More empty houses than diamonds

After I had read a couple of pages of “Traitor to the Cause” at Renegades Writers, a fake autobiography of a character called Vincent, where he attends a party at John Lennon’s house in 1965 and plays the piano for him, there was a most useful discussion about what I had written and after certain amusement replaced Maria Callas singing with Princess Margaret, it felt ‘smoother’! I had written that Vincent was given a pre-release copy of Revolver which I had mistakenly thought came out in ’65 and luckily was corrected, so he will be given a copy of Rubber Soul.

This led to a discussion about whether people liked The Beatles. Around half of us were knocking round when these albums came out. I was 10 when Beatlemania was at its height in ’63. My older brother liked them a lot, I thought them OK and preferred The Beach Boys. It wasn’t until 1979 when visiting San Francisco that I really began to like them. I visited someone I’d met at a party in Chicago a few weeks earlier at Christmas (and annoyed to find she had a boyfriend!), I travelled there by train via New Orleans (which I hated) and Los Angeles (which I loved). She invited a load of friends for a meal of Mexican food and huge joints (not meat) in a room in her apartment which looked over the Bay (I had to swear on a Bible in a shop that I was over 21 to get the beer!). In my ‘honour’ they put on Beatles albums, and in that heady mix I got to like them, or was it the memory of the close attentions of a friend of hers?

In our discussions at Renegades it was obvious that the majority had little liking for them, some preferring the Stones or covers. It got me wondering why they have still such an impact, you only have to listen to Tame Impala’s album which has come so high in the best albums lists for 2012 (to me it sounds like bad outtakes from George Harrison). To my ears the Stones hardly have developed, they began as a covers band of blues music, developed their own sound along those lines, and then (rather like Oasis) continued on the same tack. Fine and I like many of their songs and albums, and they were great live when I saw them in 1973, but other than their ‘style’ have they really had any influence?

After the initial Beatlemania when they were mixing covers with their own stuff, The Beatles had the most remarkable period of experimentation and development, it only lasted 6 years, but where they ended up is a million miles from where they started, that is their strength. This was of course because two people worked off each other, loved then hated each other (sounds a bit like Renegades!), experimented, were fearless and had reached a level of sales for EMI that they could do anything they wanted, a position almost no one else has had. Then when they went solo I cannot find any quality in their music, and like the Stones just ambled along with the odd better than average track. George Harrison was the one who truly developed having been held back by The Beatles experience.

Ah well, I am sure many have written much better and knowledgably about them, but I still quite regularly listen to their albums and find new experiences every time even though I can sing along to most. If nothing else wonderful happens today then I may write about albums that live with me and get replayed often.

I have continued with the photograph a day for a year. Below is a house in Bond Street, Tunstall, where there are more empty houses than diamonds. It was taken today 5^th January 2013 on a very mild sunny morning at 11am.