The Beatles were a cultural phenomenon that keeps on giving even to this day. Generations have come and music genres have changed, but The Beatles remain. Their music goes on and on. But why do The Beatles endure? What is it that makes them so relevant even 55 years after they broke up? In a conversation with Oliver Craske, who has written in length about the pop band, Sidharth Bhatia tries to decipher this mystery that has left many fans questioning the same.
Sidharth: Hello and welcome to The Wire Talks. I’m Sidharth Bhatia.
They lasted for less than a decade as a group. All their well-known songs were recorded in the 60s. They broke up 55 years ago. So many more music genres and popular artists have emerged since then.
So why are they still big? Why do their songs still get downloaded in humongous numbers from Spotify and other places? And most of all, how come they won a Grammy just this year? The Beatles continue to be popular with generation after generation. Their albums sell big. And the two individual performers, who are still alive, draw crowds even though now they are in their 80s.
Ringo Starr just had a number one album. And Paul McCartney continues touring all around the world. Films continue to be made and books on them are published regularly.
My guest today, Oliver Craske, is somebody who knows quite a lot about this. Krask, who is an author and book editor, wrote An Indian Son, The Life and Music of Ravishankar – a well-received biography of Ravishankar – and has worked on many books about The Beatles – The Beatles Anthology, The Beatles Get Back, which accompanied the Peter Jackson film, and George Harrison Living in a Material World.
He is going to tell us why The Beatles still endure after so many years. Oliver Craske, welcome to The Wire Talks.
Oliver: Thank you, Sidharth. It’s a real pleasure to be here.
Sidharth: Oliver, tell us succinctly in a few short words, what is the secret of this enduring popularity of The Beatles?
Oliver: Gosh, that’s a big question. I don’t think there’s just one reason, but fantastic music is the baseline of everything, which somehow still endures and appeals to new generations.
And lots of other factors as well. Maybe we can go into lots of things, including the personalities that they were, and the innovation that they represented in their time, which I think is still carrying through amazingly even today. And I’d say also what they represent to new generations.
Maybe there’s a bit of nostalgia for the 1960s and that era of real positivity and so on. And maybe, in today’s times, we still need a dose of that.
Sidharth: Yeah, so we’ll go one by one with all those points and a few more that will come up, I hope.
But I want to pick up on the fact that fantastic music – if I were to play devil’s advocate – has come from so many bands since, so many artists since, even their contemporaries, you may argue, even though some people don’t like them; The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd – fantastic music of that generation. And then you jump generations and there’s fantastic music right up to today. And yet, The Beatles still get downloaded the most.
While I was researching, I was quite surprised to know that they still get downloaded the most on Spotify compared to the others. We are not talking Taylor Swift, of course, but still. So there must be something special.
Would you say that it’s also because they were the first? They were innovators with every album they produced. They were innovators technically, technologically, as well as in terms of the songwriting.
And there’s something about those songs that carries through these generations. I mean, if you take even a simple song like I Saw Her Standing There or She Was Just 17 or whatever, or P.S. I Love You, simple songs, simple words, or you jump a few albums and you come to Tomorrow Never Knows and you jump a few more albums. So would you say it was the constant innovation that is contemporary even today?
Oliver: I think that’s a big part of it.
I mean, obviously, they became these massive global stars early on, but by 1964, they were really global stars. So we’re talking only about 18, less than 18 months after their first recording with George Martin. And to our ears, maybe that music does sound pretty simple.
I think that’s true. But I think at the time it sounded entirely fresh and new. And so they were doing something very new and setting the bar higher than anyone else had done.
And then, as you say, they continued to evolve in that short decade, less than a decade that they were around. This incredible musical transformation, which mirrored also how they looked, their sort of visual looks, how fast that evolved and how the world was changing so quickly in that period. So I think that that sense of constant innovation, constantly moving on, every album is something new again, and there’s a change in the sound.
It’s just phenomenal, I think, even now just to listen to that development. And I mean, there were other fantastic bands. I mean, it was a real golden age for pop music at the time.
There were lots of others around, but somehow they were always on the cutting edge of everything and they were listening to everyone else around them. So they were absorbing all those influences. So they were listening to The Who, for example, and as The Who became a harder rock sound, The Beatles responded with Helter Skelter, for example.
