Original subtitles

[waves crashing]

[mellow music]

[tape clicking]

[man] I'd like to direct this question to misters Lennon and McCartney.

In a recent article, Time Magazine put down pop music.

And they referred to Day Tripper as being about a prostitute.

And Norwegian Wood as being about a lesbian.

No, I just wanted to know what your intent was

when you wrote it

and what your feeling is about the Time Magazine criticism

of the music that is being written today.

[McCartney] We're just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that's all.

[audience cheering, applauding]

[pensive music]

First sight, NEMS Enterprises,

Brian Epstein's management company,

did appear to be amateur,

because everyone was working really hard there,

lacking a little in organization.

But everyone was very enthusiastic,

which made up for it, really.

And I don't believe that any great errors

were made in promotion, contractual relationships and so on.

No, it worked very well, it worked very well.

Although there was no great definition of people's roles there.

Brian invited me to become, as he termed it,

Chief Administrative Executive.

A title which I never used at all,

but he subsequently made me director of the company.

[pensive music]

Brian was a very hands-on manager.

He was their greatest fan.

He had their interests at heart in every conceivable respect.

Very, very proper Englishman.

Kind of Englishman you see in English movies.

Spoke the language beautifully, dressed beautifully.

And a gentleman. We never had a contract.

Each time our contracts were done

over the phone.

I bought them without having seen them.

And he told me I was the first American to call him.

And I offered him something that he couldn't resist.

Carnegie Hall. He says, "I've heard about Carnegie".

The Beatles were not known in America at that time.

Not even their records were playing.

But I'd been reading about them.

Their success in the States wasn't immediate.

I mean, their singles had been released in the States before

to very little impact, I mean, roughly like the impact

of feather on concrete, I suppose.

But I Want To Hold Your Hand somehow

caught the mood of the act, caught the lightning.

I said, let's bring them here.

They were coming stars, not just in Liverpool,

but going across the country,

and then doing Germany.

And going on to France later on.

I bought them because the language was the same.

And kids of England, Germany, France,

were responding to their music.

But when I saw them the very first time

when I presented them with Carnegie Hall

and I met them before they went on

at their hotel, at the Plaza Hotel,

looking out the window of the Plaza Hotel

and see hundreds of kids waving to them

from downstairs below the Plaza Hotel

and singing their songs.

In some ways, the Beatles had already cracked America

before they even arrived there,

because they already got to number one

with I Want To Hold Your Hand.

And then there was the airport arrival where

there was another big PR campaign

and I think Capitol Records paid lots of fans

to go in and jump up there.

And for a lot of people they equate the early Beatles

with I Want to Hold Your Hand, especially in North America.

That song really defines an era.

It was actually quite a lot slower. It was almost like a ballad.

When they were they wrote it,

and George Martin lifted the tempo.

And that's what made it click straight away.

It's just a very cool, simple subject matter,

which was very well done in the great Beatles way,

with great melodies, great middle eights,

just very well put together.

John Lennon plays what would be considered

almost as prehistoric heavy metal,

kind of a rhythm guitar track, very aggressive.

It's got a really strong melody against the chords.

And that's why I think a song like that

stands the test of time, because of the power of the melody.

It may have been a simple song, but the way it was performed

and the combination of the two,

plus, of course, the visuals,

remember that television was beginning to come into its own and

that really the Beatles made each and every song

of theirs their own.

The vocals explode into an almost an orgasmic kind of a finale.

I want to hold your...

[piano plays] That's quite an ecstatic leap.

They may not have been thinking of the word hand,

What I Want To Hold Your Hand has is energy

and vitality and self confidence.

And we're taking on the world and we're going to beat everybody.

Doesn't matter what the words say,

and lots of people have gone back since and said,

"Oh, the Stones wanted to take you to bed,

The Beatles just wanted to hold your hand."

And okay, that's true on one level,

but let's just listen to the actual sort of impact of the song

that words are meaningless.

What the song is saying is

"we're going to take on the world, we're going to win."

I think I Want To Hold Your Hand is iconic.

That is the Beatles number

that became the biggest in America.

This is what started them in America, you know.

And this is the record that they were first told

when they were in Paris, you've just come

number one in the American charts.

And the whole of America fell in love with them, you know,

it was such an upbeat, happy song.

Just a couple of months after

President Kennedy had been assassinated.

And America had been in mourning

and suddenly they had something to smile about

with the Beatles and this particular number.

And I think it is iconic, will always be remembered,

and I think with Americans they'll always think

of that particular number.

Ed Sullivan.

Ed Sullivan had been traveling across Europe

to get to Heathrow Airport and take a plane back

to his native New York.

At the airport when he got to Heathrow,

so a bunch of kids hold up signs.

Now the Beatles were not known here.

And he saw posters.

"We love John, we love Ringo, we love Paul, we love George."

[chuckles]

Welcome home Ed Sullivan, he asks an airport attendant,

Who are these Beatles?

Ed Sullivan used to present a lot of animal life,

you're too young to remember that, I think.

[laughing]

He asks to that flight attendant, is this an animal act?

And the man said, "No, this is England's

most popular singing group."

He had someone in his office check out, who are these?

Who are these Beatles?

And he learn that a New York promoter

with my name

was presenting them.

[nostalgic music]

The secretary call us and said,

Mr. Sullivan asked me to call you

and told me that he found out

that you're bringing the Beatles over, is that correct?

I said yes.

What do you think of them?

I said they were a phenomenon.

The rest was history.

They came here,

they did the Sullivan Show.

Sullivan bought them three days prior to my date.

Historically, his show was over Sunday.

Mine happen to be on a Wednesday, February 12.

He put them on Sunday, February 9.

[nostalgic music]

The Ed Sullivan Show was the sort of North American

equivalent of Sunday night at the London Palladium

and it was transmitted coast to coast.

And everybody saw it.

And it had roughly the same effect on the American public

as the Beatles appearance in, you know,

on Sunday night at the London Palladium

they had a few months earlier,

and everybody was glued to the TV.

