He appeared in the shape of Brian Epstein, a charming, gifted salesman, who owned a record shop in Liverpool, and was, moreover, homosexual. Invited to the Cavern, he found himself entranced by the group and offered his services as their manager. ‘All right then, Brian,’ said the typically gracious Lennon. ‘Manage us.’ ‘Guitar groups, Brian,’ said one unimpressed producer. ‘They’re on their way out.’ And so it seemed. The record labels were unimpressed by the Beatles’ music, and still more by their caustic humour. Decca, the biggest corporation of all, turned them down. But there was still Parlophone, which had George Martin, a classically trained musician who was used to orchestras and the occasional novelty act. He recognized their talent and, having recently worked with the Goons, was amused by their irreverence. When, at the end of one session, he asked if there was anything they didn’t like, Harrison observed, ‘Well I don’t like your tie, for a start.’
They had to do the rounds of cover versions, of course, but then they presented Martin with a song of their own, ‘Love Me Do’. It was pronounced an ‘odd little dirge-like thing’ by Martin. When Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones first heard it, he felt ‘physical pain’, and he cannot have been alone. It was not much of a song by later standards, but it reached number seventeen in the charts and was a respectable achievement.
‘How Do You Do It?’ would, in George Martin’s words, ‘make the Beatles a household name’. But they were unimpressed – they had grown bored of performing others’ work. They had a song of their own, they said. This was ‘Please Please Me’. When they had finished, George Martin spoke over the tannoy. ‘Congratulations, gentlemen,’ he pronounced, ‘you have just made your first Number One.’ And so it proved. From its opening notes, the song is a cascade of ebullience, with the inimitable harmonies that would soon emerge as the Beatles’ trademark. Written largely by Lennon, it was sung in the ‘mid-Atlantic’ accent used by all British performers at the time. The chords, too, were American-inspired, and yet it was clearly English. The harmonica ‘riff’ which opens this rock song almost precisely replicates that most English of sounds, the peal of church bells.
The oyster had been prised open at last. ‘From Me to You’, ‘She Loves You’, and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ all went to number one. And the sound at their concerts was ‘one of incessant screaming’ from delirious fans. Having seduced the United Kingdom, they conquered the United States, and the phenomenon known as ‘Beatlemania’ was born. It has been said that the British bands of the Sixties were simply offering the Americans American music, stripped of any ugly political associations. But they were also offering the United States a version that was distinctively English, with rhythms, tunes, traditions and frustrations peculiar to England. By now any musician from Liverpool was hunted, then feted. The Mersey Sound was succeeded by Brumbeat, and the Tottenham Sound. There was hope for everyone. The Beatles were followed by the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Troggs, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals – all both singing and composing.
For those of a certain age, the history of this English music is well known. Where once it was surprising it is now familiar, but the music and lyrics seem fresh. That was their contribution, to the Sixties and beyond.
The Stones and the Beatles were friends, uneasily sometimes, but the Kinks were not friends with either. Prickly and intense, they did not make friends easily. Gerry and the Pacemakers had known the Beatles since the beginning. The Who didn’t know anyone. But the point was not friendship so much as fruitful competition.
Where the Beatles were influenced primarily by rock ’n’ roll, the Stones were a blues band, and never strayed very far from those roots. And between the Beatles and the Stones lay a tiny but crucial age gap. Lennon and McCartney had both been ‘Teds’, while Jagger and Richards were part of a new breed peculiar to the Sixties, the ‘Mods’.
The term itself derives from ‘modernist’; unlike the Teds, the Mods saw themselves as the heirs to the American ‘beatniks’. They were, in short, of the middle class. Not that they advertised the fact. Rather, they followed the trend established in the previous decade for aping the manners and mannerisms of the street. They wore their hair long, in imitation of bygone Chelsea artists. The accent, however, was all their own, comprising a nasal drawl – in this respect, Mick Jagger was the exemplar. In the words of one radio journalist, his cadences were imitated ‘by almost every middle-class public schoolboy in the land’.
In respect of violence, however, the Mods stood proudly in the Teddy boy tradition. Sentencing a Mod, George Simpson JP offered a denunciation worthy of Cromwelclass="underline" ‘These long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums … came to Margate with the avowed intent of interfering with the life and property of its inhabitants.’
The Stones had been in no real sense ‘rivals’ to the Beatles. Under the leadership of Brian Jones, they were undoubtedly talented and distinctive, but they were also derivative, and seemed content to rework the forgotten classics of the Mississippi Delta. Their new manager Andrew Loog Oldham had other plans for them. They must become the ‘anti-Beatles’. ‘The Beatles want to hold your hand; the Stones want to burn your town!’ and ‘Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?’ were among the slogans he coined. Above all, he had plans for Mick Jagger. It was the frontman, not the leader, who caught his attention. Brian Jones would or could not write songs in the new style, which he despised as chintzy and commercial. Loog Oldham saw that his protégés would disappear if they didn’t follow the Beatles in songwriting. By the mid-Sixties, most of the major bands were writing their own material – there was simply no choice. The Beatles had not only opened the gate for others, but inadvertently chivvied them through. Neither Jagger nor Richards was an instinctive or natural songwriter. But with ‘Satisfaction’ this was to change. It had its origins, so legend has it, in a dream. The opening guitar instrumental, or ‘lick’, is ominous, funereal, even threatening. In its harsh rise and fall it seems to growl that ‘I’ll be waiting for you!’
40
This sporting life
It is most unlikely that Harold Wilson sympathized with this new musical aesthetic, for all his extolling of youth. But he felt some allegiance to his fellow northerners. This led him to propose that the Beatles be awarded MBEs for services to export. The queen approved, and in 1965 John, Paul, George and Ringo received their small gold crosses. Of Her Majesty herself, they said: ‘She was great, just like a mum to us.’ One disgruntled old soldier sent back his own MBE, protesting that the honour had been awarded to ‘vulgar nincompoops’. And even those who were more sympathetic must have agreed with Geoffrey Moorhouse: ‘One day it will all be over,’ he wrote. ‘We shall have worn out our records of “She Loves You”’.