Back in 2009 I received a rejection letter; a very nice 'Dear John' letter, but a rejection letter all the same. The BBC had passed on a radio play I'd written depicting the last ever meeting between John Lennon & Paul McCartney in New York in 1976. I mention this only because I received a text from James yesterday with the following flyer attached.
In his WhatsApp missive James said - "Dad, didn't you write this play fifteen years ago?" Indeed I did, James. Indeed I did. Which is why, a week on Wednesday, I'll be sat in row G of the stalls at Watford Palace Theatre making copious notes. And muttering a lot.
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Postscript 22.9.24
As I mentioned above, I went to Watford last Wednesday to see the play. There were some overlaps with mine (there had to be) but the writers took the production in a slightly different direction. And I enjoyed every minute of it. The two thesps who played John & Paul were superb. Will it transfer to the West End? Probably not. But I'm guessing they may take it on the road; in which case I'll definitely go and see it again. Anyway, you'll be pleased to know I've stood my legal team down!
I have a lot of love for John Power: after jumping ship from bass playing duties in the La's in 1992 (he and Lee Mavers had taken the band as far as they could*), Power formed Cast (one of the first - and probably one of the best - Britpop bands I ever saw, early in '95 at Trent Uni) before growing a beard, wearing plaid shirts and transmogrifying into something of a folkie.
John Power - Start at the Beginning (2015)
And along the way he's trod the boards - and gained much critical acclaim - in Lennon at Liverpool's Royal Court playing (the older) John Lennon** and narrator. Here he is backstage rehearsing one of my favourite Lennon songs. I particularly like it as having only two chords it's a tune I often play at the end of a night too.
John Power - Working Class Hero (2013
...
* I'm over simplifying, obviously. It's well documented that Mavers has spent all his working life trying to write and record the perfect pop song. Some say he achieved it with There She Goes. But not Mavers. Nearly forty years later he's still looking for that perfect melody, that perfect hook, that perfect chorus. It's his personal Holy Grail.
** As a native of Liverpool, a Beatles devotee, and having attended Quarry Bank High School, it's the role Power was born to play.
That feeling you get when you think you know everything about a song and then suddenly you hear how it was really meant to sound; i.e. the person writing and recording it in real time as he's vamping the chords on his old Joanna. Turns out James first heard this when he went to Uni in 2008 but failed to share this discovery with his old man. Fourteen years later and I get a casual text from him: "Dad, did I ever play you this?" I've known family rifts that have lasted for many years erupt over less (and I should know). If there's someone in your life who you think should hear this, and hasn't, please send it to them. Now. They will appreciate it...
In the world of Fifth Beatles - I imagine it to be like a low rent Stella Street where Pete Best and Brian Epstein run the corner shop and Billy Preston mans the laundromat - its inhabitants are all tenuously linked (some more than others) to the four lads from Liverpool who shook the world. And the Fifth Beatle (of which there are more than you care to think), by inference, each played his or her (small) part in the shaking. Anyway, about those flutes. Ever wondered who played the beautiful flute solo on John Lennon's You've Got to Hide Your Love Away? As pub quiz questions go it is quite niche, but the answer is Johnny Scott. Whilst this may not qualify him fully for Fifth Beatle status - maybe Sixth? - I bet it's a story that's enchanted the grandchildren over the intervening years.
Scott was - and indeed still is - a respected jazz musician, arranger and composer of many film scores. In the mid 1960s he found himself working with many acts on the EMI roster at Abbey Road and did a lot of work with George Martin (another early occupant of Fifth Avenue) - which is how he got sucked into the Beatles orbit.
At the behest of Martin he laid down a tenor flute in the spaces in Lennon's vocal track and an additional alto part played an octave higher. Hearing cover versions without the flute just don't sound right to me. Before I go, I just want to leave you with one of my all time favourite Beatles quotes. And, before you ask, it's not delivered by a Beatle. It's actually a Dandy Nichols line quite early on in the Help movie: waving to the Fab Four as they get out of their chauffeured limo and walk to their respective front doors, Nichols says to her friend about how fame hasn't changed them: "And still the same as they was before they was."