And a significant statistic here is, well the Beatles are on,

not a single hubcap was stolen in the whole of New York.

The Ed Sullivan show was extremely important.

It was a big deal.

They somehow on American TV show worked.

The whole of America saw the Beatles.

So as a springboard for America, it was huge.

[nostalgic music]

By just having one or two performances for him,

they could basically cover the whole of America coast to coast.

You know, you hear stats, like, you know,

the juvenile delinquent crime rate dropped that night,

because everyone was at home watching it on television.

You know, just like everyone who was alive

in that era could tell you where they were

when they heard Kennedy died,

most people will tell you that they saw

the Beatles that night in February.

To appear on the Ed Sullivan Show

was like the music business seal of approval.

When you're on Ed Sullivan, you are a star.

And I think it to us young kids at the time,

it solidified the fact that these guys are mega stars

and they're here to stay.

I think this very sort of careful, clever management,

that's got the Beatles to where they are.

But the Ed Sullivan shows were crucial in their career development.

It was crucial, really.

I don't know if you could say they were being marketed,

I think they were just being unveiled, I prefer that.

This phenomenon for Beatles sound, Americans just love the group.

But you can't, it's impossible to overstate

the importance of the Ed Sullivan shows because

I think it was 73 million people watched them.

And something like one in three of the American population

watched the Beatles, and that would have been an awful lot of kids,

obviously, but also parents who were actually seeing

this group for the first time.

There are two strands here, I think the American image

of English people at that time was the bowler hats

and the umbrella type of guy, you know.

So suddenly, these guys come along here,

and they clipped.

And they also had the idea that people had clipped English,

you know, very well spoken people.

Probably like Brian Epstein.

And these four guys come off a plane, you know,

whatever their moptop heads

which these days you don't seem outrageous,

it doesn't seem that long, but it was then.

With their different accent, with a Liverpool accent.

Then rarely encountered that before

and cracking jokes, you know, sorts of stuff doing one off,

one off common so.

I think the Americans were just blown over,

but blown over pious and fascinating pious.

The Ed Sullivan Shows introduced the Beatles

to an awful lot of people who had no idea

what was number one in the pop charts,

and also marked the point where they grew beyond

being a teenage band and actually became

a sort of worldwide universal old age band.

Because they had been used rarely apart from when they have people like

Bill Haley, Rock Around the Clock.

But he was then a guy of 30, which was quite old for teenagers

and he had this kiss curl.

There's Elvis, but Elvis had gone in the army.

And he was fairly clean cut sort of guy, wasn't he?

But then these guys come along, the Beatles.

One of the great myths about 60s Pop is that

nothing was happening in America.

And the Beatles came along and revolutionized everything.

It's just not true, the two biggest groups in America

in '63, '64 were the Beach Boys and The Four Seasons,

and they were pushing each other all the time

to do more and more innovative songs and effective records.

Meanwhile, you've got Phil Spector

making some of the greatest records of all time.

And there was some wonderful country things coming out of Nashville,

soul music was kicking off, you've got Sam Cooke,

his writing was just starting out, Ray Charles in his prime,

it was anything but a desert.

But what the Beatles did was bring an entirely new

sort of atmosphere of freshness.

And Englishness, which hadn't been seen

on the American pop scene before.

The cracking of America was achieved

with contributions from a number of different sources.

And I mean, on the part of Capitol Records,

there was also undoubtedly unusual promotional expenditure.

In their way, they were prepared to sort of spend money,

they produced all kinds of gimmicky things like Beatles wings.

They had their executives going around the place

in Beatles wings and waving flags and posters

and so forth, and they certainly provided posters

and banners for the kids to wave at the airport at New York

when the Beatles first arrived in February 64.

Yeah, they did. So it's a concentrated effort

from all aspects, but it was all directed at

different parts of the market, and that's what was crucial.

Normally, a Rock and Roll campaign would have concentrated

purely on the TV and magazines, probably.

We concentrated on the widest possible range

from the most sophisticated magazines

and newspapers across the board down to the TV fanzines.

[introspective music]

First of all, it was made at a much more leisurely pace

than Please Please Me had been.

So they have a chance to have a breath

and actually take a break after doing two or three songs,

rather than trying to do them all on one day.

And secondly, they were allowed to double track overdub

for the first time and so they could actually

overdub their vocals put the same vocal on twice

just to make the sound thicker.

In fact, I think later on, I think it was John who said that

they more or less double track themselves off that record,

because having discovered they could do it,

it was a great game, they just wanted to do it on every track.

But there's some fantastic material on that record,

the songs like All My Loving, and It won't Be Long,

which are easily as good as their singles.

And also some of their very, very best cover versions.

Particularly Smokey Robinson's song,

You've Really Got a Hold on Me,

which I think is one of the very, very few white versions

of a Motown song it actually beats the original.

All My Loving, for me is one of the great unsung

heroes of the Beatles era,

Though earlier, it's such an unbelievably great song.

When All My Loving came out

it was on their second album in England, With The Beatles.

And by the time they came over to North America,

that song was one of the first songs

I think they opened up with the Sullivan Show.

But it was a key song in the Beatles career.

It was just the right balance between kind of schmooze,

romanticism and kind of professional,

quite hard driving rock band.

And there's a sense in which they're taking further

what they have done previously,

because instead of basically four chord loops,

which is what we've had up to this point,

you have a much longer pattern.

[piano music]

Gosh, it sounds like organ music like that, doesn't it?

But that's what they're doing.

That's that's the underlying pattern.

You have an eight chord sequence.

And they finish with that.

Now, we happen to be in any major at this point,

that chord belongs, that chord is borrowed

from a sort of a blues background.

All My Loving was the very first song that Paul wrote,

where the words came before the music.

He said he wrote it a like a poem.

And then the music came sort of later.

So this was another step in the songwriting experience of him.

