The Beatles couldn’t be as easily dismissed as the Rolling Stones, who often seemed like an ersatz American group, especially when Mick Jagger started to sing with an American accent. But the Beatles’ music was supernaturally beautiful and it was English music. In it you could hear cheeky music-hall songs and send-ups, pub ballads and, more importantly, hymns. The Fabs had the voices and looks of choirboys, and their talent was so broad they could do anything — love songs, comic songs, kids’ songs and sing-alongs for football crowds (at White Hart Lane, Tottenham Hotspur’s ground, we sang: ‘Here, there and every-fucking-where, Jimmy Greaves, Jimmy Greaves’). They could do rock ’n’ roll too, though they tended to parody it, having mastered it early on.
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One lunchtime in the school library, not long after the incident with Hogg, I came across a copy of Life magazine which included hefty extracts from Hunter Davies’s biography of the Beatles, the first major book about them and their childhood. It was soon stolen from the library and passed around the school, a contemporary ‘Lives of the Saints’. (On the curriculum we were required to read Gerald Durrell and C. S. Forester, but we had our own books, which we discussed, just as we exchanged and discussed records. We liked Candy, Lord of the Flies, James Bond, Mervyn Peake, and Sex Manners for Men, among other things.)
Finally my parents bought the biography for my birthday. It was the first hardback I possessed and, pretending to be sick, I took the day off school to read it, with long breaks between chapters to prolong the pleasure. But The Beatles didn’t satisfy me as I’d imagined it would. It wasn’t like listening to Revolver, for instance, after which you felt satisfied and uplifted. The book disturbed and intoxicated me; it made me feel restless and dissatisfied with my life. After reading about the Beatles’ achievements I began to think I didn’t expect enough of myself, that none of us at school did really. In two years we’d start work; soon after that we’d get married and buy a small house nearby. The form of life was decided before it was properly begun.
To my surprise it turned out that the Fabs were lower-middle-class provincial boys; neither rich nor poor, their music didn’t come out of hardship and nor were they culturally privileged. Lennon was rough, but it wasn’t poverty that made him hard-edged. The Liverpool Institute, attended by Paul and George, was a good grammar school. McCartney’s father had been well enough off for Paul and his brother Michael to have piano lessons. Later, his father bought him a guitar.
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We had no life guides or role models among politicians, military types or religious figures, or even film stars for that matter, as our parents did. Footballers and pop stars were the revered figures of my generation and the Beatles, more than anyone, were exemplary for countless young people. If coming from the wrong class restricts your sense of what you can be, then none of us thought we’d become doctors, lawyers, scientists, politicians. We were scheduled to be clerks, civil servants, insurance managers and travel agents.
Not that leading some kind of creative life was entirely impossible. In the mid-1960s the media was starting to grow. There was a demand for designers, graphic artists and the like. In our art lessons we designed toothpaste boxes and record sleeves to prepare for the possibility of going to art school. Now, these were very highly regarded among the kids; they were known to be anarchic places, the sources of British pop art, numerous pop groups and the generators of such luminaries as Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, Ray Davies and John Lennon. Along with the Royal Court and the drama corridor of the BBC, the art schools were the most important post-war British cultural institution, and some lucky kids escaped into them. Once, I ran away from school to spend the day at the local art college. In the corridors where they sat cross-legged on the floor, the kids had dishevelled hair and paint-splattered clothes. A band was rehearsing in the dining hall. They liked being there so much they stayed till midnight. Round the back entrance there were condoms in the grass.
But these kids were destined to be commercial artists, which was, at least, ‘proper work’. Commercial art was OK but anything that veered too closely towards pure art caused embarrassment; it was pretentious. Even education fell into this trap. When, later, I went to college, our neighbours would turn in their furry slippers and housecoats to stare and tut-tut to each other as I walked down the street in my Army-surplus greatcoat, carrying a pile of library books. I like to think it was the books rather than the coat they were objecting to — the idea that they were financing my uselessness through their taxes. Surely nurturing my brain could be of no possible benefit to the world; it would only render me more argumentative — create an intelligentsia and you’re only producing criticism for the future.
(For some reason I’ve been long under the impression that this hatred for education is a specifically English tendency. I’ve never imagined the Scots, Irish or Welsh, and certainly no immigrant group, hating the idea of elevation through the mind in quite the same way. Anyhow, it would be a couple of decades before the combined neighbours of south-east England could take their revenge on education via their collective embodiment — Thatcher.)
I could, then, at least have been training to be an apprentice. But, unfortunately for the neighbours, we had seen A Hard Day’s Night at Bromley Odeon. Along with our mothers, we screamed all through it, fingers stuck in our ears. And afterwards we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, where to go, how to exorcise this passion the Beatles had stoked up. The ordinary wasn’t enough; we couldn’t accept only the everyday now! We desired ecstasy, the extraordinary, magnificence — today!
For most, this pleasure lasted only a few hours and then faded. But for others it opened a door to the sort of life that might, one day, be lived. And so the Beatles came to represent opportunity and possibility. They were careers officers, a myth for us to live by, a light for us to follow.
How could this be? How was it that of all the groups to emerge from that great pop period the Beatles were the most dangerous, the most threatening, the most subversive? Until they met Dylan and, later, dropped acid, the Beatles wore matching suits and wrote harmless love songs offering little ambiguity and no call to rebellion. They lacked Elvis’s sexuality, Dylan’s introspection and Jagger’s surly danger. And yet … and yet — this is the thing — everything about the Beatles represented pleasure, and for the provincial and suburban young pleasure was only the outcome and justification of work. Pleasure was work’s reward and it occurred only at weekends and after work.
But when you looked at A Hard Day’s Night or Help!, it was clear that those four boys were having the time of their life: the films radiated freedom and good times. In them there was no sign of the long, slow accumulation of security and status, the year-after-year movement towards satisfaction, that we were expected to ask of life. Without conscience, duty or concern for the future, everything about the Beatles spoke of enjoyment, abandon and attention to the needs of the self. The Beatles became heroes to the young because they were not deferentiaclass="underline" no authority had broken their spirit; they were confident and funny; they answered back; no one put them down. It was this independence, creativity and earning-power that worried Hogg about the Beatles. Their naive hedonism and dazzling accomplishments were too paradoxical. For Hogg to wholeheartedly approve of them was like saying crime paid. But to dismiss the new world of the 1960s was to admit to being old and out of touch.