They were always constantly drawing in all the other influences, even as they were creating. So I think that’s a big part of it. I think our modern world is kind of, we think of it being defined by this kind of necessity to reinvent yourself as an artist and to kind of admire people who shapeshift in that way.
And I think they were real, they really set the template for doing that themselves. How does that sound?
Sidharth: Yes, I think there is a point here, but let me also add another point to it. And let’s take the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team.
I think a team like that hasn’t come for a long time and wasn’t there before them, of course, because others used to write songs for the big stars of the day. Each player, each participant, each member of that group contributed something, George’s guitar, George Harrison’s guitar, Ringo Starr’s drumming, which really blended with the song – it was a composite band.
Now, if I talk about the lyrics, I don’t think I can hum or want to hum a song by, say, The Who, which was a pretty innovative band in its time, or Pink Floyd, which was doing some great albums, concept albums. But they are not three-minute songs that I would want to play at different times of my day or at different moods, while The Beatles are the whole composite thing, which give me music for every occasion and in every mood and every flavour and with every kind of innovation, technological as well as, I mean, what George Martin did, we could talk about that, but also what they did themselves and created these new sounds all the time. So I think it’s the compositeness of the band that really stays with us.
And I think there is something to be, there is a payoff in simplicity also, because their songs in the beginning and later too are sometimes simple songs that touch us. Now, we take something like Imagine or Let It Be, not Imagine, but let’s say Let It Be or Something or Hey Jude, they’re simple songs. There’s great music happening there, but they’re easy to sing along.
So maybe I’m throwing a lot of things together, but I’m just thinking to myself as a fan and as a questioner, could that be one of the reasons?
Oliver: I think even the songs that you describe as simple, I mean, there’s the gift of melody in it, isn’t there? I mean, you know, that’s why we sing along with them. And that’s something that is maybe deceptive. It feels simple, but we immediately find the melody catchy because there’s something brilliant in it.
And it’s not something that can be easily done. I mean, you mentioned the songwriting partnerships and the, I mean, Lennon-McCartney: I don’t think there has been a sort of duo in the pop music era that’s been comparable really as songwriters. And as you said, they drew on all these different influences and they themselves early on also look to the sort of generation before of these, you know, like the sort of Motown songwriters or Brill Building songwriters from Tin Pan Alley, you know, and they were looking at these, you know, great composers of 50s pop songs or 40s pop songs and seeing themselves as like that, as being a songwriting partnership.
So they drew on all these different influences. They were, you know, they absolutely loved their American rock and roll, black music, Little Richard and so on, but they’re also drawing on, you know, other types of songwriters and the sort of musical tradition, for example, you hear that a lot in Paul’s songwriting. And so, as you said, there’s a kind of, there’s a song for every mood almost.
As a fan, you know, you can find something that fits the mood that you want at a particular time of day. I think if it was easy to kind of bottle what they did and this sort of simple magic, we’d all be doing it or we’d all be able to, we wouldn’t be talking about it 60 years later and still trying to put our finger on what it was. I think that’s the beauty of it.
It’s so multivarious and complex.
Sidharth: So Chuck Berry used to complain that they had copied him and that John Lennon copied him and that John Lennon then had to use three of his songs. I think there was a case that was settled out of court.
But they were very, very clear that they were absorbing influences from Little Richard, from Chuck Berry, from so many others. In fact, as time went on, they picked up hints from Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan complained that all they were doing is picking up ideas that he was putting forward.
But they had no hesitation in saying they were absorbing these influences.
Oliver: Yeah, they were fans as well themselves, weren’t they? You know, they were so excited to meet Little Richard early on and then were playing his songs. And in that film, you briefly mentioned, Beatles 64, which was just released recently, there’s a clip of George Harrison playing. They’re down in Florida in early 1964, and he’s playing an acoustic guitar and he’s singing in a Bob Dylan style. And, you know, it’s so in the moment.
You know, we know he became this massive Bob Dylan fan, but he’s obviously just been listening to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album and the Talkin’ Blues style. That’s all, you know, the excitement of the moment for them, you know, that they’re fans as well as being these phenomenal musicians themselves. And they can bring it all in.
