http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/beatles/article6818430.ece
They began as a teen craze but turned into a cultural force that
changed the world. A friend of the Beatles explains their continuing impact
September 12, 2009
by Barry Miles
Since their break-up, almost 40 years ago, they have become more than
just a pop group, they have become a British institution, become part
of our cultural fabric along with Diana, Princess of Wales, Big Ben,
warm beer and cricket on the village green. Digitally remastered
versions of all the Beatles' albums were released this week,
replacing the anemic CDs currently available. That same day brought
the release of the video game The Beatles: Rock Band, which will
undoubtedly create yet another generation of fans.
With a few exceptions, such as the Marx Brothers, it is rare for
groups to enter cultural history, but artistically the Beatles
represent Britain as much as Shakespeare and Dickens. Like them, they
wrote for a popular audience and like them they conquered the world.
The Americans embraced the Beatles even more fully than the British,
but they added them to the pantheon of Hollywood stars; they made
them into inaccessible, remote gods; a blank canvas on which to play
out teenage dreams and fantasies. In Britain the Beatles always had a
deeper cultural meaning. In Britain they were real people.
Their cheeky humour John Lennon telling the audience at a Royal
Command Performance that the people in the expensive seats should
rattle their jewellery was immediately recognisable from The Goon
Show, ITMA and the Carry On films. Their lyrics, which were in no way
modified for a foreign audience, name-checked British politicians
Mr Wilson, Mr Heath and grumbled about the high taxes the group
were paying. They had the British love of double-entendre beginning
in August 1960, when they changed their name from the Silver Beetles
to the Beatles. They called one LP Rubber Soul, which was also on a
shoe, and named its follow up, Revolver. "Do you get it?" asked Paul
McCartney to a group of us gathered in Ringo Starr's flat. We didn't.
"People will think it's a gun, but its more obvious than that. It's
something that revolves: a record!" We all groaned, but McCartney
just laughed.
The Beatles jump-started the Sixties and everything from Mary Quant
and Twiggy, James Bond movies, the Mini and the mini-skirt seems, in
the public mind, to have started with Beatlemania so that now they
symbolise the entire decade: black and white newsreel footage of the
Fab Four bounding down the steps of a BEA jet whose livery has been
changed by the addition of TLES to its name; the four mop-tops on
stage doing the deep Beatle bow; Dezo Hoffman's jumping Beatles; the
Beatles with the Queen, with the Prime Minister. The decade peaks in
1967 with the Beatles as psychedelic princes in their Sgt. Pepper
finery, or singing All You Need is Love on the first global satellite
television link-up to an international audience of 500 million
viewers. Old-age Beatles in their long hair and beards complete the
decade with John and Yoko staging bizarre events to promote world peace.
Tourists who have seen Dickens only on TV, and have never read a line
of Shakespeare, dutifully visit their shrines. The Beatles, too, have
religious sights. The zebra crossing on Abbey Road and the Cavern
Club in Liverpool are a solid part of the general tourist itinerary.
In Liverpool, Paul McCartney's, and John Lennon's family houses are
now owned by the National Trust, restored as they were in the early Sixties.
The musical development of the Beatles was astonishing, moving from
the jolly romp of Please Please Me to the abstract mysteries of
Revolution 9 in only six years. Each album was a musical advance, but
as well as breaking new ground, they made sure they brought their
fans along with them. They were a formidable presence, a roadblock
that no other group could ignore. No sooner had George Harrison used
a sitar on a record than the Rolling Stones had one too. The Beatles
used feedback: heavy metal was invented. They used backwards tapes
and across London psychedelic bands puzzled over how to copy them.
McCartney's tape loops on Tomorrow Never Knows stumped everyone. They
had reached the limits of EMI's antiquated technology. It was a track
that can never be remixed because it was mixed as it happened. I was
one of the people scattered across EMI in studios and cutting rooms,
keeping a small tape loop taut against a tape recorder playback head
by spooling the other end around a jam jar. The information was
patched into the mixing desk of the producer, George Martin, and he
faded in and out, superimposing and overlapping the sounds of
speeded-up guitars that McCartney had created in his bedroom on a
pair of tape recorders. Three days after the release of Sgt Pepper,
Jimi Hendrix had learnt the title track and played it at the Saville
Theatre. (McCartney, sitting in the audience, said he had never been
so flattered in his life.)
Do they deserve this fame? It was exceptional in the early Sixties
for anyone in a group to be a songwriter, so for a group to have
three was astonishing: George Harrison's Something is one of the
world's greatest love songs; McCartney's Yesterday has been recorded
by more than 3,000 other artists. Their range of subject matter goes
from Lennon's existential classic Nowhere Man to McCartney's
mini-operas such as Eleanor Rigby, or She's Leaving Home, exploring
themes of loneliness and isolation in a three-minute pop song. The
latter tune so moved Martin that he burst into tears when he first heard it.
The Beatles knew they were making something special. I remember
walking down the corridor in Abbey Road and George Harrison ran up to
me: "You should have been here last night. We recorded the story of
this girl leaving home. It tells it really how it is, it'll make them
understand!"
Most art forms began as popular entertainment: opera, photography,
the cinema. The Beatles will last because they were the ones to take
rock'n'roll and make it into art.
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