Nothing’s Gonna Change My World (Part Three) :: BBC Radio Four Saturday 1 November 2003

[Yesterday – Arthur Mullard]

Phil Jupitus: The late Arthur Mullard, just one of countless celebrities and nobodies alike who’ve been move to proffer their own rendition of Beatles songs to the world. More than 20 years since the bands demise and the ripples are still spreading. The band have affected us all one way or another. What other popular beat combo for example could have inspired the esteemed art critic Brian Sewell to enter the giddy world of Popular Culture

[I Wanna Be Your Man – Brian Sewell]

Phil Jupitus: All these extraordinary recordings are taken from a CD of Beatles cover versions, lovingly compiled by one man – Jim Phelan.

Jim’s life has been strangely touched by the fab four. Scattered around his basement studio lie some seven thousand such versions. That’s the stuff of dreams for me, so I recently braved the elements and descended into deepest South London to Jim’s heavenly basement.

Phil Jupitus: An amazing room here. It’s like the tardis. It just looked like a normal cellar and I’ve come in and it’s just full from floor to ceiling with CD’s, covers here, I can see a Moog plays the Beatles, a synthesiser album. There’s the Band of Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst pays tribute to Lennon and McCartney as of course they would.

Jim Phelan: That’s albums that are complete Beatles tracks like Mary Wells sings The Beatles. You’ve got solo groups and tributes. You’ve got Moog and Synth.

Phil Jupitus: How do you decide what makes the cut to hit one of the Exotica Beatles Compilations? Is the bar set very high, Jim?

Jim Phelan: It is, yeah. It’s got to be exotic. It’s got to be different. It’s got be entertaining and I suppose it sort of a bloke-ish thing that if you know of a track and you want be the first to communicate it to somebody else that goes in the potential pile then. And the ratio of actually listening to tracks and logging them and then deciding which ones are gonna possibly make it onto the album. It’s about a hundred to one.

[Hey Jude – The Templeton Twins with Terry Turner and his Bunsen Burners]

Jim Phelan: Quite early on there was this push to extend the boundaries of what you could actually do with a Beatles cover. Somebody would do a baroque album or somebody would do a Nutcracker style Beatles cover. And from there you go into the punk genre, er, speed metal versions of Yesterday.

[Gestern Noch (Yesterday) - HAAX]

Jim Phelan: You know, it’s endless!

[Yesterday – The 52 Key Verbeek Fairground Organ]

Phil Jupitus: We’ll have more from Jim’s basement later. Of course the way in which the Beatles music has affected the lives of certain people is just one part of a much bigger picture. Especially in the sixties.

Ian Ingliss: When we try and assess what the legacy of the Beatles is it’s important not to look just at The Beatles themselves but at the contexts and the conditions of the times in which they were most active.

Phil Jupitus: Ian Ingliss teaches Beatles Studies at the University of Northumbria.

Ian Ingliss: And we have to remember that the early sixties were a time of huge cultural upheaval, both in this country and internationally. These included for example the development of the pill in 1960, the growth of spending power both in this country and abroad, the expansion of higher education; the Profumo scandal and the blow that that dealt to traditional notions of deference to those in authority; the growth of satire as exemplified by magazines like Private Eye and shows like That Was The Week That Was. All of these factors and others were already taking place in the early sixties and The Beatles, if you like, were part of that. Now in a sense they reflected, their music, their activities, their behaviour, reflected those wider changes but at the same time, they were also able to contribute to those wider changes.

Phil Jupitus: According to Yoko Ono, an important influence on John Lennon were the social realism films of the early sixties.

Yoko Ono: You know it started with The Room At The Top, the film. That sort of woke people up and then, you know, the sort of Angry Young Men and A Taste of Honey, you know things like that. And I think John got a lot of energy and inspiration from Room At The Top, he was one of them that got that.

Mark Lewisohn: Our society then was riven from top to bottom, with class differences.

