How wonderfully appropriate. Yesterday evening we went to the V&A to see ‘Revolution’ the story of the 60s. Not, like, all of it, just the good bits. The Beatles, sex, drugs, Woodstock, Vietnam, Ford Anglias, hippies, Lamborghini Miuras and untipped cigarettes. But of course, its heavily Beatle-fied because for many of US, they defined the decade. The Fab Four. Who… who… who… did…

What did the Beatles actually do for us? (Like the Romans in Life of Brian). I’ll tell you what they did, they grew their hair long and entertained us, that’s what they did. Oh, and almost literally, set the world on fire. They were, in pretentious talk: the apotheosis of the zeitgeist. Arguably a zeitgeist that they had initiated. At a time when the world was absolutely chock-full of teenage girls looking desperately for something to scream at. They needed to vent that pubescent overload in a very vocal and decibellish way. And here came four good looking guys (I’ll include Ringo in that because I love him) with a slightly rebellious, bad-boy-ish look who said: ok, come scream at us.

The Beatles didn’t invent music. Safe to say. Music has been around since Glenn Miller. Maybe even Beethoven. Maybe longer. General rule: if it ain’t on i-tunes, it didn’t exist. The Beatles were a massive spike in the continual evolution of popular music. They didn’t invent bands. Bands of all sizes had been around for centuries. They didn’t ‘bring music to the kids’ any more than Elvis did or the old ‘swing’ bands. Both of which were seen in their day as fairly ‘subversive’.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the Beatles. And they were my first love. But they weren’t alone. The basic light rock’n’roll format band had already evolved and they just wrote some brilliant songs that appealed to little girls, and little boys. They then produced a body of work which was quite magnificent, and I still love them. As do you. Everyone does. You have to.

Why its appropriate though, I read this very morning about a study by, in fact, an evolutionary biologist, who has studied music through his evolutionary lens and pronounced that the Beatles MUSIC was not actually as influential as that of other groups like the Stones, the Who, the Kinks. The rather ‘edgier’ bands of their day. Culturally, the Beatles had and have no equals in their massive, world-wide effect. But musically, apparently not so. BBC4, this coming Tuesday, 9pm, and you can see how Professor Armand Leroi makes himself the most hated man in Britain, if not the world. Because we’re all a bit protective of the Beatles. Our 50 year love affair has outlasted millions of marriages and even John and George.

Unfortunately, anyone who actually bought an original copy of ‘With the Beatles’ is the sort of person whose gonna forget to set the record for the program.

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

A xxxx