The Beatles
The White Album

Strangely, my computer doesn’t want to play this CD, although it will play Singing in the Rain. Walkman agrees to play it. The White Album’s a strange one – bloated, it’s been called. There’s a kind of decadence to it, if only in the fact that it’s so huge. Am realising how tricky double albums must be to pull off even if there’s some kind of proggy trick in there, some narrative or structure…and yes people must have written about underlying structures of The White Album, but to be fair it just sounds so schizophrenic, and I suppose that’s part of the fun of it.

Even though I was late to get into buying CDs, I think I waited well, as this was my second CD purchase, after Post by Bjork. And I remember singing Dear Prudence when I went busking in Bolton. Even one song in, I find myself reaching for an aesthetic at work here…you can tell it’s The Beatles (was it every possible to make that distinction though, seeming as how now we know them as we know fairy tales and nursery rhymes, which is not imply it’s a childish pursuit) but they sound so tired. Admittedly I’ve missed out Magical Mystery Tour (another album I was instructed to get rid of…) from the Beatle Cannon so I imagine having that in the right context would join the gaps that I can hear between here and Sgt Pepper.

Perhaps this is where my disenchantment with the blues, rock and roll etc (apart from selected Chuck Berry in very small doses) – already Glass Onion sounds like what it is – a quasi-groovy riff with horribly disjointed “surreal” imagery just for the sake of pulling together what it pulls together…or are all those self-references terribly clever? Was anyone else doing that kind of pan-career referencing? It’s difficult to know the difference sometimes. Am reassured by Obaldi oblada…oh Christ, what does that say about me? Will remember (again) Steve Newcombe telling me that meant I was truly a child of the 60s, as Lennon was too 90s and obvious. Why this constant partisan attitude, even in my head?

There are some songs on this album which make no sense to me though, Wild Honey Pie…yes the guitar sounds are interesting, it’s terribly daring to have such a short song with such minimalist lyrics, but really is it not just four scousers fucking around? If there is humour in this album (and I think there is) it’s pretty warped…the characters are ever so slightly more peculiar in this album…lots of different vignettes in Beatle music, and while Eleanor Rigby, Lucy in the Sky and Billy Shears have an undercurrent of…something sad in their stories…there’s something more neurotic, less wholesome almost about Prudence, Bungalow Bill and Rocky Raccoon…the most stylish one so far is obviously going to be While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which has almost been destroyed by ridiculous acoustic versions of it…there’s more viciousness in it than the title might suggest, there’s the idea of a steady-rising rage, or a fist clenching, something controlled (and if I may…”Ice, ghosts, aliens. How do you spell mogul? M-o-g-u-l…”), and then is the tragedy of something wonderful coming undone. From the 1917 disappointment to the current death of radicalism into new spaces of consumerisms, this is a horribly recurrent theme. Perhaps it’s realising the death involved and the necessity for ambiguity, the burden of living under such doublethink which creates the cynics and those who simply don’t fight.

That said, there is now a beautiful piano song about a sheepdog which I was obsessed with for many many months as a teenager and arranged it for the flute choir I played with. The strings obviously help, the piano riff. There isn’t a lot more to say, except that then with I’m So Tired and Blackbird the album raises itself into the stateliness it is often credited for. Youan and I were talking about Beatles albums the other night, how impossible it is to choose between them, but why do you have to? We both agreed we love Rocky racoon. Oh, the piano in this song. Paul McCartney is a genius. It matters ot how many dreadful songs he’s written since (and yes. I heard on T4 yesterday, while simultaneously avoiding and thanking builders coming in and out of the house, a version of “Jet” – and last night, did I have dreams about the Beatles ice-skating in terrible jumpers? With alarming haircuts and all…anyway, “Jet” was terrible). Genius genius losing its way and spaces between raindrops etc. In the name of democracy I’m glad Ringo was allowed to write the next song all by himself, but goodness it shows. Very pleased when it’s over…but not too happy about “Why don’t we do it in the road” either – blues, bluster and macho swagger have never done it for me, musical or otherwise. But I must laugh at myself a little as I’m happier with “I will”, which I will admit is fairly sappy…but there’s something nice about the vocal bass-line…am thinking about the guy I see occasionally at jam nights in Bristol who appears with a recorder and manages to beatbox and play recorder at the same time. Miles away from this. And I realise that “Julia” is a very emotional song, and having never lost a mother to death there may be elements to this song I just can’t grasp, but apart from learning the finger-picking pattern which Dan taught me from it (which has kind of become a default, tempered only by a campy straight rhythm), I don’t get much from this song, it may be the way his voice kind of lingers (self-consciously? But then shouldn’t all singing be self-conscious? Some kind of act or performance?) around each word…my respect for John Lennon diminished the more I heard of his solo output…that dreadful “Mother” song…and then seeing footage of him singing it at the piano at a gig, drugged or inebriated in some way, making a mess of it, giggling through his mistakes at what was supposed to be an emotionally draining song, playing and singing terribly, turning round to his backing band occasionally to confirm that they were all still there, and the band waiting patiently playing their dreary backing to cushion the giggling King. I didn’t get it and I never will.

