10 Beatles songs

This week I have read Hunter Davies’ biography of the Beatles. An excellent book, which has prompted me to reassess my love of the band. Well, not reassess exactly, but it’s reminded me – and really, how dare I forget – just how damn good they were, and it’s helped me to appreciate what groundbreakers they were early on.

Most of the music I heard in my early years was classical, but my parents owned copies of the Red and Blue albums, which I discovered for myself when I was about six or seven years old, I think. I can remember falling in love with the Beatles and listening to them over and over, but I don’t recall exactly just how mindblowing it presumably was for this to have been practically the first pop music I knew. I probably didn’t appreciate at the time just how spoiled I was.

I listened to the Blue album much more than the Red one, and not without reason. Penny Lane, Here Comes The Sun, A Day In The Life, Hello Goodbye, Lady Madonna… Just looking at the titles makes me feel almost dizzy. And the fact that it was on vinyl, too, that one had to turn it over periodically or change records. The idea of an album being split into sections like this is alien now that we listen to everything on CDs or MP3 players or computers. I’m not a vinyl fetishist exactly, but it made the experience of listening seem more real than it does today, to be able to hold the music and turn it over in your hand. Look at the track listing:

The Beatles 1967-1970
Apple PCSP 718 – April 19, 1973

LP Side 1
Strawberry Fields Forever
Penny Lane
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
With A Little Help From My Friends
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
A Day In The Life
All You Need Is Love

LP Side 2
I Am The Walrus
Hello Goodbye
The Fool On The Hill
Magical Mystery Tour
Lady Madonna
Hey Jude
Revolution

LP Side 3
Back In The U.S.S.R.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Get Back
Don’t Let Me Down
The Ballad Of John and Yoko
Old Brown Shoe

LP Side 4
Here Comes The Sun
Come Together
Something
Octopus’s Garden
Let It Be
Across The Universe
The Long And Winding Road

No one can look at such a list and claim this isn’t the greatest band in the world. By the time I was about ten I was borrowing the original albums from the library (on tape) and making copies for myself. I still have the tapes. It seems a very old-fashioned way of doing things now, but I like to imagine that there are still children of that age discovering old albums in the library.

With this blog being a good place to post videos, I decided it might be nice to have a look at, say, ten songs that are perhaps not among their best known. However, with the copyright of Beatles songs being what it is, most videos are not embeddable from YouTube. So there’s just the one video watchable directly on this page, and the rest available as links. I decided to restrict myself to songs not released as UK singles and have only included one song from either of the Red or Blue albums. Nevertheless, the final ten choices have ended up looking very populist. That’s because everyone presumably knows every Beatles song forwards and backwards already, and those not known best in versions by the Beatles have been covered by others. But if there are any here you don’t happen to know, please have a closer look and listen.

Today, as was the case twenty years ago, my preference is for middle- and late-period Beatles. Until revisiting the albums recently, I’d have said you could take everything from before Rubber Soul and chuck it. But I’ve ended up choosing three pre-Rubber Soul songs, and not simply for tokenistic reasons.

First up is I Wanna Be Your Man, which in 1963 was better known as a single by the Rolling Stones than in this version, despite being a Lennon and McCartney song. I nearly didn’t choose it, but I have realised that it is the Beatles song that more than any other transports me back to a particular place and time, though whether the memory is accurate or not I don’t know. I have visions of myself, aged about eleven, having a shower on a Sunday night and then dancing around and applying deodorant and/or aftershave in the manner of Macaulay Culkin. It doesn’t sound like me, but if not then why do I remember it? It certainly made me want to jump about. And it’s nice to have a song where the often unfairly maligned Ringo sings the lead vocal.

Next, Things We Said Today. Getting a bit more sophisticated now. And it’s fascinating to watch the video and remind oneself just how frightening Beatlemania was. Has so much communal teenage girl sexuality been aroused before or since? Not a chance. If only I could have been there.

