uncharted waters, and the way that it restores a little bit of thrilling uncertainty to the group’s often-repeated story: listening to this, you can hear that it might all have gone wrong.
Once The Beatles had exploded into the national consciousness, they demonstrated an ability to both respond to the expanding possibilities of pop music and expand those horizons themselves. This is now often taken for granted: when one looks at a list of 1960s UK number-one albums it seems clear that The Beatles maintained a very high level of commercial success for their entire career. Yet what is less well documented – and I would absolutely love to be pointed towards a source for information on this – is the degree of ‘churn’ in their audience. What proportion of the people who bought Please Please Me also, four summers later, bought Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? Had they all grown up with the group, or had some of them drifted away and been replaced by new fans? The stereotypical early-Beatles fan was a teenage girl; the stereotypical late-Beatles fan was a twentysomething dopehead. Yet their audience was so massive, it must have contained a wide range at all times. What was the real make-up and how did it change?
When we look back at The Beatles’ story, it seems to be leading up to the inevitable peak of Sgt. Pepper. Yet it wasn’t just modesty that led Lennon, in 1963, to comment that ‘We’ll be lucky if we last three months’. Nobody had ever been this big or had such a free hand with their career, but by mid-1964 they were at the point where most artists who’ve enjoyed huge, dramatic success go into decline. In America they were still a novelty but the British audience could easily have tired of them (compare with their stablemates Gerry and the Pacemakers, who faded as the year wore on). There was no template for what The Beatles were doing and no clue where to go next. Before them, artists sometimes switched genres (such as Dean Martin’s country albums, released under the brilliant moniker of Dean ‘Tex’ Martin), but was there anyone who really developed over the course of a career? I’m not sure, I don’t know enough about 1950s music – but it does seem like most artists turned up, did their thing, and when people got bored of it they bought something else instead.
Elvis Presley evidently considered that the best way to keep his music career afloat was to make it a spin-off of his rubbish movies. With his interest in production, Buddy Holly might have bucked the trend but his death rendered his career a brief, thrilling zenith, like so many of his contemporaries. Today, it’s generally accepted that credible musicians try to develop, avoid repeating themselves and, where possible, innovate. That’s partly a model adopted from other creative disciplines and it’s partly a response to pop’s desire for novelty, but it’s also become the model because it’s what The Beatles did.
Which brings us to Beatles For Sale. Often downplayed as a relatively weak album churned out by a tired group, I think it’s actually one of their most important records. Heard from the perspective of the first three, this is the first time they throw their audience a curveball and the audience had to decide whether to stick with them or drop them for something else. I think it’s the first time since the start of their recording career that they add new influences to their sound; the mix of rock’n’roll, R’n’B, country, American pop and soul had been in place since their debut, but here we see the first (admittedly superficial) fruits of their obsession with Bob Dylan. We also see their first, tentative production experiments.
What this might have meant to their audience at that time isn’t clear, and almost certainly nobody guessed where they would take it next, since The Beatles themselves probably didn’t know: they were probably just trying to keep things interesting for themselves. I’m sure listeners some took it for a decline or simply an unwelcome departure, and decided this was as far as they went with The Beatles. Probably few but the most ardent fans would have counted this as their favourite Beatles album up to this point. But it would be interesting to know if it won them any new fans.
Beatles For Sale was the last ‘proper’ Beatles album I owned a copy of (discounting Anthologies, compilations etc, and also Yellow Submarine which I didn’t own until I bought the recent boxset, but was deeply familiar with on account of having been obsessed with the film when I was 17) and I wasn’t expecting much from it. Yet it’s ended up being one I return to surprisingly often, partly because I’ve heard it fewer times than the others, but partly because – unlike A Hard Day’s Night – it feels like the beginning of the Beatles I love. Track-for-track it’s a weaker record than its predecessor, but I love it for its shonky eclecticism, its sense of The Beatles drifting in uncharted waters, and the way that it restores a little bit of thrilling uncertainty to the group’s often-repeated story: listening to this, you can hear that it might all have gone wrong.
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
A Hard Day's Night (2)
Last year’s Beatles NME special contained more than a few digs at Ringo and the Beatles’ practice of giving him a vocal spotlight on every album. I thought this was utter balls. Yes, the ‘Ringo track’ has entered the lexicon of popular music as a byword for a sub-par track sung by a band member who doesn’t usually sing and yes, this has happened because of rubbish like ‘What Goes On’. But it’s important to realise how important they were to the package offered by any Beatles album. The Beatles were marketed as a collective in a way that no other vocal group had been and each member had his own fanbase. Ringo wasn’t lobbying to sing, the fans demanded it. A Beatles album without a Ringo track isn’t quite complete – and A Hard Day’s Night doesn’t have one. It occurred to me to wonder, why not?
The most heavily-documented fact about A Hard Day’s Night is that it’s the first Beatles album to consist entirely of original songs (and, as there are no writing contributions from Harrison, the only one ever to consist entirely of Lennon/McCartney songs). A less well-documented fact is when exactly the Beatles decided to do this, as it didn’t happen by accident. Perhaps they simply relished the challenge of doing it, or thought it would be creatively satisfying, or would send a message to their emerging rivals, but it seems not uncoincidental that this first all-original album was recorded to tie in with their first film. Did The Beatles, or Brian Epstein, or Dick James, or someone at United Artists, point out that they’d be getting paid twice for these songs – once for use in the film, and again for their appearance on the album – and they could cash in most effectively by writing all the material themselves?
