Like many people I suspect, I spent a significant stretch of my late teens and early twenties purporting to hate The Beatles. Since then though of course, I’ve gradually come to realise that, much like claiming to hate animals or children, hating The Beatles is a mug’s game; a dreary, contrarian stance suitable only for lonely, cantankerous misanthropes.

Of course, anyone who claims to unreservedly love all of The Beatles output should probably be regarded with equal suspicion – perhaps kept at the same arms-length usually reserved for conspiracy theorists and practitioners of “crystal healing” – but nonetheless; regardless of the issues one might reasonably have with the band’s members, their respective idiosyncrasies, and their overbearing influence upon 20th century music culture, to reach a certain age without acknowledging that a significant amount of the music the band made together is joyous, innovative and basically just a whole lot of fun, is frankly just weird, to be honest.

Personally, I never experienced any road-to-Damascus, blinding-light-of-revelation type moment regarding The Beatles; instead, just a slowly growing awareness of the fact that the general ‘feel’ of their music, which made me very happy when I listened to it under parental supervision as a child and early teen, still makes me happy as an adult, now that the spiky fences erected in the name of teenage rebellion have long been trampled.

Rest assured though readers, I’ve not been inflicted by the grown up, rock-bore variant of Beatlemania that afflicts so many males of a certain age – indeed, I remain confident that The Beatles will never become a group I would actually list as one of my all-time favourites, irrespective of the time I may or may not spend delving into their catalogue.

Throughout their career, there was always something a bit, I dunno, preppy, slightly too eager-to-please, about their music (McCartney’s influence, presumably) which, together with a slightly contrived, stand-offish air (Lennon’s irony?), prevented them from ever really crossing over into the instinctive chaos and aggression that characterises true rock n’ roll in its various forms – that of course being a lineage that both preceded and followed their blanket domination of the ’63-’69 period, and that (to a greater or lesser extent) provided the framework all the white rock music I really love.

But, I like The Beatles quite a lot, and I enjoy their music when I hear it… let’s leave it like that.

As such, I have recently found myself reading a remaindered copy of the late Ian MacDonald’s much-ballyhooed book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and The Sixties (2005 revised edition). Mixing fairly high-brow musings and keen academic specificity with a rousingly Romantic (capital R) defence and celebration of the lasting and positive social change that emerged from the entity we now term “the sixties”, MacDonald’s central assertion that the progress of this transformation can be seen clearly mapped out in the chronological progress of The Beatles’ recordings is a heady one indeed.

Although some of MacDonald’s more music theory-orientated stuff goes straight over my untutored head (were the teenage Beatles really aware that they were singing harmony in recurring triplets, or instigating a daringly unconventional drop to B flat at the end of the chorus or whatever, whilst they were bashing through their sets in Hamburg?), as soon as I got to work on the detailed track-by-track analysis that makes up the bulk of the book’s text, it became clear that this thing would be nigh on impossible to read without simultaneous consideration of the songs being discussed.

Check out the ingenuity of Starr’s ‘backwards’ fill after the middle eight, MacDonald tells us, and listen out for the guitar flub at 1:27, and, can you imagine the effect all those unruly ‘woooo’s during the chorus repeats must have had on a mainstream pop audience in 1962, and so on.

I don’t know about you, but reading that sort of thing tends to result in my immediately being consumed by such an overwhelming need to listen to the thing myself and double-check these observations that it is difficult to eat, sleep or carry out my responsibilities as an adult person, until I have done so.

As a result, I’ve suddenly found myself doing something I’ve never previously gotten around to – namely, “acquiring” copies of The Beatles’ original UK LPs [ask no questions, and I’ll give you no answers] and listening to them closely, in chronological order. Which seems like something any pop/rock music fan should do at least once in their life, right..?

During my childhood, I should explain, our family had the red album and the blue album, and later a CD of The White Album, so that was the stuff I knew. I’ve subsequently filled in some of the gaps in their post’65 output myself, but, as a result, there is actually a lot of stuff on the mop-top era LPs that I’ve never knowingly heard before – so, going through it all, with MacDonald on hand to point at the blackboard and lay down the lore, is proving to be quite an enlightening experience.

