The Beatles 1. The Pole Star of Popular Music

I was only six years old when the Fab Four came to town, but because I am a life-long fan I was asked by the boss to produce a clutch of features to mark the 50th anniversary . . .

So this is the first of three related articles (the others follow below) about The Beatles having played Shrewsbury Music Hall.

All three articles appeared in the Shropshire Star on Saturday, April 27, 2013.

The Beatles 1. The Pole Star of Popular Music

No. Emphatically NO! Please don’t speak about them in the same breath as JLS or West Life or Take That. We are not today discussing some over-rated boyband.

We are discussing – half a century on from their gigs in Shropshire – the band that would become the pole star of popular music – a fixed brilliant point of light, the constellations of pop stardom charted around them.

In short, people will still be playing the music of The Beatles 100 years from now.

Yet looking here at these old black and white photographs of four young lads from Liverpool, it seems incredible that they would go on to turn pop music on its head.

In not much more than seven years, they created a dazzling catalogue of around 200 songs from A Hard Day’s Night to Norwegian Wood, from Eight Days A Week to Penny Lane, from Across The Universe to Fool On The Hill, from I Saw Her Standing There to The Long and Winding Road.

I was a mere six years of age when I heard, coming out of a tinny transistor radio, Please Please Me, the group’s first number one record.

And I’ve been a fan ever since.

The years rolled by and I went on loving them when they became solo artists. (Hey. I know McCartney’s quality control has dipped alarming on occasion, but such is Paul’s over-arching genius that I’ll defend even some of his most cringe-worthy efforts from the seventies).

But of course John, Paul, George and Ringo were never going to be able to match as individuals what they achieved as a band.

There was the shock of the long hair, the knockabout humour and warmth of their movies, the being cheeky to Her Majesty, the strange moustaches, experimenting with Indian music, going weird, being scruffy, and a legacy of 13 extraordinary albums.

Just think about this embarrassment of riches. Should you ever tire of the White Album, Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road, just go back to the very beginning of it all and listen again to those early LPs. Because their early spontaneity is equal in merit to their late sophistication.

Check out the boisterous rock and roll. Enjoy again those harmonies, those infectious tunes.

Charming, witty, self-mocking, irreverent, clever, and super-abundant music-makers, The Beatles, were always much more than just a pop group.

And that’s why these old pictures of them in Shrewsbury are so important. Because they show the first flashes and twinkles and sparks of this pole star.