"Rock
and Roll Music"
(EMI/Capitol, June 7th 1976)
Twist and
Shout/I Saw Her Standing There/You Can't Do That/I Wanna Be Your Man/I Call
Your Name/Boys/Long Tall Sally//Rock and Roll Music/Slow Down/Kansas City-Hey!
Hey! Hey! Hey!/Money (That's What I Want)/Bad Boy/Matchbox/Roll Over
Beethoven//Dizzy Miss Lizzy/Anytime At All/Drive My Car/Everybody's Trying To
Be My Baby/The Night Before/I'm Down!/Revolution//Back In The USSR/Helter
Skelter/Taxman/Got To Get You Into My Life/Hey Bulldog/Birthday/Get Back
"I told you before - oh, you can't do
that!"
How do you re-market the work of the most famous
band on the planet to a new generation without letting them down or making them
look stupid? In 1976 The Beatles were big again, thanks to Wings'
record-pulling world tour (perhaps why there are so many of Paul's vocals here)
and the 'red' and 'blue' sets proved there were a market for younger brothers
and sisters who'd just missed out on the band the first time around. Also in
fashion were hard rock, heavy metal and punk so what better time to revive the
harder edged Beatles sound? Well, to be honest, we'll never know how you
re-market a best-selling band because EMI/Capitol (delete according to which
side of the Atlantic you come from) never ever got it right in all their many
attempts to cash-in on The Beatles' name. After a career of being known as the
brand that gave fans value for money, The Beatles found their catalogue
cheapened in the worst possible way after their split.
Take the
packaging of this record for instance: a drawing of The Beatles so poor that
you wonder whether the illustrator used a picture of the band from their really
young days (Ringo looks awfully like a be-quiffed Pete Best).What's more The
Beatles are standing in front of a [pre-dominantly 1950s background: to be fair
the 1950s were big in fashion then but, honestly - the Beatles were chiefly
responsible for moving the 1960s away from that decade! (It gets worse inside:
images of Marilyn Monroe, coke bottles, a cheeseburger and a 1957 Chevrolet -
at least these things made sense when Capitol tried a similar thing with The
Beach Boys earlier in the decade, but by rights if Capitol wanted to go down
the same tacky route they should have had The Liver Building, a football strip
and a glass of rum and coke). Things get worse with the tacky addition of
'fingers' drawn round the outside clutching the record (I don't have my copy to
hand but if I remember rightly they aren't even in scale - whose buying these
records, a giant?!) Even Decca's 'ner
ner ner ner' Rolling Stones compilations - released as close as possible to
whatever the band were doing with new label Atlantic across the 1970s - show
more care than these sloppy records. Frustrated and angry at what was happening
to the reputation of 'his' band, Lennon even wrote to the boss of EMI promising
to compile the albums himself and draw a new cover in his cartoonish style -
bizarrely they turned him down! (His later declares angrily 'you've made us
into a Monkees reject!' and also offers to try and persuade Astrid Kirccherr to
dig out one of her old 1950s photographs).
To be fair, 'Rock and Roll Music' is one of the
better EMI attempts at re-packaging The Beatles. The idea - separating the
records into 'rockers' and later 'ballads' is the next best thing to simply
re-issuing the albums and made a change from simply offering a 'yellow' or
'green' best-of set to go with the 'red' and 'blue' ones. But some of the track
listing is deeply suspect, with some 3/4s of the record taken from the band's
first two years and very little from later in their career. Some of the choices
aren't exactly what you'd call rock either: 'I Call Your Name' is reggae-rock;
'Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby' is country-rock; 'The Night Before' is
folk-rock; 'Got To Get You Into My Life' is pure soul. There's also some
shockingly obvious omissions: Where is 'Money', perhaps the hardest edged of
all Beatles covers? Where is 'Can't Buy Me Love?' (one of the hardest-edged
Beatle singles?) Where are 'Day Tripper' 'And Your Bird Can Sing' 'Paperback
Writer' and 'Rain'? (All of which have that mid-60s harder edge that led to the
creation of the 'heavy metal' market EMI seem determined to break?) Where are
'Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me and My Monkey' 'Yer Blues' and
'Dog A Pony' from later in the band's career? Where, for goodness sake, is
'Help'?!
This album ought really to be forgotten, dead and
buried forever (it's never come out on CD, which is probably just as well!)
However it's worth a mention because for the first time George Martin returned
to the Beatles tapes and made the first ever post-split 'remixes' - generally
speaking converting the earlier mono tracks to stereo, which Martin did by
moving the vocals forward and into the middle and adding a lot of echo. He was
under a lot of time pressure and did a more rushed job that we're used to
hearing - the opening notes of 'Dear Prudence' can be heard after 'Back In The
USSR' for instance and the 'Yer Blues' count in after 'Birthday'. Amazingly
this unpopular, unloved, compilation of re-treads got to #2 on the American
charts and might well have made #1 had Wings not released their 'At The Speed
Of Sound' album the same week.
Luckily the album was soon deleted and replaced by
two 'single disc' volumes. While still poorly mixed and curiously assembled, at
least the second volume had a 'decent' cover of The Beatles in Paris in 1964
(the first volume had the old version we all know and hate). A bizarre spin-off
was the release of 'Got To Get You Into My Life' as a single for the first time
- it made it all the way to #7 in the Billboard charts, which wasn't bad for a
ten-year-old recording still widely available and not promoted by any of the
band! (Wings weren't even playing that one on stage in 1976!) Europe,
meanwhile, got 'Back In The USSR', which peaked at a lowly #19 (Wings weren't
doing that one yet either by the way!)
"Love
Songs"
(EMI/Capitol, October 21st 1977)
Yesterday/I'll
Follow The Sun/I Need You/Girl/In My Life/Words Of Love/Here There and Everywhere//Something/And
I Love Her/If I Fell/I'll Be Back/Tell Me What You See/Yes It Is//Michelle/It's
Only Love/You're Gonna Lose That Girl/Every Little Thing/For No One/She's
Leaving Home//The Long and Winding Road/This Boy/Norwegian Wood/You've Got To Hide
Your Love Away/I Will/P.S. I Love You
"How I long for Yesterday!"
Here, inevitably, is Capitol compilation part two,
1970s style: we've had the rockers so here are the 'love songs'. However the
same problems as with the last set apply here: songs like 'Girl' 'For No One'
and 'Norwegian Wood' are the very antipathy of 'love songs' (by contrast about
being out-smarted in an unequal relationship, being trapped in a cold loveless
marriage and using arson as revenge for being stood up during an affair!), while
'The Long and Winding Road' and 'She's Leaving Home' aren't even about love!
(Well, only parental love in the latter case). Some albums are better catered
for than others (almost half of 'Help!' is here for instance set against just
one apiece from 'Abbey Road' and from the 30-track 'White Album'). It's as if
someone at Capitol thought, 'gee, these are all love songs aren't they, I'll
just select a few at random!' Oh and in case you think that there aren't enough
love songs it might be worth adding a few more they could have used: 'Please
Please Me' 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' 'I Feel Fine' 'If I Needed Someone' 'The
Word' - what's going on?! I'm half surprised 'Yellow Submarine' 'Octopuses
Garden' and 'Revolution #9' aren't here as well! At just an hour this is also
incredibly stingy for a double album
All that said, at least Capitol (roughly) got the
packaging right this time. The album cover is luxurious looking leather, as
befits The Beatles (although CSNY got there first with 'Deja Vu' in 1970...),
with a nice rarely seen Richard Avedon drawing from 1968 on the front in
fake-gold lettering (actually re-designed from the original illustration where
Ringo was in front and Paul smaller, nearer the back: Capitol changed all this
and re-edited the photo to capitalise on Wings' continued success, meaning poor
Ringo got even shorter!) The inside packaging is superb: lyrics to every song
printed on parchment paper (apart from 'Sgt Peppers' no Beatles LP had lyrics
printed, so this was a big deal back in the days before 'The Beatles Songbook'
and 'The Beatles' Illustrated Lyrics' came out. Early editions also came on a
limited edition yellow vinyl (surely red/blue or white would have been more
apt? There isn't even a drawing of a submarine to go with it!) Perhaps hurt by
the 'Rock and Roll' album Americans only bought enough copies of this album to
make #24 in the charts, but a big following in Britain loyally saw this album
rise all the way to #7.
"Rarities"
(EMI/Capitol, December 2nd 1978)
Across The
Universe (WWF Mix)/Yes It Is/This Boy/The Inner Light/I'll Get You/Thank You
Girl/Komm Gib Mer Deine Hand/You KNow My Name (Look Up The Number)/Sie Liebt
Dich//Rain/She's A Woman/Matchbox/I Call Your Name/Bad Boy/Slow Down/I'm
Down/Long Tall Sally
"It's my pride, yes it is, yes it is oh yes it
is, yeah!"
In 1978 a monumental event happened: after years of
becoming increasingly rare every single Beatles album was released on LP
(except for 'Magical Mystery Tour', which back then wasn't considered an LP in
Europe). Re-issued in a handsome big blue box containing mock-up signatures of
all four Beatles, it marks the first 'real' re-issue bonanza under the Beatles'
name. 'Rarities' was the album meant to go with the set, a kind of prototype
for the later 'Past Masters' sets that gathered together everything that hadn't
appeared on album or the best-selling 'red' and 'blue' sets (which basically
means a load of B sides and the 'Long Tall Sally' EP). At first available only
with the box set, 'Rarities' was eventually released on its own in 1979.
The title has, of course, confused more than a few
people who see it in Beatles discographies and think they're onto something
really good: an early version of 'Anthology' or a remix album a la 'Love'.
Instead the rarest things this record contains are the two German language
recordings (which were rare in Britain in 1978), 'Bad Boy' (a 1964 song first
issued in Britain on the 'Oldies but Goldies' compilation in 1966) and the
World Wildlife Fund mix of 'Across The Universe' from 1960. Much loved at the
time, this set has been null and void ever since 'Past Masters' re-issued every
single song on this set and doesn't even feature any packaging to write home
about, being a plain blue 'replica' of the box set packaging with the song
titles embossed in gold and no pictures of the band or sleevenotes. Ironically,
many people chucked their copy when the 'Past Masters' set came out and
understandably this set never did come out on CD, meaning that after all these
years 'Rarities' is finally living up to its name!
Incidentally, Capitol compiled their own, different
LP entitled 'Rarities' including songs that for whatever reason weren't widely
available in America (some because they were only out on Vee-Jay and sold less
than others). This disc contains the following track listing: Love Me Do/Misery
/There's A Place/Sie Leibt Dich/And I Love Her/Help!/I'm Only Sleeping/I Am The
Walrus//Penny Lane/Helter Skelter/Don't Pass Me By/The Inner Light/Across The
Universe/You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) and it ended with the 'inner
groove' dog whistle/nonsense from 'Sgt
Peppers', deleted from most American copies of the album! The most interesting
thing about this set, though, is the gatefold sleeve which - for the first
time since 1966 - reproduced the notorious 'Butcher's Sleeve' for 'Yesterday
and Today'!
"The
Beatles' Ballads"
(EMI/Capitol, October 14th 1980)
Yesterday/Norwegian
Wood/Do You Want To Know A Secret?/For No One/Michelle/Nowhere Man/You've Got
To Hide Your Love Away/Across The Universe (WWF Mix)/All My Loving/Hey
Jude//Something/The Fool On The Hill/Til' There Was You/The LOng and Winding
Road/Here Comes The Sun/Blackbird/And I Love Her/She's Leaving Home/Here There
and Everywhere/Let It Be
"What did we do that was wrong? We didn't know
it was wrong..."
Another day, another dollar for EMI. We've had the
rock songs and the love songs. Thankfully stopping at the next logical step
('avant garde songs' or 'music hall songs', although a 'folk-rock' songs set
would have been nice), EMI recycles themselves with no less than seven songs
repeated from the 'Love Songs' set. The biggest change is that this set runs
for a full 48 seconds longer - despite being a single disc rather than a
double! Value for money I suppose, although there were a few complaints over the
sound quality (the reason records last at most 40 minutes is because vinyl
tends to lose sound quality after 20 minutes a side).
