And in The End …
It is in the nature of things that at a Ruster’s stage of life reminders of tempus fugit – welcome or otherwise – tend to come thick and fast in all areas of existence.
Recently in the field of music a new edition of the Beatles’ penultimately released (but last recorded) album Abbey Road, now remastered by sound engineer Simon Okell and producer Giles Martin, son of George Martin the Parlophone/EMI producer who first signed the Beatles and became known as “the fifth Beatle” in overseeing their recording career, has been launched.
The project – The Beatles Abbey Road Super Deluxe Box Set (2019) – is issued to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
For me, like most people of my vintage, the world of popular music divides into two periods: before the Beatles – and after. It really is that simple.
Theirs is an extraordinary story and its details are pretty-much hard-wired into both British history and mine, so I won’t bore the Rust’s core readership by regurgitating it here.
What does surprise – well, not so much surprise as frustrate – me is the inevitable fact that people in generations after mine don’t – can’t – comprehend the enormity of the Beatles’ influence upon popular culture around the world.
I’ve seen surveys revealing the fact that teenagers today have just about heard of Paul McCartney, but know practically nothing about the Beatles, well other than that their grandparents insist on banging on about their music and occasionally forcing everyone to listen to it.
And – whenever they admit (grudgingly) that some of it is okay – they immediately go on to point out that nothing the Beatles created could possibly stand comparison with whatever is produced these days by Stormzy or Kanye West, or whomever is this year’s sensational of the moment.
Upon hearing or reading such things I tend to take refuge in the line that, of course they don’t understand – how could they possibly, when they never experienced day-by-day life in the 1960s?
It was an era when – every six months or so – life around the globe stopped whenever the news of the imminent arrival of the Beatles’ next LP in six week’s time was announced … we all waited, pregnant with anticipation … and then wallowed in the new and experimental sounds that the band had knocked out, seemingly as easily as if they’d got a direct line to the God of Music and were channelling it down for our benefit.
As they say, if you weren’t there then you could never know what it felt like.
Today I’m pleased to register that recently I managed to master the technicalities of downloading BBC Sounds, a free app, from the Google Store onto my smartphone.
Via this means I managed to listen to the two-part (60 minutes each) Radio 2 documentary about the recording of the Abbey Road album.
This was just one item in an orgy of Radio 2 Beatles-related programming – including the establishing of a temporary dedicated Beatles DAB radio station – that was put out towards the end of September as part of the Abbey Road Fiftieth Anniversary celebrations.
I haven’t listened to a more enjoyable and fascinating slice of radio in years.
Suffice it to say that I don’t intend to reheat a blow-by-blow account of what it contains – or indeed the many facts I didn’t previously know – but what came home to me with bells was an impression of the crazy world that the Beatles inhabited at the height of their fame and a personal reaction of stunned amazement at the quality of the body of work they produced whilst at the centre of it.
Abbey Road is not my favourite Beatles album – it is one of four or five contenders for that title but never the winner – yet the tale of how they produced it in less than six months, straight after completing the chaotic mess of the deranged Let It Be project in February 1969, in circumstances in which they all seemed to sense that (as a group) they were coming to their natural end, is a stonker.
Even looking back now, it is hard to credit the fantastic leaps in musicality and experimentation that the Beatles made in just a decade together.
To give just one pointer, at one stage in the development of one song (it may have been Here Comes The Sun* if my memory serves, which it may not), the presenter of the programme intoned that the next time George Harrison, its composer, returned to work on it again after a break of several weeks, it was his 26th birthday.
His 26th goddamned birthday!
And this was the last Beatles album ever recorded. That fact alone drives home with a sledgehammer the sheer epic nature of the Fab Fours’ achievements.
Upon hearing that statement I paused briefly to consider what in comparison I’d achieved in my life by my 26th birthday – and (I should properly add) it was very briefly, because what I’d achieved by my 26th birthday was precious little!
[Not that I have achieved much more since, come to think of it!] …
(* Incidentally, one tit-bit I picked up from these programmes was that Here Comes The Sun is the second most downloaded Beatles song of all time) …