Although these early albums are generally written off as a handful of great singles bulked out with careless, quickly recorded filler material (which, in fairness, is exactly what they are), I’m nonetheless going to go out on a limb here and say that ‘Please Please Me’ (cobbled together in the immediate aftermath of The Beatles achieving their first UK number # 1 with the title track) still stands up as a really great listen, despite some shaky moments.

The first nice surprise here is track # 2, ‘Misery’, a Lennon original that opens with what sounds like a bit of parody of the era’s solipsistic teen ballads, before the band pull a bait n’ switch on us and Ringo kicks in with a fairly propulsive 4/4 beat – hi-hat hissing metronome-style on every measure - and the track becomes quite a nice, laidback pop-rocker. If you want to hear an example of a good, early Beatles song whose simple pleasures haven’t been beaten into the ground by 50+ years of constant repetition, this is a good choice.

The prominence of the drumming here also serves to remind us that, irrespective of MacDonald’s more scholarly breakdowns, the genre that The Beatles were initially credited with spear-heading was Mersey-beat, not Mersey-three part harmony or Mersey-counterpoint bassline. I’m not claiming Ringo Starr was by any means the first drummer to lay down this kind of relentless, pre-motorik non-groove (it’s kind of a variant on the “Twist beat”, right?), but the importance of his decision to employ it on most of the best songs on this album cannot be underestimated, vis-à-vis it’s subsequent adoption as the foundation of pretty much all pop-rock, mod, power-pop and, eventually, punk records.

This point is perfectly demonstrated by skipping forward to what is probably my least favourite song on this record, ‘P.S. I Love You’ (track # 9). This was originally the B-side for ‘Love Me Do’, and, as per the A-side, poor Ringo found himself ignominiously kicked off the drum stool by George Martin (for shame!), demoted to maracas (the indignity!) for the duration of the session, and replaced by studio session player Andy White. I’m extremely glad the band didn’t go on to use this guy for any subsequent recordings, because his work here, though faultlessly ‘professional’, of course, is frankly pretty fucking rubbish. Whilst a lumpen, plodding rhythm actually adds to the primitive charm of ‘Love Me Do’, the “clippity cloppity”, rim shot-heavy beat White employs on ‘P.S. I Love You’ is absolutely insufferable.

Vaguely reminiscent of Ron Grainer’s theme for ‘Steptoe & Son’, it feels symptomatic of the drab, sexless, overly cautious British approach to pop that The Beatles are widely credited with instantaneously destroying upon their arrival in ’63 – a claim that is easy to believe if you skip back from ‘P.S.’ to the comparative hurricane of the ever-fantastic ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, probably the closest thing to a straight up, ‘50s style rock n’ roll classic the band ever recorded.

Herein, Starr’s relentless pulse drives things forward (even though his actual drum hits are muted by the over-dubbed hand-claps), adding an exhilarating touch of modernism to proceedings as the tempo accelerates beyond that favoured by, say, Chuck Berry or The Beach Boys, whilst the chiming, slightly overdriven tangle of John and George’s guitars cast a glance back toward Berry or even Hubert Sumlin, already ever-so-slightly anticipating the feedbackin’ excesses of the coming decade. It’s great, in other words.

Meanwhile, the inevitable suite of R’n’B covers The Beatles included here gets a lot of stick for generally being slap-dash and failing to live up to the originals - which again, is perfectly accurate, but I really enjoyed them nonetheless. You can hardly blame a bunch of teenagers, anxiously watching the clock on their first proper studio session, for failing to equal the performances of Arthur Alexander or The Shirelles, and, if The Beatles take on Goffin & King’s ‘Chains’ is a bit perfunctory (good as the band could be in early days, this song demands the kind of loose, heavy groove that these nice clean British lads were never likely to achieve), Lennon’s performance of Alexander’s ‘Anna (Go With Him)’ is actually very creditable (I really like Harrison’s little guitar riff too). Best of all though, Ringo’s token vocal, a take on The Shirelles’ ‘Boys’, is an absolute banger.

Although I didn’t intend to turn this review a spirited defence of Ringo, I’ve always felt that some of the songs he sang in The Beatles have been unfairly ridiculed over the years, and as far as this first LP is concerned, he’s probably neck-and-neck with John for MVP status, particularly when he’s bellowing his way through ‘Boys’, crashing away on his kit with the rest of the band’s “bop-bop-she-wop”s echoing away behind him. Were the vocals overdubbed? I’d like to imagine not, but either way, it’s pretty raucous, high energy stuff (check out his shout-out to George before the solo), fully aware of the humour inherent in handing a girl group number to a gentleman of Ringo’s gruff disposition. It must have gone down a storm in their live sets.