Did he? Or didn't he? We can talk till the cows come home about how George Harrison accidentally or otherwise plagiarised He's so Fine by the Chiffons, but it won't change the outcome. In 1976 the judge - after years of legal wrangling - found Harrison guilty as charged. Beatle George never saw a dime from his multi-million selling chart topper - ironic as he was the first of the post-Fab Four to land a Number One single on both sides of the Atlantic. So, whether I'm singing the George Harrison original (well, as original as a song with a nicked riff/motif can be), or the version George produced for his mate Billy Preston - before Harrison committed his to tape - My Sweet Lord is the 4h. selection of songs currently pin-balling round my skull 24/7.
Billy Preston: My Sweet Lord (1970)
John Lennon once famously said that whenever he heard My Sweet Lord he was convinced there was a God. Even as a non believer, I think I know where he was coming from.
George Harrison - My Sweet Lord (1970)
And, finally, the elephant in the room. It's hard to believe nobody (not even Phil Spector) told the ex-Beatle he was treading on very thin ice. But, hey, it made for a great rock and roll story.
John Junkin said it. John Lennon said it. "He's very clean" they both said. I know they were talking about Paul McCartney's grandfather, but my penchant for a bath most weekday nights, in addition to my daily morning shower and, well, I'm surprised sometimes I don't squeak. I'm hoping Carson Robison's theory that too much bathing will weaken you is not based in fact.
The Late Late Show comes out of Dublin every Friday night and is as Irish as, I don't know, leprechauns. The Blarney Stone. Father Ted. Tell you what, roll all three of those into one, put it into an RTÉ television studio and that's the Late Late (as it's known over there). It's been running since 1961 and in that time has only had five presenters, including the saint like Gay Byrne and the irrepressible Gerry Ryan.
D. Cullen on the other hand, whilst very much Irish, is still only a gossoon; he's barely old enough to remember the Millennium. But that didn't stop him playing his new single on the show earlier this month; or bringing a choir with him. Fair play. I think if I was debuting my new single on Ireland's Number 1 chat show, I'd bring along a choir. And a tasty horn section. And a few friends too, what the hell.
So, I don't know what it is - whether it's his voice, the piano, the tempo, or even the choir but I definitely get the feeling John Lennon would approve. I certainly do - it's a shoo in for my end of year Best Of, to be sure.
Went to see the much hyped Yesterday yesterday. Being something of a Beatles nut (clock the number of Beatles and Lennon & McCartney posts on this blog [left]), I thought it would be massively churlish of me if I didn't scribble a few words about it here. I'm usually pretty quick out of the traps when it comes to rating and ranking new movies, but this is a little bit different - I'm still processing it, would you believe; a fantastical plot (a world without the Beatles - really?) with seemingly more holes than a used dartboard, peppered with more than a few comedy cul-de-sacs and incorporating a typically lame Richard Curtis crow-barred rom-com. And yet, and yet...
That soundtrack; those songs. For all its faults, and there are many, it's the music, ultimately, that carries this film over the line. Himesh Patel who plays struggling singer-songwriter Jack Malik, has been gifted the most fantastic set of songs served on a silver platter and ready to be devoured. And they are, for the most part, played brilliantly.
Patel is not just a talented actor but he can play a bit too. That means there's no awkward miming or contrived camera angles to disguise the fact that a non musical actor is holding a strange instrument around his neck and doesn't know what a chord is, let alone know where they can be found on the neck of a guitar.
Himesh Patel - Yesterday (2019)
Apart from Malek's performance (and the Beatles music, obvs) I took three positives away from the film: Lily James - who played the love interest with just the right amount of girl next doorness. Ed Sheeran - just a good egg. The ginger superstar was quite happy to sit on the subs bench for much of the movie, but was given some great lines nonetheless. The best gag in the film - when Jack Malik realises, after an internet search, that his friends really aren't winding him up when they tell him they don't know who the Beatles are, he then Googles Oasis - nothing but a clutch of exotic holiday websites. "That figures" he says.