Phil Jupitus: Beatles chronicler Mark Lewisohn.

Mark Lewisohn: And it was The Beatles chipping away at that edifice really, which bought about the great change that occurred after that.

Peter Brown: You must remember where Liverpool was at the time, you know, and Liverpool always had it’s finger to the world and that was sort the chip on the shoulder if you like.

Phil Jupitus: Former Beatles business manager, Peter Brown.

Peter Brown: The chip wasn’t a nasty chip it was just you know, I’ll do it my way.

Yoko Ono: Britain was a very class-conscious society and a Liverpool accent didn’t help, you know.

Interview: Paul, coming quickly back to you again, Mr Edward Heath the Lord Privy Seal has said that the other night that he couldn’t distinguish what you were saying as Queen’s English.
Paul McCartney: Ah yes.
Interviewer: Are you going to try and lose some of your Liverpool dialect for the Royal Show?
Paul McCartney: No we wouldn’t bother doing that, you know. We don’t all speak like them BBC posh fella’s you know.
John Lennon: No no we don’t. Aye.
Paul McCartney: By gum we don’t. Right up north.
Interviewer: Well with that I’d better wish you good luck in the show. What song will you be singing most there do you think.
Paul McCartney: [mock accent] well I don’t know but I should imagine we’d do so She Loves You. Ha ha ha! Jolly good!
John Lennon (in background): Ha ha ha. Jolly good!

Yoko Ono: The Beatles did a lot in a breaking through and at one point, I don’t know about now, but at one point it was very kind of fashionable to have a Liverpool accent and all the Liverpudlians did get jobs in London, you know.

Peter Brown: In Brian’s and my day if you had a regional accent and you wanted to be successful in business it was tough.

Phil Jupitus: Peter Brown

Peter Brown: And that doesn’t happen anymore and I would be sure that they were very significant in that development.

[In My Life – The 52 Key Verbeek Fairground Organ]

Phil Jupitus: Meanwhile, back in Jim Phelan’s basement I wanted to find out from Jim which artist from the world of Beatles cover versions, had most impressed him.

Jim Phelan: Very early, when I started this collection I got some stuff from Germany.

["Achtung! Das es eine test."]

Jim Phelan: There’s a guy called Klaus Bayer who, he’s a German Naïve and he was doing really bizarre things with Beatles songs.

[I Will – Klaus Bayer]

Jim Phelan: What he was doing with the Beatles tracks, because he’d got no studio sophistication, he would get the Beatles song and he’d record it on his two track and then he’d actually physically cut the tape, the bits that he thought were superfluous and then he’d reedit the tape which made the whole background sort of really jumpy. He couldn’t speak English so he didn’t know what the words were so he wrote his own words to the Beatles songs.

[Hey Jude – Klaus Bayer]

Klaus Bayer: In the case of Hey Jude I first listened to the song and then I wrote down the lyrics and I tried to match with the German lyrics translation in the Beatles song book but in the case of Hey Jude there is at the beginning, there’s always a Beatle signing so I have to get another idea to get into the start of the song. That was very difficult. Everytime when they sang [hums ‘and anytime you feel afraid’] when that part comes there is a little few seconds which I looped of my whole singing that is what I used all of the song.
Interviewer: Is that art?
Klaus Bayer: I think that is art, yes.
Phil Jupitus: Klaus Bayer.

[Revolution 1 – The Beatles]

Phil Jupitus: And from modern art, to revolution and the sixties. Mark Lewisohn.

Mark Lewisohn: They particularly gave a voice to that generation in the late sixties who were more thoughtful, who were anti-war, who were more open to ideas and experimentation, to people who took drugs although that wasn’t a prerequisite, by any means, and to people who were growing up.

Greil Marcus: There would have been no counter-culture without the Beatles.

Phil Jupitus: Writer, Greil Marcus.