That song was written for the film A Hard Day’s Night, and the next one, You’re Going To Lose That Girl, was written for the follow-up, Help. I suppose some people might dismiss this as bubblegum, but I challenge you to find a better pop song. Particularly worth watching this one, I think, given it’s a video rather than a photo montage, and not without its moments of comedy.

Actually, if there is a better pop song than that, it may easily be one of the following. Rubber Soul is where the Beatles really take off for me, and You Won’t See Me is one of its highlights. I love its confidence and drive.

The next album produced was Revolver, one of the several I always end up vacillating between when trying to decide my favourite. We all know Eleanor Rigby and the horrible Yellow Submarine, but my choices would be Here, There and Everywhere, a song that gives the impression of having been born rather than composed, and I Want To Tell You, the only one of George Harrison’s songs to make this list. Here Comes The Sun and Something are probably the Beatles songs I love most of all, but I wanted to choose something a little less well known here. It sounds somehow muddy, which I’ve always liked. George should have been celebrating his 68th birthday today. RIP.

The best thing I’ve got out of my immersion in the Beatles is that last night I actually listened to a couple of the albums from beginning to end for the first time in years. Sgt. Pepper is so famous and celebrated that criticism seems pointless, but it’s not an album I have generally liked very much. Approaching it again, from a distance, it appears to be the masterpiece everyone else always said it was, and, predictably, I have chosen She’s Leaving Home. Ned Rorem (and if anyone should know, he probably should) compared it with Schubert’s greatest songs. I happen to think that’s an indefensible opinion, but it stands on its own terms as — the most poignant song of the twentieth century? Perhaps. Paul wrote it, nominally, but the instrumental arrangement, which seems so inextricably a part of the song, is by Mike Leander.

I hadn’t noticed until I was writing this out that Paul’s love songs dominate the list to such an extent. I’m sure that’s an indication of my personal tastes. I seem to respond to his songs more readily than to John’s, though this isn’t a competition. I Will, like Here, There and Everywhere, is a classic, one of Paul’s sweetest utterances and a masterpiece of concision.

But the last two belong to John. And to Billy Preston, one of my favourite Beatles collaborators. I think that even when I was very young I picked up on his keyboard playing as something very exciting. He plays the Hammond organ in I Want You (She’s So Heavy), the longest proper song in the Beatles catalogue, and perhaps the closest they ever got to prog rock. And he is the keyboardist on the rhapsodic Don’t Let Me Down. The video here is taken from their rooftop concert, quite as enjoyable to watch as social history as it is as a record of their last performance together. With the band disintegrating, they still produce something unspeakably special, though not all of the observers seem to appreciate they are witnessing history.

How many songs did they leave behind? Two or three hundred, I suppose. And I could have made ten lists like this one. I wake up and I hear the sound of Good Day Sunshine and I feel happy to be alive. And I’m indirectly indebted to them for the name of this blog too, so I thank them for that.

Thom Gunn (1929-2004)

I discovered Thom Gunn’s poetry at university. Amid periodic bouts of study I found my college library to be an excellent resource for literature, and when, sequestered upstairs at 2 in the morning and making slow progress on whatever Berlioz essay I was supposed to be writing, I decided I needed a break, I would turn to the poetry shelves and pick out a volume of Apollinaire, say, and, if I happened to be alone, would read something out loud, just to give my mind something other to do than work. And it was on these shelves that I found the Faber edition of Gunn’s Collected Poems.

What was it that immediately appealed to me about Thom Gunn’s poetry, I wonder now. Because it’s not straightforward. Much of his poetry is oblique and requires repeated readings before it begins to yield rewards – and I was then, as I am now, a superficial reader, in spite of my continuous if feeble efforts to reform myself. But I was attracted by the obvious sensuality of his writing, which is present in his earliest poems, though it is only in the later ones that his own sexuality becomes overt.

Since the publication of perhaps his most celebrated collection in 1992, The Man With Night Sweats, the following poem, the first in the book, has been widely anthologised.

The Hug

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who’d showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

The fluency of this poem is tremendous, I think, its nimble fleet-footedness, the spacing of the pauses, the way it trips off the tongue when read aloud, its clever and sometimes unexpected, half-hidden rhymes. Perhaps one of the reasons for its popularity is that, unlike a lot of his poems, its meaning is very clear.

I quote it here because I recently came by chance across an American first edition of the book in our library, formerly the property of the literary scholar Tony Tanner, who was a close friend of Gunn’s. At the front, in Gunn’s hand, is written the following:

to Tony
“old friend” of the 2nd line
in this book —
now in the charmed empire
of your own attainment —

from Thom
with the tenth degree
of love (that’s the
highest!)

July 1992, Cambridge

I was exhilarated to discover this for the glimpse it provides of the life that lies behind the work. To those interested in a more in-depth look at Thom Gunn I recommend this feature from the Guardian, written around the same time I first read his poems, just a few months before his death.

Parzival

Last night I finished reading Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, which was written around 800 years ago. The oldest thing I’ve read, I’m pretty certain. The University of Cambridge was founded at the same time, which perhaps enhanced my sense of historical perspective.

I was reading it to satisfy a curiosity about the origins of Wagner’s opera Parsifal, which I’m going to see in London tomorrow. This text was one of his chief sources, though the events chronicled in Wagner’s opera form, as I had expected, only a very minor part of the book as a whole, and there are several things in the opera that do not occur in Eschenbach – Parsifal never kills a swan, he never meets Klingsor in person, Kundry doesn’t die. But the skeleton of the story – Parsifal is taken under the wing of Gurnemanz and taught how to be a knight, he searches for the Grail and succeeds in healing the wounded Amfortas, who has been ‘pierced through his genitals’ (ouch) – is there. Perhaps other aspects of Wagner’s plot occur in Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes, which was the basis of Eschenbach’s text.

I’ve used Wagner’s spellings so far, but will now revert to the ones I’ve been reading for the past two weeks, from Cyril Edwards’ recent (2004) translation. He notes at the start that his translation is less compromising than the previous ones in its representation of Eschenbach’s idiosyncratic, sometimes capricious style of writing, and I admit I found it pretty heavy going at times, though more for the saminess of the action – joust after joust after joust – than for any other reason. Fortunately the Oxford World’s Classics edition has an excellent introduction by Richard Barber that acts as an ideal primer for reading Grail literature, and this text in particular.

The narrative is shared fairly equally between Parzival and Gawan, both of noble stock – Parzival is descended from Gahmuret of Anjou, and Gawan is the nephew of King Arthur. The first two books (of sixteen) are devoted to Gahmuret’s adventures, and once Parzival is born the focus switches to his discovery of his heritage, his coming of age and his eventual heroism.

There are a number of things that take getting used to – a certain lack of variety in the plot, the universally observed rules of the chivalric code (honesty, bravery, nobility, the avenging of ills, etc., which most of us probably have an idea of), the frequency of outrageous coincidences (Parzival and Gawan are forever meeting people who turn out to be their aunt, uncle, brother or sister without apparently having had any awareness of their existence beforehand), the endless stream of characters. Eschenbach names several hundred people, and I was forever turning to the glossary of names and the genealogical table helpfully provided at the back. I’m not sure I’d have coped without it.

There is a straightforward artlessness about Eschenbach’s manner of storytelling that perhaps recalls other early texts – I thought of the Chester Mystery Plays – and which I found very moving in places. In one respect Eschenbach represents himself simply as a chronicler of events; in another he is a poet, and his descriptions become all the more poignant for being related in a matter-of-fact style. This excerpt from Book VI shows Parzival recalling the wife he has left behind him:

His falconers had ridden that evening from Karidœl to the Plimizœl, intent on hunting, but there they met with harm. They lost their best falcon — it hastened away from them and stood that night in the forest. It was overcropping that made it hasten away from the lure.

That night the falcon stood close by Parzival, both of them unacquainted with the forest and both feeling the frost hard there. When Parzival saw day appear, his path’s track was snowed over. Through much unpathed land he rode, over fallen tree-trunks and many a rock. The day, as it lengthened, shone ever higher, and the forest began to thin out, although there was one tree-trunk which had been felled upon a meadow. Towards that he slowly made his way, Arthur’s falcon keeping pace with him all the time. There a good thousand geese lay. A great gaggling arose. With a charge it flew in amongst them, the falcon, striking one of them such a blow that it only escaped by the skin of its teeth, under the fallen tree-trunk’s branch. Pain had put paid to its high flight. From its wounds, down onto the snow, fell three red tears of blood, which caused Parzival distress.

It was his loyalty brought this about. When he saw the drops of blood on the snow — which was entirely white — he thought: ‘Who has turned his skill to these bright colours? Condwiramurs, truly, these colours resemble you! God desires to enrich me with blessings, since I have found your likeness here. Blessed be God’s hand and all His creation! Condwiramurs, here lies your semblance, since the snow has offered whiteness to the blood, and that makes the snow so red. Condwiramurs, your bêâ curs resembles this — that you can’t deny!’

The warrior’s eyes matched — so it came to pass there — two drops with her cheeks, the third with her chin. It was true love he felt for her, entirely without deviation. He so immersed himself in these thoughts that he halted there, unconscious. Mighty love held sway over him there, his wife causing him such distress. These colours bore a likeness to the Queen of Pelrapeire’s person — she it was who plucked his wits from him.

Parzival remains in a love-induced trance while three separate knights assail him. Miraculously, he survives the experience.

Eschenbach is also a good-humoured and cheeky narrator. The episode where Gawan encounters a bed with a mind of its own (a depiction of which adorns the cover of the Oxford edition) is a highlight, as is the unflattering description of Cundrie’s physical appearance:

A plait crossed the hat and dangled down from her, as far as the mule. It was so long, and black, tough, none too lustrous, soft as a pig’s back-hair. She was nosed like a dog. Two boar’s teeth stuck out from her mouth, a good span in length. Each eyebrow thrust, plaited, past her hair-band. My courtesy has trespassed in the interests of truth, having to say such things of a lady! No other lady can complain of me on that count!

Cundrie had ears like a bear’s, no match for a suitor’s love’s desire. Her countenance was hairy, as all acknowledged. She carried a whip in her hand whose thongs were of silk, and whose stock was a ruby. This comely sweetheart had hands the colour of an ape’s skin. Her nails were none too bright, for the adventure tells me they stuck out like a lion’s claws. Seldom was a joust delivered for her love.

Like Shakespeare’s Caliban, Cundrie possesses some of the most richly evocative and exciting dialogue in the work, not least in the passage where she catalogues the planets in Arabic.

Anyone who knows anything about Wagner knows he was a bit of a raving antisemite. That’s more obvious in his writings than in his music, but if there is one opera above others that is tarred with that brush it may be Parsifal. There’s nothing explicitly antisemitic in its libretto, but the villainous character of Klingsor has historically been portrayed as a negative Jewish stereotype, and the theme of Parsifal’s blood purity, viewed from our post-WW2 perspective, can leave a bitter taste.

Bearing this in mind, it is refreshing to note the relative absence of such prejudices in Eschenbach’s text. The most interesting and enigmatic character in the whole story I found to be Parzival’s half-brother, Feirefiz. On account of his mother’s being a Moor, he is born with mottled black and white skin, and is occasionally compared to a magpie. Despite his unorthodox outward appearance and his being heathen rather than Christian, he is treated respectfully and without prejudice by others, possesses a powerful appeal to women, and is considered noble and brave. It is not until the very end of the book, where Parzival’s infant son Loherangrin is scared by the first sight of his uncle, that we see any negative reaction to Feirefiz. It may be galling to modern sensibilities that Feirefiz should be blind to the Grail until he has been baptised; but the extent to which such a man is not remotely demonised by Eschenbach – as one presumes he would have been by other authors – is pleasing.

Whether having read the book will affect my appreciation of the opera, I don’t know. I doubt it. But I have a feeling of preparedness that I never had when going into exams.

A telephone call from the Prime Minister

A bizarre but admittedly exhilarating thing happened to me this afternoon. I received a phone call at work from an employee of the Prime Minister’s Office wanting my advice. A pretty damning indictment of the country if David Cameron’s getting his staff to cold-call junior library assistants to find out what he should do, you might think, but given the announcement made at lunchtime that the nation’s forests weren’t going to be cut down and sold to the French or whatever the plan was, I was feeling better disposed towards the government than is my custom. So I stayed on the line.

'Gareth? I'm in the most frightful mess.'

I’ve only just begun, but permit me a diversion. It is not every day that one is called upon by one’s country, and I found my mind wandering to this dream, caught and catalogued by Roald Dahl’s BFG:

THE TELLYFONE RINGS IN OUR HOUSE AND MY FATHER PICKS IT UP AND SAYS IN HIS VERY IMPORTANT TELLYFONE VOICE ‘SIMPKINS SPEAKING’. THEN HIS FACE GOES WHITE AND HIS VOICE GOES ALL FUNNY AND HE SAYS ‘WHAT! WHO?’ AND THEN HE SAYS ‘YES SIR I UNDERSTAND SIR BUT SURELY IT IS ME YOU IS WISHING TO SPEKE TO SIR NOT MY LITTLE SON?’ MY FATHER’S FACE IS GOING FROM WHITE TO DARK PURPEL AND HE IS GULPING LIKE HE HAS A LOBSTER STUCK IN HIS THROTE AND THEN AT LAST HE IS SAYING ‘YES SIR VERY WELL SIR I WILL GET HIM SIR’ AND HE TURNS TO ME AND HE SAYS IN A RATHER RESPECKFUL VOICE ‘IS YOU KNOWING THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?’ AND I SAYS ‘NO BUT I EXPECT HE IS HEARING ABOUT ME.’ THEN I IS HAVING A LONG TALK ON THE FONE AND SAYING THINGS LIKE ‘LET ME TAKE CARE OF IT, MR PRESIDENT. YOU’LL BUNGLE IT ALL UP IF YOU DO IT YOUR WAY.’ AND MY FATHER’S EYES IS GOGGLING RIGHT OUT OF HIS HEAD AND THAT IS WHEN I IS HEARING MY FATHER’S REAL VOICE SAYING GET UP YOU LAZY SLOB OR YOU WILL BE LATE FOR SKOOL.

Well, it wasn’t quite like that. It was like this. A foreign dignitary is coming to visit (a Head of State, no less). We want to give him a CD as a present – something British. What should we do?

The power of being given such a responsibility! Well, my first thought was this, but apparently the recipient isn’t Christian, so choirs singing churchy music are out. But he is devoted to organ music, so what about that?

Who is this man? I wondered. Surely I’d have heard if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, say, was coming to Britain. Not very likely, given how much he loathes us. But what if he were making a top-secret visit that had to be kept positively hush-hush? Could I possibly pinpoint some music that would alter such a man’s perspective on the world, even curtail the pernicious spread of Islamic fundamentalism? It might take a bit more than a CD to do that. On the other hand, if I were to make a bad choice, might it expedite the start of that third world war we’ve all been expecting right about now? We all know how music can affect the mood. And that doesn’t even take into account the possibility of a major blunder like Barack Obama’s gift to Gordon Brown of a DVD box set of classic American films – all of them Region 1.

So I played it safe and advised Robert Quinney’s universally lauded recording of the organ of Westminster Cathedral, or either of John Robinson’s recent recordings from Carlisle Cathedral – his recital of mainly English music, or his traversal of the complete organ music of S.S. Wesley. The charming lady I spoke to suggested something involving the Mander organ of the Royal Albert Hall, citing its status as the second largest organ in Britain, but my own experience is that size is no indication of quality where organs are concerned.

It turned out that Robert Quinney himself had already been called earlier in the day, but it was nice to feel important for a few seconds. If the Iranians stop putting gays to death, I am happy to take some of the credit.