It’s often said that “Happy Birthday” is the most sung song in the world ever…it seems a little odd that only two attempts to rewrite it (to my knowledge) have been made…the Beatles version and that one from the 80s (Altered Images?). Birthdays are strange…they seem to do more with it in other countries, celebrating existence should be a bigger deal than going to a different pub for a change. More (yer) blues. Do I dislike it because it’s so relentless self-centred (funny that, coming from me…) – I this, I that…Eliot, traditionalism, individual, multitude, observational, confessional, landscape, portrait, horizontal, vertical. Or do I dislike it because it’s boring and shit? And you can hear the edit (clumsy?) back into the main section where obviously the jam didn’t work out as they’d planned. Although full of love for the idea of the city (any city), after yer blues am very happy to have Paul McCartney with a brass band singing about how nice the countryside is. Even though I can’t quite deal with the countryside aesthetic (Milan Kundera makes a nice point about this seemingly-conditioned response we have that makes us feel “A sparrow! How lovely!” and relates it to clockwork mechanisms and erections gone wrong. And Gilbert and George do a nice film about “The English Countryside” wherein two country gents sit in their tweed, chewing their pipes thoughtfully, occasionally looking over to each other and exclaiming “How nice!” while the big famous bit from “Morning” by Grieg plays and swells underneath).

Am glad for Sexy Sadie because it restores John Lennon to somewhere I love. You can hear the velvet and the smoke in this song. Obvious to point to Helter Skelter as an early start to heavy metal. Am very glad the voices remain intelligible, and the backing chorus changes it. This may be where the album changes from unwholesome to sinister, and then takes its own fairly frightening turn at Revolution9.

Speaking of revolutions, I realise that Rwevolution1 is blues in form, but there’s something the deranged and dilapidated cabaret artiste playing to an empty house of red velvet chairs, leaving feathers lying around the stage and they exhaustedly go through the motions on the stage with dead eyes, but the lyrics underneath still seem vital with disappointment. To say “Yes I’m lonely, wanna die” seems too simple, too straightforward. There aren’t enough veils of layers and what-ifs, and what-elses to keep me interested.

And now absolute sincerity of 1930s parlour songs…this must be the most historically-accurate one (recording techniques notwithstanding) – previously all the other McCartney songs in this vein contained elements of 1960s, combined them together, but this one is pretty exact. It must be the clarinets (or maybe the admittedly horrible spoken break in the middle 8 – it SHOULD NOT BE DONE). Although it reminds me a little of that amazing “You know my name, look up the number” out-take included on the anthology…My mother tells me that she breast-fed me in front of Pennies from Heaven by Dennis Potter, and I can see how it has jelled my mind into a Kundera-sparrow-clockwork admiration of such music. I love it still.

Savoy Truffle, nary a finer song about dental decay was written.

Now, Revolution 9 is very strange. As a horribly precocious adolescent, I’m afraid I expressed a love for it I’m sure I didn’t really understand or feel, I was just aware it was bizarre. As part of my GSCE music course we were asked to bring in a CD or tape of something we loved and explain why. I brought this is just to be an arse I’m sure (everyone was an arse at that age so I think it’s OK). I also tried to make my own versions of Revolution 9 – my first bit of recording equipment was a weird karaoke machine given to me when I was 12 and liked to sing songs with my friends. I learned how to use the tape-to-tape facility to record layers and layers over songs, recording terrible early songs of mine with each layer distorting the tape quality further and further…anyway, I got into the habit of pressing “record” and playing with the radio frequency to pick up random extracts from the airwaves, when it was raining I hung the microphone out of the window one fireworks night with lots of distortion and reverb to pick up traffic noise and airbursts. I twisted up old tapes I didn’t care about and played them backwards. The results were, typically, terrible but interesting. I blame this piece.