Whenever this happened, it wasn’t at the start of the album sessions. The Beatles’ studio time before the film was precious – they needed to get at least seven songs locked down. With this in mind, the fact that they recorded ‘Long Tall Sally’ in this time strongly suggests that it was intended for the film: as Ian Macdonald says, it was often used as their closing number and would have fitted well into the TV concert scene at the end. At some point, then, The Beatles decided that only their own music would feature in the film.
However, it seems clear that they didn’t envisage the entire album as being original, as when the group completed filming they resumed work on the album with ‘Matchbox’. This Carl Perkins cover would have provided Ringo with his spot on the album and made the second, not-from-the-film side a mix of covers and original material – which does seem to support my theory that it was the film element of A Hard Day’s Night which motivated the leap to all-originals. I will now present a slightly shakier theory that it was because ‘Matchbox’ turned out a bit rubbish that they decided to leave it off altogether and go for an all-original album: I’m not entirely convinced by it myself, but it’s worth considering that the third cover version they recorded during these sessions, ‘Slow Down’, is also fairly weak.
With Lennon in particularly prolific form they had enough new songs to fill the album out, so they did – and they perhaps blithely assumed that by the time of the next LP, they’d be able to do the same. Rather than banking the three covers they’d recorded for next time, they shoved them out on an EP named after its only genuinely good track, ‘Long Tall Sally’ – an unusual release, as all previous Beatles EPs had been compilations of already-released material aimed at paupers who couldn’t afford LPs. Oddly, this release seems to have sold about the same as a normal Beatles EP, so perhaps people didn’t realise it had new stuff on it.
One final twist in the assembly of A Hard Day’s Night came on the final day of recording. The Beatles had fourteen original tracks from the sessions, but ‘I Call Your Name’ had to be booted off because it sounded too similar to the much better ‘You Can’t Do That’, so it ended up on the Long Tall Sally EP. (Capitol’s artless sequencing of Beatles albums is epitomised by the fact that the two tracks were released together on Something New, separated only by ‘Long Tall Sally’.) The Beatles therefore fully intended to head into the studio to record one more song for the album the day before they headed off on tour. However, Ringo was taken ill on the morning of the session and instead the group spent the time rehearsing with his stand-in, Jimmy Nicol.
Studio documentation records that The Beatles booked this session, but doesn’t document what they planned to record. Maybe somebody should ask them before they all die, but here’s my theory: this session was intended to record a Ringo number, a Lennon/McCartney original, to replace ‘Matchbox’. It would be surprising if they hadn’t at least considered giving Ringo a new track for the album, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it was left to the last minute – this theory occurred to me when I discovered that the reverse later happened on Help!, when a Lennon/McCartney original intended as Ringo’s feature was replaced at the very last minute by ‘Act Naturally’, a cover.
If the track had featured any of the other Beatles as lead vocalist, it would have been possible to record it with Nicol after the rehearsal; there was certainly time to do so. It’s more likely that this didn’t happen because the group simply didn’t want to put another drummer on the record out of respect for Ringo, but if the ‘missing’ track was indeed intended for Ringo to sing, there would have been no hope whatsoever of recording it. I’ve even got a theory as to what the track in question might have been – the aforementioned ‘What Goes On’, which was almost recorded back at the session for ‘From Me To You’ over a year earlier but only saw the light of day on The Beatles’ next all-original LP, Rubber Soul.
This is all total speculation – if you can provide any evidence for or against, please do – but what is clear is that The Beatles had become quite wedded to the notion of the album being an all-original affair, because they could easily have stuck ‘Matchbox’ or ‘Long Tall Sally’ on it anyway to round it out to fourteen tracks – but they went with thirteen instead, making it the only one of The Beatles’ first seven albums not to contain fourteen tracks. Why was fourteen the magic number anyway? Was there a concrete reason for this? Please pipe up if you know.
The most heavily-documented fact about A Hard Day’s Night is that it’s the first Beatles album to consist entirely of original songs (and, as there are no writing contributions from Harrison, the only one ever to consist entirely of Lennon/McCartney songs). A less well-documented fact is when exactly the Beatles decided to do this, as it didn’t happen by accident. Perhaps they simply relished the challenge of doing it, or thought it would be creatively satisfying, or would send a message to their emerging rivals, but it seems not uncoincidental that this first all-original album was recorded to tie in with their first film. Did The Beatles, or Brian Epstein, or Dick James, or someone at United Artists, point out that they’d be getting paid twice for these songs – once for use in the film, and again for their appearance on the album – and they could cash in most effectively by writing all the material themselves?
Whenever this happened, it wasn’t at the start of the album sessions. The Beatles’ studio time before the film was precious – they needed to get at least seven songs locked down. With this in mind, the fact that they recorded ‘Long Tall Sally’ in this time strongly suggests that it was intended for the film: as Ian Macdonald says, it was often used as their closing number and would have fitted well into the TV concert scene at the end. At some point, then, The Beatles decided that only their own music would feature in the film.
However, it seems clear that they didn’t envisage the entire album as being original, as when the group completed filming they resumed work on the album with ‘Matchbox’. This Carl Perkins cover would have provided Ringo with his spot on the album and made the second, not-from-the-film side a mix of covers and original material – which does seem to support my theory that it was the film element of A Hard Day’s Night which motivated the leap to all-originals. I will now present a slightly shakier theory that it was because ‘Matchbox’ turned out a bit rubbish that they decided to leave it off altogether and go for an all-original album: I’m not entirely convinced by it myself, but it’s worth considering that the third cover version they recorded during these sessions, ‘Slow Down’, is also fairly weak.
