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Film review: Give My Regards to Broad Street

Give My Reagrds to Broad Street movie

Give My Regards To Broad Street is an absolute blast, but only if you adopt the following strategy. Every time you find yourself scratching your head at an illogical plot point or a random sequence that appears to have nothing to do with the rest of the film, repeat this mantra: ‘Paul is the Beatle King, he can do anything’. Accept that, because of his song writing genius, McCartney had earned the absolute right to do what the hell he liked with his expensive, self indulgent folly of a film and you will have a very enjoyable 1hr and 48mins.

Ignore the damning 20% Rotten Tomatoes score and the savage reviews (in his one star review, Roger Ebert said, ‘Broad Street supplies us with a fake crisis, paper-thin characters, and long musical interludes that have been photographed with a remarkable lack of style…the movie treads water with idiotic dream sequences’). Ignore that the film took $1.4mill at the box office but cost $9mill to make. You even have to put aside McCartney’s own opinion that trying to extend what was originally planned to be a one hour TV special (that makes sense; Broad Street shares the rambling, illogical and episodic nature of Magical Mystery Tour) to a feature length film just didn’t work. In Conversations with McCartney, he told author Paul Du Noyer, ‘A feature film has got to have some dynamics, some strength and depth. We didn’t really get round to that…There’s a couple of redeeming features about it, but it’s just not very good.’

Technically, that is true. If you’d paid good money to see the film at the cinema in 1984 you’d have every right to be bitterly disappointed and even to demand a refund. But as this is 2023, you can watch Broad Street for free on YouTube and any true McCartney fan won’t resent investing a little under two hours of their lives to do so.

Broad Street is like an updated Help! but far less offensive (thankfully, racial stereotyping and brownface actors do not feature this time around). Just substitute Ringo’s ring for stolen master tapes as the film’s McGuffin and Leo McKern’s dastardly Clang for John Bennet’s sinister Mr. Rath as the villain of the piece and you have the makings of a plot just about sturdy enough to support a string of musical numbers, dream sequences and dialogue scenes that are meant to represent one day in the life of a rock star.

There’s no real jeopardy and the resolution to the mystery of what happened to those missing tapes (apparently worth £5million; gosh, how thrilling) is laughably weak and not worth waiting for. McCartney, despite having cast himself in the lead role had apparently failed to take a single acting lesson since Help! (or Magical Mystery Tour). So why is Broad Street worth your time?

The first and most obvious thing is the music. Who doesn’t want to watch McCartney sing Beatles classics including ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Here There and Everywhere’ with George Martin looking on from the studio control room (where Geoff Emerick is playing the recording engineer) while Ringo clowns around in the background, trying to find a pair of brushes to play his drums with that you know he’s going to locate just as McCartney plays a final chord.

There’s a brilliant set piece that brings the otherwise rather ordinary song ‘Ballroom Dancing’ to vibrant life, with an all star band that includes Ringo, Dave Edmunds, Chris Spedding and John Paul Jones strutting his stuff in a way he never got the chance to in Led Zeppelin. With a touch of very 80s-style androgyny, Paul and Linda face each other across upright pianos, dressed in matching teddy boy-style blue drape suits. Similarly ‘Not Such a Bad Boy’, which sounds unremarkable when heard on the soundtrack album makes a lot more sense when you see it played with gusto in a faux rehearsal set up with Ringo, Edmunds and the always effortlessly cool Spedding. McCartney looks like he’s having a ball and therefore so do we.

Even the utterly barmy staging of ‘Silly Love Songs’, with the entire band dressed in none-more-80s Toyah-esque garb and Jeffrey Daniel from Shalamar moonwalking and miming out front is a hoot (re-recorded for the film, the version features some fantastically funky playing from Brother’s Johnson bass man Louis Johnson, although he doesn’t appear in the film). While the period costume ‘Elanor’s Dream’ sequence, set to an extended orchestrated version of ‘Elanor Rigby’ doesn’t make an awful of sense, it does at least look grandly cinematic (it’s also reminiscent of the fantasy sequences in Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains the Same).

It’s also fascinating to see a glimpse of London’s past. By the early 90s, Butlers Wharf near Tower Bridge, where the rehearsal scenes are set, would be gentrified with pricy loft apartments and expensive restaurants, but in the early 80s it was still mostly derelict. A few years after filming, Broad Street railway station, where the film’s, er, ‘climatic’ scene is set, was closed and replaced by what is now Bishopsgate. The closure by the way was due to travellers switching to the London Underground and not fall out from its association with McCartney’s less than magnum opus.

As well as the musical legends mentioned above, the film’s cast includes everyone from Shakespearean actor Ralph Richardson to wrestler Giant Haystacks, comedian Tracy Ulman and Aussie star Bryan Brown (you may have seen him juggling shakers behind the bar with Tom Cruise in Cocktail) and a ton of British character actors such as Philip Jackson and Christopher Ellison which all adds to the entertainment value, at least for viewers of a certain age.

Watching Broad Street, it’s pretty obvious why McCartney decided not to pursue a second career in screenwriting and hasn’t made another feature film since (losing £7.6million probably helped in that particular decision making process). But fans should be glad that he gave it a go, however messy and idiosyncratic the results. The film has a kind of mad energy that keeps your eyes fixed to the screen. It’s never boring because you never quite know what’s going to happen next. While I’d never recommend it to the average viewer, for true Beatle-believers it’s a must watch. Just keep the mantra in mind, ‘Paul is the Beatle King, he can do anything’.

Beatles Handbook rating: 4 stars
Buy the album: Give My Regards to Broad Street

Paul McCartney solo albums ranked: The 80s

1. Flowers In The Dirt (1989)

Flowers In The Paul McCartney

The 80s were a creatively fecund time for McCartney. In full magpie mode, he took inspiration from a variety of musical styles – the emerging electronica scene, funk, soul, folk and 50s rock and roll – and found either creative or commercial success (and sometimes both) with all of them, racking up 6 top 10 albums in the UK, 6 top 30 albums in the US, 11 top 10 singles in the UK (5 of them number 1s) and 6 top 10s in the US (including 3 number 1s).

But equally, the 80s were a testing time for Macca. As Jeff Slate noted in his 2017 Esquire article that coincided with the release of the Archive Collection edition of Flowers in the Dirt, the 80s saw, ‘a pot bust in Japan, the break-up of Wings, the assassination of John Lennon, a failed venture into filmmaking, a floundering recording career, public and private squabbling with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, and Michael Jackson buying the rights to his beloved Beatles songbook out from under him’.

With all that going on (although, given the above chart stats, I don’t agree that McCartney’s recording career was ‘floundering’) it’s no surprise that listening through McCartney’s 80s albums can be something of a chore. Despite some very high watermarks – ‘Waterfalls’, ‘Coming Up’, ‘Say Say Say’, ‘No More Lonely Nights’, ‘Here Today’, (and even the pomp-pop of ‘Tug of War’ and ‘Pipes of Peace’) – the albums can be typically characterised as extremely uneven with a few great tracks a piece and an awful lot of filler. McCartney II and the throwaway but fun Choba B CCCP are the partial exceptions that prove the rule.

In a 1987 NME interview, McCartney admitted ‘I’m superstitious. I think that if you stop, you might never come back’. Much of his 80s output sounds like McCartney writing and recording something, anything, simply to avoid stopping and disappearing into the pop void.

But all that changed with Flowers in the Dirt, the strongest McCartney album since At The Speed of Sound more than a decade earlier. In a filmed interview for Put It There: The Making of Flowers in the Dirt, McCartney says the album’s consistent high quality is due ‘mainly ’cause we’re going out on tour, we kinda probably took a little bit more care over this one. I just don’t want to get stuck out in America somewhere on tour flogging an album that we don’t like.’

There was of course another reason. In 1987, McCartney began a short-lived writing partnership with Elvis Costello that, given the results on Flowers, reinvigorated McCartney’s creativity. McCartney himself compared the collaboration to his partnership with Lennon; a huge compliment. Costello’s raw and radical vision for the record was at odds with McCartney’s desire to make a more polished product and so only four co-writes made it on to the album (other tracks appeared over time on later McCartney and Costello solo records). But even if we were cheated on a complete album’s worth of material from the pair, what we do get is impressive.

The bold a cappella harmonies that open ‘My Brave Face’, and the album, are almost confrontational. McCartney seems to dare his critics to deny him the right to plunder his own musical legacy, with a nimble, melodic bass line played on that Höfner 500/1 as a bonus F.U.. It’s a tantalising taste of what The Beatles might have sounded like had they made it unscathed to the end of the 80s.

There’s more than a hint of Lennon and McCartney lyrical yin and yang about the memorable duet ‘You Want Her Too’. As McCartney pointed out in the NME interview ‘Elvis, he reminds me a little of John. Working with him is very similar. We wrote one song and thought ‘God, this is just like The Beatles’. There seems to be more of Costello’s dark edge in ‘Don’t Be Careless Love’, a sweet love song over which illogical anxiety casts its long shadow (‘Saw your body/rolled up in a rug/chopped into two little pieces/By some thug….But in the morning light…you’re by my side).

‘That Day Is Done’, written about the passing of Costello’s maternal grandmother, is the album’s emotional centrepiece. He told Esquire magazine that it ‘just came tumbling out in a lot of dense images that were very vivid and real to me, but perhaps not so comprehensible to the listener. Paul did something very subtle but crucial in making that song pay off to a big, plain spoken chorus, after I’d piled up all of these lines in the verses, including the one that yielded the album’s title.’

Perhaps buoyed by such a productive partnership (the above mentioned re-issue is well worth investigating for additional songs including the ‘Lovers That Never Were’, ‘Tommy’s Coming Home’ and ‘Twenty Fine Fingers’ that are easily as good as the tracks that made it to the original release. For a full appraisal of the McCartney/Costello demos, this article at reclinernotes.com is excellent), McCartney’s solo writes are uniformly excellent. ‘Distractions’, ‘Figure of Eight’ and ‘We Got Married’ are all top drawer stuff. There is the bafflingly awful white man’s reggae of ‘Too Many People’, but that’s just part of the eternal mystery of McCartney; the man that can write something as sublimely strange and haunting as ‘House of Wax’, to take just one random example, is the same man that can compose awful dreck like ‘We All Stand Together’.

It seems a shame that McCartney has never worked with Costello again given the quality of Flowers, but perhaps the echoes of Lennon and The Beatles were just a bit too strong for him. Given the breadth of his work in the 90s and beyond, with his classical compositions and his more experimental work with Youth as The Fireman, it seems McCartney had his sights fixed firmly on the future rather than looking back to the past.