Greil Marcus: The Beatles were the great sign that said life can be different, you can make your own world, you can live in your own group, you can make a sound that has never been heard before, and life will be richer, better, more fun, more interesting, because of this sound. None of this would have existed without the Beatles.

Phil Jupitus: But was it really a conscious decision by The Beatles to be a voice for the counter-culture movement? Ian Ingliss and Peter Brown think not.

Peter Brown: John Lennon in particular often denied that The Beatles were responsible for the changes that many people attributed to them. He claimed, on several occasions, that the Beatles were simply reflecting trends and developments and patterns that were already there. Maybe he said, maybe we’re in the crow’s nest of the boat, but we were all being blown along by the same wind.

Ian Ingliss: It was something that I think was probably more thrust upon them much more than they wanted and I’m not sure that they wanted it at all. There’s the famous case of George and Ringo being in Height Ashbury in 68,69 and them being quite frightened because they were besieged like as if they were prophets and because they didn’t have any magic word to convey to the crowd it got rather irritated and nasty. And Ringo, both Ringo and George have said how frightening it was. But I think it was the sign of the times, everyone was looking for the word, whether it was the Maharishi’s word or whether it was LSD’s word or whatever it was but everyone was looking for a word.

[The Word – The Beatles]

Ian Ingliss: Everyone was looking for ‘the word’, they were considered, you know maybe they had the answer. All You Need Is Love.

[All You Need Is Love – The Beatles]

Phil Jupitus: Mark Lewisohn and Yoko Ono point to the odd occasion when the Beatles did try to shift the prevailing social and political tides.

Mark Lewisohn: All You Need Is Love in 1967, anthemic, was the most wonderful example of where the Beatles were at and how they were able to take a message but put it across in a totally direct and simple fashion.

Yoko Ono: Love Is All You Need. All You Need Is Love.

Mark Lewisohn: Even those who don’t speak English very well they would understand all you need is love, love is all you need. Very simple.

Yoko Ono: You know underneath all of us, it’s there. And of course we’re not all drug addicts and sex maniacs like we were in the sixties, we’re just sort of standing firmer and trying to create something positive.

Phil Jupitus: But did the heady idealism the group represented ever really permeate mainstream society enough for it to have made a lasting impression? Mark Lewisohn again.

Mark Lewisohn: The Beatles were always tremendously optimistic and they did speak for a lot of people and they did carry people. But ultimately pop music can’t change the world in particular at that time we had, in America for example, Nixon and the Viet Nam war and indeed riots across Europe and a great deal of civil unrest and although people agreed with the Beatles point of view, it could change some people minds but I don’t think it could change everything. And the way the Beatles themselves broke up in quite serious disarray and then had their dirty laundry aired in public in a way ushered in a more confrontational period in the 1970’s and then that led to Thatcher-ism and everything that’s followed since. We’re a long way now from All You Need Is Love, and goodness me we need it.

[Let It Be – Ron Geesin (Piano & Organ)]

Phil Jupitus: But some think the message does still live on.

[Hey Bulldog – Neil Innes on piano]

Neil Innes: Hey Bulldog. You can talk to me. Not when you’re in that mood John!

Phil Jupitus: Beatles parodists The Rutles frontman Neil Innes, recently visited a Beatle Convention in America.

Neil Innes: It’s a family weekend. People just delighting in the music and being very friendly with each other. I mean All You Need Is Love, they believe it and it’s a nice thing to be a part of. And of course, I’m there as a Rutle and what’s kind of nice is that over the twenty years or so The Rutles songs have sort of been assimilated into the mainstream of Beatle music. Two little nine or ten year kids came up to me and said ‘Hey you write really cool lyrics’ you know, I said oh thank you very much. And the other one just said ‘Yeah, with paradise for hire on the backstreets of desire, that’s really cool!’ Ten year olds, you know!

Phil Jupitus: Paul McCartney’s biographer Barry Miles find the whole Beatles convention scene a bit perplexing.

