Beatleology (Daily Mail, March 2009)

            This week Liverpool’s Hope University’s applications department has been busy with enquiries. Not from eager eighteen year olds wishing to study astrophysics or medieval history, but from mature students who already have one degree. And their subject of choice? The Beatles.
            Because from next September, Hope University will be offering what they believe will be the world’s first one year MA course in “The Beatles, Popular Music and Society”. Countless colleges in America have had BA courses on the Fab Four for decades, and my bookshelves have more than their share of unread academic treatises on Beatle related subjects, if not quite all the 8000 books reputed to have been written about the foursome.
            But, better late than never. Where better than Liverpool to give scholastic legitimacy to, in local parlance, “The Four Lads Who Shook The World”?
            Now I’m not the professorial type, but what, I’ve been wondering, would I teach if I were setting up this £3,445 course for the thirty successful applicants? Helpfully Mike Brocken, senior lecturer in popular music at Hope, has already indicated that among the subjects studied will be the postwar music industry and Liverpool life from the Thirties onwards. And I’m sure that will be very interesting.
            But, for me, the conditions which helped create the Beatles, as well as much of what we refer to as the culture of Sixties, would be the essential starting point. And that, I would suggest to my students, began two hundred miles away from Liverpool in the House of Commons.
            I’m referring to “Rab” Butler’s 1944 Education Act, which made it possible for millions of working class children to go to grammar schools, opportunities their parents never had.
            Three out of the four Beatles went to grammar schools, and although their attentions were distracted by their famous extra curricula activities, they were well educated—Paul McCartney going into the sixth form and John Lennon on to art college, another product of Butler’s wartime social engineering which was to produce so many other young musicians. Not only that, it was from the art colleges that so much of the fashion of the Sixties sprang, not least variations on the mini-skirt and the bold, bright young look of the time.
            Two other pieces of legislation were also important. In 1954 the Conservative Government relaxed controls on hire purchase on electrical goods, primarily to help housewives buy washing machines. But it also made it possible for young musicians to buy electric guitars and amplifiers on the never-never.
            Then in 1960 national service was abolished, giving boys of 18 an extra two years to grow up in an age of growing prosperity, summed up in Harold Macmillan’s phrase “You’ve never had it so good”. The Beatles spent their two free years perfecting their musical style in nightclubs in Liverpool and Hamburg.
            Since no student would be on my course if he or she didn’t know every detail of the life stories of their heroes, I’d skip any biographical information on them in favour of a consideration of the Beatles’ music and the way it developed.
            And, once again, they’d see that time and place played a major part---rock and roll music reaching the UK from America when all the Beatles were in their mid-teens and at their most impressionable. More than that, rock brought with it the template for the minimal four man group, of two guitars, bass and drums, which the Beatles’ idols, Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, all used.  And which is why there were four Beatles. 
            Students would be asked to show how the Beatles adopted this music, and, more importantly, how they then adapted it.
            Geography comes next. In Liverpool much has been made of the city’s special relationship with New York in that young merchant seamen plying the Atlantic in the early Sixties would bring home American records that were unavailable in Britain. In this way songs by black groups like the Shirelles and the Miracles found their way into the Beatles’ hands---to be then rearranged, several for their first album. So a lecture on culture drift seems appropriate here.
            Curiously what is often overlooked is the subliminal influence of the BBC Light Programme on the Beatles’ music. The BBC may have had little time for rock and roll in the Fifties (you had to listen to Radio Luxembourg for that), but what it did was present the nation with a solid grounding in a wide variety of popular music from arias by Puccini to show tunes and jazz—not least by way of Sunday’s Two Way Family Favourites, a programme that virtually the entire country listened to.
            For a boy as musical as the young Paul McCartney these various influences would blossom eventually in a dozen or more classic Beatle hits from Yesterday and When I’m Sixty Four, to Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, Lady Madonna and Let It Be. Indeed part of what made the Beatles so exceptional, and so particularly British, was the dazzling array of styles they demonstrated as the Sixties wore on, from Goon Show surrealistic imagery to calypsos, from waltzes to hurdy-gurdy fairground sounds. 