Sidharth: Interestingly, he did sing a Bob Dylan number, If Not For You, later on for his triple album, and later created this super group with Bob Dylan and others, the Travelling Wilburys. So they were not sly cheaters.
Oliver: No.
Sidharth: They were very open about it.
Oliver: I think it would be fair to say that George, probably his two musical heroes, were Ravi Shankar, who, as you said, I wrote about, and I think Bob Dylan. I think he was always – he was good friends with Dylan, but he was also in awe of him for what he’d done. And as you say, he wore that on his sleeve. They all did.
They love to talk about their influences.
Sidharth: So now I’m going to go somewhat deeper into why their music was changing. Imagine you are 60 years old, 16 or 18, whatever, and you listen to this song, like Nowhere Man or even Tomorrow Never Knows, and you wonder to yourself, what’s going on? And today, they’re part of the soundtrack. It doesn’t sound that impressive.
So, you know, I thought after the first three or four albums, which were full of young love songs, each of their albums after Rubber Soul, which came in 1965, which is just two years after their first album. Just think about it, two years later, they say, Please Please Me.
And in Rubber Soul, they have Nowhere Man, Norwegian Wood with its sitar. And most of all, In My Life, which is completely a revolutionary song. The whole melody is completely revolutionary.
It’s the first time Lennon is writing about his life. It took two years. That’s quite a development, isn’t it? And they’d had about four or five albums in between. They were producing albums like anything. I think they produced something like 12 or 13 albums in those seven or eight years. And in the American market, they produced something like 17.
So they were prolific. So tell me about what Rubber Soul must have represented at that time.
Oliver: Yeah, I think it’s interesting you picked up on In My Life, because as you say, it’s this autobiographical song written by John Lennon, mostly, in which he’s reflecting on his childhood.
And he’s kind of admitting to his own sort of nostalgia for the past. And it’s part of this development where he’s talking about his frailties more and more. He’d done this already in the song Help.
I think it’s so important that they moved on from these initial songs where they were, you know, addressing the object of love, Love Me Do, Please Please Me. And now it’s talking about feelings. And maybe this is perhaps to listen to Bob Dylan or just starting to develop as artists.
But the music has that sense of nostalgia and sensitivity that matches the words. And this art form is really being taken on to another level now where the music and the words were working together. It’s a fantastic song.
And there’s that lovely middle eight on the piano, which is actually played by George Martin, their producer. So I think these kind of instrumental touches as well that mark them out where, you know, you’d have a like a sort of harpsichord style solo there, or you had a string quartet on Yesterday, earlier that same year, things that were new, you know, you just wouldn’t expect to find that on a pop song in 1964.
Sidharth: Or a sitar.
Oliver: Or, as you said, that same album, you’ve got George’s first efforts on sitar on Norwegian Wood. So they’re always pushing. Yeah, I mean, his first efforts were, by his own admission, very amateur.
This is before he’d even met Ravi Shankar, which didn’t happen until the following summer in 1966. But he’d been listening to Ravi Shankar’s albums and became fascinated by the sitar and David Crosby of the Birds had spoken to him and also encouraged him to listen to Ravi’s records.
And so George got himself a cheap sitar in London. And when they were just recording this song that John Lennon had written, Norwegian Wood, he just, you know, as they tended to do, was sort of reach for something innovative. And he brought the sitar into the studio and added a solo on.
And again, you’ve got a completely new sound, which was something we associate with him album by album. They’re bringing in all these different sounds, innovation and I think you get this progression. I mean, you see it, you hear it even more the next album, which is Revolver, you hear the sound moving on even more.
So it would be one of my top two favourites of their albums, Revolver. There’s such wonderful song writing on it.
And the sounds, I mean, the last song on the album is, as you mentioned, is Tomorrow Never Knows, which is a completely revolutionary soundscape with all these sort of backwards tapes and use of snatches of sitar and tempura and treating John Lennon’s vocal like he’s a Tibetan llama singing from the mountaintop. And it was actually the first song they recorded on that album.