This is about where they started losing

some of the high end in their sound, in my opinion,

you won't hear that cymbal crash and the snare quite as much,

you are starting to hear a little bit more

of the bottom end of the song, a little bit more bass.

Bass is a little more predominant in that song,

and the drums as well as actual bass playing.

Paul had this walking baseline

that was unheard of before.

There's so many chords in it.

And he just had this beautiful

walking bass line all the way through.

And it was kind of overshadowed even by John's

jangly rhythm guitar, which is very, very hard to execute on stage

or studio or anything.

And Lennon always said that, you know,

he had a hard time playing that song

because of the complicated sort of fretting pattern on that song.

So definitely, it was a step up,

the Beatles were experimenting more.

They were doing something that was different.

They weren't copying so much as as developing and innovating.

What we have here is a song I think it's

fairly well advanced,

certainly compared with their first compositions

on the first album.

To this day, you know, I can't believe that a song

so good that they would never have used it as a single.

But that's certainly my all time favorite Beatles song,

I can listen to that thing forever.

I think All My Loving is interesting songwriting from Paul,

first of all because of the counterpoint, or harmony singing,

which is, I think, the most interesting

that the Beatles have done up to that point.

Secondly, because it's got some amazing rhythm guitar work

on it from John, which I think he was very, very proud of.

And thirdly, because it's maybe

Paul McCartney's first great melody,

which it's on the road to things like Yesterday

and so on later on.

I'm being told by a friend of mine

that it's actually Nick from Tchaikovsky.

I don't know whether that's true or not.

I've never heard the better of Tchaikovsky.

But it's just a fantastically catchy pop song,

and it says something about the caliber of the Beatles material

at that point that they could write a song

as amazingly commercial as that,

and then not put it out as a single.

By then they could have easily written the whole album.

But I think obviously, because again,

they're the new band still,

even though they were knocking at number ones

like, you know, like anybody's business.

They still obviously had people around them,

still didn't trust them to write a whole album

full of their own material, which I think is a bit sad,

because I think they could have.

It's certainly not true that the Beatles were the first people

to write their own hit records.

The Shadows have done it, even Cliff Richard

that actually helped out The Shadows to write some of its own hits.

And in America, people like Chuck Berry

had made an amazing career

out of writing some of the greatest Rock and Roll songs of all time.

But in terms of being an entirely sort of self contained group

who could come up with an entire album's worth of material,

the Beatles are the first.

And in some ways, you could say that they ruined the music industry

because they made everybody else think

"oh, if I'm going to be a proper Pop star,

I've got to write my own songs."

And actually, an awful lot of pop stars

have been far better having songs written for them

by Carole King, or people like that.

But they insisted on doing their own.

So it was a revolution, which obviously encouraged the Beatles

to come up with the best music they ever did.

But at the same time, also produce an awful lot of rubbish.

You couldn't yet get away with an album

of entirely self penned material.

So you actually had to put in some standards in there.

Things like Money and Roll Over Beethoven work well

because they're the sort of Rock and Roll stuff

that The Beatles have been playing for years.

They're very familiar with that sort of style,

and they're beginning to turn out things in their own style.

A lot of these American influences were very much

a big draw on the Beatles,

they really wanted to put a lot of these songs into their repertoire.

And I think, at the time, when that album came out,

they were still unsure that their songs

on their own could sell an album.

So you throw a bunch of different covers on there too,

because the average record buyers will say,

"Oh, I know that song, Money."

And they'll buy the album maybe on that purpose.

It's a way of sort of cementing themselves

within the tradition to take on a song like that,

which may not belong really within their repertoire,

but because it uses material that they themselves use elsewhere,

it's a way of saying, you know, we're actually firmly within this--

I think about tradition really for early Beatles,

but that really is what they're saying, you know,

we're not doing anything outrageous.

I'm not sure whether to say it's an improvement

A Hard Day's Night album because it's entirely

Lennon-McCartney compositions.

I actually think there's there's more consistency there

because this is all their own material.

It was great to listen to an album that was all new.

It wasn't covers where "Oh yes, I've heard that song great cover,

but I've heard the song."

And I think it was a landmark in that sense

where you knew they were here to stay.

A Hard Day's Night was some sort of highlight

of the early years because every track

was written by Lennon and McCartney.

And they were all strong numbers.

And also, they were quite unusual.

I mean, for example, that the final track I'll Be Back,

which wasn't in the film,

the harmonies wander all over the place.

I mean, it doesn't seem to have a standard

sort of verse chorus pattern at all.

And I think they are actually trying to extend the boundaries

of the common pop song.

A Hard Day's Night, what an amazing record.

It's completely composed by Lennon-McCartney, to begin with.

One of the very few times that had been done

by anybody in a Rock group up to that point.

And the maturity of the songwriting

within the very sort of narrow pop,

I love you, you love me, kind of format they were working.

Very, very complex harmonies, interesting chord changes,

just fantastically professional songwriting

all the way through.

I think in lots of ways, and essentially,

the interesting thing about that record

is the fact that it's completely dominated by John.

I think, almost for the last time at any Beatles record,

he wrote more songs than Paul did.

13-14 songs, and John wrote about 10 of them.

Amazing sort of purple pants for him.

And I think that really sort of said he rocked up at Paul's backside.

And as a result, Paul dominated almost every album after that.

I mean, it certainly produced, you know,

a modicum of hits, not by the Beatles

in all sorts of cover versions of all the songs on it.

Every song was covered by another artist,

and the Beatles themselves score with A Hard Day's Night itself,

which was number one for weeks, throughout the summer.

I mean, what a way to start an album.

You know, this was still a world where you expected introductions,

proper introductions to songs, and all you get is this in a chord,

which rings and actually suggests nothing about

what's going to follow, I mean, incredible.

There's no way that you can't actually

just hear the beginning of that song

and know who it is and what it is. It's a brilliant song.

This was the start of bringing in the slightly tougher approach.

And then juxtaposing it with the slightly

sugary more sort of softer middle section.

There's a sort of slight humor in there as well.

