Where to start? If I’m going to be decorating these pages with what is going on in my head, both the transient notions and deep-seated background noise, there is no better place to start than with the soundtrack. I may have been raised on a reasonably potent home brew of Basie, Brel, Maiden, Peterson, Lehrer and Marley, but the soundtrack of my life is unquestionably The Beatles. I appreciate that may seem like the most vanilla opinion in the world, but that is forgetting that vanilla is a banger of a flavour. We’re talking proper crushed Madagascan vanilla pods here. Ethically sourced. Whipped into the finest Italian gelato. Served with a flake. Saying you’re obsessed by The Beatles is utterly uncontroversial. Yet the love that immersing yourself in their music consistently provides, the rewards offered by constant reinvestigation and the over-flowing bounty of their back catalogue as it continues to grow as you do is a bottomless well of joy. It’s all you need.
And you know what? If I am just another middle-aged man wanging on about my love of the Fab Four, I appreciate that the chances of any great revelations aren’t huge. But that doesn’t matter. It’s The Beatles. Their very existence is enough for celebration and illumination. It can be trite to say you love something religiously, but as someone brought up in a Jewish household who no longer practices the faith, I really think the Beatles are an unbeatable replacement. I love the food, humour, music and literature of Judaism, I just can’t stretch to the theology. The Beatles take their place. There is endless mythos, reams of text to interpret and the music genuinely changed the world. Oh and they definitely existed.
Anyone born after the 1960s will never be able to truly experience the lightning bolt, “what the fuck was that?!?” experience of listening to the opening splang of Hard Day’s Night, the bizarro wormhole of Tomorrow Never Knows or the pop-symphonic genius of the second side of Abbey Road. We’re all living in the reverb echoes of The Beatles, a world where their greatness is already accepted as gospel. But that doesn’t devalue it. Shakespeare’s has been on the highest cultural shelf for hundreds of years and his plays still contain new truths to be minted and old ideas to be keenly restated. Performers and audience members alike still cannot help but find new pleasure, new meaning, new life in the choice of vocabulary, image or musicality contained within his work. To pore over it with a fine toothcomb is a moreish pleasure. It is the same with The Beatles.
Of course the melodies, chord changes and arrangement still hurtle along with fizz and invention, sweeping up the listener with the impulse to dance and howl, pause and lament or giggle with wonder, but now I find more enjoyment in poring over the songs like a stamp collector or painter of tiny figurines. Detail is everything. Having listened to most of the songs countless hundreds of times I feel like hearing them is akin to walking through a vast museum and searching for exhibits which I’d previously over-looked. Sometimes these are entire albums. Beatles for Sale is the most obvious forgotten collection, the sound of the most creative force of the 20th century absolutely shattered and doing the best they can on all the amphetamines money can buy. For years I ignored it, living in the shadow of it’s bolder and more creative siblings. Recently I popped on my white gloves, took it out of storage and was rewarded with the drunk, woozy guitar bends of Baby’s in Black and I’ll Follow the Sun, a tiny vignette of crepuscular perfection that other artists might hang entire careers upon.
