Help

Although I lived through the 1960s I did not, happily, live them in the intense way that those a few years older than me clearly did.  I therefore have none of the current cloying nostalgia for these supposedly halcyon times.  Indeed my most perfect sixties moment was also in retrospect one of my most perfectly embarrassing: that of performing at about the age of eight a feeble interpretation of the Twist on a stage before the assembled junior school along with a few other deranged classmates.

My only other Beatles memories are the early hits 'She loves yeah, yeah, yeah', 'It's been a hard day's night' etc. and the thoroughly wholesome film 'Help', scenes of which are still vivid in my mind almost thirty years later.  My knowledge of the Beatles' subsequent hits is thereafter rather sporadic, the result of chance, unordered encounters rather than concerted listening; but at least as a result I am able to approach the later albums, taken as a whole, with a completely fresh ear.

For example, listening to 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' I recognised such classics as 'With a little help from my friends' and 'When I'm sixty-four', but the rest and above all the overall effect were completely new to me.

I was therefore quite unprepared for the amazingly witty self-referential title track, the Beatles pretending to be another band hymning a third, or for its striking orchestration of tumbling horns interspersed with thicker textures.  The infamous 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds' I had heard of, but never heard: Lennon's tripped-out images and dazed triple time form a powerful contrast to McCartney's more homespun social realism in 'She's leaving home' or in his soft-centred 'Lovely Rita'.  More contrast too in the sitar-soaked and tabla-tickled 'Within you, without you' George Harrison's incoherent but affective Indian takeaway philosophising and in the splendidly bouncy and surreal 'Being for the benefit of Mr Kite'.

But even more impressive than these particular components is the structure and effect of the whole.  For perhaps the first time in pop music there is a sense of direction: the opening song is clearly the equivalent of an overture; its return at the end is equally clearly a reprise before the final coda.  And what a coda: Lennon and McCartney know that there is the world of difference between a song played at the end and a song that is the end. 'A day in the life' effects the latter perfectly.

The other innovative elements - the use of one unbroken band on each side of the vinyl, the gatefold sleeve, the cut-out cards and the cheerily megalomaniacal cover by Peter Blake showing the Beatles surrounded by eighty-odd cardboard notables and a host of definitive sixties paraphernalia - all reinforce the sense that this is a breathtakingly original record, perhaps the single most inspired production in the world of recording.  Listening to it and sensing the feverish excitement of the 129 days that went into its making I find myself strangely excited too, filled with the happy hope that perhaps music like this could really change the world, making it a better, more loving place.  In other words I find myself living the 1960s for the first time.  Perhaps I need help. 

(14.3.92)

Index