Beatles Handbook rating: 5 stars

Essential tracks
My Brave Face
You Want her Too
That Day Is Done

Buy this album: Flowers in the Dirt

2. McCartney II (1980)

Echoing McCartney a decade earlier, McCartney II is a completely solo, home-recorded album that explores the possibilities offered by the then new-fangled technology of synthesisers and sequencers. Away from the band setting of Wings, which McCartney was becoming increasingly frustrated by, he seemed to relax and allow his creativity to flow. The results are delightful, if varied in quality (well, this is a Paul McCartney record after all). ‘Temporary Secretary’ sounds like your mad middle-aged uncle covering D.A.F., but in the best possible way; the unfortunately titled ‘Frozen Jap’ could be a Kraftwerk outtake, and ‘Front Parlour’ might be the electronic theme tune to a forgotten 80s children’s TV show.

‘Summer’s Day Song’, with it’s sweet melody, sophisticated chord structure and minimalist synthetic arrangement is the bridge between the album’s purely electronic tracks and those with more traditional instrumentation and arrangement. Despite the presence of bass, drums and guitar, ‘Coming Up’ still manages to be a slightly batty fusion of four-to-the-floor funk and 1920s dance band horns; it remains an irresistibly unusual groove and an album highpoint, along with ‘Waterfalls’, one of McCartney’s most beautiful and tender love songs.

So, not a perfect record, but a huge amount of fun. The extended Archive Collection edition is also well worth exploring.

Beatles Handbook rating: 4 stars

Essential tracks
Coming Up
Waterfalls
Temporary Secretary
Buy this album: McCartney II

3. CHOBA B CCCP (1988)

CHOBA B CCCP

CHOBA B CCCP (‘Back In The USSR’) is stripped back palate cleanser after the production excesses of Press Play. Recorded live in the studio with a top band that included lauded Pirates guitarist Mick Green, Macca rattles through some rock’n’roll favourites and sounds like he is having a ball doing it. Not an essential album by any means, but in the the context of McCartney’s variable 80s output, a very welcome addition to the catalogue.

Beatles Handbook rating: 3 stars

Essential tracks
Twenty Flight Rock
Lucille
Lawdy, Miss Clawdy
Buy this album: Choba B CCCP

4. Tug Of War (1982)

Recorded in the wake of Lennon’s death, Tug of War contains the moving tribute ‘Here Today’ to his former bandmate. Further Beatles connections in the form of George Martin’s production and Ringo Starr contributing drums and backing vocals on several tracks can save this from being an uneven and incoherent collection of songs. The almost endless personnel list includes everyone from Stanley Clarke and Steve Gadd to Andy Mackay and Carl Perkins (and Stevie Wonder of course) which reflects the album’s plethora of styles. The title track sounds much better now than it did at the time but still suffers a little from 80 bombast and grand statements, as well as some truly terrible lyrics and the unfortunate sub-high school English student rhyming of grumble/tumble/crumble.

The album also contains one of the worst songs ever composed in ‘Ebony and Ivory’. I’m sure some clever music critic somewhere has managed to argue its true artistic merits, but the reality is that this collaboration with Stevie Wonder is a mawkish and inane song with no redeeming features. Whereas the direct simplicity of ‘Silly Love Songs’ works wonderfully, taking a similarly naive approach to race relations in ‘Ebony and Ivory’ results in one the worsts clunkers in the entire McCartney canon. Somehow, two of the finest musicians and songwriters of all time manage to cancel each other out. At least we have ‘What’s That You’re Doing’, an absolute belter of a funk/pop tune to show what they could achieve together.

‘Wanderlust’ apart (a gospel-influenced, soaring ballad with a nice brass arrangement), the album is dragged down by too much ballast in the form of forgettable pop ditties like ‘Take it Away’, ‘Somebody Who Cares’ and the horrible comedic um-pah of ‘Ballroom Dancing’.

McCartney is a hard worker, no one could dispute it. Seven albums (plus a movie) in one decade is ample evidence of that. But listening to Tug of War makes you wish he’d taken it a bit easier, recharged the old song writing batteries and come up with something just that bit better.

Beatles Handbook rating: 2 stars

Essential tracks
Here Today
Tug Of War
What’s That You’re Doing
Buy this album: Tug of War

5. Pipes Of Peace (1983)

The title track is a finely crafted piece of catchy pop with some nice turns of phrase (‘Will the human race/be run in a day’) with a straightforward pacifist message. The remainder of the album is mostly made up of a vaguely pleasing wash of white pop/soul/funk (‘So Bad’ and ‘Through our Love’ are relative stand outs) that only catches fire when Michael Jackson gets involved; ‘Say Say Say’ is an enduring pop classic with an earworm of a melody and ‘The Man’ is just a great tune that features a sweet-as-honey Jackson vocal performance. With too many filler tracks like the disposable ‘Tug Of Peace’, it’s hard to imagine listening to the whole album through very often, if at all.

Beatles Handbook rating: 2 stars

Essential tracks
Say Say Say
The Man
Pipes Of Peace
Buy this album: Pipes of Peace

6. Press To Play (1986)

In which McCartney gets well and truly Hugh-Padgham-ed. A terribly dated, none-more-80s exercise in slick over-production. Unusually, McCartney seems to be relying on sound textures to create interest rather than solid song writing, despite help on a number of tracks from the estimable Eric Stewart. The cod-reggae of ‘Good Times Coming’ is a low point, the perfect, shiny pop of ‘Press’ is a real high. The solo-penned ‘Only Love Remains’ is beautiful, a true McCartney classic love song.

Beatles Handbook rating: 2 stars

Essential tracks
Only Love Remains
Press
However Absurd
Buy this album: Press to Play

7. Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984)

Give My Regards To Broadstreet by Paul McCartney

The soundtrack to McCartney’s ill advised post-Beatles foray into major motion pictures is mostly composed of re-recordings of previously released Beatles and solo McCartney songs. It’s a rum old mix, with stone cold classics like ‘Here There and Everywhere’ rubbing shoulders with lesser McCartney compositions such as ‘Ballroom Dancing’. The only new tracks on the album are the the excellent pop ballad ‘No More Lonely Nights’ (one of McCartney’s best) the average, mild mannered rocker ‘Not Such a Bad Boy’ and the faux-punk ‘No Values’ (*shrugs*). There’s an extended symphonic reworking of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ called ‘Eleanor’s Dream’, which is certainly interesting but hardly essential. McCartney completists will want an updated ‘Yesterday’ (even if it does sound very similar to the original) but others need not apply.

Beatles Handbook rating: 1 star

Essential tracks
No More Lonely Nights
Buy this album: Give My Regards To Broad Street

George Harrison Solo Albums Ranked

1. All Things Must Pass

Here comes little Georgie Harrison with a great big statement of a triple album set. He’s got his two albums worth of weirdo electronica experimentation out of his system since The Beatles finished and he’s ready to lay down all those songs Paul and John turned their nose up at. And what songs they are. All that pent up frustration that was made so clearly visible in the Get Back footage is unleashed to magnificent and enduring effect. All Things Must Pass is not just George Harrison’s finest solo album, it’s the best solo album ever recorded by a Beatle, and ‘All Things Must Pass’ is the finest solo Beatle song.

Harrison assembled a who’s who of rock to make the record, including Ringo, Billy Preston, Eric Clapton (and the rest of his alter ego band Derek and Dominos: Bobby Whitlock on keyboards, Jim Gordon on drums and Carl Radle on bass), Peter Frampton and Ginger Baker among many others. It was produced by Phil Spector and the opening track ‘I’d have You Anytime’ was co-written with Bob Dylan.

The set’s 23 tracks run the gamut from rock and R&B to gospel, country and folk. While it is a sprawling collection, there is a cohesiveness to it that makes listening to all six sides (or streaming it in its entirety) a real joy. Are the final two sides of jams essential? Well, maybe not, but they have enough energy and invention to make them enjoyable. I for one would miss them if they weren’t there.

It’s hardly going out on a limb to call All Things Must Pass a masterpiece. It has been included in countless best albums lists including Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time best albums of all time, and in 2014 All Things Must Pass was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Essential tracks
All Things Must Pass
My Sweet Lord
Beware of Darkness
What Is Life
Wah-Wah
If Not For You
Beatles Handbook rating: 5 Stars
Buy this album: All Things Must Pass

2. Living in the Material World
Living in the Material World George Harrison

After completely emptying the tank for All Things Must Pass, Harrison struggled to follow it up, proving it was a one-off, solely fuelled by his backlog of Beatle’s cast offs, right? Wrong. Living in the Material World might be less ambitious than All Things, as a single album with far fewer contributors and a more narrow and concentrated musical style, but it’s a very strong successor that proves Harrison’s song writing skills and melodic ear were every bit as honed as McCartney’s or Lennon’s.

Let’s overlook the clunker that is ‘Sue Me, Sue You Blues’ (Harrison in full mithering mode, bemoaning his legal costs in the wake of the Beatles break up – someone really should have said something to him) and instead concentrate on all the wonderful, spiritually charged music the album otherwise contains. There is strong competition for most-beautiful-Harrison-composition in the form of the yearning ‘Who Can See It’ and elegiac ‘The Light That Has Lighted The World’, but the winner must be ‘Be Here Now’ with an elegantly sparse arrangement that highlights Harrison’s mesmerising guitar playing and heartfelt, lilting vocal.

But ‘Be Here Now’ might not even be the best track on the album, such is the consistent quality of Harrison’s writing and performing. ‘The Day The World Get ‘Round’ has a stronger hook, ‘Try Some Buy Some’ a slightly heftier emotional punch. ‘Living In The Material World’ is an earworm of a pop hit and ‘Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth) with it’s soothing slide guitar, is a gentle stroll through a sun dappled meadow with a loved one.

So, Living In The Material World doesn’t quite reach the dizzying height of All Things, but then very little in the rock and pop canon has. It does however further establish Harrison as an all time great recording artist in his own right outside of his work with his old band. An absolute delight and one to be cherished.

Essential tracks
Give Me Love
Be Here Now
Living In The Material World
Beatles Handbook rating: 4 Stars
Buy this album: Living in the Material World

3. Cloud Nine

A fine, vital return after a 5 year break. Harrison is eased into the late 80s high production-value pop/rock area by Jeff Lynne’s steady production hand. From the taught blues funk of the opening title track to the pop joy that is ‘Got My Mind Set On You’ (a cover of Ruby Clark’s 1962 song), Cloufn Nine is a blast. Why no modern boy band has covered ‘That’s What It Takes’ is a mystery.

Given that uber-Beatles fan Lynne is at the helm, it’s no surprise to find some nods, overt or otherwise, to Harrison’s old muckers. ‘When We Was Fab’ is indeed fab, with its oblique, sarky lyrics and musical Beatles quotes including ‘I Am The Walrus’ and ‘Within You Without You’. The video, featuring Ringo Starr is a proper hoot too. And I swear there is more than a hint of Lennonesque rasp to the vocal ‘Fish On the Sand’.