What probably comes across most strongly on this LP in fact is a glimpse of the indefinable charisma and good feeling that played such a huge role in winning The Beatles their popularity in their early years. Lest we forget, it wasn’t the band’s music that convinced George Martin to continue recording them after their disastrous first demo session at Abbey Road - more the fact that he just enjoyed their company and had a great laugh with them.

No doubt the audiences who reportedly went wild for them in Liverpool and Hamburg felt similarly, and, listening to ‘Please Please Me’, it’s easy to understand how they felt. Even through the dreary ballads, unconvincing concessions to popular taste and ill-chosen cover versions that make up about a third of the record’s track list, it’s almost impossible to listen to it front to back without being won over a bit by that intangible feeling of comfort, good cheer and happiness that came to define “The Beatles” in the popular imagination.

Partly as a result of the larger-than-life personalities and bracingly informal manner that made The Beatles so appealing in ’62-’64, there was also an unresolved conflict between mainstream showbiz populism and rebellious, trend-setting idiosyncrasy that persisted throughout their career, and this disjuncture remains fascinating to me, even though the former aspect generally won out (prior to ‘Revolver’, at least).

It would be easy to characterise this conflict as a straight McCartney / Lennon split, but digging more deeply into these early records reveals that it was never quite as simple as that. Even this early in proceedings, Lennon seems to have wanted to fall back on irony and pastiche to separate himself from the schmaltzy sentimentality that the rest of the band seem to have happily embraced (check out the consciously cheesy doo-wop backing vocals that pop up in several places on this LP, for instance). Although much of the material he contributed to the original songs here is excellent, he seems to have been keen at this stage on telling anyone and everyone that the primary goal of his song-writing was to become rich and famous – thus by implication retaining his rock n’ roll hipster cred by dismissing his band’s repetitious “baby love you” type numbers as a cynical commercial necessity. (Macdonald reports a story that Lennon at one point recorded a demo of a song he intended to sell to Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas in the toilet cubicle of a Hamburg nightclub, symbolically pulling the chain upon completion.)

The simple, winning earnestness of some of Lennon’s songs and performances however makes his disavowal of their sentiments feel at least a bit hollow. Specifically in regard to this LP, it is instructive I think to note Lennon’s apparent enthusiasm for emerging African American performers such as Arthur Alexander and Smokey Robinson. (He covers the former with some gusto here, and appears to have written the so-so ‘Ask Me Why’ in imitation of the latter.) In these fresh sounds of ‘60s soul, could Lennon have discovered a way to turn conventional, lovey-dovey lyrics into vehicles for genuine creative expression..? A bit of a Eureka moment, perhaps…?

Certainly, the many excellent songs he would go on to write within the confines of the band’s melodic pop formula over the next few years would suggest such an inspiration, as indeed does ‘There’s a Place’, the penultimate track on ‘Please Please Me’, and another rarely excavated highlight. This is a splendidly loping Lennon original whose spectral, down-at-heel optimism and raw, unfussy musical arrangement convey a warmth and honesty that parallels that of the emerging American soul sound, without resorting to imitating it. Again, it’s well worth a listen.

Indeed, along with McCartney’s pleasantly nostalgic arrangement of the theme song from the 1961 new wave drama ‘A Taste of Honey’, ‘There’s a Place’ is the only song here that actually dares to reflect the band’s Northern British roots instead of playing pop star dress up (as was the industry expectation at the time). Both songs are liable to raise goose bumps in anyone with a yen for the particular aesthetic of the era’s “kitchen sink” movies and literature, and both set the stage for the many similar excursions that would follow once the band officially hit “phenomenon” status, when, depending on which way you choose to look at it, they either felt secure enough to be themselves…. or else realised just how effectively they could sell their – ahem – cheeky working class personas around the world.

I don’t know whether or not I’ll find anything similarly pertinent (read: long-winded) to say about ‘With The Beatles’ (which followed later in 1963), but watch this space.

Labels: album reviews, old LPs, The Beatles