Thursday 17th May

There are some people who purport not to like the Beatles; they just don’t get it at all.  But what is not to get?  Almost everything they ever committed to tape was of a quality and excellence that has rarely been matched before or since.  Maybe you had to live through the sixties though, to appreciate just what Beatle-Mania was, to have shared with your friends and family the ever-growing love we all had for the four mop-tops.  There exists a certain snobbish belief that high quality and excellence cannot sit in the same sentence as commercial success; that somehow if everyone likes something it cannot be any good.  I must admit that at times I too have held this attitude, which is why I have never read any J K Rowling or seen any of the films, but I know deep down that this may well be because I do not want to end up admitting that they are very good rather than because I know they are rubbish.

The Beatles were (to me, a twelve year old at the time I first heard them) like the older brothers I never had, and we grew up together throughout the sixties, that most creative of decades.  They expressed in song and in their interviews a cheeky insouciance and disregard for the status quo without ever openly rebelling.  They were also at the cutting edge of new music, interpreting and amalgamating all the disparate ideas emerging at the time into their own constantly evolving music.  Say what you like about Madonna or Michael Jackson, but they never really changed music that much; they were very good at what they did but after a certain point of technical proficiency they tended to rest on their laurels.  Just listen to songs from ‘With the Beatles’ or ‘A Hard day’s Night’ and then listen to ‘Hey Jude’ or anything from ‘The White Album’ or ‘Abbey Road’, and it is hard to believe that just four or five years separate them.  And even these later songs, with all the psychedelic sounds and strange melodies were loved by everyone; they seemed to have the knack of carrying us all along with them.

And though their dissolution was bewailed by us all, you cannot deny that they left at the top of their game, before having to resort to constant re-recordings and live albums of their earlier hits as so many others have.