There are a number of songs I don't need to hear again. And at least two of them were written by John Lennon. Imagine is one; mawkish. Woman is another; anodyne. The latter was lifted from Lennon's Double Fantasy album just days after he was assassinated, and put out as a single. Whereupon it went straight to Number One; of course it did.
Double Fantasy was Lennon's first album in over five years. He'd turned his back on music in 1975 and had been working part-time for Warburtons. His new record, released only three weeks before an infamous autograph hunter lay in wait for the ex-Beatle outside the Dakota building, had generally been ignored by the press and public alike. Mark Chapman, however, changed all that.
But if you take Lennon's killing out of the equation, it's a very ordinary album; considering it was made by a very extraordinary man. It's slushy for the most part and a bit of a let down. With the exception of one track. I'm Losing You had been demo'd by Lennon with members of Cheap Trick and it was John at his lowdown best; dirty John, if you will.
But when it came to the finished studio version the rough edges had all been sanded down and his studio musicians had taken all the life out of it. Shame on them.
The Cheap Trick version appeared about 20 years later tucked away on an anthology. And it's still classic Lennon, sounding just how you've always wanted John Lennon to sound. Imagine if the rest of the album had been this good.
John Lennon with Cheap Trick - I'm Losing You (1980)
In 1996 Blair’s Britain couldn’t get enough of Britpop. With TFI Friday regularly outgunning News at Ten's viewing figures1, saturation point had yet to be reached and so, what Oasis and Blur had unwittingly started less than two years earlier, was now operating with an open house policy to all and sundry.
But quite how a Fab Four parody troupe who hadn’t been seen since 1979 fitted into the scene was, at first, a little unclear. But fit they did, perfectly.
The Rutles were essentially a ragtag bunch of bewigged men old enough to know better. A post-fab guitar band (in the guise of Neil Innes2– or was it the other way round?) who had openly lifted3 more Beatles riffs, harmonies and melodies than a flock of thieving Noel Gallaghers. Maybe, just (definitely) maybe, this resurgence was down to their mighty Archaeology album in which Innes lovingly tipped his John Lennon cap to the Beatles’ recently released Anthology series. Innes had mined his huge pop sensibility songbook and came up with something far and away greater than a regular tribute to Four Lads From Liverpool Who Shook the World™.
Laid out before us were 16 tunes, each of them a stand alone classic, yet when listened to back to back in, shall we say, the context of a lost Beatles album, then the ensemble piece was staggering. Staggeringly good, staggeringly incisive. Although context is usually everything, Innes proved with Archaeology it isn't always.
At the back end of last year when Neil Innes, via his Twitter feed, agreed to answer a few quick-fire Rutle related questions I jumped at the chance. I kicked off our brief 140 character limited chit-chat with:
When I played them to George H - after 3 or 4 - he said "Hang on, these songs are yours! Don't be shy." So I went ahead...
He went on to tell me that "Questionnaire was the song that persuaded me to go ahead." And what a great song that is - dipping, as it does, in and out of Fool on the Hill, I am the Walrus and Imagine, but never giving up its own identity; unlike the first album where the line between Beatles/Rutles, real/parody was so blurred it all became one.
When I asked Neil if he could condense Archaeology into a 4 track EP4, along with Questionnaire he name-checked Major Happy, Rendezvous and Shangri-La.
Shangri-La is so clever (but not in a smart arse way) in that it turns pastiche on its head. Not long before Archaeology Noel Gallagher had ripped off Innes' How Sweet To Be An Idiot (when Oasis recorded Whatever). Innes couldn't resist dropping that motif straight in at the start. I guess all's fair in love and plagiarism.
It's an "homage". They're not supposed to be Beatle songs but songs about what the Beatles wrote songs about... Love and Life? [Barry is a child - 2 x children]
However, unlike George (a huge supporter of all things Rutle) and, to a lesser extent, John, Paul McCartney never liked the Rutles (no shit Sherlock). He hated them. Indeed because of Macca, Innes spent many an awkward day in the High Court defending both the band and his own songwriting.