            So another wedge of my course would be to show how the Beatles took American rock and roll, welded it into the British experience and then sold it back to America and the world, often containing images of Liverpool. Students would be asked to provide examples.
            Above all, though, and at the centre of my teaching, would be the dynamic of individuals to shape history. Lots of groups in Liverpool and elsewhere were subject to the same influences as the Beatles, but they didn’t have two very different, but quite brilliant, young men like Lennon and McCartney in simultaneous collaboration and competition leading them.
            McCartney was the more gifted melodically, but Lennon, the avid reader, was witty, subversive and a true impudent original. Apart they were good; but together they were astonishing, reshaping the sound of popular music and the ambitions of songwriters. Before John Lennon who else would have thought to put references to Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling into rock songs?
            So, students would be expected to write essays discussing who wrote what, as well as searching out hidden references in Beatle songs, and the origins of some of the group’s most famous lines, many of which have now become figures of everyday speech. Think only of “It’s been a hard day’s night”, “eight days a week”, “a day in the life” and “all you need is love”. 
            Because of the over-riding talents of Lennon and McCartney it’s easy to neglect the contributions of George Harrison, himself no mean songwriter, and Ringo Starr. So lectures on each, given by musicians, should show their often overlooked contributions in the recording studio. Was it trickier than many think being the Beatles’ drummer?
            The studio was, of course, largely the domain of producer George Martin. Without his guidance and musicianship as he arranged and played on so many Beatle records, they simply wouldn’t have sounded the same.
            What would Yesterday have been like if Martin hadn’t suggested a string quartet; or John Lennon’s masterpiece Strawberry Fields Forever without Martin’s skill at cutting two different versions in different keys and different times together to make a single recording? And would In My Life have been so effective without George Martin’s electric piano break that sounded like a harpsichord? Students would be asked the question: is it fair to consider George Martin as the fifth Beatle?
            Other lectures would be the role the media played in championing the group and helping create Beatlemania? Another would ask students to deconstruct some of John Lennon’s more opaque lyrics? Were they just the outpourings of a guy playing with words, maybe even druggy words, or evidence of a serious literary talent?
            This MA course, though, isn’t only about the Beatles, it’s about their lasting significance on society, if indeed there was a significance—which would be for the students to decide. If there was, how much of it was beneficial in the long term and how much of it was short term fashionable tat---like moustaches and long hair, and hippy kaftans and beads and flowers in your hair?
            Further, students would be asked to consider if songs like All You Need Is Love and The Word really did anything to help world peace and understanding, or if they were just catchy, modish tunes.
            For me there’s no doubt that a Sixties cultural revolution would have happened if the Beatles had never existed, because as we’ve seen all the conditions were in place, from the Pill, to the growing feminist movement, to anti-war attitudes, to the appearance of a new confident grammar school/university educated professional class. And class barriers did crumble, although perhaps not as far or as universally as was expected.
            But it was the music that would inevitably have been most different without the Beatles in that for nearly a decade they were the artistic locomotive dragging everyone else along with them.
            Without their lead would Procol Harum have ever made A Whiter Shade of Pale? Unlikely. Would Ray Davies have written Waterloo Sunset, and the Beach Boys have sung God Only Knows? And would the Rolling Stones have existed. I think so. But, like Oasis. they would have sounded very different.
            I suppose in setting the course the point I’d be finally trying to get across is that the Beatles, the music of the time and the Swinging Sixties in general, wasn’t simply about groups of talented individuals. All kind of other things went into the wash right across the world, not least that special ingredient of chance.
            What would have happened, for instance, if Lennon and McCartney had not lived a mile away from each other and had, in fact, never met?  I’ll tell you. No Beatles.
Personally, as a fan, I’m rather glad they did meet. But that won’t get me an MA.

# Footnote: As talented as the four Beatles were, with their limited academic qualifications, it’s doubtful that they would ever have been allowed on any university MA course to study themselves. They could only muster five O’levels and one A-level (all belonging to Paul) between them. John got none.

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