It wasn’t like people often think that it’s just about to do Sergeant Pepper, that it’s sort of a stepping stone, but it’s the other way around. That was actually the first thing they recorded for that album.
Phenomenal.
Sidharth: For Revolver.
Oliver: For Revolver, yes, yes.
Sidharth: So I’m jumping on to the next album. But for Revolver, of course, that’s a great song, Tomorrow Never Knows. And I later found out that the Seagull sounds were Paul and they had either double looped the tape or taped at full speed, but recorded it the other way around. So, it’s just a song that even today I wonder how they must have done it. So you can imagine what it must have been back there in those days, in ‘66.
Oliver: It’s interesting because as you said, they were using tape loops on that song.
So little short spools of physical tape, which they just glue the end onto and then run it through the head of a tape player. And there may be sort of five second samples. And you get this sort of Seagull-like sound.
One of them is a backwards bit of sitar playing and they’re all mixed live in the studio. I mean, this is the really cutting edge of the time. They were actually copying what some of the electronic composers were doing at that time – people like Stockhausen. They were drawing on these influences to bring it into pop music.
Now you can do that on your computer in a matter of seconds. You could do a little loop and play it. But back then, it required like this sort of wonderful analog technology to sort of run through a tape loop through a machine while they were live mixing. And it’s amazing to think that’s how they did that stuff.
I think maybe because you’re at the limits of the technology, it makes you very, very creative. You have to think, how can we do this in a new way? What can we do that nobody’s done before? Given the limits of technology and still working on, I think, probably four track recordings at that time on Revolver. So these are technical limits that they had at the time.
You’re asking about Rubber Soul, Revolver – they were starting to use the studio as an instrument in itself. They were spending more time in the studio. They were first album they recorded in one day. They did long 12-hour sessions or something and recorded all the songs that they had they wanted to put on it.
And by now, though, they’re spending, you know, days on each track increasingly. And then that with Sgt Pepper in ‘67, Reece in ‘67.
Sidharth: I think they’d given up live touring, live performances.
Oliver: Yes, in 1966, by that time, all the hoopla around the tours was just becoming unbearable. And they were getting death threats.
And it was just ceasing to be fun. So after their last American tour in August 1966, they just decided there was no point going on the road anymore. And what they’d rather do was immerse themselves in the studio and start expanding their lives more, getting a bit more control over their own lives in a way.
And then, as I said, they were able to explore the studio and what could be done there. And that was all new.
Sidharth: And they had a sound engineer like Jeff Emerick, who was ready to do their bidding.
Oliver: Yes, I think that they had, in retrospect, a bit of a knack of collecting them around them, a few really key individuals who brought the best out of them. Jeff Emerick, you mentioned the engineer, I think was 19 when they did Revolver. He was working at Abbey Road Studios in London, where they recorded almost everything that they did.
And Jeff Emerick was working under their wonderful producer, George Martin. Who, you know, was this different kind of personality from them, but really complimented them so well, and just brought the best out of them in a fantastic way. So I think that, yeah, they had this knack of collecting people, you know, compared to a kind of modern day pop star, band or whatever, which often have big entourages, they had this kind of small collection of really key people. Brian Epstein, their manager, of course – they seem to have the knack of picking the right people.
Sidharth: So before we leave Revolver behind us, I must mention an extremely unusual song like Eleanor Rigby, which had only orchestration and the band didn’t play – there were no drums, there was no guitar. It’s just Paul McCartney and the orchestra. And I think that too, must have been quite significant at that time, apart from the fact that it’s an extremely well written song.
And so each album had at least three or four or five classics – present day classics and future classics; classics that have remained with us. I’m sure Eleanor Rigby still has, you know, a lot of downloads.
Oliver: It’s a timeless song, isn’t it?
Sidharth: It’s absolutely timeless. It’s about loneliness. It’s about so many things. And it’s written in a very, very simple way. I use the word simple in its most eclectic sense, without making it sound simplistic. But yes, those songs, that song, it loops so well as a story.
Oliver: It’s stripped down. I think that’s probably what you mean by the simplicity, but it was just his voice. And then the strings. It’s a string octet, actually. It’s just eight musicians, string musicians.
Sidharth: I thought it was a full orchestra.