Although Cloud Nine lacks the spiritual heft of All Things and Living (‘Just For Today’ is however a touching lament that wouldn’t be out of place on the latter album), it succeeds completely on its own terms as a meticulously engineered, gleaming pop/rock artifact. ‘Devil’s Radio’ is something of a Tom Petty-alike throwaway rocker and ‘Wreck of The Hesperus’ is similarly lightweight, but both are well constructed and enjoyable, you wouldn’t skip them on a listen through.

As the last album released during Harrison’s lifetime, it’s a fitting finale (Brainwashed, released in 2002 was completed by Harrison’s son a year after Harrison’s death) with Harrison on top form again in all departments and embracing the future while slyly looking back to his illustrious past.

Essential tracks
Got My Mind Set On You
When We Was Fab
That’s What It Takes
Beatles Handbook rating: 4 Stars
Buy this album: Cloud Nine

4. Thirty Three & 1/3

A very strong collection of tunes including the slap bass-driven Woman Don’t Cry For Me, the sublime white soul of Pure Smokey and the addictive pop hook of Crackerbox Palace.

Essential tracks
Crackerbox Palace
Woman Don’t You Cry For Me
Beautiful Girl
Beatles Handbook rating: 4 Stars
Buy this album: Thirty Three & 1/3

5. Extra Texture

From the opening euphoric, sax-driven blast of pop joy ‘You’ to the closing surreal-rocker ‘His Name is Legs’, an album of varied delights.

Essential tracks
You
This Guitar (Can’t Keep From Crying)
His Name is Legs (Ladies and Gentlemen)
Beatles Handbook rating: 4 Stars
Buy this album: Extra Texture

6. Dark Horse

Memorable tunes and a successful mix of guitar-led pop ballads and white boy soul stylings make for a great album. The festive Ding Dong, Ding Dong is a Wizzard-style Christmas knees up.

Essential tracks
Dark Horse
So Sad
Far East Man
Beatles Handbook rating: 4 Stars
Buy this album: Dark Horse

7. Brainwashed

Recorded in the late 80s and 90s and finished following Harrison’s death in 2001 by his son Dhani and Jeff Lynne. A strong coherent collection with ‘Stuck Inside A Cloud’ a plaintive highlight.

Essential tracks
Stuck Inside a Cloud
Brainwashed
Looking For My Life
Beatles Handbook rating: 4 Stars
Buy this album: Brainwashed

8. Gone Troppo

Bookended by the rousing pop of ‘Wake Up My Love’ and the haunting, mournful ‘Circles’, the album sags badly in the middle, despite a gleeful cover of doo-wop classic I Really Love You.

Essential tracks
Wake Up My Love
Circles
I Really Love You
Beatles Handbook rating: 3 Stars
Buy this album: Gone Troppo

9. Wonderwall Music
Wonderwall Music by George Harrison

The first ever Beatles solo album is the all instrumental soundtrack to a psychedelic film starring Jane Birkin that incorporates classical Indian music. An interesting curio.

Essential tracks
Red Lady Too
Wonderwall To Be Here
Party Seacombe

Beatles Handbook rating: 3 Stars
Buy this album: Wonderwall Music

10. George Harrison

‘Here Comes the Moon’ is an interesting yin to ‘Here Comes the Sun”s yang, but otherwise a fairly ropey record, epitomised by the awful F1-themed ‘Faster’

Essential tracks
Love To Everyone
Here Comes the Moon
Not Guilty

Beatles Handbook rating: 3 Stars
Buy this album: George Harrison

11. Somewhere in England

A lacklustre and uninspired album compounded by weedy production. Only the jaunty pop of Teardrops and the sombre drama of Baltimore Oriole make an impression.

Essential tracks
Teardrops
Baltimore Oriole

Beatles Handbook rating: 2 Stars
Buy this album: Somewhere in England

12. Electronic Sound

Two 20 minute tracks of patience-testing synth noodling. I’d love to know how many other people have actually listened to the whole thing. Zero fun.
Essential tracks
None
Beatles Handbook rating: 1 Star
Buy this album: Electronic Sound

Why did The Beatles Break Up?

Let It Be

Why did The Beatles break up? On the face of it, that we’re still asking the question more than half a century after the fact might seem a little strange. But this is The Beatles we’re talking about, the most important and picked over band in the history of recorded popular music, of course we want to know why they didn’t last beyond the 18 August 1969, the last day they recorded together.

Or was it 20 September that year when Lennon told his bandmates he wanted a ‘divorce’ (it’s worth remembering that, by this point, Lennon had already released ‘Give Peace a Chance’ as Plastic Ono band earlier in July and recorded the follow up ‘Cold Turkey’ on 30 September which was number 14 in the charts by November)? Maybe it wasn’t until 10 April 1970 when Paul McCartney issued a statement to the press to say that he had left. It might have been 29 December 1974 when all the legal disputes were finally settled and the dissolution of the band was formalised.

If we can’t even agree on the date they broke up, how are we ever going to get to the bottom of the real reason of why a group of 20-somethings who, despite having already composed and recorded some of the finest songs ever written, still potentially had their best years as a group ahead of them?

At this point, some readers may be thinking, who is this idiot writing this, doesn’t he know that Yoko Ono broke up The Beatles? Well, not according to McCartney, who in a recorded conversation with Let It Be director Michael Lyndsay Hogg in 1969 said, ‘It’s going to be such an incredible comical thing like in fifty years time y’know, “They Broke up because Yoko sat on an amp”. There’s nothing wrong really’. It’s true that McCartney’s comment is far from definitive or unambiguous (you can listen to the quote in context in the video below and make you own mind up) but it does seem to strongly infer that McCartney was willing and able to accommodate Lennon and Ono’s inseparability and continue as a Beatle.

According to McCartney, the real culprit was closer to home. In Paul Du Noyer’s excellent book, Conversations with McCartney, he says, ‘There were the arguments, the business differences and all that. We were sort of coming to an end. Round about that time we made Let It Be, but because of the fraught personal relationships, the final straw that broke the camel’s back was Allen Klein coming in.”

Klein was appointed The Beatle’s manager in February 1969 against McCartney’s wishes, who would have preferred his father-in-law Lee Eastman to have had the job. A combination of Klein forcing the band to accept adding Phil Spector’s string arrangements to the otherwise stripped back Let It Be album and taking a jaw dropping 20 per cent fee from them was all too much for McCartney.

The strain on McCartney’s relationship with the other three who were in favour of Klein and his whopping cut of the profits eventually led to McCartney issuing a press statement. Accompanying the release of his first solo album McCartney, the Q&A stated among other things that his writing partnership with Lennon was over and that he had no plans to work with the other Beatles in the future. The Daily Mirror ran with the headline, ‘Paul Quits The Beatles’ laying the blame firmly at McCartney’s door, despite Lennon quitting the band a few months earlier, albeit in private.

So did Paul McCartney break up The Beatles? The truth is that major fissures had been apparent as far back as August 1968 when Ringo left during quarrels while they were recording the White Album. As he related in an interview in the Anthology documentary series,

‘I left because I felt two things: I felt I wasn’t playing great, and I also felt that the other three were really happy and I was an outsider. I went to see John…I said, ‘I’m leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close.’ And John said, ‘I thought it was you three!’ So then I went over to Paul’s … I said the same thing and Paul said, ‘I thought it was you three!’ I didn’t even bother going to George then. I said, ‘I’m going on holiday.’ I took the kids and we went to Sardinia.’

Ringo was back within a matter of weeks, greeted by a studio adorned with flowers, which was enough to reconcile him with his fellow bandmates. But fast forward five months and history nearly repeats itself, although this time the wayward Beatle is not Ringo but Harrison. As seen in Get Back, on 10 January, 1969, while the band were running through the arrangement for ‘Two Of Us’ on the soundstage at Twickenham Film studios, George announced ‘I think I’ll be…I’m leaving…the band now’. Although not recorded, Harrison reportedly told the others he would ‘See you round the clubs’ and walked out of the studio.

Although obviously shellshocked, it’s not long before John was suggesting getting Eric Clapton in as a replacement and ruminating about Harrison, saying, ‘I’m not sure whether I do want him’, hardly the sign of a stable and happy group situation. After a band meeting at Ringo’s house, Harrison agreed to return if the idea for a big live show, which the filmed rehearsals at Twickenham were moving towards, was dropped and rehearsals were relocated to the basement studio at Apple HQ in Saville Row, both of which the other band members acceded to. That Harrison felt the need to dramatically quit and for his return to be dependent on demands and ultimatums doesn’t exactly scream happy campers. With the band on such shaky ground, it was inevitable that something or someone would soon turn out to be the final straw and that just happened to be Klein.

But the real reason The Beatles broke up was because they had to. They were like the universe, ever expanding. The moment when John, Paul, George and Ringo were first in a room together was the big bang, a release of creative energy that would eventually pull them apart. To mix metaphors, a Beatles year is the human equivalent of a dog year; what they experienced and achieved in 12 months would take most mere mortal a decade. They were maturing and transforming at an astonishing rate and they only way they could realise their full potential was separately, not together. As Harrison noted in Anthology, The Beatles ‘gave us the vehicle to be able to do so much’ but ‘it got to the point when it was stifling us, there was too much restriction. It had to self destruct’.

Maybe the ideal outcome was not a permanent disbandment, but a hiatus every so often so that they could let off steam with solo projects and then come back together to do more Beatles. But, arguably, The Beatles as a unified band ceased to truly exist after Revolver. After that, they were four individuals clinging on to the idea of The Beatles but spinning further away from the reality of what The Beatles had been; every new release pointing towards a future where The Beatles would no longer exist. In their hearts, The Beatles knew better than anyone that it was time to let it be.

Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm National Portrait Gallery exhibition review

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Eyes of The Storm is a magical, unmissable exhibition of 250 never before seen backstage pictures taken by Paul McCartney between November 1963 and February 1964. In an introduction to the exhibition, McCartney says that, ‘I’m not setting out to be seen as a master photographer, more an occasional photographer who happened to be in the right place at the right time’. Even if McCartney isn’t technically brilliant (although to my relatively untrained, photography ‘O’ level grade C eyes, the shots appear to be high quality stuff) he made the most of his unique position to capture his fellow Beatles and entourage on film like no one else could ever do.

