The Beatles: a trigger for a musical revolution

In an extract from a new anthology of Beatles-based writing from the Guardian and the Observer, Stanley Reynolds turns his investigative eye on a new four-piece band from Liverpool
The Beatles at the Cavern
The Beatles at the Cavern. Photograph: Michael Ward/Rex Features

On 5 October 1962, the Beatles released their first single, Love Me Do. It eventually reached No 17 in the UK charts, but this modest debut was the trigger for a musical revolution.

At first the national press paid little attention to the Liverpool four-piece. Then, in February 1963, their second single, Please Please Me, topped the charts (helped by an appearance on the Thank Your Lucky Stars TV programme) and it was hard to ignore them. Beatlemania had arrived.

The Guardian embraced the new phenomenon in June 1963 when it sent respected writer and critic Stanley Reynolds to Liverpool to investigate. The long feature that followed was illustrated with Graham Finlayson's brilliant, moody photographs of the Cavern Club.

That piece, which you can read below, is the first in a new anthology of Beatles-based writing from the Guardian and the Observer.

Throughout the early years of the group's success, both papers regularly carried news items about screaming girls, boys being suspended from school for sporting Beatle hairstyles and the storming of America, rather than reviewing the actual music. By the mid-1960s though, with Beatles records becoming ever more sophisticated, a serious level of criticism was required.

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At the Guardian, Edward Greenfield, the paper's classical record reviewer, was given the task of deconstructing discs such as Revolver (For No One: "Purcellian tricks ... gently-moving, seamless melody with characteristic descending bass motif, over which half way through there emerges a haunting descant"), while at the Observer, Tony Palmer, a leading director of musical documentaries, did a similar job (Revolution 9: "backwards-tapes, janglings from the subconscious memories of a floundering civilisation. Cruel, paranoiac, burning, agonised, hopeless.") Other notable names to be given the honour of writing about the Fab Four included Kenneth Tynan, George Melly and Geoffrey Cannon.

The Beatles: A Band Reviewed is now available as an ebook for £1.99.

From the archive, 8 October 1969: The Guardian reviews Abbey Road

Big time
By Stanley Reynolds
The Guardian, 3 June 1963

Written across the front of St George's Hall, Liverpool (a building dear to the heart of John Betjeman), are huge chalked letters declaring: "I Love the Beatles." There is hardly anything cryptic about this declaration to anyone who has ever viewed Juke Box Jury, listened to Pick of the Pops, or fathered a teenage daughter, for in the last six months the Beatles have become the most popular vocal-instrumental group in Britain, and as everyone with any pretension towards mass culture should know, the Beatles are from Liverpool.

In fact, there is a connection between Liverpool and the four young musicians that seems to go deeper than pride for hometown boys; something, perhaps deep in the mysterious well of English and especially northern working-class sentimentality. When Liverpool, and the north in general, was a forgotten second class citizen, this rock group suddenly made Liverpool fashionable in the entertainment world. After their first two records it became necessary for people in the business in London to learn a few words of Scouse.

And their third record, From Me To You, was the top selling record, with 500,000 copies sold, for six weeks; another song written by them but sung by another Liverpool boy is current top; and still another of their songs sung by yet another Liverpool singer was number one on the sales charts for several weeks.

Unlike earlier Liverpool entertainers, who seemed to either Londonise themselves or specialise in being Scouser yokels, the Beatles have come up with a different and heavily northern flavoured sound of their own. It is amusing without becoming a joke. Bowing to romantic pseudo-sociology one might say that they are representative of the war babies who were unable to get jobs in the England of HP fridges and Whipsies. They have certainly set off a chain reaction in Liverpool, where there are now about 200 rock groups. London talent scouts are said to cruise Merseyside's clubland like sharks in a swimming pool. What Lord Hailsham tried to do for the north-east, the Beatles have apparently been able to do for Liverpool.

In order to become the second city of the British musical industry it seems that Liverpool now only needs its own recording studio. But even with having to go to London to record, Liverpool has won the title of "the Nashville of Britain," and if one looks at the percentage of Liverpool records in the sales charts, then the city does indeed rank with the American pop music capital.