The packaging is best described as...weird. A dwarf
John, Paul, George and Ringo sit in a forest surrounded by various cats and
rabbits. The whole band look cross, apart from Paul who looks deeply depressed,
which is about as far away from their 'normal' image as you can come (well
except George perhaps, but then again he's the happiest of the four here!)
Drawn by John Byrne and sampled from the equally bizarre 'Illustrated Book Of
Lyrics' from the late 1970s, legend has it this cover was prepared ready for
'The White Album' back when it was still called 'A Doll's House' (although if
that's true then it's a deeply unsettling vision of a dolls house - I've never
kept my pets in one). At the time of release this set actually did really badly
_ perhaps sensing they were on to a bad thing EMI didn't do much publicity for
it and 1980 was a quiet year for The Beatles without any touring from any of
them. However the album rose as high as #17 in the UK charts following Lennon's
death three months later, making this the last 'official' Beatles product when
all four of them were still alive. He deserved better - a lot lot better.
"Reel
Music"
(EMI/Capitol, March 22nd 1982)
A Hard Day's
Night/I Should Have Known Better/Can't Buy Me Love/And I Love Her/Help!/You've
Got To Hide Your Love Away/Ticket To Ride/Magical Mystery Tour//I Am The
Walrus/Yellow Submarine/All You Need Is Love/Let It Be/Get Back/The Long and
Winding Road
"They're gonna put me in the movies, they're
gonna make a big star out of me!"
My personal favourite of all of EMI's increasingly
desperate Beatle compilations, 'Reel Music' might have a daft idea at its core
(Beatles music as featured on film and tv special soundtracks)but the packaging
is done with far more care and attention than anything else with the band's
name on it since the split and the front cover ('A Hard Day's Night' era
Beatles queuing for cinema tickets while 'MM Tour's 'Walrus' gets out of a car
and tried to avoid contact with the 'semaphoring' Help! Beatles blocking his
path) is fantastic. (The back cover continues the theme in the car park round
the back, where the Pepperland Beatles try to prevent a 'glove' knocking the
'Let It Be' Beatles off a smaller version of their 'rooftop' while a 'Help!'
and a 'Yellow Submarine' Ringo have their arms round each other! The inside sleeve
features various Beatles actually inside the cinema, with AHDN Ringo and 'Let
It Be' Lennon sharing some popcorn, while a 'Help!' Paul chats to a 'MMTOur'
Magician 'George'!) The cinema is naturally, lined with all the band's film
posters, a look that's really quite good...The packaging inside is pretty great
too with lots of glorious stills from the films (not yet available on home
video remember and with bright shiny DVDs not even possible to imagine back
then - although that again does make basing an album around films no one can
see a bit daft).
The set was particularly handy for Americans of the
day, who got to hear 'true' stereo mixes of four songs for the first time
(three from 'A Hard Day's Night' plus 'Walrus'). The running time also manages
to find the space to include not only seven #1 UK hit singles (count 'em) but
also some more obscure pieces from the band's glorious back catalogue,
seemingly plucked with care (or was EMI's randometer simply working better than
normal that year?): gems like 'I Should Have Known Better' and 'You've Got To
Hide Your Love Away' that often get neglected next to their more famous
bedfellows. Poor 'MM Tour' and 'Yellow Submarine' are rather hard done by,
though, with just two songs each rather than three or four like the others...Ah
well, as compilations go this one isn't bad and even features a very Beatley
pun in the titleadly this record has never been re-issued and while an ok
seller (it charted at #19 in the US) didn't do as well as the others: EMI will
get sensible from hereon-in but first they get really really desperate... ! A
single, 'The Beatles Movie Medley', was also released as promotion for the
album, the first time any of the band's old music had been re-issued in new
form. It won't be the last...
"20
Greatest Hits"
(EMI/Capitol, October 11th 1982)
Love Me
Do/From Me To You/She Loves You/I Want To Hold Your Hand/Can't Buy Me Love/A
Hard Day's Night/I Feel Fine/Ticket To Ride/Help!/Day Tripper/We Can Work It
Out//Paperback Writer/Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby/All You Need Is
Love/Hello, Goodbye/Lady Madonna/Hey Jude/Get Back/The Ballad Of John and Yoko
(note: the US
version substitutes 'Eight Days A Week' 'Yesterday' 'Penny Lane' 'Come
Together' 'The Long and Winding Road' and 'Let It Be' for 'From Me To You' 'Day
Tripper' 'Yellow Submarine' 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'The Ballad Of John and Yoko')
"Day tripper, Sunday driver, yeah!"
At last the sensible option: Effectively a '20
Golden Greats' best-of to cash in on the recent successful albums for
labelmates The Hollies and The Beach Boys (basically anyone else on Capitol or
EMI which the American label co-own). The trouble is - The Beatles had so many
hits where do you draw the line? And unlike The Hollies (who stopped having
hits halfway into their career) or The Beach Boys (who switched record labels
in 1969) EMI have access to everything. Their solution? Release two very
different records for two not that different markets, a 'British' set with the
emphasis on the early years and every single with the exception of 'Something'
'Let It Be' and 'The Long and Winding Road' (making for a record that starts
with the innocence of 'Love Me Do' and ending with the archness of 'The Ballad
Of John and Yoko'). The American version cuts out a lot of the middle period
and that last song in favour of some American-only 1960s singles: 'Eight Days A
Week' and 'Yesterday'. 'Strawberry Fields' is conspicuous by its absence from
both versions. 'Hey Jude' meanwhile, gets a haircut from seven minutes to five
on the US version (though not the British one). Neither version really gives an
overview to what the Beatles were all about (their greatest claim to brilliance
was their consistency over several years), but if a one-stop shop is all you
need then this is (nearly) as good as any (or at least it was at the time till
'1' came out). Lacking the length and the 'one size fits all' majesty of the
later compilation '1', this record is badly packaged (plain white sleeves had
been done - ever heard of 'The White Album'?!) and done without much care. The
music still sounds good, though, obviously and putting all the hits out on one
disc for the first time since 'Oldies But Goldies' a shocking 16 years earlier
actually makes more sense than any of the past four EMI compilations.
"Past
Masters Volume One"
(Parlophone, March 1988)
Love Me
Do/From Me To You/Thank You Girl/She Loves You/I'll Get You/I Want To Hold Your
Hand/This Boy/Komm Gib Mer Deine Hand/Sie Libt Dich/Long Tall Sally/I Call Your
Name/Slow Down/Matchbox/I Feel Fine/She's A Woman/Bad Boy/Yes It Is/I'm Down!
"Remember what I said tonight..."
With all The Beatles albums out on CD for the first
time in the late 1980s, EMI were hit with a quandary: what to do with all the
songs that hadn't come out on album? They could have added them as 'bonus
tracks' to each record but instead they did the sensible thing and released
them as a two-disc set containing every single Beatle release up to that point
not available elsewhere. A boon for collectors, this meant that the two
German-language songs could now be heard for the first time ever in Britain
(unless you had a friend in Germany or America or were willing to pay import
costs) and relative rarities like the 'Oldies but Goldies' compilation orphan
'Bad Boy' and the four-track Long Tall Sally' EP finally got a proper place in
the canon. Some fans moaned at the lack of rare mixes (there are many different
versions of many different songs spread across many different countries) but
'Past Masters' very cleverly straddles the need to appeal to fans and casual
newcomers. In all three number one hit singles are on this album - how many
other compilations of 42 minutes can say that without recycling songs available
on album?
The packaging is slightly less successful. While Mark
Lewisohn did a great job at coming up with the name (a very Beatley pun on the
fact that 'masters' are reels of tapes held in a recording studio that in this
case are from the 'past' and also comparing the band to 'past master'
painters), the track listing and some excellent informative sleevenotes that -
arguably for the first time - treated The Beatles as a historical artefact to
be savoured rather than recent cultural history to make a fast buck from.
However it's a shame that the albums come in such boring covers, with plain
text on a black background(in this case) or white (in the next case)- a poor
man's 'red' and 'blue' idea which also sails uncomfortably close to 'White
Album' territory. This is a colourful band but most of the compilations never
really seem to reflect this. 'Past Masters' was re-issued as a two-disc set for
the first time in 2009, when all the albums were re-mastered and re-released,
with different sleevenotes by Kevin Howlett, new photographs and with just the
black cover on the front.
"Past
Masters Volume Two"
(Parlophone, March 1988)
Day
Tripper/We Can Work It Out/Paperback Writer/Rain/Lady Madonna/The Inner
Light/Hey Jude/Revolution/Get Back (Single Version)/Don't Let Me Down/The
Ballad Of John And Yoko/Old Brown Shoe/Across The Universe (WWF Charity
Mix)/Let It Be/You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)
"Without going out of your door you can know
all things in Heaven...just plug in some headphones!"
More of the same, covering The Beatles;' peak years
of late 1965 through to 1968 and featuring no less than six UK hit singles. The
B-sides are still the biggest selling point for me though: 'Rain' and 'The
Inner Light' in particular are among two of the greatest Beatles songs that
only fans know and any other band would have released them as 'A' sides. This
time around there aren't quite so many rarities however, with the only oddity
the 'World Wildlife Fund' mix of 'Across The Universe' which appeared in December
1969, four months before the release of the album mix on 'Let It Be'. In truth
it's not all that different or all that good, but it makes sense that it's
here. The set ends strangely, though, with 'You Know My Name', the band's last
ever B-side, a psychedelic joke that sounds out of place after the keening hymn
of 'Let It Be' (perhaps EMI should have switched the two songs around?) Still, that's what 'skip' and 'programme'
buttons on your CD player are for and - as with the first set - it was the release
at last of a full Beatles collection on CD that made many collectors take the
plunge for the first time, with 'Past Masters' the first stopping point for
many. Our love affair with the compact disc has come and gone over the years
(replaced by DAT, mini-disc and mp3 players - temporarily in some cases) but
our love affair with The Beatles grows and grows. Even more than 'Volume One'
'Past Masters' is a good clue why, giving you a rounded picture of the band
that mixes well loved songs with some that people might not know and as such is
more rounded than the 'res' and 'blue' sets or indeed the 'one' best-of.
"Anthology
One"
(Apple, November 1995)
CD 1: Free As
A Bird/We Were Four Guys...*/That'll Be The Day/In Spite Of All The
Danger/Sometimes I'd Borrow...*/Hallelujah I Love Her So/You'll Be
Mine/Cayenne/First Of All...*/My Bonnie/Ain't She Sweet?/Cry For A Shadow/Brian
Was A Beautiful Guy...*/I Secured Them...*/Searchin'/Three Cool Cats/The Sheikh
Of Araby/Like Dreamers Do/Hello Little Girl/Well The Recording Test...*/Besame
Mucho/Love Me Do (First Version)/How Do You Do It?/Please Please Me (First
Version)/One After 909(Tracking Session and Completed Version)/Lend Me Your
Comb (BBC)/I'll Get You (London Palladium)/We Were Performers...*/I Saw Her
Standing There (Live, Stockholm)/From Me To You (Live, Stockholm)/Money (That's
What I Want (Live, Stockholm)/You Really Got A Hold On Me (Live,
Stockholm)/Roll Over Beethoven (Live, Stockholm)
CD
2:She Loves You (Royal Variety)/Til' There Was You (Royal Variety)/Twist and
Shout (Royal Variety)/This Boy (Morecambe and Wise Show)/I Want To Hold Your
Hand (Morecambe and Wise Show)/Boys, What I Was Thinking...*/Moonlight Bay
(Morecambe and Wise)/Can't Buy Me Love (First Version) Recordings 1964: Can't
Buy Me Love (First Version)/All My Loving (Ed Sullivan)/You Can't Do That
(First Version)/ And I Love Her (First Version)/A Hard Day's Night (First
Version)/I Wanna Be Your Man ('Around The Beatles')/Long Tall Sally ('Around
The Beatles')/Boys ('Around The Beatles')/Shout ('Around The Beatles')/I'll Be
Back (First Version)/You'll Know What To Do/No Reply (Demo)/Mr Moonlight (First
Version)/Leave My Kitten Alone/No Reply (Early Version)/Eight Days A Week (Outtakes
and First Version)/Kansas City-Hey! Hey! Hey!Hey! (Second Version) * = spoken word
"Now
for Paul McCartney of Liverpool (and his three friends) Opportunity
Knocks!"
