Here’s the table, and here are my cards, face up: I very rarely listen to them. Important – crucial, even – to me at the time, but that importance has flatlined over the years. Time has enabled a perspective that didn’t exist when I was so close to them I couldn’t see anything else. Now, they seem like a jolly enough bunch, singing songs Gran could pat her knee to, and the ruddy-cheeked newspaper boy could whistle as he went on his rounds. They were a great little Variety turn – possibly the best – seeing us through the Bakelite years and dropping us off in the sunflower of our love, our eyes like kaleidoscopes. But many British acts lifted the spirit of Our Island Nation in earlier times. George Formby, Vera Lynne, Max Bygraves, Lonnie Donegan. That’s the Moptop’s lineage – rollicking end-of-pier entertainment, and by golly did the loveable foursome deliver! Toe-tappers a-plenty!
The problem is the fans. The problem is always the fans. Because fans subscribe to a belief system, they buy into a myth, and the myth here is the Beatles Are The Best. Not even “were” the best. For fans, their floppy-fringed love-objects are still » Continue Reading.