Oliver: No, it’s that simple. It’s that stripped down.
Actually, it was George Martin who arranged it. Paul wrote it and asked George Martin to arrange the strings because Paul didn’t write music scores. And they were influenced by Bernard Herrmann, who was the film composer, who worked a lot with Hitchcock.
And he’d done the famous film score for The Birds, and particularly Psycho is actually what I should really mention because it’s got those harsh string sounds in it, you know. Quite sort of angular, not this lush string sound that we might have expected.
And that’s what they did on the Rigby. And it just works so well. Although it’s using a string octet, eight string players, which almost sounds quite conservative, it’s done in a very innovative way.
And for a pop song, it just works so well.
Sidharth: Before I move on to other questions, one last song in one last album – though, of course, I’m tempted to talk about Abbey Road, and that might require a show of its own – but (from the album) Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, A Day in the Life. Now, what can you tell us about that song in terms of its technical work and the writing?
Oliver: So, interestingly, it’s made up of separate songs, one originally written by John Lennon and one by Paul McCartney, which are spliced together. And the joins between the songs are also really interesting, because this time they do use a full orchestra to have these incredible crescendos.
I mean, it’s just gone to a completely different level of production and arrangement and composition from those early simple songs. I think it felt revolutionary at the time, this approach. And at the very close of the song, the orchestra builds up to this enormous crescendo and all the instruments are basically being told to, in the orchestra, to play up to the very highest note they could play on that instrument and you get this sort of crashing dissonant chord at the end.
I mean, it’s just like music from another world, really. And yet, within that, you’ve got these beautiful melodies. “I read the news today, oh boy” – the opening, I mean, everything is in there, this sort of tenderness right through to this cataclysm or whatever it is at the end.
Sidharth: And it still sounds revolutionary.
Oliver: I think so, yes.
I mean, you know, people have done things like that, but it has captured something, you know.
Sidharth: Now, there were other bands at that time, as I mentioned, The Rolling Stones, who were their exact contemporaries, and bands that came later, Pink Floyd, The Who, Led Zeppelin, and so many others.
The Rolling Stones are still rolling. They keep performing. Mick Jagger looks younger every day, still prances around the stage. Keith, what can one say about Keith Richards? You know, he’s going to be around forever. And they’re a pretty good band on stage. It’s not that they sound doddering. Their songs are popular.
They have said and their fans keep saying that, look at the Rolling Stones, they’ve been performing live for the last 60 years almost. And yet, that eternal debate, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones? Is there a debate, really?
Oliver: I love the Stones but I was always much more of a Beatles fan from my childhood. So to me, no, there’s no debate.
But of course there are plenty of people who prefer the Stones. One thing that’s interesting, that maybe you’ll touch upon here, is the sort of afterlife of The Beatles after they broke up in 1970. And bands like the Stones kept going on and Led Zepp became enormous and Pink Floyd sold, I don’t know, 50 million copies of Dark Side of the Moon.
I suppose it’s not inevitable that The Beatles would remain as popular as they have done down the decades. And I think that’s quite interesting to think about because you and I have lived through that phase. I mean, to me, it always seemed that they were there up at the pinnacle.
I was actually born in 1970, which is the year they split up. So in my formative years, I mean, I liked a lot of the 1980s pop music that I grew up with, but I’ve always had The Beatles there. They were somehow the first band I discovered as a boy. They’ve always kept coming back into my life very happily. But, you know, usually what happens with a lot of artists, they sort of gradually fade, don’t they, in popularity over the years and the decades.
And maybe there’s a bit of a revival. But why have The Beatles remained at this level? I think one of the things is that they themselves and their own company, which is Apple Corps, have done a really good job of keeping them in the limelight. This started, in particular, I think with the anthology project in the 1990s.
I mean, full disclosure, I worked on the book. I was one of the editors who worked on that book. But they also put out this hugely successful TV series, which was like reviewing all their history, first person interviews with the three of them who are still alive.
And then, you know, old footage of John who had sadly been murdered by that point. And then also they put out albums of rarities at the time, and it really sort of put rocket boosters under their reputation. And they suddenly were selling huge amounts of albums again.