Always the Beatle keenest to resurrect the past,
McCartney had been trying to come up with a 'Beatles history' ever since 1972
(when it was titled 'The Long and Winding Road'). Wings, marriage, babies and
the indifference of the other three meant that he didn't get his wish until
1995 when for various reasons (Most of them financial) George, Ringo and EMI
were all willing to go back to the idea. The first of three double-disc
Anthology albums duly came out in November 1995 - thirty years to the month
since 'Rubber Soul' - closely followed by an eight part TV series and - much
later - a big fat book. Critics and fans alike generally agree that the CDs are
the most effective part of the 'Anthology' series: there was something inside
that even old timers who owned every Beatles bootleg had never heard, while new
fans born after the 1960s could enjoy being caught up in a little bit of their
own reflected 'Beatlemania'. In truth, none of us would have missed the best of
the albums (which on this set include the band's first single as The Quarrymen,
unheard except in brief clips, since 1957, the one-off TV recording of 'Shout!'
- an Isley Brothers sequel to 'Twist and Shout' - and the storming 'Leave My
Kitten Alone', a candidate for one of the greatest Beatles covers ever, which
would have livened up 'Beatles For Sale' no end) for the world, even at the
hefty price EMI were asking. All the recordings were spit and polished and in
incredible quality for outtakes (in fact, embarrassingly, The Beatles' outtakes
were the best-sounding part of their catalogue right up to the 'mono' and
'stereo' sets in 2009!) Worries about Lennon's absence were covered on both
record and TV soundtrack with copious interviews and if anything John got an
even bigger share of the sets than the other three.
However, there are many things 'Anthology' got
wrong. The sets are either way too long for newcomers (the single 'Sessions'
set intended for release in the 1980s would have been more than enough) and not
enough for big fans (who would have preferred a set more like the 'Bootlegs 1963'
one). The use of chat in between the songs (sensibly dropped for volumes two
and three) badly spoils the flow (these could have been edited together as a
'bonus' at the end if they wanted people to 'follow' the story that well -
although that's what the tie-in series was meant to be doing). There are too
many boring TV appearances simply lifted from the soundtracks (e.g. The Eric
Morecambe and Ernie Wise show appearance is fun to have and deserves it's place
in the series, but does the comedy version of 'Moonlight Bay' really deserve a
place in between studio outtakes of key songs 'Please Please Me' and 'Can't Buy
Me Love'? Ditto the Royal Variety Show, where on audio the band sound really
nervous). Surely the rest of the Decca audition tapes or a bit of the Star Club
tapes professionally cleaned would have been a better bet? While less
noticeable in this first volume, the 'Anthology' sets also had a way of
bastardising recordings, sticking edits from two, three...sometimes six or
seven takes together to come up with something The Beatles never intended or
created. The set also tries hard to run the songs in chronological order - but
their own recording dates often give away how much they're out (they don't turn
up till volume three, but the three demos George recorded on his 27th birthday
should be together, not scattered up to five songs apart). The sad truth, too,
is that a lot of these outtakes just aren't that interesting (although they do
get better on later volumes), while a lot of the recordings still unavailable
except on bootleg are much more interesting (where is Paul's 1960 demo for his
1964 track 'I'll Follow The Sun'? The live version of 'Some Other Guy' at the
Cavern Club taped for 'People and Places'? John's demo of 'Bad To Me'? The
seven minute jam on 'She's A Woman'? A glorious outtake of 'I'm A Loser'? Or
best of all, John Lennon and the Quarrymen playing at Woolton Village Fete the
day Paul met him?) There's also the jarring fact that we begin, not in 1957,
but in 1995 and 'Free As A Bird' - fair enough that it had to be here for extra
publicity but why not stick it on the end as a 'bonus' track?
The packaging too isn't quite what it should be:
you can tell where Klaus Voormann was going with his cover: faded Beatle
posters stuck one on the other as if flying back in time. But in practice it
makes The Beatles look cheap and shabby right at the point when they had never
sounded so bright and shiny in their careers. There are, at least, some rather
good sleevenotes but even these could be longer and more thorough given all the
hoo-hah about this being the 'definitive' word on the band: any newcomers to
the group must have been badly lost as names like 'Stuart Sutcliffe' and 'Brian
Epstein' are banded round without explanation. This first volume also created
great controversy when the main cover image of a 'Hamburg' shot of The Beatles
has Pete Best's head ripped off and a 'Please Please Me' Ringo inserted on top!
Actually Pete Best did rather well out of this album, securing his first proper
money from The Beatles' career and his drumming on the early songs (he plays on
ten of the songs here) helped rescue his rather sabotaged reputation
(interestingly Ringo did rather well out of these sets too: while the other
three quite often 'mess up' on the outtakes the band never have to stop because
of Ringo).
The sad fact is, at those kind of prices, the
average listener came away feeling cheated - and volumes two and three didn't
quite sell as well despite offering better value for money. The word 'anthology'
doesn't actually mean a collection of or a complete guide to or a 'best of'
anything - it really means a jumble of stories or poems collected together.
That sounds about right: 'Anthology' is a jumble of leftovers never intended
for release stuck together as if they're something big and grand and ordered.
Still, for all my grumpiness, I'm still very grateful that these sets exist and
the best of them are genuinely jaw-dropping. All Beatles fans must have yearned
to have been a fly-on-the-wall as these great songs were made and the fact that
we get the chance to hear ideas that were discarded, didn't work or were simply
hammered into shape with practice is endlessly fascinating. It's just a shame
that there isn't either more or less of this, depending on how much of a
committed fan you are and that there isn't just that bit more care taken with
everything. The sad truth is a lot of bootleg compilations covered better
ground in a shorter time and for far less money. In a sad footnote 'Anthology
One' peaked at #2 in the UK albums charts behind novelty act Robson and Jerome
(the second time the band had been denied by a 'novelty act'; since the curse
of Englebert Humperdinck in 1967) - something which speaks volumes about how
much tastes had changed and how 'Anthology' fell between two stools, not quite
designed with either old fans or newbies in mind. Thankfully better is to
come...
"Anthology
Two"
(Apple, March 1996)
CD 1: Real
Love/Yes It Is! (First Version)/I'm Down! (First Version)/You've Got To Hide
Your Love Away (First Version)/If You've Got Trouble/That Means A Lot/Yesterday
(Early Version)/It's Only Love (First Version)/I Feel Fine (Live in
Blackpool)/Ticket To Ride (Live in Blackpool)/Yesterday (Live in
Blackpool)/Help! (Live in Blackpool)/Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby (Live at
Shea Stadium)/Norwegian Wood (First Version)/I'm Looking Through You (First
Version)/12 Bar Original The Void (aka Tomorrow Never Knows First Version)/Got
To Get You Into My Life (First Version)/And Your Bird Can Sing (First
Version)/Taxman (First Version)/Eleanor Rigby (Strings)/I'm Only Sleeping
(Rehearsal and First Version)/Rock and Roll Music (Live, Tokyo)/She's A Woman
(Live, Tokyo)
CD 2: Strawberry
Fields Forever (Demo and Alternate Versions)/Penny Lane (First Version)/A Day
In The Life (Alternate Version)/Good Morning Good Morning (Early Version)/Only
A Northern Song (First Version)/Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite (First Version)/Lucy
In The Sky With Diamonds (Early Version)/Within You, Without You (Strings)/Sgt
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) (First Version)/You Know My Name
(Look Up The Number) (Unedited Version)/I Am The Walrus (Basic Track)/Fool On
The Hill (Demo)/Your Mother Should Know (Early Version)/Hello Goodbye (Early
Version)/Lady Madonna (Alternate Mix)/Across The Universe ('Anthology' Version)
"You say 'goodbye' I say 'hello'!"
'Anthology Two' is more interesting than 'Anthology
One' for a variety of reasons. First the irritating chat bits have been taken
out, there are less excursions to telly and in concerts and by and large we're
in the Beatles' peak creative years here, when songs used to change
dramatically between first rehearsal and final version. As a result this set
has many priceless highlights: the
weird-but-not-quite-was-weird-as-the-final-version first take of 'Tomorrow
Never Knows, different arrangements of 'I'm Looking Through You' and 'Got To
Get You Into My Life' that sound like completely different songs, a storming
alternate take of 'I Am The Walrus' with Lennon spitting holding nothing back
and a gorgeous piano demo of 'Fool On The Hill'. For most bands these songs
would reflect the highlights of an entire career, not just the highlights of a
band's unreleased career.
And yet...while a few things have been ironed out,
'Anthology Two' still ought to have been better. Even more of these songs have
been stapled together from different edits that never actually existed, passed
off as genuine when they're actually 'fake'. We get string parts for 'Eleanor
Rigby' and 'Within You Without You' that even George Martin admitted were
'filler'. There's a whole six minutes taken up with the released take of cult
B-side 'You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)' for the sake of 45 extra
seconds. There are also four songs from 'Live At Blackpool', one from 'Shea
Stadium' and two from one of the band's final shows in Tokyo: all deserving of
release but on a 'live rarities CD', not here where they interrupt the studio
flow with their muddy sound, incessant screaming and off-key harmonies (no
wonder The Beatles were getting fed up after hearing 'Revolver' playing in
their heads). Anthology also pulls the trick once too often of giving us a song
with a guide vocal, only to snatch it away from us and fade into the finished
version we've bought several times over already (what's wrong with leaving the
second half as a backing track if the vocal stopped there?)There's also no one
great entirely unreleased track on this collection, unlike volumes one and
three: a hole that was originally meant to be filled by 'Carnival Of Light'
before George vetoed it ('If You Got Troubles' and 'That Means A Lot' are
better than people say, but they're no 'Leave My Kitten Alone'). That's a shame
because, weird as I'm sure the end product was, a lot of 'Anthology Two' seems
like a lot of dressing and padding for a suit of clothes that isn't actually
all there yet. Where, too, are other gems from this period (common on bootleg)
including the tape loops for 'Tomorrow Never Knows', a rocky 'Sgt Peppers'
before the horns were added and it was an uptempo rocker with an uncertain
ending, Lennon's basic but great demo for 'Good Morning Good Morning', an
unedited 'It's All Too Much', 'She's Leaving Home' with its original full
string accompaniment, edited in the final mix, an even more chilling 'Walrus',
yet more fantastic alternate takes of 'A Day In The Life?'
Don't get me wrong: the chance to hear the
alternate versions of some of The Beatles' greatest songs (as outlined above)
is a great privilege and the production team have clearly worked hard to clean
everything up. It's just that, as with the first volume, there is either too
much here - or not enough by half.