It's not completely, you know, sort of just

A Hard Day's Night sort of play on words.

So it's still got a little bit of the kind of sort of romantic Beatles

sort of theme running through it,

but it's kind of much more confident.

And it was a step forward in in melody,

and the way the the backing vocals were arranged,

very, very good song.

I think that there's something about the art school training

or whatever like that, and you sort of admire

the fact that three seconds into this thing you're sitting,

"Oh, what's going to happen next?"

You know, it's not like somebody's going,

"Oh, look at me I'm wonderful."

You know what I mean, it's kind of like any face,

you know about this, don't you?

Just that one chord, I mean, how many of the songs are the way

you can just hit one chord, and you know what it is?

Very, very self confident piece of songwriting from John Lennon.

At the other extreme, If I Fell, which is a John Lennon ballad

that everybody assumes must be Paul McCartney.

But it's John again, very, very fragile love ballad

in the sort of early 60s girl group tradition.

And then a third song from John called You Can't Do That,

which is as close as the Beatles ever got to being an R&B band.

He said he was trying to get that sort of Wilson Pickett feel.

And he actually plays lead guitar on that

which adds to the sort of general roughness and rowdiness

of the atmosphere.

And alongside that very, very smooth that's the songwriting like,

in Things We Said Today, Paul McCartney,

one of his finest melodies again.

But almost every track on the record

is a standout, it's very hard to find a weak moment.

[typewriter clanking]

I suppose the next big step for the Beatles

was to go on to the screen.

I mean, people have seen them on television.

But everybody wanted to really get closer to the Beatles

and see them, hear them talking. Find out what they were like.

It was the first harder rock movie

that was made-- that was a success in the cinemas.

A Hard Day's Night was a fantasize version

of what the Beatles life was like.

In there it was just that constant being chased.

It was never sitting down for a minute of peace,

just them being bullied into doing things.

Yes, bullied into doing things

that you didn't always want to do.

They did have their limits of how much they would

commercialize themselves.

They just blew everyone away.

They just made the right film with the right director

with the right script at the right time,

using all the right material.

They couldn't have done it better.

Because United Artists thought the Beatles would

probably be just be a flash in the pan,

sort of overnight success and then disappear.

They decided to make movie for 150,000 pound budget,

and in black and white to save money.

I think that actually Paul McCartney said that,

"thank God, they made it in black and white

because if it had been in color would have been crap."

It could have been a disaster, it could have gone the wrong way.

It could have proven to be embarrassing

or perhaps just not at home in a film medium.

But in fact, they turned out to be just as confident

and self possessed as they appeared on stage or in interviews.

A Hard Day's Night was more or less art imitating life

and showing a beat group going around the country

in a bus being chased by fans and never having a moment's rest.

So you could say that it wasn't exactly challenging

to write the script for that one.

In fact, a lot of people think that it was all ad libs,

but there was virtually no ad libbing at all,

little scripted written by a script writer, Alun Owen,

but because they were sort of young, and they've never acted,

and they were a little bit nervous.

Each line has a maximum of six words in it. [chuckles]

It was the first pop film

that actually gave the impression of being real life.

And obviously it wasn't because the Beatles didn't go

running off round playing fields just before gigs,

and Ringo didn't storm off and in a terrible half,

just when they were about to go on TV and so on.

And okay, but their characters were very cliched,

and they were sort of placed into the pigeon holes

that they then had to occupy for the rest of the 60s.

But it had an amazingly documentary feel about it,

which was all down to Richard Lester, the director.

It was his idea, I think to try and get away from the cliche.

Let's do a show, kind of Hollywood musical style.

Obviously what the Beatles would do for the movie musical,

which in a sense was what this now was

and updating of the musical tradition.

That would obviously set a tone for other groups

to follow and for what was to come later in the decade.

That's another first for the Beatles.

["Can't Buy Me Love" by The Beatles playing on piano]

So you've got a blue third, and you've got a melody which is

falling all the time.

And it's scalic.

Those characteristics are all important,

you get into the middle eighth or the bridge...

[piano music]

You've lost your blue third,

you've lost the falling nature of the melody.

It's now basically rising,

and you've lost the scaling aspect.

It's now basically an arpeggio.

Can't Buy Me Love was an interesting song

because it was the first major Beatles song to feature

one vocal rather than Lennon and McCartney together.

And of course, seeing the Beatles in the movie

A Hard Day's Night, eating around in the giant field,

when that song was playing, you know,

it just had a real fun flavor to it.

But what's significant is that the guitar, electric guitar,

has really come to the fore, and its mix's louder

and drives the track along.

It was much more sort of aggressive,

not in a mad way. But there was a tougher sort of sound

and a tougher record and slightly more guitar-y.

And I think in that way, it made slightly more impact.

The public responded really well, they really liked

the kind of more driving harder edge.

Because by now bands like The Stones, were starting to

not really give the Beatles so much competition,

but they were dirtier and harder

and more kind of Rock and Roll.

And the Beatles already were sort of starting to

take on this kind of goody goody image,

which I don't think they really liked.

And I think still at this stage,

George Martin was just helping them to, you know,

drop that chord there guys, or you know, that's good, repeat that.

So he was giving them his arrangement ideas.

Listen to the production, you know, because there's not a simple thing,

even in the earlier tracks, you know,

there's bongos going away in the background.

It's all about feel, getting the tempo right,

and getting the feel right.

And then seeing them birds over the top.

When you would go to a concert,

whether it be a big band, or small group or, or whatever,

you will be sitting in the audience of the venue

and you would hear a mixture of direct sound

from the stage, but you will always get a mixture

of the ambient of that room.

The throwback from the walls or whatever.

And I had this sound in my mind that I wanted to try to get through

to that similar sort of sound as I could and put it on tape as I could.

So what I did, I had a method of

I had to go down to the Beatles, they were set,

I set them up in a certain way.

We did have a company policy before I became really established

as their sound engineer, which I was told to follow.