With Lennon in particularly prolific form they had enough new songs to fill the album out, so they did – and they perhaps blithely assumed that by the time of the next LP, they’d be able to do the same. Rather than banking the three covers they’d recorded for next time, they shoved them out on an EP named after its only genuinely good track, ‘Long Tall Sally’ – an unusual release, as all previous Beatles EPs had been compilations of already-released material aimed at paupers who couldn’t afford LPs. Oddly, this release seems to have sold about the same as a normal Beatles EP, so perhaps people didn’t realise it had new stuff on it.
One final twist in the assembly of A Hard Day’s Night came on the final day of recording. The Beatles had fourteen original tracks from the sessions, but ‘I Call Your Name’ had to be booted off because it sounded too similar to the much better ‘You Can’t Do That’, so it ended up on the Long Tall Sally EP. (Capitol’s artless sequencing of Beatles albums is epitomised by the fact that the two tracks were released together on Something New, separated only by ‘Long Tall Sally’.) The Beatles therefore fully intended to head into the studio to record one more song for the album the day before they headed off on tour. However, Ringo was taken ill on the morning of the session and instead the group spent the time rehearsing with his stand-in, Jimmy Nicol.
Studio documentation records that The Beatles booked this session, but doesn’t document what they planned to record. Maybe somebody should ask them before they all die, but here’s my theory: this session was intended to record a Ringo number, a Lennon/McCartney original, to replace ‘Matchbox’. It would be surprising if they hadn’t at least considered giving Ringo a new track for the album, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it was left to the last minute – this theory occurred to me when I discovered that the reverse later happened on Help!, when a Lennon/McCartney original intended as Ringo’s feature was replaced at the very last minute by ‘Act Naturally’, a cover.
If the track had featured any of the other Beatles as lead vocalist, it would have been possible to record it with Nicol after the rehearsal; there was certainly time to do so. It’s more likely that this didn’t happen because the group simply didn’t want to put another drummer on the record out of respect for Ringo, but if the ‘missing’ track was indeed intended for Ringo to sing, there would have been no hope whatsoever of recording it. I’ve even got a theory as to what the track in question might have been – the aforementioned ‘What Goes On’, which was almost recorded back at the session for ‘From Me To You’ over a year earlier but only saw the light of day on The Beatles’ next all-original LP, Rubber Soul.
This is all total speculation – if you can provide any evidence for or against, please do – but what is clear is that The Beatles had become quite wedded to the notion of the album being an all-original affair, because they could easily have stuck ‘Matchbox’ or ‘Long Tall Sally’ on it anyway to round it out to fourteen tracks – but they went with thirteen instead, making it the only one of The Beatles’ first seven albums not to contain fourteen tracks. Why was fourteen the magic number anyway? Was there a concrete reason for this? Please pipe up if you know.
Saturday, 20 March 2010
A Hard Day's Night (1)
A Hard Day’s Night was a big part of why I started this blog, because it’s the only Beatles album I’ve never got into. I’ve no idea why – it was the second one I bought after Sgt Pepper, when I found a vinyl copy for a quid in a bargain bin. Perhaps it was just the times: this was the mid-1990s and, and Alexis Petridis said in his review of The Beatles in Mono, whilst The Beatles were hugely feted back then, their early material was curiously unfashionable. Yet I did get into Please Please Me and With The Beatles when I bought those a couple of years later.
Times have changed and A Hard Day’s Night is now often seen as the essential early Beatles album. It enjoys the credibility of being the first to consist entirely of original songs and it’s attached to a very good film (I’ve always preferred Help! myself, although my opinion of A Hard Day’s Night went up after I watched it for only the second time last year). As Jonathan Gould notes in Can’t Buy Me Love, this was an important test for The Beatles: their movie was assessed by serious cultural critics in a way that their music hadn’t yet been, and it was generally recognised as much better than expected. However, it’s still the Beatles album I’m least likely to pull off the shelf. Even Beatles For Sale or Help!, both of which – unlike A Hard Day’s Night – have properly rubbish tracks on them.
I could just put this down to a gut reaction and you could go and read something else, but let’s try to rationalise it. A Hard Day’s Night was largely recorded in two halves: the first side had to be finished off quickly so that the songs could be placed in the film. This is apparent from the way the songs are integrated into the plot, i.e. not at all: The Beatles simply stop and play a song. There are several good reasons for The Beatles playing themselves in the film: it didn’t require them to stretch themselves too much as actors and it’s probably what the fans wanted to see. However, it also meant that the film didn’t have to be a ‘true’ musical, which it isn’t – the songs don’t tell the story or particularly break reality. Instead The Beatles, in their capacity as professional musicians, sometimes perform some music.
For A Hard Day’s Night to be a ‘true’ musical it would have needed a much, much longer development time, with full collaboration between Lennon/McCartney and screenwriter Alun Owen – but The Beatles were insanely busy and the film was a quick cash-in, making this impossible. It’s also hard to imagine what form a ‘true’ musical starring the early Beatles would have taken – at this stage they were still trading entirely in love songs, so for the songs to tell the story it would have had to be a romance, with all four Beatles pursuing one love interest or a love interest for each of them. Both would have made poor use of their group dynamic, and in any case it would have been a huge demand to place on songwriters who’d never done anything like that before (although Lennon mentioned it as something he’d like to do in an early interview). Far better to let Owen leave gaps in the script reading [SONG HERE] and let The Beatles record whatever they could come up with.