"Anthology
Three"
(Apple, October 1996)
CD 1: A
Beginning/Happiness Is A Warm Gun (Demo)/Helter Skelter (First Version)/Mean Mr
Mustard (Demo)/Polythene Pam (Demo)/Glass Onion (Demo and First
Version)/Junk/Piggies (Demo)/Honey Pie (Demo)/Don't Pass Me By (First
Version)/Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (First Version)/Good Night (Rehearsal)/Cry Baby Cry
(First Version)/Blackbird (First Version)/Sexy Sadie (First Version)/While My
Guitar Gently Weeps (Demo)/Hey Jude (rehearsal)/Not Guilty/Mother Nature's Son
(First Version)/Rocky Raccoon (First Version)/What's The New Mary Jane?/Step
Inside Love- Los Paranois/I'm So Tired (First Version)/I Will (First
Version)/Why Don't We Do It In The Road? (First Version)/Julie (First Version)
CD 2: I've
Got A Feeling (Early Version)/She Came In Through The Bathroom Window (Rehearsal)/Dig
A Pony (Rehearsal)/Two Of Us (Rehearsal)/For You, Blue (Rehearsal)/Teddy
Boy/Medley: Rip It Up-Shake Rattle and Roll-Blue Suede Shoes/The Long And
Winding Road (Basic Track)/Oh! Darling (Rehearsal)/All Things Must Pass/Mailman
Bring Me No More Blues/Get Back (Later Version)/Old Brown Shoe
(Demo)/Octopuses' Garden (First Version)/Maxwell's Silver Hammer (First
Version)/Something (Demo)/Come Together (Early Version)/Come And Get It/Ain't
She Sweet (Rehearsal)/Because (Vocals Mix)/Let It Be (First Version)/I Me Mine
(Unedited)/The End (Remix)
"All through the day, I Me Mine..."
By now the world was getting a little bit fed up of
'Anthology' to be honest. A full year of media blitz meant it was 'all too
much' for more than a few and the first reviews of 'Anthology Three' were the
most 'ho-hum' of the lot. History, however, has been a bit kinder to this set,
which many longterm fans now rate as the best of the three thanks to a whole
disc of White Album outtakes and the lack of any TV/live/spoken word
interruptions. In truth the first disc is better than the first and while a
good half of the 'White Album' and two-thirds of the 'Let It Be' recordings are
worth releasing, the same can't be said for the 'Abbey Road' outtakes, which
are mainly in a rather sorry state. The one much-talked about unreleased song
from these sessions, 'What's The New Mary Jane?' was seen as a major
disappointment all round after being once described as a 'six minute
distillation of 'Sgt Peppers' (a six-minute extension of that album's run-out
groove more like...) However George's rocking 'Not Guilty' bowled away all
sorts of fans who only knew the song from George's more placid solo reading in
1969, his very different demo of 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' won him many
news fans in the form of reviewers and many more plumped for Paul's rushed demo
for Badfinger 'Come and Get It' the highlight of the entire six CDs.
There's also less interfering this time around:
thanks partly to the sheer amount of 'White Album' demos (most of them lovely
although as there were 22 in all the mere five included here seemed a bit mean;
George's unreleased 'Circles' and 'Sour Milk Sea' and John's rough demo for
'Jealous Guy' - still an entirely different song titled 'Child Of Nature' and
apparently influences by Paul's 'Mother Nature's Son' - are more interesting
than anything we get here) and to the 'back to basics' spirit of 'Let It Be'
there's less messing around by Anthology producers. Interestingly there's a lot
more messing around from The Beatles themselves as they begin to grow less
afraid of wasting time and have more fun, which rather sits against what we
know about the fall-outs and bitterness across these recording sessions
(although that said Lennon's barbed comment about giggling during the solo for
'Let Ie Be' says more about the break-up than the entire two CDs). Along the
way John and Paul make up a quick song as Spanish buskers 'Los Paranoias', John
tries desperately to fit new girlfriend Yoko's name into 'Happiness Is A Warm
Gun', Paul introduces a sparkly first take of 'Hey Jude' as 'from the heart of
the black country', a lovely rehearsal take of 'Good Night', a very different
arrangement for the under-rated 'Glass Onion', there's a rocking early version
of 'I've Got A Feeling' until it breaks down at the end and funky readings of
'Old Brown Shoe' and 'Come Together' that sound all the better for being raw
and spiky, not to mention George's glorious dig at Lennon and the band during
the last official Beatles session 9which he must have known would be listened
back to for posterity). Of course we also have to sit through another
interminable 'Rocky Raccoon', a longer take on nobody's favourite Beatle song
'Why Don't We Do It In The Road?' , an even more repellent 'Maxwell's Silver
Hammer' and both of Ringo's sole compositions for no other reason than to give
the drummer a bigger share of royalties. Better still would have been the
addition of some cracking further outtakes we know still exist: the original
twenty-minute version of 'Revolution' that knocks socks off any other
incarnation of it, Paul's delightful improvisation to cheer up his
step-daughter 'Heather', a classy demo of 'Goodbye' a Macca song for Mary
Hopkin, an early soulful 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' where John duets with
Billy Preston, a terrific jokey accented
version of 'Two Of Us', a glorious sped-up gibberish version of 'Get Back',
John having a genuinely affectionate go at Paul's first song 'I Lost My Little
Girl' and the unreleased Lennon ballad 'Oh I Need You', a cross between 'I Want
You' and 'Don't Let Me Down'.
The result is, like the first two volumes, mixed
but arguably has more great rarities and alterations between songs than either
of the first two versions. Once again there's either too much or nowhere near
enough, but at least you feel like you've got closer to value for money on this
version, while the concentration on three albums and period singles as opposed
to four and five albums respectively makes this set feel like a more thorough
examination of this later period. Best of all its changed our understanding of
what that period was like, making it more three-dimensional than simply 'that
sad bit at the end when everyone hates each other' and featuring some terrific
band interplay both musically and verbally. Perhaps Anthology One and Two
should have been more like this. Perhaps, too, there'll be an 'Anthology Four'
one day that will take the best of the rest from all periods and once and for
all proves what an embarrassment of treasures there is in The Beatles'
unreleased canon.
"Yellow
Submarine Songtrack"
(Apple, September 1999)
Yellow
Submarine/Hey Bulldog/Eleanor Rigby/Love You To/All Together Now/Lucy In The
Sky With Diamonds/Think For Yourself/Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band/With
A Little Help From My Friends/Baby You're A Rich Man/Only A Nothern Song/All
You Need Is Love/When I'm 64/Nowhere Man/It's All Too Much
"Everywhere is birthday cake, so take a piece
- but not too much!"
In retrospect, this expanded re-issue of 'Yellow
Submarine' (minus George Martin's incidental music but with every song heard in
the film - however briefly, although 'A Day In The Life' and 'I Am The Walrus'
are conspicuous by their absence) seems like testing the waters for the 'Mono'
and 'Stereo' box sets. Rather sweetly called a 'Songtrack' rather than a
'soundtrack' album, it's rather redundant now without the film to go with it
and with all these songs out in improved sound on the 'mono'/stereo' re-releases
of 2009, but at the time was a well-kept secret: the best place to hear
gorgeous stereo remixes of several key Beatles songs for a good decade. This
could have been more of course: the film version of 'It's All Too Much' is
significantly longer and this would have been a nice way of releasing it
officially for the first time; ditto the a capella harmony overdub for 'Think
For Yourself' (which is how the Beatles wake up their 'Pepperland' counterparts
and was actually part of the only pre-Let It Be session taped in full, in the
hope that it would provide something useful for the band's 1965 Christmas
fanclub disc - it didn't by the way, with the band oddly self-conscious that
day). Still, before I turn into a blue meanie, this was still a good idea: a chance
to remix The Beatles and check for fans reactions before going the whole hog
(about 95% of which was positive about the results) and while not quite so
essential a purchase today still offers cheap and rather good compilation of
the band's middle years that's somehow more satisfying than the 'res' and
'blue' sets or the later 'Tomorrow Never Knows'.
"1"
(Apple, November 2000)
Love Me
Do/From Me To You/She Loves You/I Want To Hold Your Hand/Can't Buy Me Love/A
Hard Day's Night/I Feel Fine/Eight Days A Week/Ticket To
Ride/Help!/Yesterday/Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out/Paperback Writer/Yellow
Submarine/Eleanor Rigby/Penny Lane/All You Need Is Love/Hello, Goodbye/Lady
Madonna/Hey Jude/Get Back/The Ballad Of John and Yoko/Something/Come
Together/Let It Be/The Long And Winding Road
"Hold me, love me, hold me, love me!"
OK, dear readers, here's a puzzle for you. What's
the best-selling AAA album of all time, whether compilation studio live or solo
record? 'Dark Side Of The Moon'? Nearly. 'Exile On Main Street?' wrong part of
town. 'The Best Of The Beach Boys?' Close, but no striped shirt. A clue for you
all? The walrus was Paul! Yes inevitably it's a Beatles product, but which one?
Sgt Peppers? The Red and Blue sets? 'Jolly What! The Beatles and Frank Ifield
Live On Stage?!' Hardly! It is, of course, the CD compilation 'One', with 31
million copies (and counting) sold. The millennium was a good time for
re-issues, with strong entries in a good half of the AAA band's back
catalogues, but the one that took people's imaginations as a summary of all
that the 20th century had created was a minimally packaged 27-track album of
songs every serious music collector already owned several times over already.
So why was this the 'big' one? And why is it still
a relatively uncommon site in the kind of places you see other popular
best-sellers after a few years? (Charity shops are full of brain-numbing crazes
like Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' and 'The Spice Girl's Greatest Hits!) Well,
'One' finally makes good on what all those EMI and Capitol compilations had
tried to do over the years: include only the songs that everybody knows. This
time, though, they have a full 80 minute CD running time to do it. They also
have a cute peg to hang this particular compilation on (every track within this
album got to number one...only Elvis can compete in terms of quantity) but one
that's wide enough to include a couple of surprises ('...but not necessarily in
the Beatles' homeland, which is why they can get away with including American
number ones 'Love Me Do' 'Eight Days A Week' 'Yesterday' 'Penny Lane'
'Something' and 'The LOng and Winding Road'). While not having the space or the
depth of the 'red' or 'blue' compilations, this set does have the advantage of
being both shorter and cheaper, more something in the price range of the casual
music fan who thinks they ought to own it, as well as The Beatles collector who
has to have everything. Of course most of the 'casual music fans' who bought
this album fell in love with the band and bought everything anyway. Of course
you can pick holes in it: sleevenotes or photographs would have been a nice
touch, the 'number one' principle means that there's no 'Please Please Me'
(some charts had it at #2 in the UK and it barely charted in the US in 1963)
and there's nothing here you couldn't already get on either the 'red' or 'blue'
sets. No matter, it is what it is: a fairly good one disc guide to a band who were about so much more than
could ever have been fitted onto a single disc.
"Beatle
Bop- Hamburg Days"
(Bear Family, November 6th 2001)
My Bonnie
(with German intro, English intro and no intro)/The Saints/Cry For A Shadow/Why
(Can't You Love Me Again?)/Nobody's Child/Ain't She Sweet/Take Out Some
Insurance On Me Baby/Sweet Georgia Brown/Swannee River*
* Features a
non-Beatles re-creation of a Beatles arrangement
There have been several borderline-legal attempts
to release the Beatles' Tony Sheridan recordings of 1961/62 on LP after they
became famous. Several of the early ones didn't even feature The Beatles all
the way through (instead containing recordings by Sheridan's backing band under
the pseudonym The Beatles used for the recordings 'The Beat Brothers'). For the
record these are: 'The Beatles with Tony Sheridan and Guests' (MGM, 1964), 'The
Beatles Beat' (Odeon, 1964), Ain't She Sweet? (Atco, 1964), The Beatles' First
(Polydor, 1967), In The Beginning (Polydor, 1970) and The Early Tapes Of The
Beatles (Polydor, 1984). However to date the most recent compilation is 'Beatle
Bop - Hamburg Days' - the most comprehensive way to hear all The Beatles
recordings in one place but nothing else (except a sole 'Beat Brothers'
rendition of 'Swannee River' and even that is reportedly a re-creation of an
arrangement The Beatles created but never got round to recording). Anyone
curious to hear the 'Beat Brothers' recordings should look out for the 'I Saw
Her Standing There' two-disc set reviewed later on.