The majority of the time though, I obsess about the nano-seconds of genius, that one extra brushstroke that mere mortals would not bother with: the high-pitched ding at the end of the solo in Nowhere Man, Ringo’s pitter-pattering on his hi-hat that tickle the close harmonies on This Boy, Paul’s merry little vulpine howl that signal’s Get Back’s false ending before all four (well five, as Billy Preston has turned up to join the fun by now) of them motor the song towards it’s triumphant finale. As ever, I could go on; it’s an endless cornucopia of wonder. We’re here to enjoy ourselves, so I will…
Both versions of Revolution repay repeated listening just for their introductions. The snarling electrified B-side and the chugging aborted then restarted acoustic take on The White Album are the perfect pair of squabbling twins. Sometimes it’s quite astonishing the sort of casual genius they will throw away, like Dali or Picasso thunking out a bunch of prints of an afternoon to pay the bills which still reek of mastery. The riff to Hey Bulldog, certainly nowhere near the Top 10 in their arsenal, redolent of a daft 70s cop show that never existed; the entirey of Martha My Dear - a paean to Paul’s beloved dog - that contains more ideas than most albums, a stately yet lolloping piano figure that pretty much invented Badly Drawn Boy, lush orchestration, crunchy guitar stabs and warm pastoral horns. All done in under two and a half minutes. Cry Baby Cry, end of album fluff that cannot shake off its delicate sense of the sinister that is found in the best Grimm’s fairy tales. Or (I promise this will be my last) Dig A Pony, which seems like lazy knockabout daftness until you try and play the damn thing and realise that they’ve somehow taken a traditional blues riff and recreated it as some sort of Mobius pretzel, garlanded with seraphine harmonies and George’s eternally tasteful lead guitar work. George. I’ve barely talked about him. The greatest lead guitarist, not because of explosive fretwork and wild eruptions at the top of the instrument’s neck, but for serving the song perfectly every single time. I could write paragraphs about his pedal steel. I won’t on this occasion, as even obsessives have to know when to shut up and let their captives take a breath.
This sort of obsession is a joyful headlong leap into a world of constant discovery. Just listening back to a few tracks and typing this I can feel the temptation to pop on my moptop helmet and begin spelunking into the bowels of their work again. There is comfort and wonder in there. I could spend hours in their Anthlogoy. Imagine any other band releasing their archive to such acclaim. I don’t know, but surely that was another way in which The Beatles were trailblazers. I find it genuinely fun to pretend that I’m some sort of musical archivist sniffing through the records with a fine toothcomb for an extra sliver of brilliance that we haven’t fully appreciated. I leap into the back catalogue of other artists - Bowie and Dylan invite it, as do countless jazz performers, the deep history of travelling blues singers and bands I’ve been with from the start like Ben Folds Five and the Super Furry Animals. Any band that has a world you can get lost in sonically is a gift, but only the rarest artists have a universe that is so large, taking in all sorts of things beyond music, art and literature, that it warps and distorts all other parts of the world.
A friend of mine made a beautiful discovery recently. His Mum revealed to him that a vast collection of WarHammer books and figures which he believed he had binned were actually kept in storage. He had been deeply ashamed of them; he had obsessed over the wrong thing. Yet now, decades later, when she revealed that they were still there, still safe, he found that he had regained a crucial part of his past. That obsession in tangible physical things, whose likeness he created and world he bought into, is some of the greatest solace a person can find. There is a beauty and warmth in finding your niche, your tribe. The Beatles made us all part of their tribe. The writer David Quantick has described them as “the ultimate wedding band”. Even at the height of their bohemian experimental phase they still want to play something for everyone: a crooner for the grannies, a song for the kids, a rocker for the teens and then all the oddball psychadelia for the hip kids. It’s the same band. That true eclecticism - not for its own sake, but out of the delight of curiosity - melded to musical virtuosity, is what makes them so great.
My Mum accuses me of brain-washing my 5 year old son into loving The Beatles. That’s not possible - he drops out of Sgt Pepper (or “Paul McCartney’s multi-coloured friends” as he calls it) half-way through She’s Leaving Home and I doubt I’d keep him on board with Blue Jay Way or Revolution no.9. He might be ready for Happiness Is A Warm Gun though. ANYWAY, the point is that I play an awful lot of music every day. There are a few artists that he comes back to, but it is The Beatles who seem to have these little moments that he can pick out. The rinky-dink piano and drums of Lady Madonna, the perfect simplicity of the sunbeam D-major riff of Here Comes the Sun, Drive My Car, every component working together like a finely tuned engine, from propulsive riff to cheeky “beep-beep” backing vocals. He’s beginning to curate his own collection. A comforting obsession. It’ll be all he needs.
What an emotional ride your piece just took me on. Let me respond briefly:
'Ditto'