They put out this album called The Beatles: 1. I think in the year 2000. And it was a very clever idea, actually, of Neil Aspinall, who was the head of Apple at the time, which was just to put all the number one records, all the number one singles they’d had on a single album.
They’d had some greatest hits collections before what they called the blue and the red albums, which are completely phenomenal. But the idea just to have a single album CD, as it then was, of all their number one hits, and it sold, you know. I think it was their biggest selling album ever or something. So this is a very clever way of curating their history.
And that’s gone on. We talk about these films that have been made like Peter Jackson’s wonderful Get Back series and Beatles ‘64 and the kind of repackaging of albums. I think they’ve been really astute in the way they’ve done it.
And they’ve kept the music relevant. And it kind of protected the quality of it. Didn’t want to just license it all out to everyone to do whatever they wanted to do and make a bit of extra money; it was always about protecting the quality.
Sidharth: On the other hand, I may argue that if the Stones were producing new albums every other year or whatever and were touring and were in the public space, why would The Beatles – and so many new bands had come, so many new artists had come, so many musical styles had come – there is no reason why those albums would have succeeded unless there was something at the core of it.
Oliver: Yeah. It’s not just down to marketing. As I said at the beginning, the core of it is this fabulous music, which we could talk about all day. But I think it has been astute what they’ve done in terms of keeping it relevant, putting out new offerings.
You referred to the Grammy that Edgars won, which is pretty amazing for a band that hasn’t formally been in existence for whatever it is, 55 years. But they released this song now and then, which is what you’re referring to, which actually was not recorded in the 60s because it was a John Lennon recording.
So recording from the 70s to which they added extra tracks in 1994, I think it is when George added his piece and then was finished off a couple of years or so ago by Paul Ringo. And they were able to use this fantastic technology that Peter Jackson had developed in order to separate out the John Lennon voice.
And I mean, it’s magic, you know, how they’ve done that. And there you’ve got the last new Beatles song. There won’t be another, as they say.
But you know, what an incredible, clever thing to do to keep us all wanting to hear The Beatles again.
Sidharth: Tricky question, because people have been trying to, you know, find the answer to this one. Why did they break up? Was it John and Yoko, Yoko’s presence? Was it creative differences? Was it George getting very restless and wanting to pursue a solo career? And so did the others want to pursue their solo careers?
What was that one reason why they split?
Oliver: Well, yeah, I don’t really want to disappoint you here, but I’m not sure there is one reason. I think if there’s one reason, it’s just that they were growing apart as people do as they get a bit older, and they didn’t want to spend all their lives in each other’s pockets. And, you know, the tensions that started up over whether it’s personal relationships or money or this and that.
And I think they were just growing apart by that point. You know, George in particular, felt like he was happy to move on. And it was John who really announced it to the other members of the band in September 1969 that he was going to leave and, you know, that was it. They’d just done Abbey Road. But I don’t know if there’s any one particular reason.
I wouldn’t blame Yoko Ono at all, really, on this.
I think one thing was really fascinating about the Peter Jackson Get Back series was to see John and Paul in particular working together in the studio.
I mean, all of them, you get a sense of how they operated as a team. But there’s this sort of myth that had built up that by the time that was recorded in January 1969, those sessions that John and Paul were kind of really daggers at each other and they’d really fallen out permanently. And there was all this tension between them and that the sessions were terribly miserable.
And it’s a kind of revelation to watch that series because it’s all filmed like a fly on the wall, multi-camera film job, very innovative for its time. And you see so often that Paul and John are still riffing off each other, constantly inspiring each other, telling jokes, writing songs in front of us. And it was really a revelation.
In fact, it was a revelation even to Paul McCartney himself, who admitted that he had kind of accepted the kind of popular myth that he and John had fallen out by that time. And he said it surprised him to watch that footage and to remember now, actually, no, we were still getting on pretty well. And, you know, there’s still a fantastic partnership between them.
So they were still able to make this amazing music in 1969 and it just drifted apart.
It’s like being in a sort of very intense relationship almost that it just became too intense, too many outside pressures on them. They just needed a bit of a break from each other. And unfortunately for us, the break became permanent.
Sidharth: You must have seen the video of them playing on the rooftop. And they were pretty much operating as a unit.