The music is, of course, shaky. The Beatles are
merely a backing band here and only 'Ain't She Sweet' (the album highlight)
features a Beatle lead vocal. However The Beatles are game for anything on
their first professionally released recordings and add much fire and enthusiasm
to the recordings. Sheridan is a good singer too, better than he's often given
credit for (especially on 'My Bonnie', the best thing here), although its
rather disconcerting to hear such a 1950s style grafted onto something much
more modern and 'new'. The 1962 recordings are definitely under par compared to
the 1961 ones, too, suggesting that the second time round the band were more
dispirited than the first. Still the first half of this set is essential to any
Beatles collection, showing off a band at the start of a great journey and who
already seem to have a vision much bigger than the tiny German school hall
they're playing in.
"Let
It Be...Naked"
(Apple, November 2003)
Get Back/Dig
A Pony/For You, Blue/The Long And Winding Road/Two Of Us/I've Got A Feeling/One
After 909/Don't Let Me Down!/I Me Mine/Across The Universe/Let It Be
"Get back to where you once belonged!"
'Let It Be' was always a sticking point in The
Beatles' career. The one album that wasn't signed off by each of them (Phil
Spector was invited at Lennon's invitation to do what he liked to tapes that
had by then been gathering dust for a year), it somehow fell between two
stools: Phil's terribly over-lush orchestral arrangements had made a mockery of
the original intentions of a 'back to basics' LP, while compared to the recent released
at the time 'Abbey Road' it didn't sound that polished either. McCartney,
especially, hated the final version of that LP and well he might - he took
Lennon's witty ad libs personally (especially the mock choir boy who introduces
'Let It Be', a song his colleague loathed) and resented the OTT arrangements
meted out on two of his finest ballads ('Let It Be' and 'LOng and Winding
Road'). Paul at least was always going to return to this project one day and do
things 'his' way. The strange thing about this record was the fact that this
hadn't been done earlier (say when 'Let It Be' was first re-mixed for CD in
1988) and why then, in 2003 (Beatle conspiracy theories claim that George
blocked it every time Paul tried and that after his sad death in 2001 this was
Paul's first opportunity to have a go; the publicity, however, made much out of
the fact that George had given his blessing to the rough idea).
So was it worth returning to such bad vibes in the
name of art? Well, yes and no. I've always maintained that there's a great LP
in 'Let It Be' somewhere - I actually prefer a lot more songs individually on
this album to 'Abbey Road' and McCartney, particularly, is in the last stage of
his impressive run of form that lasted from 1966-69 and which he won't find
again until 1973 onwards. The 'Let It Be...Naked' album works much better than
the original album did for several reasons: the running order works better,
there are no cul-de-sac oddities like 'Maggie Mae' and 'Dig It!', 'I've Got A
Feeling' is now an edited hybrid of the original album version and the
'Rooftop' concert (a sensational version that should be here complete!), 'Dig A
Pony' has had the odd mistake 'auto-corrected' (you wonder why they bothered
but, yes, it does make one of the most overlooked Beatle gems sound slightly
better), 'Don't Let Me Down' - senselessly left off the album because it had
already come out as the B-side of 'Get Back' - is present and correct and, as
we suspected all along, Paul's original simple versions of 'Let It Be' and 'The
Long and Winding Road' are goose-pimply perfect. If this record existed, as
many fans supposed it did, simply to prove the bassist 'right' then it does so
with spades: far from being the lame dog of the Beatles' back catalogue, 'Let
It Be' now sounds like one of those 'B+' Beatle albums, able to hold its head
high amongst the likes of 'Beatles For Sale' and 'Magical Mystery Tour'. Even
like this few fans are ever going to rate it as their favourite Beatle album,
but 'Let It Be' always deserved another chance and it's rather pleasing that it
got it.
However (and I bet you knew that was coming...)
'Let It Be...Naked' could have been great, not merely very good. The first
person The Beatles turned to after the project 'crashed' was engineer Glyn
Johns (a star on various Who and Rolling Stone records in the 1970s) who
promptly put together an album entitled 'Get Back'. Much bootlegged, this
fascinating little record sounds like exactly what The Beatles envisaged: a
rough and ready bare bones little album that rocks nicely. Johns tended to go
with takes that 'felt' right rather than, as Spector did, choosing the songs
with the least mistakes in them and he left in even more chat, intriguing
little snippets of oldies and Beatle chat that are far more interesting than
what did make the record. While a few songs - notably the ballads - were the
same as the ones that made the record, many of the takes were better (well, in
my opinion and a few other Beatleologists anyway). You can see whether you
agree yourself on the 'Anthology Three'
version of 'I've Got A Feeling' (to date the only 'other' recording from this
album with an official release) where Lennon gets the words wrong and the whole
song break down but in-between the song is punchy and fired up - far more so
than on the record. 'Let It Be Naked' might have been more interesting still
had this worthy version of the album been released in its stead - even as a
'bonus disc' version. The Beatles could also have 'borrowed' someone
knowledgeable to sift through all the session tapes ('Let It Be' being the only
album that exists complete, thanks to the film cameras doubling everything) and
come up with a multi-CD box set if they'd wanted. Yes a lot of the 'Let It Be'
tapes (widely bootlegged) are blurred and boring chats about nothing with the
odd chaotic attempt to rehearse a song no one wants to play. But there's easily
a majestic four CD set that could be made from this: cracking alternate
versions of all the album songs, fascinating little titbits such as Lennon
trying to remember The Who song 'A Quick One' (played when he and director
Michael Lindsay-Hogg were at the taping of the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll
Circus a mere month before) and busking Paul's first song 'I Lost My Little
Girl on his own and an early version of 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' with Billy
Preston trading lines. There's also a whole load of chat that's crucial to The
Beatles tale: some of it happy (the band jokingly debating where they should
their 'end' concert -ideas include the Pyramids and the QE2!), some of it sad
(John, Paul and Ringo camp out at the canteen to decide whether they can carry
on without George the day he walks out - and whether Eric Clapton might be
available now Cream have folded?)
Instead the only 'bonus' collectors get is a rather
odd 22 minute compilation of 'Beatle chat'. These are given to us higgledy
piggledy, with no mention of whose speaking to whom and with the edited
sections often out of sequence (what's more they don't 'pair' with the
interview snatches printed in the booklet, most of which are more interesting
than what's included here). The CD is occasionally illuminating: John and Paul
revive two pre-Beatles song 'Because I Know You Love Me So' and 'Fancy me
Chances With You', neither of which is up to 'One After 909' but would have
made a fine double A side for Peter and Gordon. Talking of which, John's
caustic reply to Paul that after seven years he 'finally' understands '909's
lyrics and the fact that the boy is at the wrong platform to greet his girl
('It's the word location....it rhymes with station!') is worth the price of the
disc alone. However you need a diploma in 'Let It Be' to understand every
reference here (there's even a few I don't get!)and a lot of what's here is
either confusing or ordinary (Ringo's second ever song 'Carolina', isn't even
up to 'Don't Pass Me By'!) What might have been better would have been a
'straight' re-issue of the original album packaging (as well as the original
album, a 'deluxe' edition of the record came in a box set with a rare book of
photos and quotes that was so cheaply made
- blame Allen Klein again - it soon fell apart and is now very rare!)
Ultimately, then, 'Let It Be...Naked' (and don't get me started on that awful
name - what's wrong with 'Let It Be Unplugged'?) is a lost opportunity. Unlike
a lot of reviewers of the time I do like it, I do prefer it to the 'finished'
version and I'm glad that Paul (with Ringo's backing) tried to put this album
right rather than simply 'Let It Be' (although this version of the album is
conspicuous by its absence from the 2009 box sets). But I say let's have
another go and let 'Let It Be' be the beautiful album it always should have
been, one that really does show The Beatles with their 'trousers down' and yet
ends up making them looking better, cleverer and tighter than even this new
improved version does.
"Love"
(Apple, November 20th 2006)
Because/Get
Back/Glass Onion/Eleanor Rigby-Julia/I Am The Walrus/I Want To Hold Your
Hand/Drive My Car-What's That You're Doing?-The Word/Gnik Nus ('Sun King'
backwards)/ Something-Blue Jay Way-Nowhere Man/Being For The Benefit Of Mr
Kite-I Want You (She's So Heavy)-Helter Skelter/Help!
/Blackbird-Yesterday/Strawberry Fields Forever-Hello Goodbye/Within You,
Without You-Tomorrow Never Knows/Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds/Octopuses'
Garden-Yellow Submarine-Sun King/Lady Madonna/Here Comes The Sun-The Inner
Light/Come Together-Dear Prudence-Cry Baby Cry/Revolution/Back In The
USSR/While My Guitar Gently Weeps/A Day In The Life/Hey Jude/Sgt Pepper's
Lonely Heart's Club Band (Reprise)/All You Need Is Love
"'Love' isn't all you need - it's just like
looking through a glass onion while EMI make your mother buy, though she's old
enough to know better...I'm crying!" Or "What's that you're
doing?...Help!"
Well, I honestly didn't see this coming. Never in
their darkest, most desperate moments in the 1970s did EMI sink so low as to
mess around with history and even in 1982 'The Beatle Movie Medley' is the
equivalent of giving the statue of David a new lick of paint to keep him fresh.
'Love' is like tipping a barrel of paint over him, sticking on a psychedelic
jumper and feeding him LSD-;laced cocktails. 'Love', you see, is not so much a
'remixed' Beatles album as a 'remashed' Beatles albums, with George Martin and
his son Giles lots of bits and pieces from lots of different periods having
nothing more in common than (occasionally) tempo or key crammed together to
create a new artificial monster that was never meant to be. The result is an
album that scares off youngsters who see their grandparents messing around with
technology that should be 'theirs' and confusing elder generations who simply
want to be able to hear their favourite albums in sound as good as modern
records. Apparently created for a 'new' backdrop for a terrifyingly dull
'cirque de soleil' routine based on The Beatles (I haven't seen it, but after
sitting through the documentary in the project I truly don't want to - never
thought I'd say that about an official Beatles product!), it was the last
official product that George gave his 'blessing' too. I can almost hear him
laughing from here, as Paul and Ringo try to keep a straight face about how
this album is 'different way of listening to The Beatles' (yeah, so is
listening to all the records underwater but I don't fancy that much either).
It's all very clever. It's all very fun if you know
your Beatles enough to work out which bits came from where. And occasionally
it's quite good (The 'Octopuses Garden' merged with bits from 'Yellow
Submarine' and 'Goodnight' is actually better than the original!) But The
Beatles are the greatest cultural legacy of the 1960s and playing 'Where's
Wally' with different bits of their back catalogue just seems like vandalism.
The point a lot of fans miss in their excitement at racing through the album is
that some of this album still hangs together really really badly: who in their
right mind thinks that stapling the first half of 'Drive My Car' to the second
half of 'What You're Doing' with the sax riff from 'Lady Madonna', the guitar
solo from 'Taxman' and God knows what from 'The Word' to mask the gaps in any
ways improves on the original? And why, for God's sakes why, is there an entire
minute of 'Sun King' played backwards for no apparent reason (if you want to do
that to a song, do it to 'Rain' - the track Lennon originally intended to be
completely backwards!) Oh and minus several hundred marks for taking the
beautiful understated of 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' from 'Anthology Three'
- and then plastering it with such yucky syrupy strings. I'm surprised George's
ghost (or his re-incarnation) didn't return to wipe the master tapes then and
there. Incidentally this idea isn;t even that original - a site called 'The Beat
Goes On' had fans doing this kind of stuff for years and almost all of it was
done better on no budget, just out of love (there's a particularly good 'Leave
My Kitten Alone' with howls from 'Hey Bulldog' plus the animal sound effects
from 'Good Morning Good Morning' and a terrific version of 'The End' with solos
imported in from a good 20 Beatles songs - why couldn't EMI do something
similar?)