However, I do think that the pressure to get those songs in the can weakens the first side of the album. The singles are great, of course, but ‘I Should Have Known Better’ is only a half-successful stab at the new sound which would emerge on Beatles For Sale. ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’ is notable for being the last Harrison feature written by Lennon/McCartney, and its chaste soppiness almost seems calculated to rile him into writing his own bloody songs in future. (It’s hilariously at odds with Harrison’s prickly sarcasm.) ‘If I Fell’ is glib and insincere: when performing it in the film Lennon seems slightly embarassed by it, adopting his ever-sensitive ‘retard face’ in the opening verse.
The second side, polished off after finishing work on the film, is better. I’m dubious of judging music on the grounds of ‘authenticity’: authenticity can be faked, and some of my favourite pop music is deeply pretentious and contrived. However, it’s at exactly this point in The Beatles’ career that Lennon seems to tire of writing generic romance songs and starts to tentatively mine his own experience (possibly inspired by Bob Dylan, whose work the group had discovered just as they started work on the album). This would prove a rich seam for him. ‘I’ll Cry Instead’ – submitted for the film, but rejected for the sourness of its lyric – is a fascinating mismatch of words and music, with a jaunty country tune forming the backdrop to a lyric of turbulent emotions, with the narrator promising to take revenge on a lover by breaking the hearts of other girls – but it’s a threat rendered empty by his admission that for now, he’s just going to cry. It’s Lennon’s most interesting lyric to date – and, apparently, autobiographical.
On the second side they also embrace ambiguous tones, with McCartney’s ‘Things We Said Today’ and especially Lennon’s superb ‘I’ll Be Back’ introducing a new style beyond their exuberant rockers and soppy ballads. As with some of the With The Beatles material, these songs attempt a subtlety which would have been of no use whatsoever at their inaudible gigs. It’s a strong statement of intent that they use the latter of those tracks as a closer for the album, where the first two closed with soul screamers.
But still, I think A Hard Day’s Night isn’t the strongest showcase for the Beatles I love. It’s their most unified album in terms of songwriting and performance: Harrison liked to use a different guitar for each album, and here he mostly uses a Rickenbacker 12-string given to him in America which has a particularly distinctive sound, whilst Lennon makes a perhaps Dylan-inspired switch to acoustic rhythm guitar for almost the entire album. These two things strongly colour and unify the sound of A Hard Day’s Night. In addition, this is a period where McCartney’s songwriting stalled whilst Lennon’s blossomed, with the result that a massive ten of the thirteen tracks are mostly by Lennon. Even one of McCartney’s, the aforementioned ‘Things We Said Today’, sounds more like a Lennon song. All of which means the album slightly lacks the eclecticism that I really enjoy from The Beatles. You often hear people grumbling about the early Beatles albums being padded with covers, but I rather miss the covers here.
I’ve still got another week of A Hard Day’s Night to go, but I haven’t been hammering it anything like as much as I did the first two. Maybe it’s just not going to happen.
Times have changed and A Hard Day’s Night is now often seen as the essential early Beatles album. It enjoys the credibility of being the first to consist entirely of original songs and it’s attached to a very good film (I’ve always preferred Help! myself, although my opinion of A Hard Day’s Night went up after I watched it for only the second time last year). As Jonathan Gould notes in Can’t Buy Me Love, this was an important test for The Beatles: their movie was assessed by serious cultural critics in a way that their music hadn’t yet been, and it was generally recognised as much better than expected. However, it’s still the Beatles album I’m least likely to pull off the shelf. Even Beatles For Sale or Help!, both of which – unlike A Hard Day’s Night – have properly rubbish tracks on them.
I could just put this down to a gut reaction and you could go and read something else, but let’s try to rationalise it. A Hard Day’s Night was largely recorded in two halves: the first side had to be finished off quickly so that the songs could be placed in the film. This is apparent from the way the songs are integrated into the plot, i.e. not at all: The Beatles simply stop and play a song. There are several good reasons for The Beatles playing themselves in the film: it didn’t require them to stretch themselves too much as actors and it’s probably what the fans wanted to see. However, it also meant that the film didn’t have to be a ‘true’ musical, which it isn’t – the songs don’t tell the story or particularly break reality. Instead The Beatles, in their capacity as professional musicians, sometimes perform some music.
For A Hard Day’s Night to be a ‘true’ musical it would have needed a much, much longer development time, with full collaboration between Lennon/McCartney and screenwriter Alun Owen – but The Beatles were insanely busy and the film was a quick cash-in, making this impossible. It’s also hard to imagine what form a ‘true’ musical starring the early Beatles would have taken – at this stage they were still trading entirely in love songs, so for the songs to tell the story it would have had to be a romance, with all four Beatles pursuing one love interest or a love interest for each of them. Both would have made poor use of their group dynamic, and in any case it would have been a huge demand to place on songwriters who’d never done anything like that before (although Lennon mentioned it as something he’d like to do in an early interview). Far better to let Owen leave gaps in the script reading [SONG HERE] and let The Beatles record whatever they could come up with.