There is an unequalled intimacy to McCartney’s candid portraits of Lennon, Harrison and Starr that is just beguiling. It’s as though the camera doesn’t exist; there’s no barrier between McCartney and his subjects who are seemingly captured at their most relaxed. His shots of Mal Evans and Brian Epstein are also wonderful. All of them appear in the first part of the exhibition which documents the band’s 1963 autumn UK tour, the filming of an episode of Juke Box Jury and It’s the Beatles for the BBC in Liverpool, The Beatles Christmas Show at the Astoria in Finsbury Park and their London Palladium shows in January 1964. The photographs of The Beatles hectic trip to Paris, also in January 1964 also contains some great images including Harrison dressed as a gendarme.

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The exhibition is less successful when The Beatles make their first visit to America and McCartney turns his attention away from the band and towards ‘airport workers, the police and the press photographers’. While it’s interesting to get a inside-out view of Beatlemania, there are a few too many mundane snapshots. Things pick up when McCartney arrives in Miami and starts shooting in colour (there’s a specially commissioned film with a new score by McCartney playing in the Miami room which adds interest) although there is more than a hint of holiday snap to many of the pictures.

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Despite these minor shortcomings, Eyes of the Storm is an absolute joy. I found myself grinning like an idiot for most of the hour I spent in the gallery. I would allow at least that to see the exhibition and more like 90 minutes to do it proper justice. The galleries were quite packed on a late Thursday afternoon so it’s probably worth going early morning if you can, I imagine this will be a popular show and rightly so. Any Beatles fan will absolutely love it.

Eyes of the Storm is on at the National Portrait Gallery until 1 October 2023. Click here for more information.

One Suite Dream: The Beatles’ White Album and The Art of Song Sequencing

The Beatles White Album

The song ‘suite’ plays a major role in The Beatles canon, both band and solo eras. For many, it the form will forever be associated with McCartney and Wings. From ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ to ‘Medley: Hold Me Tight/Lazy Dynamite/Hands Of Love/Power Cut’ to ‘After The Ball/Million Miles’ and ‘Winter Rose/Love Awake’ or the pocket symphonies of ‘The Back Seat Of My Car’ and ‘Band On The Run’.

All of that stems from the fragmentary glory that is Side Two of 1969’s Abbey Road, the musical definition of a whole that is greater than a sum of its parts. It’s arguably the aural summit of The Beatles’ recorded work. However, the finale of the album almost called ‘Everest‘ was derided by John Lennon as ‘unfinished songs all stuck together. Everybody praises the album so much, but none of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all, only the fact that we stuck them together‘ (John Lennon Playboy interview with David Sheff, September 1980 (published January 1981)). Lennon’s criticism is harsh, but there is truth in it. While ‘Abbey Road Medley’ ( Side Two of Abbey Road is colloquially known as the ‘Abbey Road Medley’, however, the 2019 box-set reissue also refers to it as ‘The Long One’) is a delight, befitting the end of a decade and the band that defined it, there is an earlier near-perfect track sequence in The Beatles’ canon.

Side Four of The White Album is often overlooked and even ignored as the ‘weird’ side; evidence that the 1968 thirty-track behemoth should’ve been a two-sided LP. But it might just be the best example of a song suite in popular music. Individually, ‘Revolution 1′, ‘Honey Pie’, ‘Savoy Truffle’, ‘Cry Baby Cry’, ‘Revolution 9’, ‘Good Night’ are unlikely to make anyone’s Friday night playlist. If you met someone at a party who said that any one of them was their favourite Beatles track you’d make your excuses and head to the bar.

One might even go as far to say that not one of the tracks stands out on The White Album. The popular verdict: ‘Revolution 1’ is a less-exciting cousin to the raucous, electrifying B-Side to ‘Hey Jude’. ‘Honey Pie’ personifies (in name and substance) the sickly-sweet nadir of McCartney’s pastiche and ‘Savoy Truffle’ is another forgettable ‘Harrisong‘, meaninglessly listing the contents of a chocolate box and warning against the perils of tooth decay. ‘Cry Baby Cry’ is a glorified lullaby based on an advertisement, a continuation of post-Rubber Soul Lennon laziness, ‘Revolution 9’ is a mess of noise, a waste of vinyl space at 8 minutes, 22 seconds. Ending the album with ‘Good Night’, a Ringo vocal is a bad move to say the least, exacerbated by Disney tremolo strings and saccharin lyrics.

Side Four of The White Album, ‘You can count me out (in)’. Right?

Wrong.

A Doll’s House

1968’s The Beatles (whilst this is the official album title, it quickly became known as The White Album for its minimalist cover) was almost called something very different . Had it not been for British psychedelic group Family’s debut LP Music In A Doll’s House released in July of the same year, the Beatles’ only double was slated to be ‘A Doll’s House‘.

Imagine that. A creepy Victorian miniature mansion with 30 rooms, one for each song. Each behind an auspicious door with which, upon opening, you might be met with anything from a dose of pastiche surf rock (‘Back In The USSR’), a game of self-referential Beatles Cluedo (‘Glass Onion’), a paean to mating primates with one of the most underrated rock vocals of all time (‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’), a song about a sheepdog (‘Martha My Dear’), a blackbird (‘Blackbird’) or a Raccoon (‘Rocky Raccoon’), a dystopian warning à la Orwell (‘Piggies’), an anti-hunting anthem? (‘The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill’), a slagging off of Sir Walter Raleigh (‘I’m So Tired’), a slagging off of the Maharishi (‘Sexy Sadie’), a slagging off of ‘you all‘ and the invention of 1970s FM radio rock (‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’), the world’s first heavy metal song (‘Helter Skelter’), a bassline played with the mouth (‘I Will’), a Psych/hard rock/gun magazine Doo Wop (‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’), a song for anyone with a birthday this year (‘Birthday’), Ringo’s songwriting debut country groove (‘Don’t Pass Me By’), a cowbell maybe even too prominent for Christopher Walken in the Saturday Night Live sketch ‘More Cowbell’ which aired on 8th April 2000 (‘Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey’), a blues dirtier than a Woodstock puddle (‘Yer Blues’), potentially androgynous reggae (‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’), an attempt to coax Mia Farrow’s sister from a hut (‘Dear Prudence’), the musical and spiritual meeting of the two great loves of John’s life (‘Julia’), an acidic glimpse of mantra madness (‘Wild Honey Pie’), pre-‘Country Dreamer’, country-dreamer-Paul (‘Mother Nature’s Son’) or drums so distant and heavy they sound like they could’ve been recorded in the Himalayas six months earlier, the sound only just reaching you now (‘Long, Long, Long’).

After the pop side (Side One), the folk side (Side Two) and the rock side (Side Three), Side Four is ‘The Doll’s House Side‘. It should be noted that what follows is not a proclamation that Side Four of The White Album is a predetermined concept or even, on a song by song basis, necessarily how The Beatles intended to convey meaning through its contents. However, it is an interesting way in which you can listen to it and, more importantly, it’s a lot of fun; a manual for a new way to try the songs you may have underestimated by the band you thought you definitely hadn’t.

A childlike revolution

Revolution 1
Recording sessions for The White Album began in EMI Studio Two at Abbey Road on Thursday 30th May, 1968. Having recorded the extensive Esher Demos at George’s Surrey bungalow, Kinfauns, the boys had over forty songs from which to build the official follow-up LP to Sgt. Pepper (Magical Mystery Tour was only released as an EP in the UK. Interestingly, 1968 is the first instance since 1963’s Please Please Me where The Beatles had more material than was required to fill an album and the only time where all of that surplus was original material). ‘Revolution’ was selected as the first of the new batch to be recorded and the work done on this day gives us two of the songs on Side Four of the eventual LP (Take 20 produced ‘Revolution 1’ and its extended outro provided the structure of ‘Revolution 9’).

The White Album is inextricably linked with The Beatles’ pilgrimage to Rishikesh, beginning in February 1968. Although reference to the Indian experience justifies the acoustic timbre of a significant portion of the album, it is perhaps just as prudent to consider the album in the context of the year of its creation which, like 1967, is a year in which its music is difficult to separate from its events.

By late ’67 it was becoming clear that the hippie utopia wouldn’t materialise on either side of the Atlantic. The Haight-Ashbury had descended into “ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains” (George Harrison’s comment on witnessing San Francisco in 1967, included in Derek Taylor’s memoir ‘As Time Goes By’ (1973)). US death tolls in Vietnam were at their highest in 1967-1968 at more than 28,000. On 17th March 1968, approximately 25,000 people gathered outside the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square to protest the US involvement in Vietnam, resulting in riots. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on 4th April in Memphis and Robert Kennedy on 6th June – a week into The White Album sessions – in Los Angeles.

It is, therefore, hard to ignore the notion that, in beginning work on their new album, The Beatles were following past practice and reacting to the world outside Abbey Road, setting ‘Revolution’ and its subject matter as The White Album‘s manifesto.

Whether discovering The Beatles in real time or later you were likely already familiar with another version of the song; the distorted guitar and screams version which backed ‘Hey Jude’ as the first Beatles’ release on the Apple label (26th August 1968). ‘Revolution 1’ was, and to a degree still is, therefore, a surprise. It has broadly the same arrangement as the B-Side but is much slower, less electric and with an almost comical doo-wop backing.

Whereas the single version ‘Revolution’ embodies the idealised uprising from the perspective of its subscribers and participants (perhaps the Grosvenor Square crowds) ‘Revolution 1’ is more like a middle-aged, bowler-hatted Londoner, let’s call him Harold, walking through those 1968 scenes. Passively passing through Ladbroke Grove, he is sympathetic to the cause but feels the need to point out why it is so easily undermined by those so inclined with the lines ‘if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow’ and ‘if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you is brother you’ll have to wait’.

The protagonist does not necessarily feel part of the ‘Establishment’, but his age lends itself more readily to the established order than to subversion of it. This generational gap creates an unbreakable apathy in the older generation, in which its flippant treatment of the younger generation and its dogmatic belief that to ‘change the world’ is an impossibility is acutely distilled in Lennon’s sarcastic vocal delivery: ‘we’re all doing what we can’.

Honey Pie
‘Honey Pie’ is disadvantaged by its place in the The White Album track listing. Firstly, after three-and-a-bit sides of largely unusual music, a listener may be fatigued. Secondly, we’ve already heard ‘Wild Honey Pie’. That either means we’re intrigued by what a similarly-named song has to offer (not a great deal as it turns out) or, if you hated ‘Wild Honey Pie’, ‘Honey Pie’ is already tarred with the same brush. Thirdly, ‘Honey Pie’ naturally falls within the McCartney music hall catalogue of which this album already exhibits a superior representative in ‘Martha My Dear’.

