Another new year and another new Beatles release. This time it’s a DVD documentary
celebrating the 40th anniversary of the quartet’s first American tour.
Released early next month, The Beatles First US Visit promises
”exceptionally candid footage” of a legendary event. It follows hard on
the heels of last year’s Let It Be . . . Naked CD, which in turn followed
the five-DVD Anthology box set, the Anthology book, the 1 CD compilation of
”greatest hits” and the remastered Yellow Submarine DVD and ”songtrack”
CD. In fact, there has been a steady stream of Beatles product since 1994,
when the Beatles’ company Apple began a programme of reissues with the
double CD set Live at the BBC.
Apple boss Neil Aspinall had spent much of the previous two decades
amassing a vast collection of Beatles ephemera, buying the copyright to
virtually every photograph, piece of film and television appearance worth
owning. In the early 1990s, Apple decided to open its archive, and a decade
on, it shows no sign of slowing down. Future projects include DVDs of the
films Let It Be, Magical Mystery Tour and Help and another book, about
which Apple remains tight-lipped.
In fact, it’s a little hard getting information about anything out of
Apple. In the late- 1960s, it was an infamously dissolute company: one
former employee dubbed it ”the longest cocktail party”. Today, Apple has
something of the secret society about it. Part of the Beatles’ inner circle
for 44 years, Aspinall is famously publicity-shy. One journalist who
recently spotted him at a party and attempted to canvass his opinion on Let
It Be . . . Naked received only a silent shake of the head in response.
Other employees prefer not to be directly quoted.
Given the current climate of gloom in the music industry, you might
think that Apple would be screaming its sales figures from the rooftops –
but no: it refuses to divulge how many units anything it releases has
shifted. Perhaps this is the business equivalent of the faux-humility that
causes Paul McCartney to continually refer to the Beatles as ”a good
little band”. Or perhaps, after 30 years of selling albums by the million,
you begin to lose interest in bragging about numbers (although Apple will
admit to being stunned by the alleged 28m sales of 1). Publicly at least,
the company eschews anything as vulgar as discussing the Beatles as a brand
or reinventing the Fab Four as a ”sexy” product for a younger audience,
although 40% of those 28m purchasers of 1 were between 17 and 25 years
old.
”You can’t promote the Beatles’ catalogue – it’s out there,” says
Jonathan Clyde, who, like all of Apple’s employees, has no official job
title: a solitary concession to the louche days of the longest cocktail
party. ”New technology gives the opportunity to introduce new generations
to Beatles music in a modern context. These DVD releases, such as First US
Visit, inevitably drive people back to the original recordings, because,
of course, the music is ultimately what it’s all about.”
If the Beatles releases of the 1990s did not single-handedly create the
huge ”heritage rock” market of CD reissues and classic rock magazines –
MCA successfully re-released Jimi Hendrix’s back catalogue a year before
Live at the BBC – they certainly took it to previously unimaginable levels
of success. The Hendrix albums made the top 30 but Live at the BBC went to
number one and spawned a top-10 single in Baby It’s You. The three
Anthology albums of unreleased out-takes attracted an unprecedented level
of media attention.
It has not been an entirely smooth ride. The surviving Beatles’ attempts
to rework the old John Lennon demos Free As a Bird and Real Love met with a
decidedly mixed response, as did Let It Be . . . Naked, which removed Phil
Spector’s syrupy orchestrations from the original album to reveal tracks
that Lennon had once described as ”the shittiest load of badly recorded
shit”. Nevertheless, these are minor blips. The fact remains that The
Beatles dominate heritage rock with the same sort of totality with which
they dominated the 1960s singles chart. None of their competitors – The
Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley – can match the Beatles’
commercial appeal.
It was not ever thus. For more than 20 years after their demise, no one
saw the Beatles as a brand or appeared to consider their ongoing commercial
potential – least of all the Beatles themselves. Their back catalogue was
treated in a desultory manner. For every success – anyone in their 30s will
remember the ubiquitous ”red’ and ”blue” double compilation albums The
Beatles 1962-1966 and The Beatles 1967-1970 – there was a raft of
disappointing releases. The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl album proved
to be the ideal gift for anyone with a burning desire to hear half an hour
of American teenagers squealing. There were some ”themed” collections of
love songs and film music, which usually wound up on budget label Music for
Pleasure – an ignominious fate for music that was supposed to have changed
the world – and the Beatles Movie Medley, a belated attempt to cash-in on
the early 1980s mania for ”medley” singles with a disco backbeat.
