It’s more than forty years since the Beatles stopped recording together (their final album, Let It Be, was completed in April 1970) but the world is still celebrating the Fab Four. We’ve heard all we ever want to hear about John’s funny little poems, Paul’s cheeky grin, George’s mysticism and Ringo’s seventeenth comeback. What the world needs now is someone to put the whole thing in perspective, slot the Beatles into their place in musical history and explain what would have happened if the lovable moptops had never met in the first place.
Would there have been all that taking-themselves-seriously that went on in bands in the late-sixties/early seventies? Would punk rock have been needed? Would Dylan still be strumming an acoustic guitar? Would the Rolling Stones have given up and gone into teaching? In short, would the world not be a better place?
So here’s the indictment against J,P,G & R:
• They were musically overrated to a ludicrous degree. Having grown famous by ripping off (note for note) little-known American performers from Barrett Strong to the Do-nays, they hooked up with a classically-trained producer (George Martin) who gave them string-quartet arrangements. They ended up sounding like everyone from Wagner to Ravi Shankar by way of George Formby, but they advanced the cause of music not a crotchet.
• They encouraged the delusion that the world needs to hear and take very seriously the opinions of pop-singers about everything from American foreign policy to vegetarianism.
• Their much-vaunted sense of humour, evolved to cope with the drunken heckling of Hamburg matelots, did not include a sense of the ludicrous. They dressed like pillocks and spouted pretentious rubbish.
• They influenced both fans and fellow-musicians to take drugs. This would not (arguably) have been such a bad thing had they not also suggested that taking drugs makes for better music and more appreciative listening. The result was some of the worst music ever committed to vinyl.
• They conceived the idea that musicians must ‘progress’ from one record to the next (hence ‘progressive rock’). The only dimension along which progress was in practice achieved was that of gargantuan pretension. The Beatles started the process that ended up with Rick Wakeman performing King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table On Ice. They took rock performance out of the club or concert-hall and into the stadium, where dopy fans paid fortunes to peer at inaudible performers from a quarter of a mile away. By becoming individually rather than collectively famous, they created the conditions for the supergroups (and then they broke up and joined in the nonsense themselves). Bloated egos clashed to the edification of no-one.
• Nor let us forget the Monkees, Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine, Yoko Ono, the collarless jacket and those endless overpriced anthologies cluttering up the record shops.
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