The first album I ever bought was ‘With the Beatles’. I was 7. Knew fuck-all about music, but I loved the Beatles. Because I was alive and conscious, in a 7 year-old kind’a way, and therefore I loved the Beatles. Everyone loved them. You simply had to. They were ‘different’ enough to be special, with their long hair and matching suits, yet normal enough (arguably, being Liverpudlians, ‘sub-normal’ might even be appropriate) that you kind of related to them rather than revered them.

Which was probably their Unique Selling Point. That and the total mass hysteria that they created from the moment Please Please Me hit the charts. Everyone became a part of the Beatles story. Albeit a pretty small part, unless you were John, Paul, George, Ringo, Brian Epstein or George Martin.

Last night I went to see the new Ron Howard movie, The Beatles: 8 days a week. And it is totally brilliant. Not just for those of us who remember some of the events shown from their insane ‘tours’, playing in front of crowds of up to 55,000 people. No, actually not ‘people’ in any regular sense, 55,000 screaming teenage girls. But really screaming. To the point that no-one could hear the music, neither the crowd nor the band.

The movie shows everyone why the Beatles were great. Mainly because they were the first ‘pop group’ who wrote and played their own brilliant music, four guys who truly loved and supported each other, but who were always funny and irreverent at a time when such a thing was tantamount to anarchy. They answered back. Which turned them into the first ever ‘superstars’, even way beyond Elvis’s wildest dreams (and he dreamed pretty ‘wild’, particularly where food was involved).

They refused to play at a stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, because it was ‘segregated’ (the American Apartheit system so popular in the South in those days), so the authorities had to de-segregate it. Which they didn’t do for the civil rights movement, but they did for the Beatles.

In an interview John had said that ‘the Beatles were bigger than Jesus’. He said it not literally (obviously; to us, at least) but ironically. The fact that 55,000 people wouldn’t have turned up for a prayer meeting but would to see the Beatles was not really what he meant. But it was ironic, thus the Americans misunderstood it, banned them, burned their records in Birmingham, Alabama (bible belt; ‘segregation’, you gotta love that southern mind-set), and issued death threats.

The movie showed the fantastic relationship between the four guys, and their wonderfully charming way of dealing with the madness they created. At the end they show the concert at the Shea Stadium before 55,000 shriekers but manage to filter out most of the screaming. And its wonderful. Four amazingly talented guys living ‘the dream’ just as it was really turning into something of a nightmare. But what music…

Go see it.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx