Fifty Years Ago Today, it was Twenty Years Ago Today...

Remembering Remembering the Beatles: Part One

June 1^st 1967. As every music fan knows, the release date of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Arguably, one of the most significant dates in the history of popular culture. Like today, June 1^st 1967 fell on a Thursday. It was half term, so I can't claim to have been distracted by school work. But I was utterly oblivious to what had happened.

Were I to plot my childhood awareness of the Beatles’ activities on a graph, summer 1967 would see something of a trough. I’d been well aware that there was a phenomenon called the Beatles from the age of about two and a half: I can recollect both She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand getting their first round of airplay courtesy of the BBC Light Programme. More clearly, I remember Ticket to Ride sitting at number one in the hit parade, around Easter 1965. I remember seeing the Beatles on TV miming to I Feel Fine, a performance which helped to define my own personal image of the band. I remember right up to Help! and then…

Thinking back, I was curious as to why I had somehow missed out on significant singles like Day Tripper/ We Can Work It Out and Paperback Writer. Of the former tracks I have no recollection prior to acquiring my first Beatles album, A Collection of Beatles Oldies, in the spring of 1974. ‘Blimey,’ I thought, on hearing the introductory riff to Day Tripper: ‘this is all right!’ As for Paperback Writer, I must have been dimly aware of it, because I recognised it when the BBC used it as the introductory music for a book discussion programme during the 1970s. But as to whether I heard it back in 1966, I’m less certain. I have clear recollections of The Mamas and the Papas’ Monday Monday, which was in the charts around the same time; but I’m less sure on Paperback Writer. Why should this be?

I’ve come up with a triumvirate of reasons to explain this anomaly in my memories of the Beatles’ singles. First is the simple fact of exactly which songs I was able to hear on the radio. During the daytime, we listened primarily to either the BBC Light Programme – the source of all popular music – or the Home Service. The latter would be instantly recognisable to any modern listener, today's Radio 4 being barely any different. But the Light Programme was as its name suggests: light, and relatively undemanding. Contemporary pop music was just part of a mix of contemporary and light classical recordings that comprised the bulk of the station’s airplay, interspersed with comedy and variety shows. But the kind of pop music that got played on the Light Programme – certainly during the hours when I would have been able to listen – was generally of a kind considered ‘safe for broadcast’ by whoever made such decisions at Broadcasting House. The ‘heavier’ pop items of the day were not to be found playlisted on the likes of Housewive’s Choice nor the Saturday morning children’s request show fronted by, amongst others, Blue Peter’s Christopher Trace.

I’m not saying unequivocally that the Light Programme never played records by bands like the Who, the Kinks or the Stones; but their heavier releases certainly didn’t seem to figure in the playlist to the same extent as, say, Dominique by the Singing Nun, or Josh MacRae’s Messing About on the River. I heard Kenneth Williams' comedy monologue ‘Hand up your Sticks’ more times than I Can’t Explain, or You Really Got Me, neither of which made it into my awareness until years after their release. This, then, might be one reason why I missed out on some of the ‘heavier’ Beatle singles. But there’s another reason, and it’s significant.

In September of 1965, Thunderbirds arrived on television. It had been heavily trailed in the preceding weeks, and there was no way on earth that I was going to miss it. In the ATV region where I lived, it was broadcast at 7.30 on Thursday evenings – meaning that it clashed with Top of the Pops which, up to this point, had been a programme I saw quite regularly. Charting my memories of pop singles, I’ve noted a distinct dip beginning around late 1965 and lasting until spring of the following year: a dip that corresponds almost exactly to the first run of Thunderbirds. The Sunday chart show Pick of the Pops was a programme which I discovered a year or two later, so that at this time, TOTP presented my only opportunity to see and hear some of the edgier new artists who were making waves in the pop world. Without it, I missed several key releases.

Another factor, also occurring around this time, is that I started school. This happened when I turned five, in March of 1966. Prior to this, having been at home during the day, I’d had much more opportunity to hear new records when they were played on the radio. From spring ‘66 onwards, my listening was essentially confined to that Saturday morning show, adding the chart rundown from somewhere in late 1967.

Thus it was that, at the fulcrum moment in June 1967, I was not tuned in; neither, for that matter, was I turned on or dropped out… the only LSD I was aware of was pounds, shillings and pence. The first person I heard singing Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was, sadly, Petula Clarke, on a Beatles-themed TV show around 1973. And at that point, I had genuinely never heard of it before...