However, I do think that the pressure to get those songs in the can weakens the first side of the album. The singles are great, of course, but ‘I Should Have Known Better’ is only a half-successful stab at the new sound which would emerge on Beatles For Sale. ‘I’m Happy Just To Dance With You’ is notable for being the last Harrison feature written by Lennon/McCartney, and its chaste soppiness almost seems calculated to rile him into writing his own bloody songs in future. (It’s hilariously at odds with Harrison’s prickly sarcasm.) ‘If I Fell’ is glib and insincere: when performing it in the film Lennon seems slightly embarassed by it, adopting his ever-sensitive ‘retard face’ in the opening verse.
The second side, polished off after finishing work on the film, is better. I’m dubious of judging music on the grounds of ‘authenticity’: authenticity can be faked, and some of my favourite pop music is deeply pretentious and contrived. However, it’s at exactly this point in The Beatles’ career that Lennon seems to tire of writing generic romance songs and starts to tentatively mine his own experience (possibly inspired by Bob Dylan, whose work the group had discovered just as they started work on the album). This would prove a rich seam for him. ‘I’ll Cry Instead’ – submitted for the film, but rejected for the sourness of its lyric – is a fascinating mismatch of words and music, with a jaunty country tune forming the backdrop to a lyric of turbulent emotions, with the narrator promising to take revenge on a lover by breaking the hearts of other girls – but it’s a threat rendered empty by his admission that for now, he’s just going to cry. It’s Lennon’s most interesting lyric to date – and, apparently, autobiographical.
On the second side they also embrace ambiguous tones, with McCartney’s ‘Things We Said Today’ and especially Lennon’s superb ‘I’ll Be Back’ introducing a new style beyond their exuberant rockers and soppy ballads. As with some of the With The Beatles material, these songs attempt a subtlety which would have been of no use whatsoever at their inaudible gigs. It’s a strong statement of intent that they use the latter of those tracks as a closer for the album, where the first two closed with soul screamers.
But still, I think A Hard Day’s Night isn’t the strongest showcase for the Beatles I love. It’s their most unified album in terms of songwriting and performance: Harrison liked to use a different guitar for each album, and here he mostly uses a Rickenbacker 12-string given to him in America which has a particularly distinctive sound, whilst Lennon makes a perhaps Dylan-inspired switch to acoustic rhythm guitar for almost the entire album. These two things strongly colour and unify the sound of A Hard Day’s Night. In addition, this is a period where McCartney’s songwriting stalled whilst Lennon’s blossomed, with the result that a massive ten of the thirteen tracks are mostly by Lennon. Even one of McCartney’s, the aforementioned ‘Things We Said Today’, sounds more like a Lennon song. All of which means the album slightly lacks the eclecticism that I really enjoy from The Beatles. You often hear people grumbling about the early Beatles albums being padded with covers, but I rather miss the covers here.
I’ve still got another week of A Hard Day’s Night to go, but I haven’t been hammering it anything like as much as I did the first two. Maybe it’s just not going to happen.
Friday, 5 March 2010
You Never Give Me Your Money
A quick post today (although I’ve opened posts with that before and had to go back and delete it 600 words later) prompted by an edit I had to make to the previous one last night. I popped into the blog for no real reason other than I was delaying getting down to work (I told myself I was checking for comments, but that wasn’t true because I get email notifications when comments are posted) and discovered that the YouTube clip of ‘All My Loving’ on The Ed Sullivan Show had vanished due to a copyright claim. There are a couple of other copies of this on YouTube, but one has rubbish sound and the other a terrible picture, and besides there seemed a fair chance that the copyright holder would ask for them to be taken down too. To my considerable delight, I found this instead, which I post again because it is FULLY AWESOME. Great work from 8-year-old Jordan and his dad.
I was slightly taken aback to find the original video had gone down, because there’s a hell of a lot of Beatles on YouTube and nobody seems to mind. Readers of earlier posts will know that vast chunks of the group’s discography has been posted in audio form, and you can watch pretty much all their videos and major television appearances, from Around The Beatles through Shea Stadium to the Budokan Hall. The copyright claim on the Ed Sullivan clip hadn’t come from Apple or EMI, and presumably came from the rights holders to the original shows. That’s actually characteristic of Apple, who are remarkably non-litigious over Beatles stuff considering how much financial clout they must have.
A lot of people probably think the opposite is true, because there have been some high-profile cases where someone has been prevented from using Beatles material – The Grey Album, the excellent mash-up of the ‘White’ album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album, is the obvious example. However, that’s the only area where The Beatles have clamped down on things: original Beatles recordings are kept the exclusive preserve of Beatles albums. You can’t buy commercial compilations with their tracks on and you’ll never hear them sampled, with a few rare exceptions (as producer of Withnail & I, George Harrison permitted the inclusion of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ on the soundtrack album, whilst his son Dhani recently allowed The Wu-Tang Clan to sample the same track).
In all other things, they seem to take a light touch. Most notably, I don’t think they’ve ever sued anyone for ripping off their songs – and god knows they’ve been ripped off a lot. ‘Start!’ by The Jam is probably the most blatant example.
I’d be interested to know whether the lack of action is because they just can’t be arsed, or whether it was a conscious decision. They were certainly never afraid to nick ideas from their peers back in the day, and Lennon and Harrison both had personal experience of legal action (over ‘Come Together and ‘My Sweet Lord’). Do they leave it alone because influence and ‘borrowing’ were strong parts of their own songwriting process, and it would be hypocritical of them to say ‘Wait a minute, The Coral, this “Pass It On” song of yours bears more than a passing resemblance to the mediocre Harrison composition “You Like Me Too Much” off side two of Help!’ I’d like to think so.
