I published a post about the last episode of our humble A Year With The Beatles podcast at the end of last month, for those of you keeping up. The show was a limited series of podcasts that explored one studio album by The Beatles each month as hosted by my oldest and best friend Graeme Burk and co-hosted by me, along with many other fine people as guests.

But what I didn’t tell you here on The Delete Bin was that during the course of our project, we recorded a number of supplementary episodes in the series beyond just those 12 albums.

For those of you who are completists, here is a list of those episodes for your amusement and edification that you may have missed, and with links to each!

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When George Harrison returned from visiting Bob Dylan and The Band, who were happily holed up in Upstate New York and busy inventing Americana by the end of 1968, he described the situation to which he was returning as “the winter of discontent that was The Beatles”. That’s pretty harsh. But things really were that bad, with relations between the principals having deteriorated over the course of the year. Nineteen-sixty-nine didn’t promise to be very much more bearable for The Beatles. And it wasn’t!

No one could say they weren’t busy, though. They’d made a film and had a lousy time of it. They’d recorded hours and hours of material for a new record but no one wanted to do the necessary with the tapes in order to turn it into an album. Internally, the whole Beatles thing was a giant pain in everyone’s ass by early 1969. This isn’t even counting the money-hemorrhaging business pursuits of their company Apple Corps, or the fact that discussions around future management of the band and its catalogue were becoming more and more heated and unproductive.

In the middle of all this, they really were trying to get back to where they once belonged. They wanted to kick all the psychic crap they’d accumulated just from being Beatles to the curb and make a stark, honest, and liberating rock n’ roll record without any studio trickery just like they’d done in their early career. The result is the only Beatles album I don’t love; Let It Be. Read more

A recurring theme in my walk through The Beatles’ discography and therefore their history too, has been the mythic quality of their story. For me and for many fans, The Beatles are more than just a rock group. They were a generational ideal, or at least representatives of what talented people could do when they came together to form a common identity.

When we think of any band we love, this is often the common denominator; that in the making of art, mortality is subverted somehow. The Beatles went beyond the realm of the musical in this. They were cultural paragons, and collectively a symbol for that which can potentially change the world for the better. That’s a lot of pressure on four musicians in their twenties. It couldn’t last. Nor did it.

It’s been noted by both McCartney and Starr that when The Beatles recorded Abbey Road, they weren’t doing so with the idea that they’d never record together as a band again, as bad as things were getting by 1969. Maybe in retrospect it just seems like it. But there is something of the journey to Avalon about this record. Read more

The Beatles had a heck of a 1967, with plenty of ups and downs to characterize the year. One big “up” was the success of Sgt. Pepper in June that helped to change the game for peers, fans, the music industry, and for The Beatles themselves. Another was the discovery of Transcendental Meditation, which initially helped them to gain perspective on their own fame and the demands of the material world. They would double-down on their involvement with it by joining their newfound guru, Maharishi Mehesh Yogi, in Rishikesh by the start of 1968. That’s another story.

But back to 1967.  A big “down” in this very same year was the loss of their manager, Brian Epstein, who died due to an accidental overdose of prescription drugs in August while the band were away in Wales on a TM course. This set the band adrift in terms of their commercial destinations, an area that Brian had always tended as their manager. In fact, Brian had been their ballast as a unified group all around. By the end of 1967, they were on their own. So they decided to keep working.

They made a film, Magical Mystery Tour, that was shown on British TV on Boxing Day. Around the same time, they put out a couple of EPs with some new songs they’d worked up and had featured in the film along with a few that hadn’t been. A few of those songs were about their childhoods back in Liverpool, a theme which the film also touches on. Given the loss of their friend, it probably seemed like a good idea to reset things with such an affectionate nod to their roots during what must have been a very confusing and upsetting time. In so doing, they managed to create the most childlike and optimistic releases in their catalogue. It’s certainly their most “scouse” record, which is to say it’s overtly rooted in Liverpudlian culture.

Eventually, Capitol records who distributed Beatles releases in North America put all of the songs on the EPs together into a bang-up full album called, well, Magical Mystery Tour. And for once they were dead right to do so, so much so that Parlophone and Apple included the album in the cannon of official Beatles releases (so, we did too!). It’s a record that John Lennon once called his favourite Beatles album “because it’s so weird”.