But maybe, just maybe, ‘Honey Pie’ isn’t a music hall pastiche. Harold arrives home. He’s off the streets of a crumbling London and into his sanctuary where, if he likes, nothing ever changes. He pours himself a cognac and places the gramophone needle on his favourite 78; the sound of the 1940s, his golden generation. He dreams of Hollywood and romance; the song’s heroine evokes the great loves of his youth before he settled down into a settled job and a settled life. ‘Honey Pie’ is an exploration of his delusional apathy and selective ignorance of the reality of things. In providing a stark contrast to the breakdown of the psychedelic generation’s attempts to change the world, it represents the very people best-placed to assist yet whose only act was to turn their backs and turn up their radios to drown-out the sound of a world about to erupt outside the four walls of their homes.

Savoy Truffle
The compressed horns of ‘Savoy Truffle’ lay a fanfare foundation for the entry of the family’s children into the front parlour with their mother holding a new baby. They’re excited to see their father, home from another very important day in the very big city making the world go round. They’re clutching at boxes of chocolates and grinning from ear to ear. The Mackintosh’s ‘Good News’ varieties listed in the lyrics contrast with the bad news about to unfold outside. Shinily-wrapped in a tooth-decay warning, Harrison’s metaphor is dual-purpose for the loss of the innocence of childhood by adopting those ‘adult’ ideas of security, self-preservation and greed and, with it, the decay of progressive society. An arguable theme of the album is the notion that once such innocence is lost, it is irretrievable: ‘You might not feel it now, but when the pain cuts through you’re going to know and how the sweat is going to fill your head, when it becomes too much you shout aloud’, sings George in a sentiment that goes beyond a mere call for a Clapton root canal (the genesis of the song was friend (and White Album contributor) Eric Clapton’s love of chocolates).

Cry Baby Cry
Father sings a lullaby to his family, ‘cry baby cry, make your mother sigh’. The man of the house is happy to admire his family at a distance but without adopting direct responsibility; they are one of his marks on the world (‘the children of the King’) and it is enough, to him, that he graces them with his presence. His wife is ‘old enough to know better,’ supposing that age equals wisdom, a view that the songwriting is questioning here. The enemy to progress is the established order, the staid way of thinking, risk-averse sensibilities and the only burning desire, seemingly, a one to ‘grow up’.

The characters in ‘Cry Baby Cry’ are obvious symbols of this established order. The Duke is ‘having problems with a message at the local bird and bee’. Perhaps he is physically barricaded in his local pub by active participants in the peaceful revolution. Perhaps the childlike suggestion of the ‘birds and the bees’ presents him as emotionally barricaded from showing his wife the love she deserves. She, the Duchess, seems to be elsewhere, maybe invited to the family home for tea after the children go to bed. ‘Cry Baby Cry’ is The Last Supper for the establishment while the revolution rages on the other side of the draped windows.

The hidden track between ‘Cry Baby Cry’ and ‘Revolution 9’ harnesses the ethereality of the former, souring in its fading notes toward the apocalyptic feel of the latter. ‘Can you take me back where I came from?’ sings Paul with reverberant acoustic guitar accompaniment. The final verse of its parent track describes ‘a séance in the dark with voices put on specially by the children for a lark’. Is this, the child track, the voice of one of those children larking about? Or is it the voice of a ghost trapped in the Ouija board and summoned up during the séance? The repeated one-line lyric could be heard as a plea by the adults in the room to revert to the innocence and security of their own childhood, but they know too much and find themselves helpless. They are the dolls in a Doll’s House.

Revolution 9
‘Revolution 9”s foray into musique concrète is the sound of the revolution itself. John Lennon has said as much: that the song is ‘an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution’. The Lennon/Harrison collaboration is possibly better-described as a Lennon/Harrison/Ono collaboration, significantly influenced by an absent Beatle first-interested in avant garde experimentation and the use of tape loops, Paul. In any event, the supposedly random collection of sounds throws up some interesting ideas.

The ‘Number 9, Number 9’ refrain is not reminding us Paul is dead. It is the Doll’s House gramophone sticking; the party is almost over and the world outside is falling apart. ‘Revolution 9’ evokes the disconcertion of a semi-dream state, its split-screen narrative flicking between what is going on inside and outside of the Doll’s House. The introductory exchange between George Martin and Alistair Taylor apologising for not buying a bottle of claret, followed by the exclamation of ‘cheeky bitch’ makes the listener feel they’re eavesdropping on a middle-class conversation in the [pineapple] heart of Dinner Party Society.

The crazed female laughter is the Duchess from the previous song, ‘always smiling and arriving late for tea’. The discussions of the ‘price of grain in Hertfordshire’ and ‘financial imbalance’ are the gentlemen discussing matters of a fiscal nature over a cigar while the baby cries in the corner for its mother’s attention. Outside, the prophecies of ‘Revolution 1’ are coming true with riots and gunshots and cries of “Right, Right”. George’s repeated ‘El Dorado’ is foreshadowing the fall of the empire around the Doll’s House next to his sombre double refrain ‘Who was to know?’ suggesting a tragic meaningless to all this violence.

As the sound collage reaches its chanting climax, its most famous line, spoken by Yoko, ‘if you become naked’ is confirmation that the regression to a childlike state is the answer – the true revolution is not political, economic or violent but is to reject baseless ‘adult’ ideas. The dream isn’t over, it’s just a different dream to what we thought was the answer in 1967.

Jonathan Gould wrote that ‘Revolution 9’ is ‘an embarrassment that stands like a black hole at the end of the White Album’. But it isn’t at the end of The White Album and the track that closes out the LP is far from a black hole.

Good Night
No other song from the Esher Demos would be a more appropriate finale to this strange and wonderful cabinet of curiosities and, sometimes, there’s no other song in the world that I’d rather listen to than ‘Good Night’. The comfort of Ringo’s voice cascades from the record like a warmed blanket unfurling, inviting the listener to feel like a child being tucked-in for a sound night’s sleep by its singer. And that is why it’s perfect. None of the other Beatles could have sung it convincingly, yet Ringo is earnest. ‘Good Night’ is the foil to ‘Revolution 9’. In the same way that the gravity of Revolver‘s closer is tempered by its comic title, The White Album‘s final song sweeps away any pretension left hanging after ‘Revolution 9’, yet simultaneously progresses the apparent theme of Side Four, resolving it in the only way The Beatles knew how, with positivity. Within the safety of the child mind, the regression from the chaos of the adult world is complete and maybe it is ‘gonna be alright’.

Take this, may it serve you well
The resurgence in popularity of the vinyl record is encouraging for the preservation of the ‘album’ as an art form. If artists are to write and record successful ‘albums’, attention must be paid to track sequencing and how a side of vinyl flows, develops, balances light and shade, maintains interest and leaves a lasting impression. Whereas Side Two of Abbey Road is a masterclass in sonic knitting, Side Four of The White Album is a thematic opera: A Doll’s House. If you’re striving for a new way to listen to The Beatles, I invite you to revisit Side Four and see what you think it’s all about. After all, it’s all in the mind you know.

Written by Jordan Frazer. Follow him on Twitter at @TheStylusMethod and find out more about the band at Bandcamp

Movie review: If These Walls Could Sing

If-these-walls-could-sing

On 30th May 2022, I walked up the fabled steps of Abbey Road Studios, guitar in hand, heart in mouth. I was there to record with my band, The Stylus Method, for our second album, The Imaginary Costume Party. Anyone who has made the pilgrimage to St. John’s Wood will be familiar with the magic feeling the place conjures, despite its understated external appearance and sleepy surroundings. Entering the rabbit-warren of connecting corridors, stairways and secret passages adorned with the faces of musical and cinematic greats, I felt honoured to be contributing to the rich seam of sound recorded here. I hoped to mine some of those jewels during my own musical journey there.

Mary McCartney’s new documentary If These Walls Could Sing, celebrating the 90th anniversary of Abbey Road Studios, re-creates that feeling in its opening sequence. As narrator, she even makes the same point: ‘every time I walk through these corridors it feels magical’. Some flashing glimpses of a young George Harrison with his 12-string Rickenbacker and Wings-era Paul and Linda standing on Studio 2’s parquet floor help to set the scene for what follows.

90 minutes for 90 years is barely enough time to scratch the surface and it must have been a difficult task to narrow down the shortlist of contributors. However, the stories and interviews selected are rather hard to argue with. The film begins in 1931 with the black and white genesis of Abbey Road, its inaugural recording/performance of Sir Edward Elgar conducting a live orchestra through his ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, cut straight to a 78rpm disc. McCartney then traces the transition from classical to pop and back again. Cliff & The Shadows, Cilla Black, Gerry Marsden, Pink Floyd, Fela Kuti, Nile Rodgers, Kate Bush, Oasis and Celeste are bookended by performances of Elgar’s ‘Cello Concerto in E minor, Op.85′ by Jacqueline du Pré in 1967 and Sheku Kanneh-Mason in 2022, demonstrating the expanse of genres to flourish at Abbey Road, still the place to be to record the world’s greatest music.

Sir Elton John and Jimmy Page recall their days as young session players. The reverence with which they talk of Abbey Road and the musicians with whom they worked in those days is genuinely humbling and shows the power of music in bringing together and inspiring a community of like-minded creatives.

Perhaps the most interesting section of the film is the studios’ survival story, through the drought of bookings in the late 1970s & early 1980s when Studio 1 was relegated to a staff badminton court (and nearly converted into a car park) before being rescued by the tireless work of its staff and a renaissance in film music. Legendary composer John Williams of Star Wars fame provides some delightful insights, including his memories of the studio canteen (which I can confirm from experience serves extremely good roast potatoes). Rather perfectly, the London premiere of If These Walls Could Sing was the first ever to be hosted in Studio 1.

While the coverage of the Fabs’ time at Abbey Road is substantial, the film’s focus is not on the Beatles themselves or their music; it’s on the people at Abbey Road who made it happen (and continue to reinvent it) or, as Paul describes them, the ‘really cool boffins’. From the great George Martin – Ringo putting it eloquently, that ‘George was incredible and we were buskers’ – the tireless work of Ken Townsend, starting out as a trainee engineer in 1950 to retiring as studio chairman in 1995, faithful veteran technician Lester Smith and insights from current studio manager Colette Barber, the commitment to Abbey Road transcends simply what these people do for work; it is love.

It’s always spine-tingling to hear the surviving Beatles talk about ‘The Beatles’ and there’s plenty of that to enjoy. Paul seems genuinely excited to be there, in Studio 2, giving us a rollicking rendition of ‘Lady Madonna’ on the Mrs Mills piano and proclaiming the essence of what Abbey Road meant to the 1960s cultural revolution: ‘here you were in London, which was on fire’.