Oliver: Ah, phenomenal band, aren’t they?
Sidharth: And that was the last hoorah!
Oliver: Their last live show, yeah.
They went and recorded Abbey Road after that. Later that year, they continued on in the studio, but they didn’t play another concert. But yeah, what a band, what a live band they were. Phenomenal.
Sidharth: So to round up Abbey Road, their last great album, I won’t talk about Let It Be and what it became, but Abbey Road had some great stuff, ending with The End. So, quite the send off by The Beatles to their fans.
Oliver: Yeah. I mean, I’m a huge fan of that. There’s a, what was the second side of the vinyl album? There’s this big, long medley of songs, which you’ll know very well, Sidharth.
It’s almost uncanny how good that is. This is your last album, that’s how you’re going to go out.
And then your very final song is called The End. Phenomenal.
Sidharth: So that was the great way to end their career. And in fact, there’s always speculation, and I’m going to bring up this question and perhaps give up one possible reply, what if they had continued? And I think if they didn’t, it doesn’t matter because I think they gave us some great music.
Oliver: I mean, they were often asked in later years to reform, you know, and then I think it was all something that they could never really agree on. You know, they just all seemed too big. Too freighted with too much baggage, maybe.
But they worked individually, they worked with each other on projects.
And the big one being the anthology when eventually in the 90s, the three surviving members got back together in the studio. But by that time, John wasn’t around. So who knows?
I mean, I think at the time they split up, you know, of course, they didn’t know it was going to be permanent. You know,it wasn’t impossible that a couple of years later, they could have gotten back together and reformed as so many bands do.
Sidharth: So it’s like The Eagles. Yes. They keep saying no and then hell freezes over and they go.
[Oliver laughs]
But again, we are no closer to answering that 64 million dollar question. Why do they endure? And I think they endure because they are great.
Oliver: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the simple, not very helpful answer.
But yes, even in their time in the 60s, you know, the famous review when, I think it was the White Album that came out, where somebody compared them to Schubert. We have to think of them in those terms as being really not just a phenomenon in the 1960s, but of the 20th century or this marker in musical history.
Sidharth: So last provocative question, provocative because I think it is but you may not find it.
Oliver: Go ahead.
Sidharth: How many of the current superstars will be around 60 years from today, their music?
Oliver: Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m really qualified to judge that.
Because you get older, you start to realize how out of touch you get with musical trends. I’m sure some of them will. It may not be the ones we expect. If you go back to that era, the 60s or the 70s, there are artists who were relatively small at the time who somehow had wonderful afterlives.
I went to a great concert last summer at the BBC Proms in London, which was the orchestral arrangements of the music of Nick Drake. He was a sort of, at the time, quite a minor folk singer, folkish, you know, mainly singer-songwriter with his guitar. And he’s gained this big reputation to the point where, you know, long after he died, he died very young, sadly.
But at the time he was, he made those albums, you know, he didn’t have very much impact and nobody would have thought we’d be playing it 50 years later. So sometimes you get these surprises in the afterlife, they gain their reputation.
Sidharth: I mean, no doubt there are music groups which were not that big at the time or a bit niche, and then suddenly have become cult bands like The Velvet Underground, which is a good band but nothing on this scale.
And I think the 60s were something quite unique as a period too. So many of those bands will continue. I think Pink Floyd ain’t going nowhere. They are really good. And so also the others I mentioned, Led Zeppelin keeps picking up new listeners all the time. But The Beatles are The Beatles.
Oliver: Yeah. So we’ve had a long chat about them and we’ve concluded that The Beatles are The Beatles. [laughs]
Sidharth: Yes, that’s my conclusion. You may want to give something else.
Oliver: But I’m with you on that. Yeah, I agree.
Sidharth: Thank you, Oliver.
Once again, chatting with you. I hope you’ll write another book on them. I mean, I’m amazed at how many books and movies keep coming out.
And we’ll be back. That was Oliver Craske talking about a subject we both were very, very interested in and got involved in: why do The Beatles endure? And we’ll be back once again next week with another guest.
Till then, from me, Sidharth Bhatia, and the rest of The Wire Talks team, goodbye.
