Fifty Years With the Beatles

 

The album that started it all...

Saturday May 4, 1974. The record department of WH Smith, Birmingham. I’d been angling to get a Beatles record for some time and our dad had finally caved in. The Beatles had been history for almost four years, but their records were still readily available: they had a whole section to themselves in Smiths’ record department. If WH Smith sounds like an odd choice to go shopping for records, it’s probably worth mentioning that, at the time, theirs was the best stocked record department in any Birmingham store. HMV’s shop was tiny and still specialised in classical music. I’m not sure that Virgin had even got going, and if they had, it was still a very minor player. In 1970s Birmingham, when you went shopping for LPs, WH Smith was the place to go.

Faced with a choice of Beatle product, I had to decide which album to get. We already owned A Hard Day’s Night, but this belonged to my brother. Now, as I flipped through the empty sleeves, it was my turn to take the plunge. The obvious place to start would have been the classic ‘red’ album, compiling the band’s key songs from the period 1962-66, but being a double this was beyond our budget. What I wanted was a collection of hit singles, focusing on the early years which I preferred. The obvious candidate was 1966’s compilation LP A Collection of Beatles Oldies. 

The sleeve wasn’t exactly an enticement to purchase, with its generic Carnaby Street graphics, all the rage in December 1966 when the album came out, but now really showing its age in a way the other album sleeves did not. The Beatles reportedly hated it, and I can see why. The back cover photograph saw them surrounded by oriental objets d’art, and framed in a haze of cigarette smoke. Pot? I was too young to spot the significance. Either way, it would have made a better cover.

There wasn’t a lot on TV that evening. Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was just setting out on his final adventure, while Mike Yarwood offered forty minutes of impressions and a special guest in the form of Cliff Richard at 8.20. Between them, we got The Wonderful World of Disney, which I always avoided, and a romantic adventure film, Saadia, starring Cornel Wilde. Time to leave the TV set and turn on the record player. It was sometime during that interregnum that I got to play my very first Beatles LP.

A Collection of Beatles Oldies was a somewhat skewed introduction to the band’s output. Having been released for the Christmas market in 1966, it contained no material later than that year, and omitted the singles ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Please Please Me’. It contained a few songs I’d never heard before, notably ‘Day Tripper’ and its double A-side ‘We Can Work it Out’ which had escaped my notice on release in 1965. Of the album’s other selections, I was hearing most of them for the first time since they’d been in the charts in the 1960s. It was a modest beginning, but I was on my way. Within a year I would own five more of the Beatles’ LPs, plus a selection of singles and EPs. But the Beatles and I go back further than that...

Growing up in Britain in the 1960s, one could hardly fail to be aware of The Beatles. Looking back, I’m fairly sure that the very first Beatle record I heard that left an impression was ‘Twist and Shout’. They were all over the airwaves by the time I was old enough to take any notice, and I can clearly recall hearing ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘All My Loving’ played on the BBC Light Programme around the tail end of 1963 and into early 1964. I was just two and a half years old at the time, but nevertheless well aware that all these songs hailed from the same artist. 

Moreover, I knew the band’s name well enough to understand our mum’s wisecrack when, one morning, aged around three, I came in from the garden and told her I’d seen a beetle: ‘Which one?’ she replied: ‘John, Paul, George or Ringo?’ They were public property already: everyone knew their names. Their image was epitomised for me by seeing them perform on TV sometime in 1964. I think it was the single 'I Feel Fine', performed on a Thank Your Lucky Stars special. The mop tops had now acquired the proportions of German army helmets, John's especially, and this image of them became etched into my imagination.

In spite of the Beatles’ all-conquering status and popularity, I didn’t have any of their records bought for me during their time in the charts. Even Beatle merchandising passed me by, with the sole exception of a Yellow Submarine picture card that came out of a packet of sweet cigarettes. When I was bought a toy electric guitar, at Christmas 1965, it was adorned with images of The Rolling Stones (but I was more interested in its array of plastic knobs and switches). 

By the end of the sixties, there were still huge gaps in my knowledge of The Beatles’ career. ‘Norwegian Wood’ I knew only as a jazzed-up cover by the Buddy Rich Big Band, whose albums our dad would regale us with on his swish new Bang & Olufsen hi-fi. ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club’ band first came to my attention being covered by Petula Clarke on an early 70s TV special. I didn’t remember The Beatles doing a song like that! I’d missed out on the whole critical debacle that was ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, and had somehow got through 1967 without hearing either ‘I Am the Walrus’ or its double A-side ‘Hello Goodbye’. As for ‘All You Need is Love’, it might never have happened. My attentions were clearly elsewhere. 

Having started the ball rolling with A Collection of Beatles Oldies, I was ready for more. Christmas 1974 brought the albums Help! and Rubber Soul. Revolver I bought with a record token and some trepidation around my birthday in 1975 – I’d been warned that this was where the Beatles started getting ‘weird’. It was soon joined by With the Beatles (much more my kind of thing) and the Long Tall Sally EP, notable in that its four tracks were unavailable anywhere else (most Beatles EPs were still on catalogue well into the 1970s). With the addition of Sgt Pepper shortly afterwards, I now owned what I felt were the essential Beatle albums (for the record, my brother had nabbed Please Please Me and we didn’t need two copies of it in the house). In the space of a year, I’d fixed the Beatle-shaped hole in my record collection, and would spend the rest of the decade listening to their music in preference to anything else the contemporary scene had to offer.

To date, A Collection of Beatles Oldies is unique amongst the original EMI albums in never having been released on compact disc. At sixteen tracks, it was also, on release, the longest Beatles album, and the sound quality suffered somewhat from ‘groove cramming’. It contained one unique item in the form of ‘Bad Boy’, a leftover from the Help! album sessions that had previously been released in the USA but not here in Britain and would remain unavailable elsewhere until the 1988 CD compilation Past Masters. One other minor oddity concerned the song ‘From Me to You’ which had been remixed for stereo omitting John Lennon’s harmonica part; and a couple of the other tracks, originally released in mono, had been ‘electronically enhanced for stereo’ by George Martin.

These days, the album is largely superflous, all the material being available elsewhere, most notably the classic ‘red’ and ‘blue’ albums, reissued last year on CD. But I still own that original copy of Oldies... with its mid-70s black Parlophone label, and will give it a spin tonight, fifty years to the day if not the exact minute: because it’s where the Beatles story really got started for me.