You can admire it bit by bit, piece by piece, there isn’t a structure or overall to love in it, more passing elements, like you’re on a train, now the robot fretting in the corner, now the little bits of slightly alarming dialogue (As time went by everyone got a little bit older and a little bit slower) – the crowd screaming, a very Elizabethan almost trumpet, a sudden sense of urgency. Whatever else can be said about this piece (and it is a piece, rather than a song and surely that’s the point) – although of superior quality, it’s hard to imagine another boyband doing anything like this (although the Monkees did that movie Head which I would very much like to see, I’ve heard about it). The burning and the strings are still scary. The continuity falls down when everything stops and John Lennon says “Take this brother, may it serve you well” – the piano chords that follow make you presume the ending is coming down in monotone and blocks of colour like a Rothko but it changes – there is a shift in the works. The first section hangs together like some-one staggering through a rather frightening party (like the bunker shown in Downfall, the last days of Hitler where Nazi guards are shown drinking champagne while talking about how best to kill themselves. The part that follows it is more like the bedroom the morning after the party, where you are full of acidic remorse. Goodnight, following Revolution has to be the most unsettling juxtaposition ever in pop music. It’s hideous. And only Ringo could have sung it – it’s rather wonderful. It is horribly unsettling though. I’m starting to wonder what I need to do to right myself after listening to those two. It is beautiful, but in the chloroform sense of beauty…the angels surrounding you will soon be drowning you. There is something deeply warped about The White Album.

The Beatles
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Tune-up, audience noise. When it first played, how must it have felt? The way Paul McCartney sings the word “style”. The French Horns. How must it have felt? To hear it for the first time and not know it as a picture, a Mona Lisa, a top, best, greatest ever…even though it may well be, and I’m a ware of how fashionable it may be to say otherwise. There’s even something wonderful about the frighteningly-polite sentence structures “I don’t really want to stop the show but I thought you might like to know”…and even when it segues perfectly into “A little help from my friends”, I’m reminded of hearing John Lennon speak somewhere, saying “It’s called the world’s first concept album but it doesn’t really go anywhere…” – I don’t know what would be the world’s first concept album…being prog through and through allegedly. Maybe Sgt pepper is the concept of a concept album, which is as silly and beautiful as Adrian Mole’s novel Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland in which his writer (Jake Westmoreland) writes a novel called Sparg from the Kronk, about a caveman writing a book with no language called A book with no language.

Tangerine trees, Ethel Merman (as previously mentioned in confusing her voice with John Lennon’s when I was a child) and the animation of those paint brushes becoming dancing skirts, the way that the chorus is never quite as euphoric as you hope it will be, but a little more and more expectation arises…being used to stereo throughout on all and realising what more can be painted with just the drum or just the bass in the left or right…always listening to things on headphones gives you the grain of the music up close, and maybe there’s disappointment therein…when you see that Picasso (three mademoiselles? They’re in a crucifix formation, one has a mad dripping mouth and they’re on a balcony) and you see the lines go over, the rough edges of the painting…it was all I could do not to rush up and touch it. Another reference to artworks in this writing – is there any other way to think of Sgt Pepper?

I remember when I first heard “Getting Better” and “Fixing a Hole” as a teenager, I was desperately disappointed, having heard the recognition/love of the opening three (triptych?) which we all know/love…increasingly appreciating the repeated note at the top, the anticipated hi-hat and the harmonies in the vocals…and the tamboura (I think) that opens the third verse…reminds me so much now of that horrible ALL-IS-WELL noise that kicked off the Protect and Survive videos…and it’s a cliché to say that the mix of “It’s getting better all the time/it can’t get no worse” displays the Lennon/McCartney dialectic…but as I’m sure we all know, a dialectic ain’t a binarism and for every Revolution 9 there is a Goodnight and for every Martha my dear a Helter Skelter…but that’s for another album…(I still hate guitar solos which kind of mark time…no-one is innocent of them).

