The Beatles And A Mass of Humanity

The Beatles were a pop/rock group and were and are a phenomenon that has been a major part of my life and my psyche for over 30 years, ever since the day in about 1988 when a boy in his early teens brought up on mainly commercial 1980s music suddenly encountered music that was largely new to his ears but which had been created 25 years previously. The music I'd known up to that point mainly featured the 'self-conscious synths' of the New Romantics and the 4-minute single created by gifted songwriters but with an overemphasis on production and electronic technology. Through the compilation 'A Collection of Beatles Oldies... But Goldies', which spanned the singles and most famous album tracks from 1963 to 1966, I marvelled first at the 2-minute immediacy of 'She Loves You' and 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' from '63, so direct, exciting and driven by guitar and voices that were young, raw and uninhibited with the power and energy to immediately excite the ears and lift the spirit. From there came the still catchy but more world-weary 'Ticket To Ride' from '65 and then the next sensation of 'Eleanor Rigby' from '66, 3 years on from 'She Loves You' but a quantum leap in terms of progress. Rather than go through the incredible Beatles story and try to make it my own, I'm instead going to just jump to one small but significant aspect that perhaps typifies both their appeal and what we are all striving for. In around 2010, I watched some video clips of Beatles expert Mark Lewisohn, a veteran of many reference books and radio specials about the group, discussing a forthcoming trilogy of Beatles books called 'All These Years' that he was writing and which would eventually offer the complete story up to the split in unprecedented detail and drawing from truly obsessive full-time research. Even when I saw the length of the first one released in late 2013 (900 pages, with an 'author's cut' edition of 1700 pages!), I didn't really believe that there could be much information that a seasoned Beatles expert like me hadn't already come across. Tackling the author's cut this year, it turned out to be a 3-month odyssey of steady reading and one fantastic revelation after another, giving a much clearer sense of why the Beatles became so big. Bear in mind that this first book of the trilogy, entitled 'Tune In', only takes the story up to the end of 1962, where The Beatles are on the cusp of fame but without a hit single to their name, so the utter powerhouse that The Beatles have already become is at this point without the force of the now-legendary Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership and their incredible creations that have been with us 50 years and are probably going to last for as long as music is appreciated. What comes across clearly from 'Tune In' is that The Beatles were stars from about 1961, 2 years before anyone outside their immediate part of the world (the north-west of England) and one city in Germany had ever heard of them. After an incredible Hamburg apprenticeship which encompassed 415 stage hours in 14 weeks from August-December 1960, followed by a mind-boggling 503 hours in 92 straight evenings from April-July 1961 and would include 3 more visits of varying lengths in 1962, the basic elements of their appeal were already there, and they had a following which was intensely loyal and already showing signs of becoming obsessional. They weren't the only band to log this approximate number of hours on stage in Hamburg, but crucially they were the ones who seemed to take full advantage of the remarkable opportunity to grow that the relentless Reeperbahn slog, which began on the 20-year anniversary of the first Nazi bombs hitting Liverpool, afforded. To cut a very long story short, they learned incredible stagecraft, being able to take all the various elements of the music they loved and meld them into something hard rocking but also soulful, soaring harmonies of incredible beauty contrasting with a relentless beat and the raw brillia