For all my rant, there are three great moments
where this concept works. The first we've covered. The second is 'Here Comes
The Sun', now bookended with the 'sun sun sun' riff heard over the rattled
tablas of 'Within You Without You' and little tweaks here and there from 'The
Inner Light'. The one thing that prevented this track from being one of the
greatest songs for me was the lack of a decent opening - and now it has the
perfect one, with The Beatles temporarily turned into the Beach Boys for 30
glorious seconds. The third - the set's masterstroke - is in combining two of
my favourite Beatle songs: the heavy relentless backbeat of 'Tomorrow Never
Knows' with the voices from 'Within You Without You', a terrific three minutes
that's amongst the most blissfully psychedelic things in my back catalogue.
Yes, I know these two songs were never meant to go together either but whether
by design or lucky accident these two somehow sound 'meant' to be in a way that
the rest sounds likes a clever engineer with way too much time on his hands. Oh
and there's another clever passage where the closing radio of 'I Am The Walrus'
slowly fades into the squeal of Beatle screams (added to the familiar version
of 'I Want To Hold Your Hand'). Even there though the producers mixed a trick:
surely the squealing noise is the perfect intro to the jet plane of 'Back In
The USSR'?
In short, however, three great moments (four at a
pinch) across a full-price album of 26 tracks doesn't cut it. 'Love' is an
album that's actually quite hard to 'love', one that on the one hand manages to
go for all the obvious choices (if they really wanted to mess around with a
song, why not 'Revolution #9' or 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun', two songs made of
pulling apart, or the name-checking 'Glass Onion' of which only a few fragments
are used) and on the other wrecks songs that mean an awful lot to an awful lot
of us. 'Love' is wrongly made, it's worst fallacy is that it doesn't feel like
it's made with 'love' at all, just a con trick for enticing youngsters hooked
by 'The Beatles Rockband Game' (a superior product all round) who don't want to
buy a full album. While many were impressed at the time (and this album made a
respectable #3 in the UK, even if it was outsold by an Oasis compilation that
got things right by not messing round with history at all - a salutary lesson
there), fans have gone a bit quiet on this album since, whose production
gimmicks have already dated it quicker in ten years than all the 'proper'
Beatles albums have in fifty.
They say you can measure the success of a Beatle
project by how many people copied it. The fact that there's no Rolling Stones
remixes album out there (inevitably called 'hate' you'd have thought, in
response to this album) or a Who concert anthology called 'Live'(whereas quite
a few bands released an 'Anthology' or their own BBC sets) points to how coolly
most quarters received this album. When, we fans asked, were EMI going to stop
playing around with their new toys and re-issue these albums properly, the way
they were meant to be heard? Thankfully even EMI realised they couldn't keep
stalling anymore and sanity is just around the corner...
"The
Beatles In Mono" /"The Beatles In Stereo"
(Apple, September 9th 2009)
(First published as part of News, Views and Music Issue #45
on October 9th 2009 as part of a review for 'Magical Mystery Tour')
The Mono set
contains: every British studio album released between 1963 and 1969 (ending
with 'Yellow Submarine' and missing out 'Abbey Road' and 'Let It Be') plus the
'Past Masters' compilations from 1988 and the 'American' version of 'Magical
Mystery Tour'
The Stereo
set contains: every British studio album released between 1963 and 1970 along
with 'Past Masters' One and Two
"I'm in love and I feel fine!"
Was it only on September 9th there were
cries of ‘Please Mr Postman look in your bag and see if there’s a parcel for
me?’ Demand for the mono/stereo Beatles sets were so high the amount of stock
sent to individual shops had to be restricted and the backlog for online
shopping was quite high too. It was like Beatlemania all over again - only with
online shopping instead of proper record shops and album cover reproductions
much smaller than our old vinyl discs (ours arrived nice and early, by the way,
but then again we’d had it on order since the beginning of June!) Amazingly
every single Beatles album charted somewhere in the top 100 a month ago
(Peppers highest, Yellow Submarine lowest – no surprises there) and it was,
temporarily, just like the 1960s all over again (though, sadly 1967 thanks to
the anachronism of Vera Lynn making #1 in the album charts that week rivalling
the unexpected and seemingly never-ending #1 of Englebert Humperdinck in the
singles that year). What a year Beatle fans with the Beatles Rockband game
that’s out too. (Thanks, Apple, all my money’s gone now!)
We’ve waited a long time for this fellow Beatles
fans – 22 years to be exact – and just as with every single one of the many fab
four re-launches since 1969, half of the planet’s population who aren’t
passionate record collectors suddenly look on us with half-hidden respect and
the other half just laugh at how caught up in all the minutae we are. In the
past Apple have been hopelessly misguided about who to flog their latest
Beatle-linked products too, trying either to coerce newer fans to the party who
half-heard about these timeless songs and are genuinely interested in partaking
of the feast just to see what all the fuss is all about and half that pander to
the other extreme, offering us lots of raw Beatles delicacies that give all but
the converted horrible indigestion. We’ve been fairly scathing about EMI/Apple
on this website and all their many mistakes over the past 20 or so years - 40
if you go back to the 'theme' compilations of the 1970s (the less said the better:
'Got To Get You Into My Life' is soul, not rock!)
For starters we got ‘The Beatles At The BBC’ which
was a fairly promising first taster for our favourite band’s less heralded
moments but suffered as any two-hour extract seemingly randomly picked from 12-odd
hours of output would be. It catered to newbies in other words and not
necessarily to fans who would have preferred the box-set treatment – even
though the thought of hearing raw and ragged versions of tried and tested
classics with some new tracks thrown in almost had the words ‘fans only’
written all over it. Then we got the horribly drawn-out Anthology project, one
whose six hour CD running time and 8-part TV special put off practically all
newcomers to the band simply through their sheer size and scale (it’s still a
pretty daunting prospect listening to all six CDs of Anthology end to end and
you’re talking to someone who heard all 12 hours of BBC sessions in one go
without a break) – and its still not enough to appease the true fans (there’s
at least the same amount of useable outtakes available again in the vaults –
3/4s of them better than the average track on Anthology). Even the mammoth
coffee-table book, whilst full of interesting anecdotes and the occasional rare
photograph is hardly a book designed for casual reading – its way too heavy to
hold and the print is so small that my opticians did well enough out of my
failing eyesight that year as to move to bigger premises, mainly thanks to my
money. And as for the remix project ‘Love’ (a great way of introducing
newcomers to the band’s music...marketed to longtime fans as ‘The Beatles as
you’ve never heard them before!’ instead) I was beginning to think that perhaps
the late Neil Aspinall was playing a practical joke on his old employees and
was out to kill off the band that turned his life upside down after all.
We fussed and moaned and gurned and gesticulated
all through the Beatles reviews on this website, pleading with somebody to see
sense and re-master the fab four’s albums properly (I’d love to say that’s the
only reason why Apple agreed to the project but they’ve been working on it in
secret for six years or so apparently) – after all, we’d spent 11 years with
the best quality Beatles recordings around being...the out-takes, rehearsals and
live sessions as included on Anthology! So much effort did I put into
emphasising how much the Beatles risked dying out amongst the new generation
that I can scarcely believe my eyes at the speed of the turn around and the
mini-revolution we had last month. Did the Beatles re-mastered stereo and mono
sets really come out without being pulled hours before release? And is that
really a Beatles computer game I keep seeing in all the games shops,
enthralling young and old alike in a way that only Halo, Fable and Football
games have before them? Have I entered a parallel world where EMI/Apple
actually care about the most important (and potentially lucrative) back
catalogue on the planet? Do I really hear youngsters on the bus and in the
streets gazing at Beatles merchandise in awe and respect, instead of shaking
their heads over how people can listen to music that isn’t sampled (somebody
had to invent the music that’s being remixed y’know!) The only thing better
than this would have been a Beatles reunion (and no, ‘Free As A Bird’ doesn’t
count!)
These new re-issues are not the cheap and nasty
thrown-together CD releases of 1987 that launched the medium as the mainstream
in the eyes of many (most collectors said they were either holding out until
the first batch of shiny Beatles discs came along or specifically for Sgt
Peppers – and I think I’m right in saying that it took another 5 years before
the sales of CD players caught up with this 1987 sudden spike). The packaging
of each one is exquisite – lots of rare photos that even Beatlebuffs like me have
never seen before and – more importantly – they’ve been chosen with care and
all fit into the relevant timeline of each release (unlike, say, the
‘Anthology’ book). The remastering is, generally, exemplary too. I wouldn’t it
past Apple to re-issue the whole set as a 5.1 surround sound or a Blu-ray
edition someday as there’s still room for improvement in places but each of
these CDs sound better to some extent – some more than others it has to be
said. Oh and forget all the hoo-hah there’s been about buying only the mono box
by the way – yes, it may have been the way the Beatles intended you to hear
these albums in the 1960s and the mix they spent most time on, but the run of
technology we’ve had in the past 40 years has left mono far behind and even in
better sound they sound like bygone relics rather than the could-be
contemporary classics they do in stereo (although 'Rubber Soul' still sounds a
bit weird in stereo). And you pay the same price as the Stereo set for the
privilege of not owning ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Abbey Road’ (which never did come out
in mono). OK – we never did get the long list of extras I requested on each CD
(the relevant outtakes from ‘Anthology’ would have done, even without the
oodles of great things still in the archives) but EMI/Apple got the important
half of the job done and after 20-odd years of trying to make them eat it I
take my hat off to them. Even the price isn’t that bad overall (I paid £135 for
my set but even the full whack at £170 is cheaper than the old CDs were if you bought
them all together).
The biggest winners of the batch are Please Please
Me (which has far more power and personality, at least in stereo, than it ever
had on the old mono CD – there’s far more strain showing in the 10 songs the
Beatles recorded in that single 12 hour session but in the case of songs like
‘Twist and Shout’, where the band’s ready to fall apart at any minute, that
only helps make a classic shine even more brightly), With The Beatles
(similarly more powerful in it’s 2009 model compared to 1987, with Ringo’s
drums sounding like the band’s leading starr rather than just offering an
occasional cameo), ‘Help!’ (which sounds the best of all the Beatles albums
previously available only in mono – the stereo mix trumps it in every way
suggesting the Beatles might have been dabbling in stereo by 1965 despite what
the books tell us), ‘Revolver’ (the best sounding album of all in 1987 is the
best sounding album of all in 2009 too, with so much more going on than you
ever heard before) and ‘The White Album’ (the memories of that awful 1990s
re-issue can be banished forever, thank God).
For some reason every fan, fanzine and music mag has been raving on
about how good ‘Abbey Road’ is – personally it doesn’t sound that different to
these ears and the slightly crisper, cleaner sound is only a benefit on about
half of the tracks (what’s the point of hearing a song like ‘I Want You (She’s
So Heavy)’ in perfect sound – the whole point is meant to be that we can’t hear
what’s going on ; thank God that doesn’t happen with ‘Helter Skelter’ which
still sounds joyously tuneless!) Even so, Abbey Road is still an improvement on
the 1987 model, as are all these albums to be fair. The only two albums that
disappoint are Sgt Peppers (OK, so it’s not that great an album anyway but
considering the amount of sounds that were stuffed on this record it’s a shame
that you can still only hear about half of them) and Past Masters Volume One
1963-65 (which still sounds as thin and weedy as it ever did – it’s always been
sonically the paler cousin of the two records and now, despite its new status
as a double pack, the gap between the two volumes has got even bigger).
Overall, though, this is nitpicking at the smaller
things because - for the first time since at least 'Past Masters' in 1988 - The
Beatles finally have a re-issue programme they deserve! Excuse me, I must go
now - there's still another three hours of the day left in which to start going
round all the albums in order a fourth time...
Onion
"The Beatles Rock
Band"
(Harmonix, 2009)
(First
written as part of an early issue of
'News, Views and Music' sometime in late 2009 but left unpublished and
later re-created from memory and an unfinished draft I discovered on my old
pen-drive!)
"And now, the act you've known for
all these years!"
