How I learned to stop worrying and quite like The Beatles

It's been a long and winding road...to this particular Beat(les)croft Social

Normally I’d tell any recipient of this newsletter that if they were looking for The Beatcroft Social radio show they should skip to the end for the playlist and streaming links. But please, for once read the following text first. Hey, it’s about a conversion experience, sort of.

My Beatles memories: seeing them on (BBC children’s TV show, younger viewers) Blue Peter, all carefully-coiffed and smart as morning meeting worshippers in their suits and ties.

Except they were never on Blue Peter. Apart from Valerie Singleton once showing young viewers how to make a Beatles skirt, presumably in an early approach to crafting multi-gender apparel. And a heavily hirsute Ringo in 1971, trying to sell some of his furniture to bairns. The Fab Four did appear on the kids’ telly programme Tuesday Rendezvous in 1962, but it was broadcast only in London. I’m sorry never to have seen that, as both the country presenter Wally Whyton and seminal guitar guru Bert Weedon were on as well.

False Beatles Syndrome - an affliction affecting many from the Liverpool area who may or may not have known the band in their youth. Or seen them play in the Two Red Shoes dancehall in Elgin, the Strathpeffer Spa Pavilion, the Odeon in Glasgow or the Star Club in Hamburg.

I do remember hearing Hey Jude for the first time, on a transistor radio someone had playing in the boat park at Troon Sailing Club, where I was moaning about having to crew my dad’s Enterprise dinghy. I’ll forever associate that song with the clanging rattle of wire halyards against aluminium masts. The song seemed to go on forever. More exciting was the fact that I got to drive the sailing club’s tractor that day. Aged 12.

The following year, my dad had been in London at some kind of dental training conference, and returned bearing a copy of the just-released Abbey Road. This was his first significant Plymouth Brethren compromise towards the worldly world of secular pop music, though my Uncle John had already bought me, the previous Christmas, a copy of The Monkees album (LPs, we called them) Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd, and the following year would compound this enticement into the Great Bang’n’Twang by suppplying me with Taste’s eponymous second record. The One with Sugar Mama, on it, which I thought was something to do with confectionery.

By that time, at 14, I wanted rock, not pop in my life, the harder and more crunchy  the better. I’d heard Get Yer Ya-Yas Out and was as dissolute as a born again boy could be, at least via Dansette; and so the Beatles were consigned to the cultural dumper, a place whence they never really returned, other than in sporadic post-breakup bursts like the Plastic Ono Band and some snippets of Wings.

I wrote two songs about the Beatles, sarcastic and dismissive. I even recorded and performed them, much to the anger, in the case of 2005’s Learning to Hate the Beatles, of one or two moptop obsessives. And correctly, as it’s full of rage and inaccuracies. Generally, I would class myself as a Stones fan, in that ridiculous and unnecessary division between the Fabs and the Greasers, that competition already so thoroughly won by The Beatles it hardly deserves highlighting. Though Lennon eventually cracked in 1970 and told Jan Wenner of, uh, Rolling Stone magazine:

“I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every fuckin’ album. Every fuckin’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same. He imitates us…they are not in the same class, music wise or power wise. They never were.”

Now - who cares? I suppose I do - I have changed my mind. Had it changed first and foremost by a book, not by the music, though one led to a saturation in the other. The book in question is Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four - the Beatles in Time, which is a gloriously odd mixture of memoir, history, acute cultural insight, interviews, travel, musical appreciation and anecdote. What it does better than anything else I’ve read is place the Beatles in context, their colossal  importance, their mammoth talent, the astonishing coalescence in Liverpool of four disparate and complementary young men. And how they, quite literally changed everything.

Even me.

The show you’ll hear if you’ve listened to The Beatcroft Social on 60 North Radio (or by clicking the links below) is a tentative attempt to claw my way into the Beatles repertoire, the people they influenced, the songs and the lives they lived. It’s superficial but I hope interesting and entertaining, and probably ignorant and misleading in places too.

But as my meandering pathway into the Beatles continues, there will almost certainly be more to come…I mean, the spiral of influence takes in everything from other musicians to books, politics, philosophy, religion and criminal law. There are the Beatles children - Julian, Sean, Stella, James, Zak and Dhanni, Jason, Lee, Beatrice and Mary. Yoko, who comes out very badly from Craig Brown’s book. The whole Epstein saga and the bands and artists he managed. That quote from Vladimir Putin: “I love the Beatles. Their music was a drop of freedom in the Soviet Union.” The Scottish connection - McCartney’s Kintyre and Lennon in north west Sutherland. That weird business with Yoko and the kids in Gairloch in an Austin Maxi.

It was and is, I’m belatedly realising, a Beatles world. We just live in it.

The Beat(les)croft Social, 19 July 2024.

Available to stream on 60 North Radio and Mixcloud.

The Beatles — Come Together (Take 5)

Elton John, John Lennon — I Saw Her Standing There

The Beatles — Hey Jude

The Rolling Stones — Street Fighting Man

The Inmates — You Can’t Do That/Daytripper

The Beatles — Back in the USSR

Jackie Lomax — Sour Milk Sea

James Taylor — Carolina in my Mind

Mary Hopkin — Goodbye

Trash — Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight

Badfinger — Come and Get It

Wings — Hi HI Hi

Ringo Starr — Back Off Boogaloo

Thomas the Tank Engine — Theme

Paul McCartney — We All Stand Together (Frog Chorus)

Pat Benatar — Helter Skelter

Joe Cocker — With a Little Help From My Friends

George Harrison — Any Road

Rufus Wainwright — Across the Universe

Jimi Hendrix — Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Oasis — You’ve got to Hide Your Love Away

Otis Redding — Daytripper

Aretha Franklin — The Long and Winding Road

Bobby McFerrin — Drive My Car

John Lennon — How do You Sleep?

Wings — Let Me Roll It

Paul McCartney — Dear Boy

John Lennon — Be Bop a Lula

The Beatles — I Want You

The lyrics to 

Learning to Hate the Beatles

George Martin was rubbish, you know

Couldn’t even do a good Goon Show

He could twiddle those knobs, but any old nob could do that

Take a listen to Sgt Pepper, and tell me which sounds better

Any Stax or Atlantic sixties side

Or that piece of crap

Friends, you can be free, you can redemption just like me

You too can learn to hate The Beatles

There were on Blue Peter when I was a kid

You can bet your life that’s something the Stones never did

They might’ve got Valerie Singleton to sniff some glue

Mum and dad thought the Moptops were sweet

They were clean and tidy and their clothes were neat

The way they shook their little heads to She Loves You

Friends, you can be free, you can live rejoicing just like me

You too can learn to hate The Beatles

I felt nothing when Lennon died

I was flabbergasted when the whole world cried

Tell that to Stuart Sutcliffe or Pete Best

I will commit a serious crime

If I hear Imagine just one more time

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one

Oh Yoko, give it a rest

Friends, you can be free, you can live rejoicing just like me

You too can learn to hate The Beatles

They dumped Brian Epstein and wrote Get Back for Enoch Powell

Got MBEs, discovered drugs and art, fell out and threw in the towel

Now two are dead and two have dubious hair

McCartney thinks the sun shines from his underwear

But you know, Ringo was great in That’ll Be The Day

And Thomas the Tank Engine; let’s not forget

The Frog Chorus, Paul’s finest yet

Much better lyrics than yesterday

Friends, you can be free, you can live rejoicing just like me

You too can learn to hate The Beatles

Copyright Tom Morton 2005