Barry Miles: It’s a strange thing to do, is to go to a Beatles Fest. Often you’ll get forty or fifty thousand people get together and they’ll watch rare Beatles clips and Beatles imitation bands of which there are dozens and dozens. I saw one once were there was a perfect reproduction of Sgt Pepper, complete with all the suits and stuff. Of course the Beatles never ever performed in those suits and never performed live any of the songs from Sgt Pepper, it was much later. And yet now it’s actually been turned into real thing and it’s extraordinary to see because modern technology enables them to do it.

[Strawberry Fields – unknown Tribute band (South American)]

Barry Miles: The myth, it’s almost like they’ve been morphed or something I mean it’s getting a very science fiction quality about it. The Beatles have really become such a mythological entity that it exists completely indepently of them as individuals or even them as what they did in the sixties. It’s now an industry and a number of feeder industries.

Liverpool Convention Stall Trader: About an hour ago I sold for three figures each a piece of cardboard with twelve little rolls of sellotape packets, it’s called Beatles sellotape but it’s basically just sellotape in a Beatle bag, that went for three figures. And believe it or not, Beatles mothballs, which stunk to hell, about early sixties and again they’re in little bags on the sheet saying Beatles Mothballs and I got a good three figures for that.

Mark Lewisohn: It’s like not only the car industry it’s the scrap industry as well.

Phil Jupitus: Beatles mothballs, Beatles wallpaper, used Beatles concert tickets, rare recordings and film clips, live Beatles cover bands can all be found here, at Britain’s largest annual Beatles fest in Liverpool.

[Any Time At All – The Beatles (Adelphi stall)]

Phil Jupitus: The nostalgia is reinforced as the memories slowly come flooding back. Most of them anyway.

Interviewer: Ah yes memories. As you get older you like to drift back in them don’t you. Some of the lads who I knocked about with in them times when I was a teenager they swore to me that we’d seen the Beatles, but I can’t say for definite that we did. Without a shadow of doubt. But they was there and they said we went to see them. But whether I did or not, I can’t swear to it.

Phil Jupitus: Any Beatle gathering’s bound to attract the autograph hunters.

David Hemms: I met Pete Best, Mike McCartney… oh yeah he’s brilliant. He didn’t come in a car or anything or security, he just walked casually down the street came up to us and he had a camera round his neck and he said ‘well don’t just stand there, pose’. So we posed, he took a picture, shook my hand, he said ‘I’ll see you inside’. And I said to him ‘I hope to meet your brother one day!’

Phil Jupitus: Whatever the reason for coming, the signature a nostalgic roam, a pilgrimage, come they do, in their hundreds of thousands. Dave Jones is one of the organisers of the event.

Dave Jones: Well we’ve just come out of the Adelphi Hotel where the Beatles Convention is on, and then we walk down the street here and at the bottom of the street you’ve got Chavasse Park which is a three-day stage for Mathew Street Festival. What’s happened is that the Mathew Street Festival has grown out of the Beatles Festival and 350,000 people attended that three-day festival last year, and a lot of it is Beatles music. We’ve got bands from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, United States, Japan, Australia, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland…

MC: Ladies and gentlemen please welcome, a huge Liverpool welcome for the Australian Beatals!
Peter Martin (Aussie Beatals): Yeah, G’day!

[Nowhere Man – Aussie Beatals]

Dave Jones: People say to me, how do you determine your market? Well the market is the world basically.

American Beatleweeker: To come here and see it, it’s always before like an ethereal dream and then when you get here all of a sudden the dream has dimension. You know there is a distance between here and there. Penny Lane’s over there, the Albert Dock’s over there, all of a sudden Pepperland is real.

Dave Jones: They’ve thought about this for a long time and they’re listened to the music, they’ve read their newspapers, they’ve read the book and they want to go to the place itself, and it really is, it really is, it’s Mecca!