Joining us this time around for our magically mysterious tour of the Beatles discography is British TV expert, visual artist, and film history author Jim Sangster, who as it happens is also from Liverpool. He even recorded his part of the episode while being only a short hop and a skip from Woolton, the site of the first meeting between Dirk and Nasty themselves. This is appropriate in that this really is the most Liverpool of The Beatles’ albums by some distance. There’s lots of cultural references to unpack here, and Jim’s the man to help us do it even when it gets graphic (which it does). We also review the aforementioned film Magical Mystery Tour, famously pasted by critics at the time. Only this time, it’s our turn!

Listen to the episode right here.

And from here, Good People, I must leave you until the dawn of 2017 (or thereabouts) when, if the stars align as they should, I will return with a mix of new songs to kick off our New Year. The podcast will continue, too of course. Until then, happy holidays everyone. Thank you all for joining me in 2016 by reading, subscribing, leaving your comments, and sharing on your social feeds. Until we meet again, friends …

Enjoy!

With the significant maturity spike as shown in Rubber Soul, it is almost inconceivable that The Beatles were only on their way up when it came to making sophisticated music and recording it in a revolutionary way in time for their seventh album, Revolver. They had a number of factors that helped them do this beyond their own burgeoning interest in the album format during a time when their touring days were grinding to a halt.

First, by 1966 they had a number of peers doing similarly revolutionary and left of centre work from the Stones’ “Paint It Black”, to the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”, to the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”, along with so many other examples. Second, they had new fangled studio technology that helped them get what they wanted more easily, with automatic double tracking, tape varispeed, and improvements in amplification and microphone technology. Third and finally, they had producer George Martin, and a young engineer named Geoff Emerick to take their creative ideas and turn them into practical sonic realities to create what was their most sophisticated and varied album to date, a work that still has impact on recordings today fifty years after its creation. The amazing part is, as groundbreaking as Revolver was, The Beatles were only getting started as to where they would take the album format, not only for them but for their peers, too.

During this month’s episode of A Year With The Beatles podcast, my co-host Graeme Burk and I are joined by writer, musician, songwriter, and seasoned podcaster in his own right Alex Kennard. In addition to talking about the record and our favourite moments as taken from it, we also talk about Howard Goodall’s documentary on how The Beatles were exemplars of western composition by the 1960s. That decade was a time when a movement of modernist and post-modernist composers had largely given up on the conventions of classical composition in order to explore new territories, often leaving general audiences behind. The Beatles re-positioned those conventions in pop music to breathe new life into them. There is some argument as to the validity of this interpretation of history, and also some thoughts on what most surprises us on a compositional level when it comes to The Beatles.

To listen to this month’s episode, make with the clicking right here.

Enjoy!

The Beatles demonstrated a significant spike in maturity by the time they began to write songs for their sixth record, Rubber Soul. This revealed itself in the way they recorded the album, deliberately meant to be an artistic statement and not just as a memento of their live act. Their new maturity also revealed itself in the arrangements of the songs, incorporating new instruments and the influences of music from other cultures, too. It certainly comes out in the vocal arrangements that are gloriously layered in a way that, as great as the harmonies always were on Beatles records, reaches a sonic zenith here with the best singing of their career as a band to date.

Possibly the most striking sign that the Beatles had truly come into their maturity as a band, a recording entity, and as individuals is the songwriting. There are love songs on this record as expected. But, they aren’t just the paeans to puppy love as they were on “Thank You Girl” or “From Me To You” from two years previous. As Moe Berg from Canadian band The Pursuit of Happiness once said: “I don’t write songs about girls anymore. I have to write songs about women“. That’s where the Beatles were at by Rubber Soul; they were adults now. So, here on this set of songs love is far more complex, often provoking as much ire and insecurity as it does warm feelings of affection. At times, it gets pretty dark and overtly so, where in the past those feelings of anger and resentment were less obvious behind a pure pop sheen. Basically, Rubber Soul is the first of their records aimed at grown-ups, or soon to be grown ups, and not specifically at teenagers screaming from the stands.

To discuss some of these themes in this episode of the podcast, my good friend Graeme Burk and I am joined by NPR Books editor Petra Mayer to talk about these very themes, and other bits and pieces to do with The Beatles sixth UK record. Speaking of teenagers screaming from the stands, we also talk about an historic performance not just in Beatles history but in all history; The Beatles at Shea Stadium.

Listen to the podcast right here.

Enjoy!