It's
amazing what they can do with games nowadays. A mere 35 years after the Beatles
'Flip Your Wig!' board game came the third release in the prestigious 'Rock
Band' series, that invited gamers to become musicians and inspired a whole new
generation to take up a musical instrument for real and...get bored after the
first lesson when no pretty colours appeared on the screen. Expensive and
addictive, the first two games featured lots of well known rock anthems (and
even a couple of obscure ones: who would have guessed at The Who's 'Drowned'
and 'Sea and Sand' or The Grateful Dead's 'China Cat Sunflower' appearing in
the setlist?!) with the 'soundtracks' from the original recordings re-mastered
and separated so that your 'bandmates' really did know it was you who fouled up
on that blue note on the 15th bar of Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid'. In truth the
first two sets were a little heavy metal heavy for a melodicist like myself and
I wasn't expecting much from issue number three, especially when someone wrote
in to ask Harmonix about including Beatle songs for the first set and they said
Apple charged too much money.
And
then...kaboom! The first and (to date) only Rock Band game centred around one
single band came out so unexpectedly I barely had time to register a trailer
before finding myself standing in a queue waiting to buy it (I still don't own
a gaming console but luckily my friend The Face Of Bo already had one so
problem solved -hours of fun, especially when I persuaded him unknowingly to
sing lead on 'I Am The Walrus' with a full two minute fade out of 'oompah
oompah stick it up yer jumper' over and over!) Apparently we have George's son Dhani
to thank as, a keen gamer himself, he represented the 'middle ground' between
the rather stuffy Abbey Road staff and the hip trendy game manufacturers (in
other words playing the same role his dad did 35 years earlier!) Giles Martin,
son of George, had a lot to do with it too and redeemed himself well in my eyes
(and ears) after the 'Love' album.
While
there were a few sticking points (George plays Eric Clapton's guitar solo
during 'While my Guitar Gently Weeps' and there's no Billy Preston on the 'rooftop'!)
, a few errors deliberately made for the sake of gameplay (the band setlist in
Tokyo's Budokan has almost nothing in common with what was actually played) and
the original 45 song game came with a bizarre mixture of the popular, the rare
and the unplayable (thankfully you could download every single Beatles track
for 90p each - I never did pluck up the courage to give 'revolution #9 a go!),
by and large I was deeply impressed. I mean, who reading this site hasn't
wanted to be a Beatle? At long last there I was, with the greatest backing
group in the world behind me, unflinching as I sang out of tune to some of the
best songs ever written. Karaoke? Count
me out! Karaoke with The Beatles backing you? Count me in!...out! (that last
one's for 'Revolution', which also happens to be extremely difficult!)
The
graphics are also amazingly spot-on, re-creating various events in the fab
four's life with so much attention to detail they were even wearing the right
clothes! (The six 'levels' are The Cavern Club, Ed Sullivan Show, Shea Stadium,
Budokan Tokyo 1966, Abbey Road Studios - with 'dreamscapes' for several songs
linked to the lyrics; 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' is the best and certainly
the trippiest - and the Apple Rooftop! is this what an acid-tinged Paul on his
first trip meant when he told roadie Mal Evans to write down the message 'there
are seven levels'? If so is there an unlockable level I haven't found yet?!)
The faces of John, Paul, George and Ringo all seem amazingly 'real' to me
(although as a caveat I am a mainly pc gamer who tends to buy stuff secondhand
that's been out at least five years so I'm no expert, but I do know my Beatle
expressions!) and in truth a little distracting every time I was meat to be
playing but wanted to gaze at how well the graphics team had re-created the
scene from 'I Am The Walrus'.
Best
of all, the soundtracks sounded amazing. This was a bit of a problem actually:
I was too busy hearing how each song sounded 'without' what actual instrument I
was meant to be playing and I ended up getting roundly booed off quite a few
stages. Then again, even Paul is reportedly to have said that his daughter
Beatrice beat his high score when she was just seven so I don't feel quite so
bad now! High scores are also rewarded with various 'bonuses' - usually concert
flyers although I did hear a snatch of one of the early Christmas fanclub
records. My favourite part in the whole game though - and the bit that really
moved me - is when the game ends with perhaps the most difficult of the
original tracks, 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' - Lennon finally getting his
wish from 1969 that the Beatles career would end with the sudden 'slicing' of
this track. However this version doesn't end - it just keeps on playing, tricky
riff after tricky riff, until the rooftop disappears in a puff of wind and fog
(a nice pairing with the use of George's moog synthesiser wind effect on the
original) until, eventually, it's all been dream and you find yourself back at
the start waiting to go into the Cavern again. Clever stuff that really makes
you feel like you've been on a 'journey'!
Not
owning a proper games console (if I took the plunge and bought one you'd never
get any of these articles/books written - although if you dislike my writing
badly enough to raise me the required funds I won't object!), I don't know if
'Beatles Rock Band' lasts through as many re-playings as it should do. I don't
know if the levels get boring the way they did after finally mastering the
impossible 'Holiday In Cambodia' on the original 'Rock Band' (which afterwards
made everything else seem really easy). I also suspect even the bit of playing
I did do has ruined my ability to play the piano in real forever (it's all much
easier with coloured dots!) Sadly Rock Band has fallen from grace in the last
five years, with no new releases for a few years now, suggesting all the above
is true and that this was a franchise 'craze' rather than a lasting addition to
both the gaming and Beatles genres. But I do know this: my first five hours or
so spent on this game in the company of one of my best friends and one of my
favourite bands was time well spent indeed. And if I keep going like this then,
why, soon I might too pass the 'audition'! Roll on the 'solo Beatles' Rock Band
in a few years when I can learn to raise sheep to 'Ram', play 'Mind Games' to
'Mind Games', go on 'Cloud NIne' with 'Cloud Nine' and get to sing 'I'm The
Greatest' with Ringo! (Note: to date only 'Imagine' and three songs promoting
McCartney's 'Good Evening New York City' DVD have so far been released as part
of the franchise).
"Tomorrow
Never Knows"
(Apple, July 24th 2012)
Revolution/Paperback
Writer/And Your Bird Can Sing/Helter Skelter/Savoy Truffle/I'm Down!/I've Got A
Feeling ('Let It Be...Naked' version)/Back In The USSR/You Can't Do That!/It's
All Too Much/She Said She Said/Hey Bulldog/Tomorrow Never Knows/The End
('Anthology' version)
"Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream..."
'At last!' I thought. 'EMI have done the sensible
thing and for their latest cash-in compilation album have finally done what
casual fans have been asking for for a long time and released the best album
material from the bands' 'progressive' middle years.' I guessed wrong: EMI
goofed again. Of the songs here only the title track, 'She Said She Said' and
'Hey Bulldog' really represent the best of The Beatles and the hodge-podge way
the rest has been thrown together ('Paperback Writer' but not 'Rain') suggests
again that somebody somewhere was picking songs at random. Released solely on
iTunes to lure new fans who only vaguely knew about The Beatles 9and were
perhaps too young for the Rock Band/Mono/Stereo sets bonanza in 2009) this
could have been a terrific opportunity to show off just how ground breaking the
fab four were - and how futuristic a lot of their best 'psychedelic' songs
sound even now. Instead, this minimally packaged download-only set left a nasty
taste in the mouth: it was like the bad old days of the 1970s again...Apple
also bizarrely chose to release two 'outtake' versions of songs from 'Abbey
Road' and 'Let It Be' instead of the real thing, for no apparent reason (for
the record the rest of the set is as these songs appeared on the 'stereo' box
sets of each album).
Hopefully one day The Beatles will get the killer
comxpilation they deserve, missing out the beginning and end and concentrating
solely on the years 1965-68, perhaps emphasising a few lesser known songs.
Heck, I was even bored enough to come up with my own running order to save them
the bother: Ticket To Ride/The
Word/Norwegian Wood/Nowhere Man/In My Life/Day Tripper/We Can Work It
Out/Paperback Writer/Rain/Eleanor Rigby/Here There and Everywhere/She Said She
Said/For No One/And Your Bird Can Sing/Got To Get You Into My Life/Tomorrow
Never Knows/Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds/Good Morning Good Morning/A Day In
The Life/I Am The Walrus/Fool On The Hill/Baby You're A Rich Man/All You Need
Is Love/ Revolution/Hey Jude/Long Long Long. Now wouldn't that be the single greatest album of
all time, a great hook to lure the next generation of Beatle fans with while
missing out the need to explain why the early 1960s songs sound the way they do
and what went wrong on 'Let It Be'? Ho hum, suit yourself!
"I
Saw Her Standing There"
(Rock Melon, April 21st 2013)
(Review first published as part of 'News, Views and Music Issue
#207' on August 19th 2013)
CD 1:
Hamburg/BBC: My Bonnie (with English
intro)/Skinny Minnie*/Whole Lot Of Shakin' Goin' On*/I Know Baby*/You Are MY
Sunshine*/Ready Teddy*/The Saints/Hallelujah I Love Her So*/Let's Twist
Again*/Sweet Georgia Brown/Swannee River*/Top Ten Twist*/My Bonnie (with German
Intro)/Ich Lieb Dich So*/Der Kiss Me Song*/Madison Kid*/Let's Dance*/Ya
Ya*/Sweet Georgia Brown (New Lyrics)/Cry For A Shadow/Why?/Dream
Baby(BBC)/Memphis Tennessee (BBC)/Please Mister Postman (BBC)/Ask Me Why
(BBC)/Besame Mucho (BBC)/A Picture Of You (BBC)/What'd I Say?*
CD 2: The
Decca Audition Tape/Cavern Club Rehearsals: Money (That's What I Want)/Til'
There Was You/To Know Her Is To Love Her/Take Good Care Of My Baby/Memphis
Tennessee/Sure To Fall/Crying Waiting Hoping/Love Of The Loved/September In The
Rain/Besame Mucho/Some Other Guy (Live at the Cavern x2)/Kansas City (Live At
The Cavern)/Radio Interview/I Saw Her Standing There (Cavern Rehearsal)/One
After 909 x 2 (Cavern Rehearsal)/Catswalk x 2 (Cavern Rehearsal)/Love Me Do/P.S.
I Love You
* = Does not
feature The Beatles
"She was just 50, you know what I mean!"
Ah that 50 years copyright rule. We speculated
a few years back what this might mean for the AAA bands and the rules were duly
tightened to songwriters receiving something closer to 70 years of royalties in
most cases. However, a few recordings fall by the way side, especially those
unreleased at the time or – as in the case of most of CD one of this set – given a limited release at the
time and blocked ever since. So here is the first of a three-way batch of
material from 1962 (ie 51 years ago) which is semi-legal (ie the Beatles don’t
want it out - indeed they’ve banned some
of these tapes many times over the years - but can’t do anything legally to
challenge it this time around). Yes,
it’s the return of the Tony Sheridan recordings, taped by the Beatles (under
the name of ‘The Beat Brothers’ because ‘The Beatles’ was considered to be a
‘stupid name’) in Hamburg in aid of a friend who needed a backing band at the
last minute. ‘My Bonnie’ was rightly chosen as the single and is the best thing
here by a country mile – McCartney’s harmonies and Harrison’s stinging guitar
solo in particular demonstrating what it might have been like to hear the fab
four in Germany on a good night. Re-released on ‘Anthology One’ in 1995, this
CD sports an alternate version with a German intro which is new to me (and
quite rare to bootleggers as far as I can tell). The other tracks here on CD One
(only a few of which feature The Beatles but all of which feature Sheridan)
aren’t in the same league but are nice to have and sound better than they do on
most other sets. In addition, CD one includes the first two ever Beatles radio
sessions , from March and June 1962 respectively (remember, ‘Love Me Do’ didn’t
come out till October that year!) These tracks have turned up on bootleg lots,
sometimes in better sound, but astonishingly were left off the official ‘At The
BBC’ set in 1994 – ‘Dream Baby’ and ‘A Picture Of You’ (songs the band never
returned to again) are particularly interesting, while it’s also fascinating to
hear subtle differences in the arrangements for future Beatles powerhouses like
‘Please Mr Postman ‘Ask Me Why’ and Chuck Berry’s greatest song, ‘Memphis
Tennessee’. At first the last track on CD one – a Cavern version of Ray Charles
‘What’d I Say’ – looked like the ultimate rarity, but no; chances are it’s not
even by the Beatles (or if it is then they’re deeply drunk and singing at the
wrong speed).
