Whatever they did and however it went wrong, the Beatles were always on top of things musically, and perhaps it is this, paradoxically, that made their end inevitable. The loss of control that psychedelic drugs can involve, the political anger of the 1960s and its anti-authoritarian violence, the foolishness and inauthenticity of being pop stars at all, rarely violates the highly finished surface of their music. Songs like ‘Revolution’ and ‘Helter Skelter’ attempt to express unstructured or deeply felt passions, but the Beatles are too controlled to let their music fray. It never felt as though the band was going to disintegrate through sheer force of feeling, as with Hendrix, the Who or the Velvet Underground. Their ability was so extensive that all madness could be contained within a song. Even ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’ are finally engineered and controlled. The exception is ‘Revolution No.9’, which Lennon had to fight to keep on the White Album; he wanted to smash through the organisation and accomplished form of his pop music. But Lennon had to leave the Beatles to continue in that direction and it wasn’t until his first solo album that he was able to strip away the Beatle frippery for the raw feeling he was after.
At least, Lennon wanted to do this. In the 1970s, the liberation tendencies of the 1960s bifurcated into two streams — hedonism, self-aggrandisement and decay, represented by the Stones; and serious politics and self-exploration, represented by Lennon. He continued to be actively involved in the obsessions of the time, both as initiate and leader, which is what makes him the central cultural figure of the age, as Brecht was, for instance, in the 1930s and 1940s.
But to continue to develop Lennon had to leave the containment of the Beatles and move to America. He had to break up the Beatles to lead an interesting life.
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I heard a tape the other day of a John Lennon interview. What struck me, what took me back irresistibly, was realising how much I loved his voice and how inextricably bound up it was with my own growing up. It was a voice I must have heard almost every day for years, on television, radio or record. It was more exceptional then than it is now, not being the voice of the BBC or of southern England, or of a politician; it was neither emollient nor instructing, it was direct and very hip. It pleased without trying to. Lennon’s voice continues to intrigue me, and not just for nostalgic reasons, perhaps because of the range of what it says. It’s a strong but cruel and harsh voice; not one you’d want to hear putting you down. It’s naughty, vastly melancholic and knowing too, full of self-doubt, self-confidence and humour. It’s expressive, charming and sensual; there’s little concealment in it, as there is in George Harrison’s voice, for example. It is aggressive and combative but the violence in it is attractive since it seems to emerge out of a passionate involvement with the world. It’s the voice of someone who is alive in both feeling and mind; it comes from someone who has understood their own experience and knows their value.
The only other public voice I know that represents so much, that seems to have spoken relentlessly to me for years, bringing with it a whole view of life — though from the dark side — is that of Margaret Thatcher. When she made her ‘St Francis of Assisi’ speech outside 10 Downing Street after winning the 1979 General Election, I laughed aloud at the voice alone. It was impenetrable to me that anyone could have voted for a sound that was so cold, so pompous, so clearly insincere, ridiculous and generally absurd.
In this same voice, and speaking of her childhood, Thatcher once said that she felt that ‘To pursue pleasure for its own sake was wrong’.
In retrospect it isn’t surprising that the 1980s mélange of liberal economics and Thatcher’s pre-war Methodist priggishness would embody a reaction to the pleasure-seeking of the 1960s and 1970s, as if people felt ashamed, guilty and angry about having gone too far, as if they’d enjoyed themselves too much. The greatest surprise was had by the Left — the ideological left rather than the pragmatic Labour Party — which believed it had, during the 1970s, made immeasurable progress since Sgt Pepper, penetrating the media and the Labour Party, the universities and the law, fanning out and reinforcing itself in various organizations like the gay, black and women’s movements. The 1960s was a romantic period and Lennon a great romantic hero, both as poet and political icon. Few thought that what he represented would all end so quickly and easily, that the Left would simply hand over the moral advantage and their established positions in the country as if they hadn’t fought for them initially.
Thatcher’s trope against feeling was a resurrection of control, a repudiation of the sensual, of self-indulgence in any form, self-exploration and the messiness of non-productive creativity, often specifically targeted against the ‘permissive’ 1960s. Thatcher’s colleague Norman Tebbit characterised this suburban view of the Beatle period with excellent vehemence, calling it: ‘The insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of that third-rate decade, the 60s.’
The amusing thing is that Thatcher’s attempt to convert Britain to an American-style business-based society has failed. It is not something that could possibly have taken in such a complacent and divided land, especially one lacking a self-help culture. Only the immigrants in Britain have it: they have much to fight for and much to gain through being entrepreneurial. But it’s as if no one else can be bothered — they’re too mature to fall for such ideas.
Ironically, the glory, or, let us say, the substantial achievement of Britain in its ungracious decline, has been its art. There is here a tradition of culture dissent (or argument or cussedness) caused by the disaffections and resentments endemic in a class-bound society, which fed the best fiction of the 1960s, the theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, and the cinema of the early 1980s. But principally and more prolifically, reaching a worldwide audience and being innovative and challenging, there is the production of pop music — the richest cultural form of post-war Britain. Ryszard Kapuscinski in Shah of Shahs quotes a Tehran carpet salesman: ‘What have we given the world? We have given poetry, the miniature, and carpets. As you can see, these are all useless things from the productive viewpoint. But it is through such things that we have expressed our true selves.’
The Beatles are the godhead of British pop, the hallmark of excellence in song-writing and, as importantly, in the interweaving of music and life. They set the agenda for what was possible in pop music after them. And Lennon, especially, in refusing to be a career pop star and dissociating himself from the politics of his time, saw, in the 1970s, pop becoming explicitly involved in social issues. In 1976 Eric Clapton interrupted a concert he was giving in Birmingham to make a speech in support of Enoch Powell. The incident led to the setting up of Rock Against Racism. Using pop music as an instrument of solidarity, as resistance and propaganda, it was an effective movement against the National Front at a time when official politics — the Labour Party — were incapable of taking direct action around immediate street issues. And punk too, of course, emerged partly out of the unemployment, enervation and directionlessness of the mid-1970s.
During the 1980s, Thatcherism discredited such disinterested and unprofitable professions as teaching, and yet failed, as I’ve said, to implant a forging culture of self-help. Today, as then, few British people believe that nothing will be denied them if only they work hard enough, as many Americans, for instance, appear to believe. Most British know for a fact that, whatever they do, they can’t crash through the constraints of the class system and all the prejudices and instincts for exclusion that it contains. But pop music is the one area in which this belief in mobility, reward and opportunity does exist.