I was slightly taken aback to find the original video had gone down, because there’s a hell of a lot of Beatles on YouTube and nobody seems to mind. Readers of earlier posts will know that vast chunks of the group’s discography has been posted in audio form, and you can watch pretty much all their videos and major television appearances, from Around The Beatles through Shea Stadium to the Budokan Hall. The copyright claim on the Ed Sullivan clip hadn’t come from Apple or EMI, and presumably came from the rights holders to the original shows. That’s actually characteristic of Apple, who are remarkably non-litigious over Beatles stuff considering how much financial clout they must have.
A lot of people probably think the opposite is true, because there have been some high-profile cases where someone has been prevented from using Beatles material – The Grey Album, the excellent mash-up of the ‘White’ album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album, is the obvious example. However, that’s the only area where The Beatles have clamped down on things: original Beatles recordings are kept the exclusive preserve of Beatles albums. You can’t buy commercial compilations with their tracks on and you’ll never hear them sampled, with a few rare exceptions (as producer of Withnail & I, George Harrison permitted the inclusion of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ on the soundtrack album, whilst his son Dhani recently allowed The Wu-Tang Clan to sample the same track).
In all other things, they seem to take a light touch. Most notably, I don’t think they’ve ever sued anyone for ripping off their songs – and god knows they’ve been ripped off a lot. ‘Start!’ by The Jam is probably the most blatant example.
I’d be interested to know whether the lack of action is because they just can’t be arsed, or whether it was a conscious decision. They were certainly never afraid to nick ideas from their peers back in the day, and Lennon and Harrison both had personal experience of legal action (over ‘Come Together and ‘My Sweet Lord’). Do they leave it alone because influence and ‘borrowing’ were strong parts of their own songwriting process, and it would be hypocritical of them to say ‘Wait a minute, The Coral, this “Pass It On” song of yours bears more than a passing resemblance to the mediocre Harrison composition “You Like Me Too Much” off side two of Help!’ I’d like to think so.
Saturday, 27 February 2010
With The Beatles (2)
A comment on the previous post on With The Beatles (from Jonny Morris again) suggests that it suffers because the group’s best original compositions at this point were being diverted into their singles. It’s not something that had ever occurred to me, which is surprising because I am... I wouldn’t say obsessed, but maybe... preoccupied with album sequencing, and I sometimes amuse myself by shuffling the line-ups of albums and switching tracks for others recorded during the same sessions. I’ll probably take you through my resequenced Help! when that album gets its turn. So, something to look forward to. For me, if not for you.
I suppose I’d never considered it with With The Beatles because I can’t quite imagine the singles that preceded and followed it – ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ – being album tracks. They’re both so important in The Beatles’ development that they deserve to stand alone. But in America, Capitol didn’t give the slightest toss about aesthetics and, when it finally deigned to release The Beatles’ records, it began a proud tradition of bastardising their albums: inserting A- and B-sides which most fans already owned and putting fewer tracks on the running order. Interestingly, for some reason – possibly financial – the five tracks they decided to pull from With The Beatles in order to construct the more cheesily-titled Meet The Beatles! were all cover versions, then three other tracks were added which were all Lennon/McCartney originals – meaning this was very nearly the group’s first all-original album.
The three tracks added were ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, its British B-side ‘This Boy’ and its American B-side ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. As it happens, I already have all The Beatles’ American albums lined up as playlists in iTunes – I’m not especially proud of it, I’m just saying – so I gave Meet The Beatles! a spin, to hear what an album with the benefit of three of the group’s best tracks of 1963 sounded like.
I found it hard to hear it as an album, partly because I’m so used to the proper version. (I almost put inverted commas around ‘proper’ there, but then I thought why should I? The other one IS the proper version.) I can’t hear ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ or ‘It Won’t Be Long’ as anything other than opening tracks, which means Meet The Beatles! has two opening tracks, neither of which is the actual opening track. It’s also because, like every Capitol Beatles album, it’s simply not as well sequenced as its British equivalent (Americans: I am willing to argue this at length). This is because George Martin actually thought about sequencing and did a blinding job of it, whereas Capitol really did seem to sling the tracks on there however they fell. Just look at the example in hand: it’s just the tracks taken from the British album, in the same order, with the extra ones bolted on the front.
But I really think the added tracks just don’t fit. You might have expected that of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, which wasn’t from the same sessions and certainly, after a month of listening to With The Beatles, it sounds like it belongs to an earlier stage. It’s a club track, designed for an audience to dance to. The Beatles had already moved on. Compare it to a more recent mostly-by-McCartney track, ‘All My Loving’, and the latter sounds more like a song written for record. With The Beatles was written in a quite different way to Please Please Me: before their debut they’d been cheekily cajoling Parlophone to release their own compositions, afterwards the label was cajoling them to come up with more, and – as noted earlier – their live set was starting to select itself. For the first time, they were writing songs that they’d never play live – the first step down a road that would lead to ‘Revolution #9’. Eventually.
Anyway, back to ‘All My Loving’. It uses a similar pause to that in the earlier ‘There’s A Place’, but whereas that was a pause for breath in a frantic number, this is cooler, more poised. Pauses are a much-underrated tool in pop music, and this is one of the best: it would’ve been easy to do the song by just strumming through those bits, but the pauses make the song. It’s a constructed pop record, the first example of McCartney’s breezy facility for knocking out such songs.