There are also some choice quotes (and drumming) from Ringo, who is looking fabulous, revealing his favourite song is ‘Yer Blues’. On Paul, he says, ‘if it hadn’t’ve been for him we’d have made like three albums’ and, on The Beatles, ‘it worked out pretty well for us’. You could say that Ringo.

The film includes archive clips we’ve all seen before, like the December 1966 interviews of the newly moustachioed Fabs arriving to work on the Sgt. Pepper sessions or the discussion of John’s ethereal vocal in ‘A Day In The Life’ (from the Anthology series). However, the words from Giles Martin are rather touching, picking up where his dad left off in similar no-nonsense terms that ‘it’s the four of them in a room making a sound together’ which is, perhaps, the most valuable asset of any great recording studio: a space in which people can create music together.

What Mary McCartney does with this film is to illustrate the cultural (or countercultural) significance of Abbey Road. A contemporaneous poetic critique of Sgt. Pepper from Allen Ginsberg gives credence to Roger Waters’ comment that this music gave musicians ‘permission to write songs about real things’ and ‘the courage to accept your feelings’. For, in this building, an entire artistic movement was born, not just a musical one but something much greater and enduring, spanning continents and lasting generations.

In that pursuit, we’re treated to some lovely archive clips such as Paul conducting the orchestra for ‘A Day In The Life’ (complete with clown noses and bald wigs) and a voice-over from George Harrison on the ‘All You Need Is Love’ filmed performance in Studio 1, its technicolour contrasting with the earlier Elgar scene in the same room. In one of the film’s finest moments, we’re shown a clip of Blackbird from the White Album sessions in 1968 (the year before Mary was born) kept in time by the tapping of Paul’s yellow and red shoes. Then, 56 years later, he plays a snippet of the song for his daughter’s camera. Reference to the unstructured Get Back/Let It Be project and a return to Abbey Road for the album of the same name provides a clever dramatic irony for the 2023 audience. The chaos of the former rectified by the latter which, in turn, now officially gives its name to the studios themselves.

Shown working on new music in Studio 3, Nile Rodgers observes that ‘so many massive rock and roll records were made here, people don’t believe that it was just done by accident’. The inherent superstition of musicians will mean that we’ll never know. However, despite the ‘smell of fear’ one might experience upon entering this hallowed ground to commit recorded sound to the history books, If These Walls Could Sing reminds us that Abbey Road is not a pretentious place.

The mark of a good documentary, Mary McCartney rarely emerges from behind the camera, instead seeking to capture the magic of Abbey Road which, for all its history and legend, is not just surviving on past glories, in fact, quite the opposite. It’s more than the name, the zebra crossing or the album cover. This is the most unlikely underdog story of what is still a working studio, and probably the best one in the world.

The studio hasn’t been made over or even tidied up for the documentary. Equipment isn’t pushed to one side to make room for better camera angles. The interviews in Studio 2, particularly those with Paul and Ringo, show cables, baffles and ‘sleeping bag’ dampers in the background and, from the door to the echo chamber to the stairs and god-like control room window, it looks just the same as it did in 1963 for the Please Please Me full-day album session culminating in, as Giles Martin puts it, ‘John’s ripped vocal’ in ‘Twist And Shout’.

For a British institution like Abbey Road, it’s rather frustrating that our American friends were able to watch If These Walls Could Sing two weeks before us, but it was well worth the wait (and a Disney subscription). Fittingly, this film stresses the eccentric Britishness of it all. Noel Gallagher describes the spirituality of the place akin to record shops, pubs, and football stadiums, while Giles Martin analogises that you’re never meant to clean out a teapot: ‘you walk down into Studio 2 and you feel as though the walls are saturated with great music’.

Why is Abbey Road still the greatest place on Earth to record? For all its mysticism, maybe the simple answer lies in the following two quotes:
– ‘People want to come here, they want the sound of Abbey Road’ (Sir Elton John).
– ‘All the microphones work’ (Sir Paul McCartney) – something which will resonate with musicians everywhere who have ever paid for studio time.

The Beatles Handbook rating: 4 stars

Review written by Jordan Frazer. Follow him on Twitter at @TheStylusMethod and find out more about the band at Bandcamp

Review: Revolver Super Deluxe Vinyl Box Set

Revolver super deluxe vinyl
I [pretentious cough] ‘discovered’ The Beatles in the mid-2000s, aged 13. I began like so many others with the Red and Blue albums, but where to go next? Back then the adage that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the greatest thing ever committed to record had largely eroded and been replaced by men-of-a-certain-age advocating for Revolver as the true rock masterpiece, so that’s where I headed.

Revolver. What is that? A pun? I spent hours staring at the artwork. Why are the boys out of order? (Paul, John, Ringo and George) Why are three of them looking away? Why, in a technicolour age is Klaus Voorman’s cover design in monochrome? And then there’s the tracklisting; the song titles are weird. Why doesn’t ‘Love You To’ make grammatical sense? Who is ‘Dr Robert’? What else, besides sing, can your bird do? What on earth (or any other planet) does ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ mean? What, exactly, has Paul got to get into his life? George has three songs on this one; what the bloody hell? Is it even George on the back cover or is it three Beatles and Keith Richards? I hadn’t yet pressed play on the first track and already my little head was filled with things to say. A portable disc player and some over the ear headphones. I was alone, I took a ride, I didn’t know what I would find there.

What I found when I pressed play was finger snaps, tape loops, wild horns, backwards melodies, searing harmonies, drones, twin-lead guitars, clavichords, changing time signatures, fade-ins and fade-outs. I found the gruff nonchalance of the ‘Taxman’ count-in and the disconcerting semitone piano riff in ‘I Want To Tell You’. The delicate beauty of ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, the thunderous trance monotony of the ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ rhythm section and the austere greyness of ‘Eleanor Rigby’. When the most perfect five-second guitar break in ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ bursts the black and white bubble and lets the colour in, it’s like Bobby Moore lifting the Jules Rimet trophy.

Revolver is the most eclectic Beatles album. It’s the most ambitious and it’s the most fun. Not once is an idea repeated and, listening in order, you can hear the expansion of 20th Century popular music with every note, inspiring future artists across genres to pick up guitars, sit at pianos and evoke the sound of the Dalai Lama chanting on a mountain-top. Well, maybe.

But this article is not about Revolver, the album. It’s about Revolver, the 2022 Super Deluxe Box-Set, for which my adoring family handed over the £189.99 (plus delivery) for my 29th birthday present. Vinyl is my chosen medium these days and the excitement of holding in my hands the ‘new’ version of the album I’d loved for 16 years was palpable.

The New Stereo Mix
Despite the temptation to skip ahead to the studio outtakes, I behaved myself. The changes here are slight but fantastic. This is not a dusting-off or a face-lift. This is more like a leg-up over the wall into the chocolate factory, a gentle nudge into the 21st Century for something that will live forever. With the exception of ‘She Said She Said’ (on which the rhythm guitar on the left channel is a little intrusive), the new stereo mixes are invariably better than the 2009 re-masters.

This is a crisper, punchier sound. It’s more metallic in just the right places, like Paul’s raga-inflected solo in ‘Taxman’ and John’s acoustic strums in ‘I’m Only Sleeping’. It’s also warmer in others, like George’s lush harmonies, Ringo’s fills in ‘Here There And Everywhere’ and the sound effects in ‘Yellow Submarine’, transporting you to Studio No.2 with bathtubs and chains, Mal Evans’ hosepipe, Brian Jones clinking glassware and George Martin wearing brass instruments for hats. You can hear the fun that was had; how amazing that sound can convey that.

For a collection of songs so familiar to its listeners, there are things you’d maybe never noticed before. In at least two places, John and Paul sing ‘Bob Robert’ rather than ‘Dr Robert’ and Ringo does indeed play on ‘For No One’! The final chorus on ‘Good Day Sunshine’ is more pronounced before its fade-out and Paul’s yawn in the middle of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ sounds like he’s waking-up right next to you. ‘Love You To’ sounds more authentically Indian than ever and for the first time becomes one of the stand-out tracks on the album.

Maybe it’s because of the sequencing or simply because Side One is so strong, but it always felt like the section after ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and before ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ was overlooked. This is where the 2022 stereo mixes shine. The guitar work in ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, the vocal agility and sympathetic percussion in ‘For No One’, the whirring guitars and Paul’s harmony line on ‘he’s a man, you must believe’ in ‘Dr Robert’ and the interplay between George’s guitar riff and Ringo’s drums in ‘I Want To Tell You’ are the highlights of the new stereo mixes.

Sessions
Even the Beatles fanatics among us who aren’t in constant search of bootlegs have heard some of this material before on Anthology 2 including take 1 of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the hornless version of ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, the how-many-words-can-we-get-into-the-backing-vocal version of ‘Taxman’ and the high-as-kites giggling breakdown of ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, perhaps more appropriately titled ‘And Your Byrds Can Sing’. It’s the material we haven’t heard before that brings the magic to this collection and there’s a lot to pore over on these four sides.

Rain Take 5 – Actual speed
The song that invented Oasis was recorded in A and then slowed down to G. That version is impressive enough; Ringo’s finest moment on record with a drum part so unusual and busy that it gives the impression it might fall apart at any time, the rest of the song crumbling around it. Paul’s rumbling bass threatens to toss the needle out of its groove. But it’s even more jaw-dropping when you hear the rhythm track at its original speed. An oft-advanced criticism of these previously-unreleased studio tapes is that seeing behind the curtain ruins the illusion. This recording is that most rare example of learning more of how something was created posing further questions and a greater sense of awe. How did they play it at this speed and keep it so tight? Has a band ever sounded that good again?

Got To Get You Into My Life (First version) – Take 8
Paul is the most musically-gifted Beatle and, at the time of recording Revolver, the hippest and most adventurous of the four. It’s rather funny, therefore, to hear his apparent confusion at the idea to fade-in the organ:

Paul: ‘I don’t see how you’ll get any different sound from that’ [hits opening chord]
John: ‘You’ll get the organ but without the start of it’
Paul: ‘Why though?’ (See the photograph of Paul on page 6 of the accompanying book as a perfect companion piece to this quote).

Whether we’d admit it or not, we all want to be in The Beatles’ inner circle and, post-Get Back, these studio chatter clips make you feel like you’re in the room. Imagine that.