He gave me a hug at the cleaned-up "Magical Mystery Tour" screening - not that long ago - but I know he's not happy with the Rutles. I don't think he blames me personally, but he ought to mellow a bit. There was no fat at the BFI...
So treasure Archaeology. And treasure the Rutles. They may not have troubled the charts, or indeed the tabloids, in quite the way that Damon Albarn or the Gallagher brothers did in those heady days of Britpop, but if it's songs you're after (and, at the end of the day, aren't we all?), former Bonzo and Python Neil Innes is definitely worth taking a detour for.
The Rutles are on tour next May/June - "Get Up and Go Again" - Ricky is always drumming with the excellent Bonnie Rait and "Sir Dirk" is flogging his memoirs. After 40 years I'm happy to say it's no longer about the "Trousers" - it's about the songs. One big happy family! x N
1 I may be playing fast and loose with the ratings here. 2 Eric Idle had left the band some years earlier. He couldn't get into his stage pants anymore. 3 Interestingly Innes was accused of stealing Cheese and Onions from the Beatles (it once appeared on a 1980 Fabs bootleg - credited to John Lennon!) It was, in fact, Innes' original demo of his own song. 4 I often condense great works of art into miniature.
...
Postscript 12.5.24
Imagine my horror upon learning that after Neil's death his Twiitter account had been hacked by an illegal crypto currency fuckwit; comedian Dave Gorman flagged it up and basically called it out for what it was. So, if you're wondering why my Twitter interview with Neil looks a bit 'gappy', that's the reason. (I'm kicking myself for not screen grabbing them instead of just leaving the Twitter links.) I may reach out to Mr. Gorman up and ask him to help come and fill the gaps...
The plane touched down yesterday just after three o'clock. It was wet. It was windy. It was cold; everything Lanzarote wasn't. A miserable December Saturday afternoon in the UK has absolutely nothing going for it whatsoever. Even the pilot was apologetic, bless him.
Rewind less than 24 hours and I'd been gazing out to sea thinking how much more tolerable life would be if this was my view, this was my vista; a light so bright and so beautifully sharp, that, if I close my eyes (even as I'm typing this), I can still see. Let's hope I can still retrieve it from my memory bank next week, and the week after... Charles Trenet - La Mer (1946)
Since time immemorial Beatles fans and scholars alike have been debating (often heatedly) whether or not the White Album coulda/shoulda been released as a single album; trim the fat, ditch Revolution No.9 (the Emperor's new clothes, without doubt) and generally rid it of anything devoid of FABness. Pah! I hear you say. Even four sides isn't enough - we want six sides, eight even.
Blue Vinyl (1/1) - signed by Macca (rare as fuck)
Well, as you're probably aware, this month saw the majestic release of a whiter than white White Album with alternative takes, demo recordings made at George's house in Esher - complete with Harrison asking Macca how many sugars he wants in his tea - and is, essentially, the kitchen sink in vinyl format. Indeed, fetching it home from your local record shop would necessitate mechanical lifting machinery and, possibly, road closures.
Not for me, however. I fell in love with this album just the way it was intended way back when; and I've got all the Esher demos on bootlegs anyway.
But to go back to the double album/single album hot potato for a second - if you ever wondered what the perfect pared down track listing would have looked like (5 tracks on Side 1, five on Side 2) - then jazzer Ramsey Lewis has beaten you to it. By 50 years. That's right, Lewis went into the studio and recorded his White Album (he actually called it Mother Nature's Son) in December 1968 and released it later the same month: only a handful of weeks after the Beatles released theirs in the November. He didn't mess about did he? The world was still coming to terms with how utterly brilliant Lennon's Cry Baby Cry was, and here was Ramsey Lewis straight out of the traps giving us his sublime instrumental take. And, I have to say, almost edging it for me. Almost.
Just back from Liverpool where sleep was in short supply*. John Lennon wrote I'm So Tired whilst in India studying meditation with the Maharishi in 1968. After three weeks of quiet, and not so quiet, contemplation, it was driving him insane; to the point that he was plagued by insomnia. And it is a very John song. Every line is pure Lennon. Paul McCartney admits he had absolutely nothing to do with it.
