Like most freelance writers, I have a notepad full of jottings which come under the loose category of ‘Ideas I Probably Won’t Get Round To Doing As I Doubt Anyone Will Be Interested, They’re A Bit Rubbish Anyway And It Probably Wouldn’t Pay Much’. Around halfway down this list is a book provisionally entitled A Hard Day’s Fight, in which I espouse my opinions on a plethora of Beatles-related debates, and add a few new ones of my own.
So along with my theories that John Lennon didn’t write any good music while he was resident in New York (the Plastic Ono Band and Imagine albums were recorded in the UK, and Double Fantasy was written in Bermuda), and that Beatles For Sale should have been an EP (everything other than ‘No Reply’, ‘I’m A Loser’, ‘I’ll Follow The Sun’ and ‘Eight Days A Week’ is utterly dispensable), I now feel I must add another bromide should times ever get lean enough that I am forced to hawk this half-baked idea around music publishers.
It goes as follows. With the newly released Disney-polished reboot of the 1995 The Beatles Anthology documentary series and the accompanying fourth volume of ‘new’ music for the Anthology Collection album series, we have reached a point where some kind of moratorium on the Fab Four should commence.
The sound of a barrel being scraped would probably have pleased Lennon if he had thought to include it on one of his late 1960s experimental albums with Yoko Ono. But it’s a grating cacophony to listeners today, who it seems are being inveigled to buy some pretty shoddy product – Apple Records I’m sure knowing full well that there are myriad Fab fans of a certain vintage who simply ‘have’ to buy whatever is released for their collections, no matter how flimsy the contents.
It’s time to leave the group alone and enjoy what we have – which is an absolutely colossal body of work
I grew up on the outskirts of Liverpool, so am well aware that the city the band were born in has a different relationship with the group to the rest of the world. It’s a dynamic that surprises many outsiders for its lack of deferent gratitude and genuflection. In our late teens and early twenties, my mates and I scoffed at the ersatz Cavern Club (the original was demolished to make way for a ventilation shaft that was never built) and, knowing we could score a free pint off an emotionally overcome Norwegian tourist, we would blag a drink before rolling our eyes at Paul McCartney’s mullet hairdo and references to ‘herbal jazz cigarettes’. How stupid we were. But this latest batch of value-free Beatles releases will do nothing other than to engender, further afield, the same kind of non-sycophancy towards ‘the lads’ that has been present on Merseyside since about 1964, the year they moved out.
On Spotify, there’s a playlist that has brought together every single piece of music that was ever professionally recorded in a studio by the group. Including all the expanded re-issues of the studio albums, the BBC live records and the endless Anthologies, there is now close to 40 hours of ‘official’ Beatles music – an astonishing oeuvre given that the group were only recording for seven years. Isn’t that enough?
OK, so I’m well aware that, although I now consider myself a huge Beatles fan, I am ludicrously lightweight compared with the obsessives who really do spend lifetimes trying to figure out exactly what George Harrison had for lunch before he recorded ‘Savoy Truffle’. These same fans are currently having web forum meltdowns about the 13-years-and-counting wait for the second volume of Mark Lewisohn’s proposed three-part biography of the group – a work which makes Robert Caro’s Lyndon B. Johnson project look like a haiku in comparison. If you still aren’t aware of the first volume, released in 2013, the ‘expanded’ version of it runs to 1,500 pages and only takes the story up to the release of ‘Love Me Do’.
So maybe Macca and Ringo Starr are only intending this ‘new’ output to be for the obsessional elements? If so then the move has backfired; the reaction of the Beatles hardcore to the release of the fourth Anthology album has been hostile in the main. It mostly consists of tracks that have already been released, while none of the 13 ‘unearthed’ recordings not officially released before add anything to the building-block story of each song’s creation.
More than five decades on from the Beatles’ break-up, it’s time to leave the group alone and enjoy what we have – which is an absolutely colossal body of work. It would also be nice if they left us alone too, barring the discovery of anything genuinely groundbreaking such as a recording of ‘lost’ bassist Stuart Sutcliffe or some colour film footage of them on stage in Hamburg.
What the ‘new’ Anthology tells us is that there is absolutely nothing of any real value left in the studio vaults. And although there will always be a few lickspittles vying for the release of ‘Carnival Of Light’, the holy grail of unreleased Beatles recordings (which, according to the few that have heard it, is a tune-free dirge along the lines of ‘Revolution 9’), the saner fans among us are right to feel irritated by yet more cynical repackaging of, well, not very much at all. Sorry, George, but it’s wallets, not guitars that are gently weeping at this latest outburst of lavishly designed, content-free Fab-crumbs.
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