And that was by the use of screens, screening everything,

you put a mic in front of an amplifier, who'd screen it.

So that ideally, when you opened up that fader, on that mic,

all you would hear would be that whatever,

that guitar that...

And that would improve the separation, as it was called.

I didn't like that at all.

Because being a jazz performer with my own group,

I like being close to the group as easy as possible.

It affects your own playing, etc.

And I thought this would apply to The Beatles too,

because they've done quite a bit in Hamburg anyway,

without having to worry about the separation, etcetera.

So I brought this to bear when I started to record,

not for Love Me Do but once they'd were established with

Please Please Me.

I thought right, this is where I can now do what I like

because now I'm established as their engineer. [chuckles]

And so I would go down and I said right,

you can set the levels you're happy with yourself,

whatever levels you want to set, do so.

Unlike in the last two sessions with other engineers,

when they have mixing up into the console,

they would perhaps ask for, "son, son, son, son,

can you turn your volume down a bit?"

Or this sort of stuff,

but I let them set whatever they were happy with their sound there.

And I would stand back at the back of the studio

and listen, see if I could get this

and beyond as I call it.

A sound, a mixture of them and what was coming back from the studio.

And then I'll replace my mics accordingly.

Sometimes a long way back to get the mixture

as I thought of this sound,

sometimes I had to use a little bit of the echo chamber on voice,

singing, sometimes you hear a bit of that.

And it was just the sound that I got

from direct and the ambient sound.

In retrospect, I would consider that George Martin

was the fifth Beatle.

They could do something he couldn't do.

And he could do something they couldn't do, perfect marriage.

Without him, we wouldn't have had such great reference at all.

And it's very hard to work out

where production ends and arrangement begins.

Because with Can't Buy Me Love, for instance,

when you hear that song, you hear the chorus comes first.

In fact, when they played it to him, the chorus didn't come first.

He said, "well put it up front, lads, that's where it belongs.

That's where it'll hit home quickest."

And if you like, if that was a production hint,

an arrangement or whatever,

it was something George Martin helped them out with,

that helped made the song.

He allowed an unknown band to record their own material.

Major step, changed everything for everyone over the whole planet.

They changed everything, from then on in

new bands with no track record with nothing behind them

could record their material.

This has never been done before. He changed pop music forever.

He was able to write for strings,

he was able to walk into an orchestra session and say,

"I want you to play this song," and write it down,

give it to the musicians and they could play on the piano.

And the Beatles respected him.

And he respected them.

As time went on perhaps they outgrew him,

but certainly for the for the early to mid period,

it was a large part of George Martin

that went in with Lennon and McCartney.

They learned a lot from George Martin,

and he was at the right place at the right time,

and thank God for that.

And I Love Her was a good example of

not just sort of screaming twist and shout. [laughing]

It was John and Paul thinking about writing more mature,

introspective material.

You know, here was a song that had a very different beat,

Ringo had it, you know, the drumming in it was

a very different style.

And it was just basically Paul and the acoustic guitar.

Very nice song.

Searching for a new way of communicating an idea,

an old idea, And I Love Her it's been around--

Love songs have been around forever,

but they always seem to find a new way to introduce it to the public,

that would grab you in some way and kind of go

"hey, that's interesting."

Unbelievably, he manages to just avoid

sort of tend to ludicrous, sort of sloppiness,

and I think that's a lot of what's down to the quality of his voice.

He just had this sort of inbuilt knowledge to just be tender enough,

but then to put the odd little bit of kind of angst in there as well.

Here was an indication

that you could switch from tough Rock and Roll

to writing sweet ballads.

I think one of the standout tracks on the A Hard Day's Night album

is Things We Said Today,

one of the few McCartney songs on the whole record.

It's a very simple song.

And I think that without it on the album,

the album will probably be a little bit maybe too contemporary.

You know, it was quite a departure from earlier Beatles material.

Is quite virtuosic, it uses a very common pattern and cycle of fifths.

[piano music]

It uses it there, but it uses a different one

in the middle eight.

[piano music]

And that's quite virtuosic. So you're actually shifting key.

And you're using the same pattern,

but a different portion of the pattern.

And as it turned out, it's a brilliant soundtrack

to a pretty good movie.

Hit songs before the Beatles were more or less

boy girl, moon June.

Something based on what a guy would buy his girlfriend

or possibly vice versa.

So when the Beatles took up their songwriting pens,

it was obvious to carry on the tradition that they knew all about.

It is the Beatles locking into what everybody else was singing about.

And presumably what their audiences wanted to listen to songs about.

It was to do with them speaking to their fans.

And when you look back, I guess it was a bit repetitious,

but at the time nobody noticed it.

And then John would actually sit down and they'd think like,

if I was a teenage girl, what would I want the Beatles to sort of,

you know, say to me kind of thing, or what would I want?

And so they were really, really aware of that sort of thing,

and they wanted to make songs where people, you know,

especially that teen market would would pick up on that,

and especially the young girl market that would want them to think that

oh, Paul wrote the song for me kind of thing, you know.

And this kind of idea. So I think,

originally that really drove them with their songwriting.

Is part of the Beatles, you know, sits without that,

I think there would have been another great band.

But I think the sort of the whole issue of love

is what established them at the top in the first place.

So they wisely kept that sort of theme

running through their output.

Had they been singing about women

and different things or singing about as opposed to girls,

I think we probably would have missed the message.

And I don't think they would have been nearly

as big as they were.

Years later, they began to write songs about like,

for instance, She's A Woman.

Now, that would be where I would think they suddenly,

when we were all a little bit older than two, so...

it was probably their evolution along with us

that made them continue on to be strong with

that group of Beatle maniacs, I guess.

She's A Woman tends to go back to that bitterness,

it's a very uncluttered sort of texture,

the emphasis is very much on the voice and the melody

because there's not really much else going on.

And I see that as a positive, as a sort of retrenchment almost,

because that will look ahead to things like

Norwegian Wood, where they can approach

a thinner texture in a positive way,

and realize perhaps that everybody doesn't have to play all the time.