The glue that holds the ‘club’ Beatles to the group’s evolving sound on With The Beatles comes from the covers – which are absent from Meet The Beatles! (I’m getting really sick of the auto-correct function putting capital letters after that title) except the atypical ‘Til There Was You’. With them gone, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ doesn’t fit – and nor, for that matter, does ‘Hold Me Tight’ (recorded for Please Please Me but held over because they messed it up). Whilst McCartney’s songs become more polished, Lennon’s songs start to aim for a greater depth of feeling and more atmosphere – not necessarily the sort of thing you’d blast out onstage. ‘All I’ve Got To Do’ and ‘Not A Second Time’ are possibly the first Beatles songs you could call subtle. (I dunno, I might make a case for ‘P.S. I Love You’, which I think is awesome.)
But to return to the original point, how does ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ – recorded a month after the final With The Beatles session, and released a week later – fit on the album? I don’t think it does, because it’s a Beatles song in a category of its own. It’s got an odd mid-paced rhythm, a vocal line that totally depends on its harmonies (as Ian McDonald pointed out, you can’t sing it a capella AT ALL) and a bright, insistent tone. I don’t think it’s like anything else The Beatles ever recorded: put a comment below if you think I’m wrong. The Beatles were running through writing styles and techniques so fast that in this case, it only lasted one track. That can partly be accounted for by the fact that it was the last time Lennon and McCartney would write so closely together, taking it in turns to write lines, meshing their styles to the point where only a very keen musical ear could distinguish them. Their diverging writing partnership would hugely influence A Hard Day’s Night.
I suppose I’d never considered it with With The Beatles because I can’t quite imagine the singles that preceded and followed it – ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ – being album tracks. They’re both so important in The Beatles’ development that they deserve to stand alone. But in America, Capitol didn’t give the slightest toss about aesthetics and, when it finally deigned to release The Beatles’ records, it began a proud tradition of bastardising their albums: inserting A- and B-sides which most fans already owned and putting fewer tracks on the running order. Interestingly, for some reason – possibly financial – the five tracks they decided to pull from With The Beatles in order to construct the more cheesily-titled Meet The Beatles! were all cover versions, then three other tracks were added which were all Lennon/McCartney originals – meaning this was very nearly the group’s first all-original album.
The three tracks added were ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, its British B-side ‘This Boy’ and its American B-side ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. As it happens, I already have all The Beatles’ American albums lined up as playlists in iTunes – I’m not especially proud of it, I’m just saying – so I gave Meet The Beatles! a spin, to hear what an album with the benefit of three of the group’s best tracks of 1963 sounded like.
I found it hard to hear it as an album, partly because I’m so used to the proper version. (I almost put inverted commas around ‘proper’ there, but then I thought why should I? The other one IS the proper version.) I can’t hear ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ or ‘It Won’t Be Long’ as anything other than opening tracks, which means Meet The Beatles! has two opening tracks, neither of which is the actual opening track. It’s also because, like every Capitol Beatles album, it’s simply not as well sequenced as its British equivalent (Americans: I am willing to argue this at length). This is because George Martin actually thought about sequencing and did a blinding job of it, whereas Capitol really did seem to sling the tracks on there however they fell. Just look at the example in hand: it’s just the tracks taken from the British album, in the same order, with the extra ones bolted on the front.
But I really think the added tracks just don’t fit. You might have expected that of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, which wasn’t from the same sessions and certainly, after a month of listening to With The Beatles, it sounds like it belongs to an earlier stage. It’s a club track, designed for an audience to dance to. The Beatles had already moved on. Compare it to a more recent mostly-by-McCartney track, ‘All My Loving’, and the latter sounds more like a song written for record. With The Beatles was written in a quite different way to Please Please Me: before their debut they’d been cheekily cajoling Parlophone to release their own compositions, afterwards the label was cajoling them to come up with more, and – as noted earlier – their live set was starting to select itself. For the first time, they were writing songs that they’d never play live – the first step down a road that would lead to ‘Revolution #9’. Eventually.
Anyway, back to ‘All My Loving’. It uses a similar pause to that in the earlier ‘There’s A Place’, but whereas that was a pause for breath in a frantic number, this is cooler, more poised. Pauses are a much-underrated tool in pop music, and this is one of the best: it would’ve been easy to do the song by just strumming through those bits, but the pauses make the song. It’s a constructed pop record, the first example of McCartney’s breezy facility for knocking out such songs.
The glue that holds the ‘club’ Beatles to the group’s evolving sound on With The Beatles comes from the covers – which are absent from Meet The Beatles! (I’m getting really sick of the auto-correct function putting capital letters after that title) except the atypical ‘Til There Was You’. With them gone, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ doesn’t fit – and nor, for that matter, does ‘Hold Me Tight’ (recorded for Please Please Me but held over because they messed it up). Whilst McCartney’s songs become more polished, Lennon’s songs start to aim for a greater depth of feeling and more atmosphere – not necessarily the sort of thing you’d blast out onstage. ‘All I’ve Got To Do’ and ‘Not A Second Time’ are possibly the first Beatles songs you could call subtle. (I dunno, I might make a case for ‘P.S. I Love You’, which I think is awesome.)