There are a variety of explanations for this. The most prosaic answer is
that the Beatles had little control over what happened to their back
catalogue until the late 1980s, when their contract with EMI was
renegotiated vastly in their favour. However, there is also the sense that
the four ex-members looked askance at their former band. All four had
burgeoning solo careers, and did not take kindly to being reminded of past
glory. McCartney seldom performed Beatles songs live, Lennon did everything
in his power to debunk the myth of the band in songs and interviews, while
journalists meeting George Harrison and Ringo Starr were tactfully advised
to avoid the subject entirely. Their antipathy sank The Long and Winding
Road, a proto-Anthology documentary compiled by Aspinall in the early
1970s: its release would have overshadowed the latest Wings or Lennon album
and led to another round of unwanted questions about when the Beatles would
reform.
In the 1990s, that ceased to be a problem. Lennon was dead and even
McCartney’s solo career was waning: he last had a solo top-10 hit in 1987.
”There was a point at which they became content to acknowledge that the
Beatles was the highlight of their career,” says Paul Trynka of Mojo
magazine. ”It’s very different to be overshadowed by your work from five
or 10 years ago than to be asked about your work from 30 years ago as if
it’s an evergreen classic of the genre. One is saying ‘You were better in
the old days’ and the other is saying ‘You will continue to influence
popular culture 50 years from now’.”
And if the former Beatles were uninterested in their past, there was also
the suggestion that the public were too. In 1976, the band’s singles were
reissued, but only Yesterday made the top 10. A similarly muted response
greeted the decision to reissue the singles again in the 1980s. This time
their debut, Love Me Do, reached number four, but the rest flopped
dismally. There was something rather ignoble about seeing Get Back stall at
74. It seemed to indicate diminishing returns and a fading appeal. Pop
music was heading in directions that had little to do with the Beatles’
legacy — hip-hop, dance music – and besides, the ex-Beatles had become
faintly embarrassing, singing runny duets with Stevie Wonder, narrating
children’s TV series or executive-producing ghastly films starring Madonna
and her awful husband.
”We put the Beatles on the cover of Q in 1987 for the 20th anniversary
of Sergeant Pepper, and it was seen as a real risk,” remembers Mark Ellen,
then editor of Q, now editor of Word. ”They were just seen as an old
group who had split up – and there were plenty of old groups who were still
about.”
But in the early 1990s, with the rise of Britpop, musical tastes shifted
again. As Trynka says: ”People just thought, pop music is always going to
be about a song, with a beat and guitar, we’re working within a defined
artform rather than moving outside the confines of it. And the Beatles had
been responsible for defining a lot of that.” In recent years, magazine
covers have proclaimed the Beatles as everything from The World’s Hottest
Band (Rolling Stone) to the godfathers of garage rock (NME). Mojo puts them
on the cover every 13 months without fail, while Word’s Beatles coverage
has been so extensive that the Mail on Sunday recently came to the
conclusion that McCartney was actually working for the magazine.
Apple’s programme stretches well into the future, which begs the
question of whether this level of interest is sustainable. Rock music could
shift away from the Beatles’ influence once again, as it did in the 1980s.
There’s also the chance that even fans will eventually have their desire
for Beatles ”product” entirely satiated. It’s a question Apple is aware
of, claims Clyde: ”If Apple showered the market with DVDs and CD
compilations and went into overdrive on merchandising, the Beatles’
reputation for integrity would be compromised. Apple is here to protect a
precious cultural legacy. Any short-term gain would be utterly
self-defeating.”
But that shows no signs of happening in the foreseeable future.”There
seems to be a bottomless appetite for Beatles material, not just in
Britain, but globally,” says Ellen. ”I went to the premiere of the
Concert for George film; Paul and Ringo were there and there were girls
genuinely screaming at them, which hardly happens when a member of the
Beach Boys sticks his head over the parapet. Most of the screaming girls
were Americans, who seem to be genetically programmed to scream whenever a
Beatle appears. The US has a very straightforward relationship with the
Beatles: unconditional love.”– COPYRIGHT: GUARDIAN NEWSPAPERS LIMITED 2004