The other particularly striking thing

about She's A Woman, is the title.

Because up to this point, they've been singing about little girls,

and all of a sudden they're singing about a woman.

Well, that says something, isn't it?

I Feel Fine will always be remembered for the feedback front.

Big mistake, fairly genius to leave it.

Now there is some debate over it wasn't, in fact,

the first song with feedback and whether it was or not

is up for debate, but it's the first one that I ever heard.

And it's a fun song again, the Beatles could deliver the goods.

I Feel Fine, a Lennon song, She's A Woman, a McCartney song.

A great combination is Something for everybody there.

I think that the process of moving from songs

which depend on their chord such structures to

songs which depend on riffs is missed.

I mean, we never really focus on that moment of change,

but it's a fundamental change and it begins to happen

in around 1965-1966.

So this...

[piano music]

Is crucial.

[upbeat music]

They're now at the height of their touring period,

so they didn't really probably have enough time

to get into the studio to give the thing their full attention.

Two standout tracks on me for this one,

is I'm a Loser,

with John and Paul, I think the harmonies on this are actually

first class and I think it's John's statement.

This is John song, although Paul is doing some good

harmony on it as well.

And the other one that stands out for me

was a great influence on the Beatles

in their early days was Buddy Holly,

it was also a great favorites of mine.

And they sing Words Of Love.

And because I'm a Buddy Holly fan, as well as a Beatles fan,

I'm very critical of people that do Buddy Holly songs.

They don't do them as good as Buddy Holly.

But this Words Of Love stands up with Buddy Holly's version,

Words Of Love by the Beatles.

So it's a good album for me

although it has been criticized as their weakest one.

Beatles For Sale was the work of a group

that was becoming tired and after

with the previous album A Hard Day's Night,

every track was a Lennon and McCartney original.

By the time Beatles For Sale came around,

they'd fallen back very much on their old

sort of Hamburg in Liverpool repertoire, you know,

old time Rock and Roll,

although there were some classic songs on it,

like, you know, Eight Days a Week or I'm a Loser.

But I think, you know, that was

almost as if they were stepping back,

you know, retreating to have prepared position almost

before going once again, for the the next album, Rubber Soul.

But isn't to say that it's a bad album.

You can't dismiss it as some sort of holding operation.

I think it's a very strong album,

but I mean, they look tired on the cover

and I think that it's to do with with

this sort of relentless touring scheduled

that had been unbroken since the beginning of 1963.

And their recording sessions tended to be

whenever they were available. It wasn't the case of block bookings.

It was a case of, you know, whenever they could get to London.

You look at the cover of Beatles For Sale

and you got four Beatles who look very tired and very bored.

And that's the predominant feeling you get from the record.

And after the creative breakthrough

of writing all the songs on A Hard Day's Night,

it went back to the old routine of doing half their own songs,

half other people's songs.

And the covers sounds so lame,

with the exception of Rock and Roll music, which is great.

The other ones really don't sound

as if the Beatles wanted to be there at all.

But at the same time, the Beatles own songwriting,

this is the moment when it starts to progress,

you get John's I'm a Loser

when he's obviously been listening to Bob Dylan for the first time,

he's got the harmonica on there.

And he is writing in a very sort of open

and rather crass way about his own fingerings.

And some of the other songs as well,

the things that people have forgotten,

Every Little Thing, What You're Doing.

They're not famous songs, but they're almost the epitome of that

that sort of beat sound. They take the beat sound

from the '64 as far as it can go.

And I think with that record, the Beatles realized they had to find

a new direction after that, or they were going to be going downhill.

As opposed to their earlier albums the songs were a little bit uneven.

It's actually the last one I ever bought

because I didn't know anything on it.

Except Eight Days a Week and having a hold of it,

I've never listened to it again.

I think it's a marvelous album, it's one of my favorites.

As a matter of fact, to me, they didn't sound tired at all, no.

But there is a burnt out tired sort of elements

that's underlying whole album, and in fact,

you can see on the album cover,

the photographer Robert Freeman took the shot and they look tired.

This is sort of glazed look there is,

opposed to this kind of impish, springy look, they usually get.

I don't think it was a tired record.

It was like, to me, I think what we do in this day and age

when we make Rock albums, we do the first album

than we think the next album must be different.

They weren't as happy. That's the other thing.

They were a little more kind of down,

when their earlier albums were upbeat.

All of a sudden, we're seeing songs where

the Beatles aren't just talking about something.

They're actually talking about experiences

that they had or inner feelings.

Lennon's often talked about songs like I'm a Loser or Help

as being sort of how he felt at the time,

or what was going through his head and writing that down,

and putting that into a song very autobiographical.

And that was something we weren't seeing

two albums before that.

Eight Days a Week, of course there's a play on words as well.

So the band will probably, yeah, working eight days a week.

I think so, and I'm wondering Eight Days a Week

that might have been another Ringoism maybe.

You think that even though Ringo isn't writing a lot of songs,

he definitely gave John and Paul lots of good ideas for things.

Almost harks back a little bit to their earlier sort of skiffle,

Rock and Roll, period.

Certainly George Harrison's guitar playing

sounds a lot like Carl Perkins, one of his heroes,

a sort of countrified guitarist.

It starts off very slowly faded it up.

And I think up until that point,

there wasn't many Rock and Roll songs that faded up,

I'd never heard that done before.

So just something a little bit different.

The Beatles were always trying looking for different

ways to present their music.

And that was something totally different.

The texture of the verse changes.

And this is something that's going to become much more important

for the Beatles subsequently, and I suspect

is George Martin, his involvement, saying,

just change what you're doing there.

The harmony's fine, the melody is fine, the lyrics are fine,

but let's just change the way it's being played.

Is it a description of how hard they're working?

Probably, probably like A Hard Day's Night.

I've had a hard day's night,

which means they've been working day and night,

eight days a week.

Yes, they probably feel as though

they've been working eight days a week.