I remember some music teacher telling me that his favourite Beatle song is “She’s leaving Home”…I couldn’t believe it at the time…why choose that song, on that album…? I suspect I may need to revisit it, the arrangement is unusual (all those half-tone scales, the Lego-like building of the chords in the chorus), but the voices going over and round each other are amazing. Around the Sgt Pepper time, I’ve read that Paul McCartney composed music for that BBC drama Cathy Come Home (I think) – in this you can really see the action happening, the vignette, very English. It’s odd that this is a rarity, you’d think there could be no such thing on such a Universal-type album…but in the second half of the album are others too…it’s an odd song. Made odder by the juxtaposition to Mr Kite, which is truly incredible. I like the way John Lennon mixes between being extremely precise with the words and almost slurring them, lurching between them. On an old South Bank Show documentary about the making of…George Martin plays the underlying tracks of some of the songs to illustrate his points about Beatle-genius…and pulls out the chopped-up madness of the various steam organs, calliopes and early Hammond’s etc…having been some days in preparation…

I’m sure once upon a time in my life, when thinking about all the lovely songs in the world I’d ever love to sing live, I thought about Within You Without You as a heavy and wide abstract piece, bass flutes (I was playing bass flute at the time and loved it) with alarming reverb, and as I get older the idea of it stays but the drums change; it would make use of the ascending cello line. I analysed this piece for my A level music report and thought about the modality and the mixture between traditional Indian and Western instruments. The voices would trip over each other in the second section (“Try to realise it’s all within yourself”). Normally I despise hippies and religious types (and I do) but I think that what is spoken about within the McBuddhism I have read about so far owes as much to physics as it does to religion. Small is big, big is terribly small and edges and boundaries reduce on each examination… I’m surprised I like this as much as I do but then again I’ve always been surprised by that song.

When I’m 64 is just gorgeous and goes like toast and marmite. You cannot argue with me about the loveliness of this and I will have none of it. When I was at primary school, in true Lancashire/retarded style, every school year ended with a concert featuring all the little boys and girls amusingly dressed up in flat cap and knitted shawl as appropriate, singing Victorian Music Hall songs, and this. I realise how it worked, but then hearing the same song (or vice versa) as part of Yellow Submarine as the Beatles bravely sail through the seas of time and relativity becoming young and old, stuck in that frightening cycle of rising and falling clocks, watching numbers going past and seeing who could spot the Blue Meanie first…I can’t relate one to the other. Chris and I sang it a capella at the Folk House that glorious day.

I love Lovely Rita – it may be almost my favourite Beatles song, if such a thing is possible. It may be the brass. It may be the maracas. It may the slightly outlandish North-West accent used. It may be the coda. Or possibly the use (again) of over-politeness “May I enquire discreetly, when are you free to take some tea with me?” – It may be odd to realise it but I do find linguistic prissiness terribly amusing and attractive (witness). I’m sure that’s why I could never live abroad where they speak “Foreign” – I would miss pretentious puns. Although I will say I prefer the coda out of headphones…wonder what the word may be for it.

To repeat – what must it have been like to be within the first listening public to hear this – it’s extraordinary…it’s not just that it looks so 60s and “psychedelic” – it’s so English (and I know I keep saying that but I love it), the structures, the lyric content, all are so strange. And yet at the same time, not a big ol’ hippy freak-out.

It’s long-acknowledged that the Sgt Pepper reprise may just be the best single unit of music ever produced in the world (apart from maybe that section in Born Under Punches where David Byrne turns into a robot and back again several times).

A Day in the Life, I realise, is responsible for tying together three large parts of my adult brain. There’s a book called Revolution in the Head (Ian McDonald?) which is a huge analytical book of all Beatlemusic. In discussing A Day in the Life, it invokes The Wasteland by TS Eliot. Also, the last chord was described as being “reminiscent of an eerily settling mushroom cloud”. Hence Beatles – TS Eliot – Nuclear paranoia are all neatly tied up. This song is something like a crucifixion. I have nothing else to back that up with, but it’s so integral and painful. Proper use of an orchestra. Even when the jangly McCartney piano comes in, it’s frightening…like the guy who sings “dem bones dem bones” at the end of The Prisoner…you can’t work out what he’s doing in the middle of this…the everyman and the dreamer…Ralph and Simon…and whose reality etc…philosopher dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a philosopher…a swimmy, drunken roll-call of holes in the ground. Horrifying. The closing “I’d love to turn you on”…the whole song is like a deeply troubled and troubling person you meet at a party who rambles incoherently but something stays worrying in your ear and later the fruition of vinyl and overtones suggest something else untouchable.

Sgt Pepper is such a strange and yet obvious thing to write about…you can almost understand, how could anyone have gone on, gone further from that?