But if the Beatles have overnight made Liverpool something that the London music world has to reckon with, the Beatles' own success has not been overnight. When they first played at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, now a sort of D'Oyly Carte of what the cognoscenti call The Liverpool Scene, they received a note from the management saying: "If you play another rock number you'll have to leave." (Another early Liverpool rock artist, Rory Storm, was actually fined 10s by the former Cavern management for playing rock.) So the Beatles went to Germany – thus setting a career pattern for other northern groups, for Hamburg now rocks with Merseyside music – but they then experienced the same difficulty as they had had at the Cavern. Then Paul McCartney, who with John Lennon writes the Beatles' songs, decided on a typically Liverpudlian approach. "There was a big German pop singer at the time named Peter Krause," he said, "Everyone wanted us to sing like him. One night I stepped to the mike and said in fractured German 'Und nun wir muchen Peter Krauses's latest single splelen. A grosser hit.' Then we played just what we wanted."

After time the Beatles' own sound caught on and they became best-sellers in Germany with a recording called "My Bonny"; this was before they had been discovered in England. They experienced difficulty in breaking into England because they were strongly influenced by American singers such as Chuck Berry, and the Shirelles, who are not well known here. Berry, a coloured man who is now doing his singing in a prison cell, was the original rhythm and blues singer, as opposed to ordinary rock. The Beatles are in the rhythm and blues tradition, which is very Negro and earthy, and related to folk music. Four years ago when they started singing together England was going through a trad and skiffle craze.

Three of the four Beatles – Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and John Lennon are grammar school boys. The fourth, Ringo Starr, aged 22, who is the drummer and a kind of talking Harpo Marx figure, claims in true Liverpool fashion, that he "was educated at Butlins."

It was in Europe that they started forming the Beatle image: the brushed straight down over the forehead haircuts, strangely reminiscent of the left-wing angry young men of Berlin in the 1930s; the publicity pictures in dark suits, looking stern and stiff like old-time Wild West badmen, and usually taken on bomb site or a scrap yard, was the idea of a German photographer.

The Cinderella aspect of the story started when Mr Brian Epstein, the director of a chain of Liverpool music shops, found that customers were asking for records by the Beatles. He traced them to Hamburg only to find that they were back playing at the Cavern only 100 yards away from his office. Mr Epstein, still only 28, signed them up and has been managing them, and a half dozen other Liverpool recording groups, ever since. (There are 14 Liverpool other groups, under separate management, also making records now.)

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Mr Epstein, an oddly shy former student at RADA, has been lucky. Each of the top Liverpool groups has its own style, and Liverpool with a folk music tradition perhaps as old and original as the American Negro's, does not lend itself to imitation.

A visitor to the Cavern will sense this right off. There is something essentially Liverpudlian about Matthew Street, in the centre of the markets and warehouses, where a dray horse with flowered bonnet stands by the Cavern entrance oblivious to the beatniks and the noise. And inside the club, down CND symbol smeared walls to a dark and bronchial cave, the dancers have originated the Cavern Stomp, because they did not have room enough to twist. In the dressing room off stage a steady flow of rock artistes come to talk with Mr Bob Wooler, the Cavern's full-time disc jockey whose visiting card tells you, with Dickensian charm, that he is "a rhythm and blues consultant."

That is The Cavern, duffel coats and feigned boredom. On tour it is like a Hollywood success story. At the Odeon, Manchester, in the Beatles' dressing room, the four boys were asking a reporter from a disc magazine to please see if she could do something to stop girls from sending them jelly babies. She had once said they liked them. "We've got two ton of them now," John Lennon said. "Tell them to send us E-type Jaguars or button-down shirts." Someone came in and said two girls had won them in a contest. "Just who are these girls who won us?" John Lennon asked. "I mean, how long have they won us for."

Outside the street was crowded with girls who could not get into the theatre. They threw stones at the window to draw the Beatles' attention. Someone pointed out that Caruso under similar circumstances once sang to such a street audience, so Paul McCartney stuck his head out of the window but only to wave a "Beatle doll." Someone asked if they had bought any cars and the curious Puritanism of the north showed in their faces. No, they said, no taste for champagne, and no cars; they were putting their money in the bank. Pale from night work and needing a lot of makeup even after a holiday in the Canary Islands, it seemed an unlucky task to be the symbol of modern northern youth. But if you had left the theatre, then going out by a side door, and had come face to face with the mob of teenagers who rushed forward their smiles, like Ezra Pound said, all teeth, only to be then recognised as nobody; then under the crushing contemptuous glares, you would have realised the importance of being Ringo Starr.

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