But I can't be that analytical.

I just put the record on and think,

I wish I could write a song like that ,unbelievable.

[bright music]

After 1964 the Beatles weren't filming or doing TV,

they were on the road.

And whereas in '62, and '63, that meant playing Liverpool,

and various cinemas all around Britain.

In '64 they went to America,

and they went to Australia and New Zealand.

And they went all over Europe,

and went to America twice, in fact.

And so by the end of the end of the year there were exhausted.

And so what did they do at the end of the year, they toured Britain.

And then they went and played a Beatles Christmas show

in London where it was like a Beatles pantomime,

which they really didn't want to do

if they had to go to the same theater,

three weeks running to really stupid sketches,

do jokes that nobody could hear

because people were screaming all the way through.

And so that was really the end of the sort of a Beatlemania,

around the end of 64 they said to Brian Epstein,

"Look, we're happy to carry on touring,

but we cannot work at this pace.

And we're never taking another Christmas Show."

John Lennon in dark glasses, white trousers,

blue plum soles, black socks, lilac shirt

and multicolored jacket, it's lovely to see you again, John,

after about three months.

I'm glad to see you, Derek and your gray shirt, blue tie,

gray trousers of a tweedy thingie,

Beatle boots and black socks.

They're not Beatle boots.

They will be to anybody who will see you in the States, Derek.

What's the film called, John?

They haven't got a title yet, the director didn't think of one.

We're pleased to hear from you, Derek.

I tried to help you once with an album cover but didn't get very far.

Have you had any ideas which come close to the title?

Oh, they've all been sort of laugh ideas.

It has all been laughs. He laughs laughs laughs laughs laughs.

Things like that.

I think George had one which was something to do with Goldilocks.

Who's been sleeping in my porridge?

That sounds pretty close. I think you might use that one.

No, because we can't really sing about

who's been slipping in my porridge.

And will the title also be the title of a song, do you think?

It'll have to be, will it?

So I heard.

How many songs have you written for the film, John?

We had 13. We've recorded 11.

They've used seven and we need titles for songs.

Altogether, I've written 14.

But only 7 will be in it.

The script, which I had a look at it this morning,

it looks a little eccentric.

The aim of the operation presumably is to get a different sort of film

from A Hard Day's Night.

Yeah.

[bright music]

[mellow music]

John Lennon in dark glasses, white trousers,

blue plum soles, black socks, lilac shirt

and multicolored jacket, it's lovely to see you again, John,

after about three months.

I'm glad to see you, Derek and your gray shirt, blue tie,

gray trousers of a tweedy thingie,

Beatle boots and black socks.

They're not Beatle boots.

They will be to anybody who will see you in the States, Derek.

What's the film called, John?

They haven't got a title yet, the director didn't think of one.

We're pleased to hear from you, Derek.

I tried to help you once with an album cover but didn't get very far.

Have you had any ideas which come close to the title?

Oh, they've all been sort of laugh ideas.

It has all been laughs. He laughs laughs laughs laughs laughs.

Things like that.

I think George had one which was something to do with Goldilocks.

[Lennon] Who's Been Sleeping In My Porridge?

[man] That sounds pretty close. Do you think you might use that one?

[Lennon] No, because we can't very well sing about

"who's been sleeping in my porridge," can we?

[man] And will the title also be the title of the song, the thing, you think?

- [Lennon] It'll have to be. - Will it?

[Lennon] So I've heard.

[man] How many songs have you written for the film, John?

[Lennon] 13. We've recorded 11.

We need a title song.

All together we have written 14 but only seven will be in it.

[man] The script, which I had a look at this morning, looks a little eccentric.

The end of the operation, I presume

is to get a different sort of film from "Hard Day's Night".

[Lennon] Yeah. And we've done it, haven't we?

If there's ever a moment when The Beatles

were being professional songsmiths,

it's the Help album.

Now in retrospect, John Lennon always used to say

that the song Help was his great cry from heart.

I was screaming out for help, and nobody could hear me.

But I think that was an inference he added to the song later.

I'm sure the rest of the members of the band didn't realize that in '65

Help was was the end of a chapter of The Beatles career.

It was like, although probably unknowing to them,

a closing chapter on the first part of their career.

Help came at the end of

pretty much two years of solid touring for The Beatles.

And as the title would suggest,

John Lennon was quite keen

that the somebody stopped the merry-go-round and let him off.

They've had this success for a few years

and I think a lot of it was getting to them.

They couldn't go anywhere without being seen

and bothered and disturbed.

So I think it was a true cry for help.

And I think a lot of the innocence of the band and music

was coming to an end at that stage of their career.

Help I think definitely was an album

that was the last time where you had rockers like Dizzy Miss Lizzy.

They had more years of experience as songwriters behind them.

They had a bit more time now to experiment more in the studio.

They became quite powerful within the record company,

because they were selling lots of records,

and they could do a little bit more of what they wanted to do.

And consequently, what they've been up to in their private life

started coming out in the making of the record.

Now, Help has also got Yesterday,

which is the most covered song in history still, I think,

and probably will be forever.

An immaculate piece of songwriting.

I have no idea where it came from.

Paul McCartney has no idea where it came from.

Various people have tried to find the melody in old songs

by Nat King Cole or old bits of classical music.

But as far as Paul was concerned,

he just woke up one morning and had that tune.

And then he spent the 18 months going around everybody he met saying,

"Have you heard this tune before? It must be somebody else's".

And they go, "No". "Oh, okay".

And then he ended up with the song.

Yesterday is certainly one of the most,

if not the most celebrated of all The Beatles' songs.

I think that was kind of a crucial moment in The Beatles career.

People realized that they were not just the four mobtops.

They really were masterful songwriters.

And of course, that attracted a whole other area of audience.

A lot of other people who might not have listened to a Beatles record

suddenly thought, "Oh, that's nice. That's different".

Even though it can be considered sort of a

middle of the road signs recovered by sight from people.