This is for anyone who's having trouble getting to sleep tonight.
The Beatles - I'm So Tired
* Not getting to bed much before 5:00 a.m. probably didn't help
Liverpool tomorrow. I'm training it - using split tickets for the first time - ETA into Lime Street around lunchtime. Ray's flying in from Belfast, due to land around the same time, so it'll be a spot of bush tucker in the Philharmonic, and then we'll see where the fancy takes us.
We're not expecting to see Macca during our two day stopover, though if he did care to join us I'm sure he'd be good company. There are many questions I'd love to put to him, not least: 'Why, at the age of 76, are you still getting bent out of shape about songs being credited to Lennon & McCartney and not McCartney & Lennon or, in the case of 'Yesterday', McCartney & Lennon can whistle? Life's too short Paulie, get over yourself.
If I've got this right, these two Hard Day's Night period classics - which, as you can see (above) were paired as an 'A' & 'B' side for their American release - were written by the pair thus:
And I Love Her (1964)- McCartney, with Lennon writing the middle eight*
If I Fell (1964) - Lennon*
*Unless of course you, or indeed Macca, know different
The Web is awash with lists. Some might say saturated. Music websites, and blogs in particular, crave the condensing; the diluting and editing of anything and everything (and anybody) into a Top 10 - usually an artist or band's entire output boiled down to a rag tag bunch of songs that then has the word 'definitive' accredited to them. As if.
And none more so than the Beatles. To be fair they had a couple of stabs at it themselves. Once (A Collection of Beatles Oldies) while they were still kicking a ball, and two more (the Red & Blue double albums) when Macca realised that the revenue from Wings was hardly likely to keep a roof (or roofs, to be more precise) over his head. Then we had Anthology, of course, followed a number of years later by the unimaginative 1, before the joyous Love (take a bow Giles Martin) became, for many, the last word in Greatest Hits: the ultimate Beatles list, the Top 26, if you will.
But what of the Beatles solo material? Sure, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr have all been victims of record company hastily prepared compilations - individually. But nobody has put out the combined Greatest Hit compilationwith all four of them sharing centre stage. Is such an eight-legged monster even capable of walking, let alone running into a record store and jumping up onto the counter?
And, to be fair, as big a Beatles fan as I am (have you seen just how many namechecks they get around here?), even I would doubt the validity of such a piece of nonsense.
Which is precisely why I am more than prepared to commit heresy and offer up before you not a Best Of album, but a Greatest Hits EP - four songs that capture the very being of the post-Beatles recorded output. And that was my only guiding principle - it had to have just four recordings on there; not even one of each. Any four. Any.
It's at this point that it dawns on me, not for the first time, that John Lennon didn't care much for being an ex-Beatle (George even less so). But John really struggled to achieve anywhere near the PB he set himself while he was with the Fab 4. He peaked creatively in 1966 and, with the exception of a couple of White Album pearls (you know the ones I'm talking about), Lennon was pretty much a spent force. And no, Imagine is not the Holy Grail everyone thinks it is: it's crass and it's insensitive. If I ever hear it again it'll be too soon. Lennon, for me, very nearly missed the cut altogether - George was going to have two on there, but thoughts of the subsequent hate mail, and the fact that Working Class Hero probably defines Lennon, means it kicks off proceedings on Side 1, Track 1.
Next up is the biggest slice of glam ever to come out of 1972. And it had some real competition too; Bowie, Sweet, Glitter. Not to mention Bolan whose fingerprints are all over Ringo's Back off Boogaloo. A great way to round Side 1 off with.
Flip our little EP over and you'll be met by George's greatest ever song. Better than Something. Better than that one about his weeping guitar; better, even, than Taxman. When George realised, quite early on, that the Beatles wouldn't even last until the seventies (let alone forever), he began stockpiling lyrics and melodies in his personal song bank. When he came to make a withdrawal in 1971 he had a perfectly formed triple album's worth. A real dark horse, wouldn't you agree? I so very nearly chose the title track, All Things Must Pass, but then came to my senses. I'd Have You Anytime is perfect. It knocks the other three songs on this fantasy project into an old brown shoe.