Yellow Submarine (Songwriting Work Tapes)
‘Yellow Submarine’ is relentlessly relied on by bores, music snobs and other Blue Meanies as hard evidence that (a) The Beatles are overrated and (b) Ringo is crap. Fortunately, I no longer feel the need to challenge such opinions. Is it musically complex? No, but we have ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ for that. Does it have the best vocal? No, but we have ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ for that. Does it challenge us as listeners? Well, now you mention it…

In Paul’s foreword he writes ‘…one twilight evening, lying in bed before dozing off, I came up with a song that I thought would suit Ringo and at the same time incorporate the heady vibes of the time, ‘Yellow Submarine”. This was certainly my understanding of its genesis. Children’s song. Written by Paul. Sung by Ringo.
However, this seems at odds with the two ‘Songwriting work tape’ versions of the song on side four of the Sessions discs. ‘In the place where I was born, no one cared, no one cared’ sings John, on a recording reminiscent of the earliest versions of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. A John song after all? What is perhaps more interesting is the following track. John sings the revised lyrics, beginning ‘In the town where I was born lived a man who sailed to sea’ after Paul’s encouragement that ‘…you know how to sing it’.

It’s impossible not to see these lines as a description of Alf Lennon. If that’s correct, then this is John at Plastic Ono Band levels of vulnerability and very far from the eventual Goons-like feel of the released version. That is not, of course, to say that Paul (and yes, okay, Donovan who contributed the lines ‘sky of blue, sea of green’ to the final version of the lyrics) didn’t write some, or even most of the remaining lyrics, but this is truly a revelation which challenges one little piece of the accepted narrative of ‘The Beatles’.

Tomorrow Never Knows – Take 1 & I Want To Tell You – Speech & Take 4
The album’s psychedelic closer was a turning point for a band for whom every album presented a turning point. If given its original name, ‘The Void’, it would be all too much. Tempered by the Ringo malapropism title and now also by John’s music-hall ‘da da da’ ending (which was left off the Anthology 2 version), we’re reminded that at almost no time ever did The Beatles take themselves seriously, and neither should we.

Similarly, a comedy highlight of the Sessions is John’s suggestion that George’s as-yet-untitled ‘I Want To Tell You’ should be named ‘Granny Smith part friggin’ two’. A reference to the working title of ‘Love You To’ being ‘Granny Smith’, this self-referential Beatle humour is just what we were hoping for. The actual working title for this song ended up as ‘Laxton’s Superb’.

Eleanor Rigby Speech before Take 2
This fragment reflects so much of what the band and their story is all about. On the studio floor, professional classically-trained musicians with cut-glass accents discuss the virtues (or otherwise) of using vibrato on the string quartet accompaniment to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ while the learned-RP voice of George Martin acts as translator. Up above them, by about 20 stairs, paying half-attention is the not quite 24-year old working class creator, James Paul McCartney. Could he tell a difference between the two takes? ‘Err, not much’. The student becoming the master.

This is a reminder of two things – first, that the creative boom of the 1960s relied on a disruption of the class system in Britain. Second, that The Beatles needed and welcomed collaborators, the most essential of whom was George Martin.

The Other Bits
The Super Deluxe box also includes:
an LP of the original mono master, still sounding glorious on 12-inch vinyl and a good comparator for the new stereo mixes; a ‘Paperback Writer’ c/w ‘Rain’ EP, reminding us of just how fierce that guitar tone was, featuring, on Side A, the new 2022 stereo mixes and, on Side B, the original mono mixes, in replica Parlophone packaging complete with ‘Emitex’ advertisement; and a 100-page book with a foreword by Paul and contributions from Giles Martin, Questlove and Kevin Howlett as well as a track-by-track exploration of the album, a comic strip from Klaus Voorman and some contextual commentary on the album’s release and musical/cultural significance all embossed with a subtle extension of the album cover’s tentacle-like moptops.

The Book
Paul plays things down in the foreword, referring to Revolver as ‘All in all, not a bad album’. Classic Paul. Giles Martin’s thank you note to his father, The Beatles and their listeners is genuine and heartfelt and the track-by-track analysis (including images of original lyric fragments and annotated tape boxes) is a lovely world in which to escape for a while. Questlove’s ‘Evolver’ piece perhaps focusses a little too much on other albums, but the sentiment is just right and the discussion of the enduring quality of Revolver and its reception by and influence on a black audience is excellent. Klaus Voorman’s comic strip on the creation of the artwork is childlike and endearing, albeit unusual, and includes a particularly enjoyable likeness of Brian Epstein.

But, like so many Beatle things, the best bit about the book might just be the photographs. Particularly good examples are: a working studio band with George on bass (pgs. 20-21), Paul listening to the competition (pg.33), sunglasses indoors (pg.34), the sartorial elegance (pgs.78-79) and the instruments which created it all, including a rare mid-sixties shot of a Beatles’ Fender Stratocaster (pg.100).

A Collection Of Oldies?
Box sets are collectors’ items; how often do you listen to studio outtakes in place of the real thing? They are a completist’s luxury, and I’m okay with that. Since the novelty of the Sgt. Pepper box in 2017 and the expanse of the White Album box in 2018, heavy scrutiny is now inevitable of these expensive annual offerings. But, what are we really looking for? I propose that we Beatlemaniacs have started to take The Beatles for granted.

Until recently, the received wisdom was that we’d never get anything earlier than Sgt. Pepper because of the way those albums were recorded. Yet, thanks to the legacy of Get Back and Peter Jackson’s ‘de-mixing’, here’s the one we were craving (with rumours of Rubber Soul as the next to receive the archive treatment). Not many albums could credibly live up to Giles Martin’s observation that ‘Music doesn’t get old; we just get old around it’ (Revolver Book – Introduction pg.9) and it’s fitting that a record which still sounds so fresh after 56 years can be enhanced for modern listening by the most cutting-edge of technologies. We can all now finally listen to Revolver on stereo headphones which means the sound of Summer ’66 can un-grey your daily commute or provide a soundtrack to your martini-sipping on a St. Tropez sun lounger.

In this chapter of the greatest story ever told, full to the brim with chance meetings, happy accidents and making-it-up-as-they-went-along, sometimes it’s the things that didn’t happen that matter most. Revolver could’ve been recorded at Stax Studios in Memphis (The Beatles’ soul record). It could’ve been called After-Geography or Abracadabra or Beatles On Safari. But it had to be recorded at Abbey Road. It needed the quintessential Englishness of men in white lab coats running around while four crazy twenty-somethings invented, created, pushed the boundaries and changed the world. Where Rubber Soul was all log fires, corduroy and incense, a stylus-crackle adding to the ambience, Revolver is tin foil, strobe lighting and mercurial intensity, demanding of the highest quality audio reproduction, which this box-set offers.

It will be forever the sound of Swinging London, England’s World Cup Win and the glistening water-mark for rock albums to come. But it is also a reminder that creative projects should be just that, creative, not conforming to an expected structure or genre-profile. Popular music has lost that edge now. Again quoting Giles Martin, ‘if you get tired of listening to Revolver, you get tired of life’. I’d urge all musicians and artists of any ability, age and discipline, use this reissue to escape, by all means, but do not view it as an historical record of something which cannot happen again. Use it as inspiration. Create.

It’s pricey, it’s extravagant, it takes up shelf-space you could fill with something more practical and no, it doesn’t have anything majorly unexpected or shocking to anyone who isn’t a seasoned Beatlemaniac. So, should you buy it? Think of it this way: this is not just Revolver, probably the best album The Beatles ever made (ask me again tomorrow and I might give you a different answer), it’s 2 hours, 42 minutes of Revolver and how could anyone not want that?

Review written by Jordan Frazer

The Beatles Handbook rating: 5 stars
Buy this album: Revolver

Author interview: John Higgs on Love and Let Die

Love and Let Die is quite an undertaking, not only telling two concurrent and interconnected stories that span 60 years, but also putting those stories in their wider historical context and mentioning Freud, Putin, Vonnegut, Desmond Dekker and the Queen (to take just a small random sample) along the way. How did you decide what to put in and what to leave out? Was the book meticulously planned out or did it evolve as you wrote it?

The book is about seeing very familiar things in a new light, so the choice of what to put in and what to leave out was largely dependent on that. Most of the things that made it into the book are things that, I hope, help to show a new perspective or give new insights into a subject that we thought we already knew and understood. There is something very exciting in realising that there is more to the thing right under your nose than you realised. It is a reminder that even the most commonplace thing has its secrets to reveal.

And yes, the book absolutely evolved during writing, as they all do. I think if you knew what a book was going to be beforehand, there would be no point in writing it.

The Beatles must be the most written about band of all time, were you daunted by the weight of words already dedicated to them when you decided to write your own book about them?

Yes, definitely! I didn’t write about the Beatles for many years for that very reason. It wasn’t until I mentally put them alongside Bond and viewed them in that context that I felt I had a way to offer up something new. The great library of Beatle books has pretty much nailed down what happened, but there is still room to explore what it all means.

It helps that, because of the nature of the publishing industry, the perspective of the establishment subculture is massively overrepresented in what has previously been written. There’s still a great deal to talk about from outside that bubble.

The coincidental release of the first Beatles record and first Bond film on the same day is quite extraordinary. Do you have a personal favourite among the many surprising connections between Bond and The Beatles you unearthed in your research?

It’s obviously great that it was Ringo of all the people who ended up marrying a Bond Girl. I also like that Ian Fleming’s wife used to refer to him as ThunderBeatle. At the time of writing, rumours in the press claim Aaron Taylor-Johnson is the favourite to become the next Bond. If that came true that would be very pleasing, given his portrayal of John Lennon in Nowhere Boy.

The Beatles are endlessly fascinating, why do you think that is?

That’s a really good question – because they really are endlessly fascinating. With most subjects, there comes a time when you decide you know enough about it, and can move on. But with the Beatles, you never really reach that point – the more you know about them, the more interested you become. I suspect that it might have something to do with just how implausible it is that they could be that good, that popular, and have that big an impact. It doesn’t seem believable, sometimes, that all that actually happened.

Can you remember the first time you heard a Beatles song?

I can’t, and I don’t think many people can either. Their music is so prevalent in our culture that it’s always present – you’re absorbing it as a nipper. In that way it’s become the folk music of our age.

What’s your favourite Beatle song and why?

My favourite album is the White Album, but naming a favourite song is trickier. Part of the appeal of the Beatles is that there is so much good stuff, and it is so varied, that narrowing it down just seems wrong. If you were to force me to just say one, however, I think it would have to be A Day In The Life. That does feel like the pinnacle of their craft.

Who is the best Beatle?

It’s the chemistry between the four of them that matters, to me anyway. Focusing on any one takes away from that. It’s like asking which is your best limb.

Who is the best Bond?

I’m increasingly of the opinion that it is Daniel Craig. But with luck, the best will be the next guy!

What will be the subject of your next book?

I’m working on four different books at the moment, so my head is far too mangled and confused to try to answer that! I don’t advise anyone try this – one book at a time is more than enough.

