In the last week, the Beatles have had media worship normally reserved for U bloody 2 or someone. They’re still one of my favourite groups (The Beatles, that is) but it’s not just because a programme maker fancied doing a documentary – in our calculated modern world, there must be a reason. Which is…
...that all the recordings released during their career are re-released today.
Let’s get The Money out of the way first. It took several years after CDs were launched before The Beatles’ catalogue became available. The accompanying fanfare – happily timed with it being “Twenty Years Ago Today” since Sgt. Pepper first came out – was a big deal. (Pity it couldn’t have been Revolver as birthday boy instead, but there you go).
Now we are told that all this Was Not Good Enough so they have to release them all again. So we pay for them all again. There are plenty of brilliant musicians from that era who never made much – if anything - from their work. But that doesn’t include Paul and Ringo.
Next up is that the 1987 discs Not Being Good Enough is missing the point. This was music that your auntie played on her Dansette while putting her mazzy on. It’s neither a call to prayer nor a hi-fi demonstration record, it’s FUN. If it is to be made available in a new format, it still has to be sold in the album packages, which brings me to…
...control freakery. The Beatles - often credited with inventing the album (they didn’t) - will argue that you should listen to the songs in their chosen order. Poo to that one – do you have any LPs where you think one side is better than the other so you play it more often? I could go on all day with an argument of why albums will never be as important as singles anyway, especially with the Beatles, but I’ll leave that to some other time.
Ever since Anthology, I’ve had a creeping feeling that the surviving members want history written according to their own image. It’s like when a designer jeans label throws a hissy fit when a supermarket procures legitimate stock from abroad and sells it cheaply back here. I don’t know if Lennon would have gone along with Stalinist revision, but he would have had to agree with what Yoko told him to do anyway. If The Beatles are bigger than Jesus (and like it or not, the statistics show that they’re close) then they should have Christianity’s contradicting accounts, gospels that don’t quite mesh with each other, and urban legend.
To stay in the spirit of this, here’s one of those cartoons that Paul and Ringo would like us to think Never Existed:
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