Beatles - in my life...

So much has been said and written about The Beatles that I will probably be unwittingly echoing someone's opinions(s) here but so be it. My teenage years were the sixties so my whole experience of popular music has been shaped by the group, their records and their personalities. The first record I bought was their Twist and Shout EP, so cool because, unlike a single, it had a cover with a  picture of them on it.  Why I and millions of others idolised them so much has been debated many times but never successfully resolved mainly because, I think, there is no one reason. Partly by coincidence and partly by design many things came together (no pun intended) to ensure that The Beatles as a phenomenon of popular music would never be equalled. Given the immense amount of documentation on this subject mentioned above, I am not going to attempt a comprehensive account of the reasons for their success. I just want to explore the main factors that made them so special for me and, I suggest, many others.

Guitars have always been special for me. I was really entranced by the echo-laden twangy sounds of the Shadows and loved the rhythmic chord work in The Everly Brothers' songs before I ever heard the Beatles. But for me the guitar parts in some Beatles songs are the key to their sonic magnetism. I had never heard anything like the quirky riff that plays behind, "Won't you please, please help me..." in Help. In fact I still haven't.  The first time I heard the fade-in volume control trick, now a commonplace technique among guitarists, was on Yes It Is recorded in 1965.  The opening guitar riffs in Please Please Me, I Feel Fine, Ticket to Ride and so many others are, for me at any rate, the main hooks, before even considering the songs themselves.

Then there's harmony. I mentioned The Everly Brothers  in connection with guitars but that ringing sound of two (or more) voices in harmony which characterises their music is present in most Beatles songs. In many Beatles hits, the harmony involves three main voices, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison. Listening to songs like I Feel Fine and Yes It Is and the assured and masterful use of harmonies, it is astonishing that such recordings were made in relatively short times with (by modern standards) primitive recording equipment.  Why harmony is so aurally attractive can no doubt be scientifically explained but it's not just a matter of the note choice and pitch: the individual attributes of the singers voices go together in a way that defies explanation. The three main voices have something which can't be reproduced artificially and the resonance of those three voices together was immensely attractive

And of course, Yin and Yang, light and dark, Lennon and McCartney... Any attempt in a short piece to fully explore this is doomed to failure but it is at the heart of the Beatles identity and greatness. When listening to She's Leaving Home, for example, McCartney's plaintive narrative, smoothly delivered, needs the sardonic counterpoint of Lennon's interjections "We never thought for ourselves, never a thought for ourselves..." as he knowingly intones the cliches that ordinary people fall into when life slaps them in the face. Emotionally it is a huge song but only because it is delivered in these two ways.  It's no accident that Beatles fans tend to be McCartney or Lennon partisans. They brought such different attitudes and skills to the songs. What I value in McCartney's work is his vocal range and his ability to bring words and music to life. In Lennon's case I love the emotional tension that he brings to the songs and his use of simple melodies (sometimes one-note melodic phrases) over more complex chord changes. But the more I try to pin either of them down, the more confounded I become by contradictions, exceptions and complications. Perhaps truly wonderful things won't be pinned down.

That might have been the place to stop but you can't write about the Beatles without mentioning two others.

Ringo didn't make a substantial contribution to the songwriting or singing but he was more than a safe pair of hands behind the kit. He had great technique, the modesty to do his job without trying to grandstand and instinctive good taste that told him when not to play - a rarer gift than non-musicians might imagine. I still get a huge buzz from his fill in Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds - all two beats of it. So simple but so right.

George Martin, often referred to as "the fifth Beatle", is immensely important.  Again it's tempting to oversimplify - to say he was the technician who facilitated their creativity. Of course he was. But he was so much more. The string arrangements in songs like  She's Leaving Home and Eleanor Rigby are obvious examples of musical and creative input. Sergeant Pepper, arguably the most important album of the sixties, couldn't have happened without him - but I think his influence went beyond that. I think the fact that he came from a classical background and was not influenced by the fads and fashions of the time helped to ground them and focus them on music. And judging from the many documentaries about them, they did need a bit of that from time to time.

In the end, after the inevitable split and the bickering that ensued, that is what matters. The screaming girls, the jelly babies, the cuban-heeled boots and "Beatle Suits" are just fluff. The well-publicised tax wrangles and personal differences of opinion are interesting to some,  but what they put on vinyl in those few years in the nineteen sixties changed the world of music and we are, to this day, indebted to them for that.