Dave Jones: Whenever I’ve presented a Beatles Tour for people I’ve always explained to them it’s a story about ordinary people. And it’s rags to riches, it’s log cabin to white house and every country in the world has got that kind of example. It’s a very ordinary story about four very ordinary people from four very ordinary backgrounds, and that’s the fascination of the story.

Phil Jupitus: our very ordinary people, from four very ordinary backgrounds. 63-year old Roy Collier is from Margate.

Roy Collier: When the Beatles came along it was like, like the bloke next door. The bloke up the road, he’s a working calls guy he’s got a group together and it was the thing to follow. And we didn’t have a lot of money in those days I remember I went out and there used to be a thing called a provident cheque where you could go and get money off this company and you could buy clothes and I bought a Beatles jacket and Beatles trousers. It took me about two years to pay the money back, but everybody tried to look like the Beatles even,  I say I was 23 year old and married with three children but it wasn’t the point, everybody wanted to be a Beatle.

Phil Jupitus: Roy saw the band forty years ago at Margate’s Winter Gardens.

Roy Collier: They were here for, I think they did three or four performances and they stayed at the Beresford Hotel at Birchington, well that’s no longer there now, that’s now a big housing estate. And we went up there, we got there about 7.30 in the evening and the queue was right up along the seafront right way round down to the harbour and the show started late because they couldn’t get all the people in in time. And The Beatles came on and everybody went absolutely beserk. When the curtains opened they had their weave jackets on with the high collars, their Beatle haircuts, their ties, they had black drainpipe trousers and they had pointed toe Cuban heeled boots. They sang a mixture of rock and roll maybe sort of Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard versions and then they did their hits right the way through as well. They finished up on Twist and Shout because that was their big song at the time, that was their big hit at the time. And it was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. The world was chaos when they were here and I’m just glad that I lived through it. It’s nice to look back and say I’ve been there, I’ve done it and I’ve seen it, which I have and it’s lovely. It’s lovely.

Interviewer: Who’s you’re favourite Beatle?
Kid 1: Ringo
Int: Why?

Roy Collier: My kids they always talk about the Beatles still, my oldest son especially he’ll always say ‘ah The Beatles this and the Beatles that’

Kid 1: John, George, Paul and Ringo.
Int: Are there any others?
Kid 2: There’s another old person…
Kid 1: Ringo? Pete Best!

Roy Collier; He lives on the Isle of Wight now, he’s very keen on them and now his little kids, I’ve got two grandchildren Harry and Annie, they’re both interested because they’re asking questions what were these pictures round the wall, was this a pop group? They’re into Club S Seven and that sort of thing now but they’re asking who was this, who was that, and it’s nice for my son who’s twenty years younger than me, he’s 43, it’s nice for us to sit there and talk to the children and try to explain to them and put the picture in their mind of what a pop group was in our day.

[Yellow Submarine (Latin) – Derek Enright MP]

Phil Jupitus: And so, to the future.

Mark Lewisohn: The ramifications of the Beatles live on to this day.

Phil Jupitus: Taking us into the sunset of this series, Mark Lewisohn. With, of course, a happy ending.

Mark Lewisohn: The ripples are extending further out and they’re not as strong at the edges as they were at the centre. But the Beatles music does still carry a message and when you hear of kids buying or hearing the One album, of all their great number one records of the sixties which came out in 2001 and surpassed all expectations, The Beatles own included, it undoubtedly helped to keep the momentum going and to remind people that at the end of the day, it’s about the music.

[I’m Only Sleeping – solo female]

Paul McCartney: This is Paul McCartney saying thank you very much, it’s been nice being on your show.
John Lennon: This is John Lennon saying thanks for everything, enjoyed being on your show.
Ringo Starr: This is Ringo saying thanks for everything.
George Harrison: And this is George saying goodbye to everybody who’s been listening Thank you very much, goodbye.