I've Got Nothing to Say, but It's Okay...

The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, first edition, 1975. John Lennon read it and even wrote in with an addendum for the next edition: 'set the Illustrated Record straight' he wrote.

Remembering Remembering the Beatles… part two

Around 1975, a book appeared in our local branch of WH Smith that provided the first decent history of the Beatles that I’d seen in print. Formatted to the same dimensions as an LP cover, it was entitled The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, and had been written by NME journalists Roy Carr and Tony Tyler. Somewhat surprisingly, Carr and Tyler didn’t stop short of criticising the fabs’ efforts whenever they found them wanting. Beatles for Sale they considered decidedly below par, with songs like What You’re Doing and Every Little Thing dismissed by the pair as ‘domestic gripes.’ Rain, now rightly regarded as a classic, they wrote off as ‘an exercise in primitive psychedelia before the word, or its creative limitations had been defined.’ O-kay... I hadn’t even heard Rain at the time, and here were two music industry hacks telling me it was barely worth wasting my time on (my 1976 diary reveals that it was on April 14^th of that year when I finally got to hear Rain, courtesy of a friend who owned the Paperback Writer single. In a neat meterological coincidence, it was raining torrentially at the time...)

Carr and Tyler’s most withering scorn, however, was reserved for the solo works of George Harrison, whose post-Beatles output they roundly rubbished. Indeed, none of the band got off lightly when it came to the section in the book entitled ‘The Solo Years’, with all four judged to have turned in some less than creditable efforts in the aftermath of the break-up. To set this in some kind of context, it needs to be borne in mind that the music press, in common with pretty well the rest of the human race, circa the mid-1970s, still clung onto the notion that the Beatles would somehow, some day, resolve the differences that had driven them apart and reunite to create great music once again. Until then, we just had to put up with whatever solo efforts they chose to foist upon a world that had once worshipped at the altar of the eight-armed deity. One day, reason would prevail, and the Beatles would return to sweep all before them. A vain hope it may seem in retrospect, but it was worth clinging on to. My 1976 diary reports a press story of the day telling of a promoter who had offered insane amounts of money to all four Beatles if they would reunite for just one concert. Such tales were par for the course in the chilly musical hinterland we inhabited without the Beatles…

'Rain – an exercise in primitive psychedelia'. Indeed… but Carr and Tyler's book certainly looked very nice.

For all its criticisms, The Beatles: An Illustrated Record became, for me, a sort of Haynes Manual for the fab four, a straight ahead, no-frills telling of their story, complete with reviews of all the albums, discussion of key points in the band’s career, and even a chapter on bootlegs, my first encounter with this now familiar expression. And there were plenty of nice pictures. In retrospect, the pictorial content of the book seems no more than a single ice crystal on the tip of an iceberg of Titanic-sinking proportions, to which more material has been added with every passing year, as forgotten caches of press and private photographs are uncovered. In fact, I doubt that anyone can ever hope to own every single image of the Beatles. But back in 1975, I was quite happy with the contents of Carr and Tyler’s book – it had full-sized pictures of every album cover, alongside an assortment of imagery covering their films, concerts and other endeavours. A tone of barely suppressed cynicism pervaded the whole endeavour: ‘note the absence of guitar leads’ read the caption to a colour pic from the 1965 television special The Music of Lennon & McCartney, showing John and George miming with Rickenbacker and Gretsch respectively.

I sometimes wonder if it was Carr and Tyler’s failure to toe the party line that provided the first seeds for the cynical attitude I would adopt towards popular culture as I grew up. These days, when every vain, exploitative piece of music or film making seems to arrive with instant critical approval from that uncritical mass known as the online media, I think we could use a lot more healthy cynicism, of the Carr/Tyler variety. Not every creative endeavour by every individual is a paragon of excellence. In fact, I’d suggest that more than 95% are the opposite, and utterly worthless. Neither do I appreciate creators telling me online how good they think their latest album/comic/whatever happens to be. I’ll listen to an objective opinion when I hear one, thanks very much. To quote John Lennon in Good Morning, Good Morning, 'I've got nothing to say, but it's okay.' That, to me, is the mantra for much contemporary pop culture...

Meantime, the Beatles, of whom there is only one valid opinion, and Sgt Pepper, which today turns fifty, reminding us, as if we needed it, that there has been nothing else to equal it in half a century. Absolutely nothing, from no-one. Listening out for the next Sgt. Pepper is like probing the cosmos for signals from intelligent life…