Recommendations of the Editorial team
When I was nine, I heard about the Beatles for the first time. I mostly spent my vacation on the Merseyside, and a girl there showed me a blurred press photo, on the back of which her names were scribbled. That was 1962 or ’63. The recording was poorly illuminated, and her look was not quite right: Ringo had combed his hair a bit back, as if he wasn’t quite convinced of the Beatles hairstyle.
I didn’t care – that was the band for me. And my experiences – discovering a new photo of you, saving money for singles and EPS, a message about you in the news – repeated each other around the world. To this extent, there had never been anything like that. But it was by no means just the numbers – Michael Jackson can sell records until the latest day, but it will never mean as much as the Beatles.
The Beatles – “Things We Said”:
Every record that appeared was a shock. Unlike Wilde R&B Evangelists, such as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles simply sounded incomparable. They had drawn Buddy Holly, Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry, but they also wrote their own songs. Until then, that had hardly existed; It became the norm through them.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney were exceptional songwriters; McCartney was and is a real virtuoso as a musician; George Harrison was never the type of guitarist who knocked a dazzling solos around the ears, but you can sing the melodies of almost all of his breaks. And they always fit perfectly into the respective arrangement. Ringo rigid drummed with a unique feeling that no one has yet been able to copy, even if many good drummer tried.
John and Paul were fantastic singers
And the most important thing: John and Paul were fantastic singers. Lennon, McCartney and Harrison wrote songs at an impressively high level. The published songs such as “Ask Me Why” or “Things We Said Today” as B-Pages, you have to imagine that. And as fantastic singles, such as “Paperback Writer” with a flipside like “Rain” or “Penny Lane” with “Strawberry Fields Forever” really only came out as singles, the songs did not appear on any LP. These records were real events, not just teasers for the upcoming album. Then they got really grown up.
First simple Lovesongs, then adult stories such as “Norwegian Wood” – on the acid sides of love – then larger topics that were not expected in pop texts. They were also pretty much the first pop band to deal with the acoustic dimension of their recordings. Excellent sound engineers in the “Abbey Road” studios like Geoff Emerick thought methods that we find today as normal when the implementation is about the implementation of musical ideas. Before that, there were no rock musicians who deliberately tipped an arrangement out of balance – for example through quiet singing to a loud playback like in “Strawberry Fields Forever”. You cannot overestimate the freedoms that opened the following from Motown to Hendrix.
“And your bird can sing”:
My favorite albums are clearly “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver”. On both of them you can hear references to other music – R&B, Dylan, Psychedelia – but never superficial and never so that the panels sound time. You just had to take “revolvers” in your hand and knew that it was something special. If I had to choose a favorite song from these albums, it would be “and your bird can sing” … no, “girl” … no, “for no one” … and so on.
The songs on their separation album “Let it be” are partly unbalanced, partly great. I think ambition and human mistakes crawl into every band at some point, but the Beatles got a few incredible performances until the end. I still know how I looked at “Let It Be” in a cinema at Leicester Square 1970. Afterwards I felt very melancholic.
I wrote some songs with Paul McCartney and played live with him twice. In 1999, shortly after Linda McCartney’s death, the “Concert for Linda” took place. Paul presented the next piece “All My Loving” for rehearsals. I said, “Should I sing the choir voice at the second round?” And he said: “Yes, just try it.”
It became a very rocky version. In the concert itself, things went very differently. As soon as he sang the first lines – “Close Your Eyes, and i’ll Kiss You” – the audience reacted so violently that the music was almost no longer heard. Perhaps at the moment I understood why the Beatles had to stop playing live at the time. The songs were no longer theirs. They belonged to everyone.