http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article6824009.ece
The Fab Four and their fabulous songs evoke an age of innocence. But
we should not forget the harsh realities of the Sixties
Libby Purves
September 7, 2009
Pre-natal nostalgia is a national characteristic (some would say
vice, but I am more tolerant). It is hard to find a great writer who
does not sometimes yearn back towards an imagined past: Shakespeare
pillaged Holinshed's Chronicles, and Dickens acute on his own
generation's ills had a misty gaze back at Merrie England. The
Eeyore tone of Housman's blue remembered hills has infected countless
English writers from Waugh to Alan Bennett. We all do it. Just as
Seventies' dandies dressed, inaccurately, in Regency frills, so I,
born well after the war, spent my teens longing to be either a D-Day
Wren or a 1930s woman out of Dorothy L. Sayers, striking out proudly
in a man's world.
As history speeds up and media proliferate, the gap closes and
nostalgia grows ever fresher. Middle-aged people such as myself are
unnerved when artefacts, bands and fashions of the Seventies,
Eighties, even Nineties get described as "retro", sometimes before we
have even noticed them first time round. As for the Sixties, they are
now officially part of venerable history: I have never got over
seeing a tin of Beatles talcum powder in a national museum, carefully
preserved. It seems only yesterday I finished mine.
Right now, it is the Beatles era that is being chewed over, with dewy
young rediscoverers listening respectfully to elderly reporters who
were lucky enough to hang around studios and hotels in the days
before musicians threw up an impenetrable wall of PRs.
Those seven Beatles years from Please Please Me to the group's end
in 1969 have echoed down the decades ever since. I couldn't be
happier: not just nostalgically but because it is so instructive to
compare teenage dreams over half a century.
Beatles music was, and remains, terrific: an English renaissance that
firmly took back authority from American imports, made skiffle grow
up and tamed rock'n'roll to a new gentleness. The young men
themselves seemed, when they first swam into my early teenage
consciousness, attractively gauche and simple-hearted. Where the
Rolling Stones were predatory and sneering, out for their own
Satisfaction, and other groups such as the Honeycombs or Freddie and
the Dreamers were just plain wet, the Beatles were exactly what girls
hoped that boys would be like.
They were vigorous in beat, dryly funny and self-disparaging in
interviews, yet intensely emotional and open in their lyrics.
Lennon's quirky, alienated odd-boy attitude gave a sharper tang to
McCartney's gentle sentimentality, and built songs that have lasted
because they express youthful love with straightforward perfection.
They leapfrogged back over the brittle jazz age, past Victorian
circumlocution and the wordy Age of Reason, and took us to an older
lyricism: to the lover and his lass, the troubadour at the window,
the humility of the knight-errant. Their griefs are not angry: "I
don't want to spoil the party so I'll go, I would hate my
disappointment to show" . . . "I said something wrong, now I long for
yesterday" . . ."I'm the kind of guy who never used to cry". Their
joys are tender "Things we said today" . . . "And I love her" . . .
"I saw her standing there".
The lyrics were literate, too: easy to sing and euphonious thanks to
Lennon's gift with words and the uncompromising primary education of
the period. No wonder they are pillaged so often by a new generation;
no wonder even the staid adults of the time sneakily took to them. In
my convent school there was a depressing period when all songs with
"vocals" were banned at our dances, after an unfortunately
sharp-eared senior nun caught the words of Manfred Mann's "If you
gotta go, go now, or else you gotta stay all night" and then
disastrously happened on a Stones album. So we were condemned to bop
dispiritedly to a scratchy pressing of Telstar by the Tornados, until
some bright spark played her a Beatles album and she conceded that
they would do, thanks largely to the lifelong (and presumably
marital) sentiments in All my Loving.
Well, it is a long way from I want to hold your hand to Smack my
bitch up and the Teenage Dirtbag. At times, contemplating the anxious
materialism, drunken excess and predatory sexuality offered as a norm
to teenagers today, it is tempting to think of it as a downhill
slope. But nostalgia has its dangers too. For one thing, the youthful
emotions of gentle, wondering, sacred love into which the Beatles
tapped are timeless, and have not faded. The pity is merely that they
are often derided and drowned by a cynical racket and a creed of
self-centred insistence on the right to sexual satisfaction.
Moreover, the social realities of those seven years in the 1960s are
harsher than the nostalgics and the happy lyrics suggest.
The history of the age is too often written by a small cadre of its
liberated avant-garde. For most, it was still a dour time. There was
real poverty on the streets where the Beatles grew up, real racism
everywhere, canes and rulers wielded in schools, and a heavy
intolerance of homosexuality.
Divorce required hard proof of adultery, cruelty or desertion, until
1969 brought recognition of "irretrievable breakdown". Unmarried
mothers the very phrase is retro now were still being forced to
give up their babies in disgrace; sex was full of fear. The Pill was
first approved in 1961 (by the Health Minister Enoch Powell, who
remembers that?) but until 1967 it could only be prescribed for married women.
The free-love culture was not widespread by 1965, nor the colourful
Quant-and-Biba fashions: we provincial teens came to the Kings Road
to press our noses to the windows, envious in our boring clothes,
saving up for weeks to buy white plastic boots and a PVC belt.
In the pub or coffee bar, girls were expected to sit in a group in
the corner, to be eyed up and vocally critiqued while the boys drank
more and laughed louder. University was for the few. The fine mockery
of TW3 and Private Eye had not seeped into the mainstream, and the
culture of deference still ruled. Numerous MBEs were pompously handed
back when the Beatles got theirs (and only in '69 did Lennon,
abruptly liberating himself from the group and the system, return his).
No, it wasn't an age of gold. But the music was terrific and lovely
and innocent. It lasts, not because it was "of its time" but because
it belongs to all time.
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