Macca will be furious he's been left till last. Good. I'd love to tell him that he's not all that. I'd love to tell him that every time I hear him sing Hey Jude I want to stab myself in the eyes with knitting needles. I'd also like to tell him that how he talks about John Lennon is mean spirited and churlish. Someone once asked 'Is it me, or are the Beatles dying in the wrong order?' I knew what he meant.
So, what's it to be then? What one song written and performed by James Paul McCartney will fade out into the run-off grooves?
Damn you Macca. How the hell did you come to write something so bloody perfect as Maybe I'm Amazed? I've gotta give it to you, it's genius.
So, there you go, four musicians' (well, three and a drummer) entire solo canon reduced to less than a quarter of an hour. Let's clap it in:
Amateur photographer Keith Jones loves his native Liverpool with a passion. His latest project has seen him going around the city snapping the Pool as it is today, and then overlaying how it would all have looked 50+ years ago; the Beatles landing at Speke Airport in 1964, now John Lennon Liverpool Airport, being a prime example.
Lennon and McCartney wrote many songs together; and many more apart. But if you were to add up the ones neither of them had a hand in - but should have got a co-write on - you'd need a supercomputer. You know what (and who) I'm talking about: take your pick from any of this lot's back catalogues just for starters: Crowded House, World Party, Squeeze, Cheap Trick, Dodgy, Badfinger, Big Star, Oasis, Cotton Mather, ELO, Pugwash, XTC, Utopia, and (don't forget) The Rutles - the list is endless. Interestingly, these days Macca himself can't write a Paul McCartney song anymore without it sounding like a Wings pastiche. How tragic is that?
As this blog enters its eighth year you can see there's been a lot of Beatles related activity (the leader board on the left hand side of the screen is a dead giveaway) since 2010. But I've never before mentioned this trio of moptastic Macca infused Beatles soundalikes: from the top - The Rembrandts condensing the White Album into three minutes, followed by the Chili Peppers melding 'Helter Skelter' & 'Vanilla Sky'. And, finally, Jellyfish, who probably lived on a very limited diet of Rubber Soul and Revolver.
Macca is currently taking Sony through the courts, trying to get his hands back on 'Love Me Do', 'Please Please Me' and all the other tunes he and Lennon wrote which are soon coming out of copyright quarantine. If I was his him I'd be setting my legal rottweilers on all the artists I've mentioned above. And the hundreds more I haven't.
In 1971 there was no love lost between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Their solo albums from the time were loaded with venomous intertribal references; both eager to piss on the other's chips. Lennon, however, had to have the last word. Early copies of his Imagine album came with a limited edition postcard of him fondling a pig's ears. A direct jibe at Macca's Ram album cover. I told you it was serious.
When we first took the Number One Son across the pond to New York City we did all the usual touristy stuff - Times Square, Central Park, the Chrysler Building, Empire State, Greenwich Village and, of course, Liberty Island.
As a Beatles nut (like his old man), James was keen to recreate John Lennon's iconic photo shoot in front of the Statue of Liberty. Who was I to deny him?
Liverpool. What's not to like? We set up base camp at The Baltic Fleet, one of the city's finest ale houses, and ventured out from there.
From The Beatles to Hitler's brother (a former resident of the 'Pool by all accounts) via Tuk Tuk rides and several sensational beers, we had a blast.
Our numbers were reduced this time (and then there were three) but that never stopped John & The Liver Birds from living high on the hog for two long days and two long nights.
Points were awarded for spotting curlers and snakeskin stilettos. Points were deducted for mentioning the Mersey Tunnel. Damn you Sat-Nav.
The four lads who shook the world are, obviously, omnipresent and the whole weekend (as most weekends in Liverpool tend to be) was accompanied by a Lennon and McCartney soundtrack.
But you do kind of feel sorry for anyone working in a 24/7 Beatles environment. Hey Jude and Let it Be must be akin to Chinese water torture after a while.
After hours parties in the hotel room were civilised and not at all sordid(!) and we all expect to be heading back to The Hampton by Hilton sooner rather than later.
