A popular beat combo, m'lud

The Beatles wave to fans after
arriving at JFK Airport, Feb 1964.
(United Press International, photographer unknown,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

It started out as a light-hearted project for the pandemic: I would finally listen to all of the albums released by The Beatles in the sequence in which they were released.

What I couldn’t have foreseen was that six months later, I would still be listening to records released half a century ago, nor that so much of my reading would relate to a band that broke up before I was even born.

How much of a Beatles expert am I at this stage, you may ask? 

Pfft. Not much, as it happens.

I still confuse the order in which the albums were released (‘does Rubber Soul come before or after Revolver?’) but I’m reading my third book on the band and of all the podcasts I subscribe to, my one must-hear is Nothing Is Real, a pod by two Irish fans who manage to be both knowledgeable and sound.

In a way, this is like being a teenager in the 1990s again: I have the unshakeable feeling that The Beatles are part of a western cultural canon that I have to familiarise myself with before I can venture out into the world. Remember that? Remember the sensation of believing that in order to be a bona fide grown-up, you really should have a firm grasp on the touchstones of culture? 

So what, apart from that one conversation back in May, has prompted this renewed love affair? After all, I did my homework in the 1990s, I decided my favourite track long before I left college (official answer: In My Life; unofficial answer: it changes depending on the day of the week).

Firstly, I can’t ignore the fact that the barriers to immersing myself in The Beatles’ work is no longer high. I have a Spotify subscription and selecting a rabbit hole to throw myself into is a better use of my fee than listening to the same 50 or 60 poorly curated songs. (As I write, I’m listening to The Radha Krsna Temple, the album George Harrison produced as the band was breaking up.)

I spent a glorious couple of weeks cycling home from work listening not to a podcast about a grisly murder but to some of the 20th century’s most ingeniously crafted songs. Even throwaway tracks, like Bungalow Bill, say, or I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party, were miles better than much of the pap I hear on the radio nowadays. 

The Beatles arriving in Spain in July 1965. 
(Iberia Airlines, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>,
via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, listening to The Beatles led me down other creative tracks. I finally listened to All Things Must Pass, which I’d always heard was a belter of an album, and then overcame three decades of bad publicity directed at Paul to listen to Ram, an album I’d never even heard of before.

(Don’t ever tell me that we are poorer for living in this age of technological advance. I would NEVER have listened to that McCartney album if it hadn’t been just a few clicks away on my smartphone.)

Secondly, revisiting The Beatles after all these years has been interesting. I think the last time I seriously engaged with their music was when Anthology came out 25 years ago. At that time, I was younger than John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr had been when they found fame and I don’t think I looked past what a rush it must have been to be gifted so much, so young.

All these years later, I marvel at what they managed to accomplish. From peerless pop harmonies and a knack for knockabout larks that made them naturals in the nascent television age, to their status as fearless musical pioneers who used their public profile to engage in the social issues of their day... that all happened in a period of seven years!

By the time Ringo, the eldest of the quartet, turned 30 in 1970 the group had disbanded.

At the moment, I’m still mulling over And In The End, by Ken McNab, which covers the year 1969, their final year as a band. I have so many questions: surely Lennon’s heroin use was a factor in the group’s break-up – why does nobody talk about this? Did the birth of McCartney’s eldest daughter Mary presage a change in him that made life in the band untenable? Does anybody understand how cigar-chomping Lew Grade ended up with the publishing rights to Lennon-McCartney’s songs? 

So, immersing myself in The Beatles at an age when I KNOW how difficult it is to get anything worthwhile done has been a useful and interesting exercise. 

See? Interesting, not depressing or dispiriting. In fact McCartney’s continued work rate (at age 78, he’s due to release a new album next month) and Ringo’s unflagging belief in “peace and love” – as evidenced on social media – serve to inspire me.

Thirdly, and this may be the element that ends up hooking me in for life, is the worldwide community of Beatles fans that I’m steadily edging towards.

The Facebook group associated with the Beatles podcast I listen to is unofficially my happy place online. People from different backgrounds, who have varying degrees of knowledge, but share a love for the band, gather to discuss elements of the band’s music and tease out various aspects of the Beatles’ lives. 

Is this a little like going to parties, back in the day, and sitting on the fringes of knots of handsome boys and listening while they talked about their favourite Beatles tracks?

The Beatles at Schiphol Airport
(Harry Pot / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Mmm, you may be right about that. I do wonder where the women Beatles fans are, and why they don’t weigh in as much. (One reason I slightly fell out of love with The Beatles in my 30s was the sexism that seemed to mark so much casual fandom – the anti-Yoko comments – the expendability of so many of the women who passed through their lives, George’s rampant shagger impulses.)

But lemme tell you: that feeling of belonging to a large, particularly cool club... it’s pretty much irresistible. And in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, sometimes all you need is... well, you know...