But to return to the original point, how does ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ – recorded a month after the final With The Beatles session, and released a week later – fit on the album? I don’t think it does, because it’s a Beatles song in a category of its own. It’s got an odd mid-paced rhythm, a vocal line that totally depends on its harmonies (as Ian McDonald pointed out, you can’t sing it a capella AT ALL) and a bright, insistent tone. I don’t think it’s like anything else The Beatles ever recorded: put a comment below if you think I’m wrong. The Beatles were running through writing styles and techniques so fast that in this case, it only lasted one track. That can partly be accounted for by the fact that it was the last time Lennon and McCartney would write so closely together, taking it in turns to write lines, meshing their styles to the point where only a very keen musical ear could distinguish them. Their diverging writing partnership would hugely influence A Hard Day’s Night.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Sounds of ’63
M’colleague Jonny Morris has been throwing me helpful suggestions regarding this blog since it started, one of which was to listen to other music from the same period to get an appreciation of context. This seemed an excellent idea, and I was particularly interested to hear what The Beatles’ commercial rivals were doing amidst their growing success. Never mind the stuff which is still considered credible today – what were people actually buying?
So I tracked down all the UK number one singles from 1963 on Spotify (except those by The Beatles, which aren’t on there) and stuck them in this playlist. There’s rather a lot of dull balladry, and it’s easy to see why The Beatles considered The Shadows the only British group worth being influenced by at this point. Again, it’s interesting to try to listen to this with a fresh ear because, if you take The Beatles out of the equation as I’ve been forced to do here, suddenly this doesn’t look much like the 1960s of the popular imagination – yet at the time it must have been an exciting new wave of which The Beatles were the biggest, but not the only, part.
The Beatles were joined in the charts by more Liverpool groups, including Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas with their Lennon/McCartney offcuts and Gerry and the Pacemakers with their debut song which The Beatles turned down for fear that everyone back home would think they were soppy wankers (evidently Gerry and co decided they were willing to live it down for the sake of a hit). However, as Jonathan Gould notes in his excellent book Can’t Buy Me Love, the Liverpool scene – which had been so exciting in the early 1960s, supporting hundreds of beat groups – didn’t produce a single other band who came close to The Beatles’ standard. By the end of the next year, the other Liverpool acts – along with almost everyone else on this playlist – would be surpassed.
The first genuine representatives of post-Beatles pop to score a number one were, ironically, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and I know the word ‘ironically’ is over-used and for some reason often employed to mean ‘exactly as you would expect’ but I think it is appropriate here. Essex group The Tremeloes were signed by Decca in preference to The Beatles following the latter’s flop audition on New Year’s Day 1962, thereby demonstrating that the oft-quoted line that Decca’s Dick Rowe is supposed to have said to Brian Epstein – ‘Guitar music is on the way out’ – was either erroneous, or just an attempt by Rowe to get Epstein out of his office. (Additionally, anyone who has actually listened to the Decca session tapes will know that Rowe’s decision was based on pretty sound evidence.) Yet in the end, The Tremeloes had their first hit by shamelessly copying The Beatles, covering ‘Twist and Shout’ in the wake of The Beatles’ version and then following it up with another soul cover (and a very smart choice, too).
I couldn’t be bothered to wade further down the charts than number one, but I’d be very interested to hear any other records from ’63 that are particularly good/bad/interesting in a Beatles context. If you have any suggestions, do leave a comment.
So I tracked down all the UK number one singles from 1963 on Spotify (except those by The Beatles, which aren’t on there) and stuck them in this playlist. There’s rather a lot of dull balladry, and it’s easy to see why The Beatles considered The Shadows the only British group worth being influenced by at this point. Again, it’s interesting to try to listen to this with a fresh ear because, if you take The Beatles out of the equation as I’ve been forced to do here, suddenly this doesn’t look much like the 1960s of the popular imagination – yet at the time it must have been an exciting new wave of which The Beatles were the biggest, but not the only, part.
The Beatles were joined in the charts by more Liverpool groups, including Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas with their Lennon/McCartney offcuts and Gerry and the Pacemakers with their debut song which The Beatles turned down for fear that everyone back home would think they were soppy wankers (evidently Gerry and co decided they were willing to live it down for the sake of a hit). However, as Jonathan Gould notes in his excellent book Can’t Buy Me Love, the Liverpool scene – which had been so exciting in the early 1960s, supporting hundreds of beat groups – didn’t produce a single other band who came close to The Beatles’ standard. By the end of the next year, the other Liverpool acts – along with almost everyone else on this playlist – would be surpassed.
The first genuine representatives of post-Beatles pop to score a number one were, ironically, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and I know the word ‘ironically’ is over-used and for some reason often employed to mean ‘exactly as you would expect’ but I think it is appropriate here. Essex group The Tremeloes were signed by Decca in preference to The Beatles following the latter’s flop audition on New Year’s Day 1962, thereby demonstrating that the oft-quoted line that Decca’s Dick Rowe is supposed to have said to Brian Epstein – ‘Guitar music is on the way out’ – was either erroneous, or just an attempt by Rowe to get Epstein out of his office. (Additionally, anyone who has actually listened to the Decca session tapes will know that Rowe’s decision was based on pretty sound evidence.) Yet in the end, The Tremeloes had their first hit by shamelessly copying The Beatles, covering ‘Twist and Shout’ in the wake of The Beatles’ version and then following it up with another soul cover (and a very smart choice, too).
I couldn’t be bothered to wade further down the charts than number one, but I’d be very interested to hear any other records from ’63 that are particularly good/bad/interesting in a Beatles context. If you have any suggestions, do leave a comment.
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