When it comes to making a musical splash, British bands have had quite the year. In August, we had Oasis gloriously give birth to hope by announcing a reunion before promptly diving headfirst into a soul-crushing ticket saga. Last week, in the aftermath of Liam Payne’s death, One Direction fans have stirred and have driven every single 1D album back onto the charts. And now, even though the ashes of Beatlemania were swept away decades ago, the Beatles, too have somehow wormed their way onto the charts.
That’s right. According to Forbes, the Beatles album Abbey Road – the cover of which famously features the group strolling along a zebra crossing – has reappeared on the Vinyl Albums charts. With over 35 million monthly streamers on Spotify, the Beatles may not be the tiniest blip on your radar, but they are a presence in the lives of – literally – millions of other people.
The biggest question, of course, is: who are these mystery people still buying vinyl albums? Lord only knows. Stone age music consumption habits, however, are a debate for another day. What is more prudent is that despite the stringent efforts of Spotify, YouTube and, of course, those studious makers of vinyl albums, the collective magic of Liverpudlian lads John, Paul, George and Ringo – or the Fab Four, if you will – continues to fall on stubbornly deaf ears.
Are they overrated?
How dare you. The Beatles are perfectly rated, thank you very much. You may have somehow slipped through the Spotify net and never heard a Beatles track in your life, but you will at least have heard of them, even though they only lasted as a band for seven years from 1963 to 1969 – little more than the blink of an eye. With their charming floppy haircuts forming the bedrock of their identity in the early years, big-headed John Lennon, equally big-headed Paul McCartney, gentle George Harrison and underrated Ringo Starr formed the band that continued to spit out hit after hit throughout the sixties across 13 studio albums. Or at least they did until Yoko Ono came along and married Lennon, indirectly causing one of the most infamous splits in rock band history.
Mandatory love ballads
Naturally, the Beatles gave us their fair share of obligatory love songs. Like humans cannot exist without oxygen, the laws of the universe mandate that a band cannot exist without love songs. You cannot escape Yesterday, the ‘scrambled egg’ song that splits guitar chords and has McCartney mulling over what went wrong in his love life. We have All My Loving, which contains a horde of tricky guitar triplets (which nearly every cover version manages to gloss over.) And who could forget the stunningly simple but ever so catchy She Loves You, harking back to the Beatles’ earliest days? McCartney loves to tell us that his father had strongly advised him to stick to the grammatically preferable ‘yes, yes, yes’ instead of the Americanised ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ – an instruction that his son dutifully ignored. Would Beatlemania ever have been born with ‘yes, yes, yes’? We shall never know. Although perhaps, after listening to Ed Sheeran helpfully inserting his take on Hey Jude in the Beatles film Yesterday (2019), we can hazard a guess: no.
Nevertheless, the love songs continued to be churned out even as the Beatles approached their final days as a band. McCartney’s ballad I Will is beautifully simple and convinces you to return to it again and again. Listen to him perform it live, or listen to the studio track, or even listen to the covers floating around YouTube – the only thing that is certain is that you will be hitting that replay button more often than not.
As unconventional as can be
Of course, once they had established a solid fanbase, the Beatles were able to branch out into more unconventional song areas. Want a merry little tune about a serial killer? Head on over to the cheerful Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Have a hankering for a song about a yellow submarine? The bizarre Yellow Submarine will tell you more than you could ever want to know about submarines (of any colour.) Want to hear musings about an octopus garden? Have a listen to the Abbey Road track Octopus’s Garden, and then head straight on over to the other Abbey Road offerings about the woman who came in through the bathroom window (She Came In Through The Bathroom Window).
Naturally, you may at some point have been seized by an inexplicable desire to hear musical musings on a street with a barbershop and a girl selling flowers, in which case, Penny Lane can do no wrong. Although if you are sick to death of everyone around you (for example, when your children suggest you listen to that other classic act Britney Spears as an alternative), the angsty Help! will provide some solace. With its choppy chords, staccato melody and legato harmonies backing it up, Lennon’s jagged plea for help resonates with everyone who longs for a sympathetic ear.
And if you have ever thought to yourself, “You know what the world is missing? A string quartet composition about a lonely woman,” then you absolutely must drink in Eleanor Rigby, which masterfully paints a beautiful picture of a forgotten woman in just over two minutes.
Truly unique
For the truly peculiar – even more bizarre than Yellow Submarine – you must not deny yourself the opportunity to dive into the Lennon-written I Am The Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever. Nearly all Beatles tracks will bear the legend Lennon-McCartney (unless either Ringo or Harrison wrote them, in which case neither McCartney nor Lennon were interested in taking any credit.) However, a good rule of thumb when it comes to The Beatles is, the crazier the track, the more likely it is to have had its origins in Lennon’s weird and wonderful head – which is why it pained him considerably to have been attached to McCartney’s Yesterday, which Lennon reportedly could not stand and wanted to have nothing to do with. For his part, McCartney, who wrote the song for his then-wife Linda, also wished for Lennon’s name to be stricken from the record when it came to Yesterday, but was unable to do so for irritating legal reasons.
It is impossible to recommend any single Beatles track, for the simple reason that there are so many good ones to choose from. Head on over to YouTube or Spotify (or the vinyl album store, if that floats your boat.) Start with All My Loving. And let the clever algorithm in your phone do the rest. You’re welcome.