CD two contains a fuller account of the
infamous ‘Decca Audition tapes’ recorded on January 1st 1962, which
Dick Rowe rejected along the lines that ‘no one wants to hear guitar groups
anymore' (shockingly Brian Poole and the Tremeloes were hired instead). Most
reviewers who’ve heard the tapes since claim that Decca was right: the Beatles
sound staid and nervous and don’t sing much of the material they were known for
even then (Brian Epstein thought doing more ‘standards’ would go down well,
although McCartney – the default vocalist for these – sounds terribly ill at
ease here). However, I think people have been unkind: the band were in an
unfamiliar studio, in the unfamiliar city of London (where none of them had
ever been before) and had absolutely no rapport with Decca from the first (unlike
EMI, where both George Martin and Ron Richards were welcoming, even if through
gritted teeth at first). Some of the songs here shine greatly: ‘Money’ already
sounds definitive (despite the band nicking it from a similar arrangement the
Searchers were doing), ‘To Know Her Is To Love Her’ shows Lennon fully in tune
with Phil Spector only seven years before the pair work together on ‘Let It Be’
and best of all the Lennon-McCartney original ‘Love Of The Loved’, while not
their greatest early song, is already as good as the standards in their set
(later given to Cilla to sing, it would have been a perfectly respectable
addition to ‘Please Please Me’). Best of all, Pete Best’s drumming is superb,
far from the amateurish playing so many people have assumed for so many years,
and is easily the better of anything Ringo plays with the band 1962-63 (the
question of course is whether Pete’s heavy sound would have ‘grown’ with the
band like Ringo did is of course unknown, but the Pete Best Combo nail the 1965
folk-rock sound so my guess is yes he would). A bunch of Cavern Club rehearsals
come next, including an unreleased McCartney Shadows pastiche (‘Catcall’, heard
twice here – the second recording of which is new to me), a ragged ‘One After
909’ (seven full years before ‘Let It Be’), an exciting ‘I Saw Her Standing
There’ and best of all a dynamic ‘Some Other Guy’ (reportedly Lennon’s
favourite ever song, so it’s amazing it never ended up on a Beatles record –
although The Searchers arguably got there first). We really didn’t need ‘Love
Me Do’ and ‘PS I Love You’ (any Beatles fan interested enough to buy this set
already owns that first single many times over), but full marks for including
the ‘first’ radio interview a fortnight after the release of ‘Love Me Do’ (note,
though, the first ‘interview’ is the TV footage from a ‘People and Places’
Liverpool special that was taped with the ‘Some Other Guy’ footage). Overall,
then, an enticing and exciting way of getting many Beatles gems from 1962
together in the same place at a cheap price – I look forward to buying both the
Beach Boys ‘Surfin’ 1962’ (their first ‘Surfin’ Safari’ album plus outtakes)
and Janis Joplin’s ‘California Blues’ (her much-bootlegged set as a teenage
folkie with an already powerful voice) in the same series soon. Not to mention
eagerly anticipating the 1963 releases for the Beatles and Beach Boys et al
next year when they too fall out of copyright... No of course they're not as
good as 'the real thing' and the official albums but Apple shouldn't worry -
overall The Beatles come out of this set rather well.
"The
Beatles' Bootleg Recordings 1963"
(Apple, December 17th 2013)
There's A
Place (Takes 5,6,8 and 9)/Do You Want To Know A Secret? (Take 7)/A Taste Of
Honey (Take 6)/I Saw Her Standing There (Take 2)/Misery (Takes 1 and 7)/From Me
To You (Takes 1, 2 and 5)/Thank You Girl (Takes 1 and 5)/One After 909 (First
Version Takes 1 and 2)/Hold Me Tight (Take 21)/Money (That's What I Want) (Take
Unknown)/Some Other Guy (BBC)/Love Me Do (BBC)/Too Much Monkey Business (BBC)/I
Saw Her Standing There (BBC)/Do You Want To Know A Secret? (BBC)/From Me To You
(BBC)/I've Got To Find My Baby (BBC)/Roll Over Beethoven (BBC)/A Taste Of Honey
(BBC)/Love Me Do (BBC)/Please Please Me (BBC)/She Loves You (BBC)/I Want To
Hold Your Hand (BBC)/Til' There Was You (BBC)/Roll Over Beethoven (BBC)/You
Really Got A Hold On Me (BBC)/Hippy Hippy Shake (BBC)/Til There Was You (BBC)/A
Shot Of Rhythm and Blues (BBC)/A Taste Of Honey (BBC)/Money (That's What I
Want)(BBC)/Anna (Go To Him) (BBC)/Love Me Do (BBC)/She Loves You (BBC)/I'll Get
You (BBC)/ A Taste Of Honey (BBC)/Boys (BBC)/Chains (BBC)/You Really Got A Hold
On Me (BBC)/I Saw Her Standing There (BBC)/She Loves You (BBC)/Twist and Shout
(BBC)/Do You Want To Know A Secret? (BBC)/Please Please Me (BBC)/LOng Tall
Sally (BBC)/Chains (BBC)/Boys (BBC)/A Taste Of Honey (BBC)/Roll Over Beethoven
(BBC)/All My Loving (BBC)/She Loves You (BBC)/Til' There Was You (BBC)/Bad To
Me (Demo)/I'm In Love (Demo)
"You won't leave me 'cause I've told you so
and I've no intention of letting you go!"
A real surprise this one:
available on I-tunes without advance notice, in some countries only for a
matter of hours before it got taken down. If you didn't hear about it, don't
worry - you weren't meant to. In fact Apple would rather you forget this set was
out at all. The only reason it's appeared (with a second volume rumoured soon)
is to combat the copyright laws, which state that although previously released
material can be 'protected' for 70 years, unissued material is fair game after
50 and so is ripe for pillaging by all sorts of record labels in 2014. Apple
clearly feared that year would see several semi-official CDs full of Beatles
recordings available on bootleg and recorded in 1963 and decided to jump in
first. What that means for the listener is the chance to hear several
nearly-identical performances of songs from the 'Please Please Me' LP and a
smattering of yet more BBC sessions not included on the first two sets. Clearly
these sets aren't for you if you have only a passing interest in The Beatles and don't already know relatively obscure
songs like 'Misery' and 'There's A Place' backwards. For true monkeynuts Beatle
fans, however, this is what we dreamed the Anthology sets would be like: a
minimal amount of packaging and fuss, no ridiculous editing putting several
takes of songs together into an un-natural whole and a strictly chronological
running order that means we can hear, note-for-note, how The Beatles grew into
the phenomenon they were. The Abbey Road takes are fascinating, especially the
ones for 'Please Please Me' whose outtakes here were recorded barely minutes
versions the whole world knows: the odd changed harmony part here, fluffed
guitar solo here is the music world's equivalent of the art world's Leonardo Da
Vinci or JMW Turner sketches of their most famous pieces, remarkably not for
being that different but just for existing at all alongside something everyone
knows really well (or should know really well).
There are rather more BBC
recordings than I was expecting and these are decidedly less interesting - all
alternate versions of big hit singles that have already appeared in superior
versions on the first two 'Beatles at the BBC sets (the cream of the fab four's
radio crop is in 1964 anyway and the 'Pop Go The Beatles' series). There's also
an interesting closing duo: two demos Lennon recorded especially for Billy J
Kramer, both of them in inferior sound than most bootlegs than contain them and
neither that brilliant as songs, the disdain in Lennon's voice giving away what
he thinks of them. Still, why weren't these rare recordings of a real live
Beatle singing songs not otherwise available on real live Beatle products not
included on 'Anthology' in favour of the soundtrack of the Morecambe and Wise
Show and Blackpool Night Out? The Mind boggles! Whether hearing the Beatles
makes mistakes and have bad ideas makes them more 'human' and fallible (as
Apple have so long feared) or more incredible and gifted (surely the fact the
final products came because of so many false-starts shows a remarkable facility
for hearing what 'worked' and what 'didn't') is up to you, but I know what my
money is on...Roll on 2017/2018 when the likes of unreleased sessions for
'Revolver' 'Sgt Peppers' and beyond is due for release!
A now complete list of Beatles links
available at this website:
'Please Please Me' (1963) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/news-views-and-music-issue-92-beatles.html
'With The Beatles' (1963) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-1-beatles-with-beatles-1963.html
'A Hard Day's Night' (1964) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-2-beatles-hard-days-night-1964.html
'Beatles For Sale' (1964) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/beatles-beatles-for-sale-1964-news.html
'Help!' (1965) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-3-beatles-help-1965.html
'Rubber Soul' (1965) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-beatles-rubber-soul-1965-album.html
'Revolver' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-6-beatles-revolver-1966.html
'Revolver' (1966) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-6-beatles-revolver-1966.html
'Sgt Pepper's Lonely
Heart's Club Band' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts.html
'Magical Mystery Tour' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/news-views-and-music-issue-45-beatles.html
'The Beatles' aka 'The White Album' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-25-beatles-beatles-aka-white.html
'Magical Mystery Tour' (1967) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/news-views-and-music-issue-45-beatles.html
'The Beatles' aka 'The White Album' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-25-beatles-beatles-aka-white.html
'Yellow Submarine' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-beatles-yellow-submarine-1969.html
‘Abbey Road’ (1969) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-beatles-abbey-road-1969.html
'Let It Be' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/news-views-and-music-issue-130-beatles.html
'Live At The BBC' (1994) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/news-views-and-music-issue-24-beatles.html
'Christmas Fanclub Flexi-Discs' (1963-69) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/news-views-and-music-issue-85-beatles.html
'Let It Be' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/news-views-and-music-issue-130-beatles.html
'Live At The BBC' (1994) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/news-views-and-music-issue-24-beatles.html
'Christmas Fanclub Flexi-Discs' (1963-69) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/news-views-and-music-issue-85-beatles.html
The Best Unreleased Beatles Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/what-we-want-to-see-on-beatles.html
A Complete AAA Guide To The Beatles Cartoons http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/an-aaa-guide-to-beatles-cartoons.html
A Complete AAA Guide To The Beatles Cartoons http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/an-aaa-guide-to-beatles-cartoons.html
The Beatles: Surviving TV Appearances http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-beatles-surviving-tv-appearances.html
A 'Bite' Of Beatles Label 'Apple' http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/a-bite-of-apple.html
The Beatles: Non-Album Songs Part One: 1958-63 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-beatles-non-album-songs-part-one.html
The Beatles:
Non-Album Songs Part Two: 1964-67 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-beatles-non-album-songs-part-2-1964.html
The Beatles: Non-Album Songs Part Three: 1968-96 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-beatles-non-album-songs-part-three.html
The Beatles: Compilations/Live Albums/Rarities Sets
Part One: 1962-74 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-beatles-compilations-live-sets-and.html
The Beatles: Compilations/Live Albums/Rarities Sets
Part Two: 1976-2013 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/the-beatles-compilations-live-albums.html
Beatles Bonuses: The Songs
John and Paul Gave Away To The World/To Ringo! http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/beatle-bonuses-songs-given-awayringos.html
Essay: The Ways In Which The Beatles Changed The World For The Better https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-beatles-essay-ways-fab-four-changed.html
Essay: The Ways In Which The Beatles Changed The World For The Better https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-beatles-essay-ways-fab-four-changed.html
Five Landmark Concerts and
Three Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/the-beatles-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
No comments:
Post a Comment