Love and Let Die by John Higgs

LOVE AND LET DIE by John Higgs published by W&N available in Hardback, eBook and audio £22

Buy this book: Love and Let Die by John Higgs

Read an extract from Love and Let Die: 1965: Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts

Read the review
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The Beatles Handbook Guide to Podcasts

I am the EggPod

I am the Eggpod

The tagline to this enormously entertaining series is ‘A jaunty stroll through Pepperland discussing The Beatles & solo Beatle albums with a pot pourri of delicious guests’. Although that’s a pretty accurate description, it does slightly undersell what makes Eggpod such as great listen.

It is as lively and cheerful as the word ‘jaunty’ suggests and, clocking in at up to two hours per episode (although more often between an hour and 90 minutes-ish), it does have the relaxed pace of an afternoon walk in the woods. It all seems effortless as charmingly amiable host Chris Shaw chats away to guests that have so far included Sanjeev Bhaskar, David Hepworth, Nicky Campbell, Samira Ahmed, David Quantick and John Higgs among many others. But such is the passion and knowledge of everyone involved that every episode is a close equivalent of a carefully researched documentary, albeit one that sounds spookily like a pub conversation.

Take for example ep 108: The Revolver Sessions with Matt Everitt. Four minutes in and we’ve already learned that film director Peter Jackson won’t allow anyone else (apart from Giles Martin) to use his revolutionary ‘de-mixing’ software that was used on the film Get Back and subsequently on the new deluxe Revolver box set. It seems as though the technology that could transform the album reissue market is being kept solely for Beatles related projects, at least for time being. We also learn that the third Beatles film was planned to be A Talent for Loving, a cowboy movie set in the 19th century and due to be filmed at the beginning of 1966 in Mexico or Spain. The film was shelved after the Fabs read the script.

The podcast really comes into its own when the guest is extolling the virtues of a more obscure or unloved album. Iain Lee on McCartney’s folly Give My Regards to Broad Street (ep 9) or Andy Miller on John and Yoko’s Some Time in New York City (ep 110) are must-listens for example. But whatever the subject and whoever the guest is, you are pretty much guaranteed an engrossing, informative and above all entertaining listen. Both Shaw and his guests tend to wear their expertise lightly and with good humour so the episodes are never hard work to listen to.

Shaw himself is however no workshy fop, undertaking what must have been a punishing schedule to publish a series of 21 episodes in January 2022, each covering a day featured in Get Back and posted on the correlating date, so ep77 is actor John Bradley discussing day 1 of Get Back, Thursday 2nd January 1969 with the episode first appearing on 2 January 2022. That mammoth undertaking didn’t prevent him from putting together a four part celebration of Paul McCartney with multiple contributors to coincide with the great man’s 80th birthday in June 2022.

The series is Beatles and McCartney heavy with only a smattering of episodes given over to John, George and Ringo, but that just means we still have All Things Must Pass and Goodnight Vienna episodes to look forward to. You get the feeling that even if the idea of podcasts had never been invented, Shaw would be tracking down Beatles fans in order to have hours-long Mop Top-themed chats just for the hell of it but thankfully we can all listen in.

The Beatles Handbook rating: Five Stars
Listen to this podcast: I am The Eggpod
Start with: ep 1 Rubber Soul with Rob Manuel
Hidden gem: ep 67 – Red Rose Speedway with Brian O’Conner and Simon Barber of the Sodajerker podcast.

Beatles Stuffology

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Blotto Beatles

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Producing The Beatles

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My Favourite Beatles Song

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Nothing is Real

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The Big Beatles Sort Out

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Ranking The Beatles

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Book extract: Love and Let Die by John Higgs

Love and Let Die by John Higgs

`1965: Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts

For all their distinct personalities, the four Beatles were effectively a gestalt entity. This was one of the reasons why they so perfectly represented Eros, or the Freudian drive to lose your limited self and become part of something larger.

In the decades after the band split, much debate occurred about why they were so special, with the assumption being that the answer must lie with one of the four. In the seventies and eighties, many rock critics took the view that John Lennon was the special ingredient which explained the extraordinary impact of the Beatles. Thinking like this was entirely in keeping with the individualism of the second half of the twentieth century. But as a framework, individualism was always too limited a perspective to understand something as interesting as the Beatles. It was the combination of those four personalities which made the Beatles greater than the sum of their parts. They were, in occult terms, a combination of the four alchemical elements. Ringo was earth, John was fire, Paul was air and George was water. Combined, they produced the fifth, transcendent element: spirit. Or alternatively, Ringo had a big nose, George had big ears, Paul had big eyes and John was always a big mouth. As individuals these attributes may be unfortunate, but when they are combined you get the face of a giant.

And then Paul McCartney wrote ‘Yesterday’.

This is, of course, one of the most covered songs in history. The melody famously came to Cartney fully formed during a dream, a gift from his subconscious that would change his life forever. It elevated him from being part of his ‘good little rock ‘n’ roll band’ to becoming the author of the front page of the twentieth century’s songbook. Even half a century after it was written, it’s impossible to grow up in the West and not know this song. It hinted at the scale of the new territory that the Beatles would now occupy. But it also hinted at the cost.

Before ‘Yesterday’, the Beatles were a unit. Lennon and McCartney had previously written songs alone, without the insights and finishing touches of their partner. But this was the first solo song that didn’t need the other three Beatles. Instead, it was recorded in two takes with Paul alone, playing acoustic guitar and singing, and George Martin added a string quartet three days later. On the same day that McCartney recorded Yesterday’, the full band also recorded two more of Paul’s songs, the larynx shredding rocker ‘I’m Down’ and the acoustic folk rock ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ – an example not just of the phenomenal work rate that the band operated at, but the variety of styles of both singing and songwriting that McCartney was capable of.

The solo nature of the song clearly troubled the band; here was a situation that they had never had to deal with before. It is striking that, uncomfortable with such a solo effort being credited to the Beatles, they didn’t release the song as a single in the UK. It’s hard to imagine any other band writing a song as strong and commercial as ‘Yesterday’, then only using it as filler on the second side of a film soundtrack album.

What ‘Yesterday’ showed was that new horizons for the band’s music were imaginable. It was not that they had plateaued and were on the way down, it was more that they had barely started. If they were to reach those new artistic peaks it would require the four Beatles to grow and evolve as individuals. They could not remain loveable mop-tops forever. But if the four of them were to change in unexpected and unpredictable ways, then how could they be expected to fit together so neatly into the perfect unit that won the hearts of the world? The future was unparalleled creative growth, yet as the melancholic mood of ‘Yesterday’ realised, it would come at a cost.

‘Yesterday’ is a song about realising that something special has changed and wishing to go back in time to how things used to be. The Beatles were going to mature into four extraordinary individuals who would offer the world so much more than the pre-‘Yesterday’ Fab Four. For all four musicians, their greatest work was ahead of them. But there is a reason why many children fear growing up. The arrival of the future, after all, must mean the death of the past. To evolve and fulfil their potential would mean allowing fractures to grow in the best gang imaginable.

LOVE AND LET DIE by John Higgs published by W&N available in Hardback, eBook and audio £22

Buy this book: Love and Let Die by John Higgs

Read a Q&A with John Higgs
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John Lennon Solo Albums Ranked

1. Walls and Bridges by John Lennon (1974)

Lennon’s most complete, satisfying and well produced solo album containing some of his finest post-Beatles songs. Head and shoulders above his other albums which by comparison seem under-developed.

Essential tracks
Whatever Gets You Through The Night
#9 Dream
Steel and Glass

Beatles Handbook rating: 4 Stars
Buy this album: Walls and Bridges by John Lennon

2 Mind Games by John Lennon (1973)

Mind Games is the first great solo Lennon song and the album is his most consistent effort up to that point. Thankfully, the clumsy sloganeering that characterised his previous album Some Time In New York City is set aside, allowing Lennon’s emotional side to shine.

Essential tracks
Mind Games
Aisumasen (I’m sorry)
Bring On The Lucie

Beatles Handbook rating: 3 stars
Buy this album: Mind Games by John Lennon

3. Imagine by John Lennon (1971)

A pretty solid collection including some beautiful heartfelt love songs is marred by self indulgent nonsense like Crippled Inside, I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier Mama (a none-more-70s title) and the execrable title track.

Essential tracks
Jealous Guy
Oh My Love
Oh Yoko

Beatles Handbook rating: 3 Stars
Buy this album: Imagine by John Lennon

4. Double Fantasy by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (1980)

A bizarre mix of Lennon’s MOR tracks alternating with Ono’s post punk stylings that make for an unsettling and wholly unsatisfying listen, despite the presence of some great songs by both parties. A side each would have made so much more sense, but at least we now we know what a collaboration between Jeff Lynne and Hazel O’Connor would sound like.

Essential tracks
Watching The Wheels
Woman
(Just Like) Starting Over

Beatles Handbook rating: 3 stars
Buy this album: Double Fantasy by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

5. Rock’n’Roll by John Lennon (1975)

Lennon puts his back into a set of cover versions of songs from his not that distant youth with more success than most of the British chart act revivalists of the time (Showaddywaddy et al). A footnote to a catalogue that doesn’t really have room for one.

Essential tracks
Slippin’ and Slidin’
Be-Bop-A-Lula
Ain’t That A Shame

Beatles Handbook rating: 3 stars
Buy this album: Rock’n’Roll by John Lennon

6. Milk and Honey by John Lennon & Yoko Ono (1984)

A big old posthumously-released mess of a cash-in. The mix of Lennon demos (and some completed tracks) and newly recorded Ono originals refuses to gel into a cohesive whole. Not the most dignified end to a career.

Essential tracks
Nobody Told Me
I’m Stepping Out
Borrowed Time

Beatles Handbook rating: 3 Stars
Buy this album: Milk and Honey by John Lennon & Yoko Ono

7. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon (1970)

Solipsistic, self pitying, morbid and badly underproduced…and that’s just ‘Working Class Hero’. Mostly unlistenable apart from a few saving graces. A bad beginning to Lennon’s solo career (I think we can safely ignore the false starts of Two Virgins and Life With The Lions).

Essential tracks
Remember
Hold On
Look At Me

Beatles Handbook rating: 2 stars
Buy this album: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon

8. Sometime In New York City by John Lennon (1972)

Hard to credit a man in his 30s could have written some of the more juvenile lyrics on this album. In the 21st century, the opening track has become even more of an ideological minefield than when it was first released; best skipped over for everyone’s sake. The overtly anti-establishment sentiments occasionally mesh well with some hard rock stylings to create moments of true excitement, but Some Time is mostly a chore to listen to, especially Yoko’s 7 minute-long filler ‘We’re All Water’.

Essential tracks
Attica State
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Angela

Beatles Handbook rating: 2 stars
Buy this album: Sometime In New York City by John Lennon

Now and Then – the last Beatles song

Review coming soon