You know, it really was a hallmark song for The Beatles,

because they were a rock and roll band,

and here was a rock and roll song using a string quartet in it.

The reason everyone fawned over Yesterday is because

it's the first time they use strings. Simple.

It's the first time an orchestra started on.

And they started to expand their musical ideas.

And that's why everyone goes for,

"Ah, The Beatles have written a ballad".

Basically, that's because people haven't listened to the other albums

because there's a few in there.

This is the first song of The Beatles where I feel

the words have been really worked at.

He's brought them together a perfect marriage.

It's a terrific song.

But the rest of the Help album was very much

sort of Beatles by numbers.

By this point, they knew how to write a Beatles pop song.

And they could do it in their sleep.

And most of Help sounds as if they did do it in their sleep.

[psychedelic music]

I think this was a groundbreaking album in a lot of ways

because this is when,

I would say more or less,

all ties were severed with the Mersey sound.

Rubber Soul. The second Beatles-fully-written album.

By the time Rubber Soul came around

most of their recording sessions were started like nine or 10 o'clock at night

and go to four or five in the morning.

This was basically because of their lifestyle

and the fact that they had a bit more carte blanche

to do a lot more different things in Abbey Road.

More than ever before they started recording their music

just using single tracks,

rather than playing so much live in the studio

as they did when they first started out.

George Martin, great musician, started to help them arrange,

started to put strings, started to put brass,

he started to help them.

He would say, "Well, chaps, you know, we've got an oboe mix

and interesting sound there, a flugelhorn".

And they'd say, "Well, let's hear it, George".

And he would get the classical musicians into play.

And they say, "That's great!

So here was a very different approach to recording.

They didn't see any reason for changing keys at the wrong time.

They didn't see any reason for not doing this.

They just saw no reason for not doing anything like that.

So when it came to Rubber Soul,

they kicked in big time.

That was the first of five classic records to be made.

Once The Beatles knew that they'd got the public here

and that they didn't have to fight to be heard.

The music became more interesting.

The songs became more interesting.

Perhaps it was the lyrics that really became more interesting

because Lennon and McCartney started putting their own problems into songs.

You see The Beatles not trying to write a love song,

or trying to write something for a specific group.

They really wanted to broaden their scope

and to write songs that were either based on life experiences

or on the way they felt about things.

Lennon and McCartney are seeing the possibilities

of the popular song as an expressive form,

rather than simply as a set of procedures,

a set of formulae that had been handed down.

I think a lot of songs at that stage,

they were taking their time and they were looking inside

and asking, "Is this really what it's all about?"

They were young guys growing up in this madness,

and they'd seen everything.

They'd done it all, they'd seen it all.

They'd probably taken it all, God knows.

I think you at some point, they must have had some tea. [laughs]

Lots of it, with biscuits.

No, I don't know.

It's difficult because their fans put them in that position

where they couldn't go anywhere.

I mean, when they used to come and see us,

they had to put their false mustaches on,

and dark glasses.

What's going on?

And so they were screened off the road.

And so they went into the studio.

And when they got all these toys,

and they had all the time in the world,

and all the money in the world to sort of experiment with it.

1965 was the year The Beatles discovered drugs,

mind-expanding drugs in a big way.

They spent most of that year listening to Bob Dylan

under the influence of mind-expanding drugs.

And they hung out with him in London.

And they met people like the beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

And so all in all, they started to think,

"We should be doing more with our songwriting

than we are at the moment".

And the results of that are on Rubber Soul,

where you actually get them trying to stand outside themselves,

and then look back at their own experience

in a self consciously artistic way for the first time.

They weren't just writing pop songs,

they were writing songs for themselves, about themselves.

And in popular music terms, in pop terms,

I don't think that had really been done before.

Okay, Bob Dylan had done Highway 61

and Bring It All Back Home by that point.

But he was a folk artist to become a rock artist.

The Beatles were still trying to be a pop band at that point.

And so it was a very brave sort of tightrope walk

that they were taking,

trying to bring all their new artistic influences

into the mainstream pop business.

There was a period of time I can't think how long it was,

but it was sometime

in between the previous album to Rubber Soul

and the start of Rubber Soul.

What had happened in that time, I don't know.

They had changed so much so that when...

You see, up to the previous album before Rubber Soul, we were like,

a happy family, the six of us.

It was that tight.

It was so enjoyable, up to that time, everything.

I mean, George Martin used to call himself the fifth Beatle.

Well, I argued with him on that when I did interviews.

He said I was the sixth.

But I used to reverse it.

I was the fifth, he was the sixth.

Anyhow, that's the sort of relationship we had.

It was lovely, you know.

Up until they came in and started Rubber Soul.

And I noticed that distinct change which I did not like one little bit.

Personality change, particularly between Paul and John.

They look different in any case.

With their beards and whatever.

And they looked completely different

and they acted so different.

And the nice family life had gone now.

Now it was this... Well, I didn't like it.

They were bickering.

They were taking much longer to do tracks.

Arguing about what they should do.

There was that distinctive,

I wouldn't say dislike, but it was the start of dislike,

growing, which upset me terribly.

And fortunately,

I say fortunately because I was able if I wish to get out of it,

simply because the offer of becoming a producer

came about soon after we started Rubber Soul,

and I thought to myself what good timing for me now to get out.

Because I don't know what's going on.

So I said to Epstein and George Martin,

I can't stand this...

I got the offer for taking into Parlophone.

Become a producer myself.

So I went out.

So of course I mean, that caused great disappointment

and upset amongst the boys.

And what they did,

to soften me up, I suppose, I don't know,

they were that upset they went out to New Bond Street

they bought me a gold clock, a carriage clock.

Inscribed it to me from them,

I still got it of course, locked away, naturally.

And I thought, well, you know...

It brought me to tears that they would do that,

what they thought of me.

Would I please continue and finish the album, Rubber Soul.

Which I agreed to do.

And but after that, I said,

"You know that I can't continue anymore,

because simply I've got now to get on with my new job as producer".

So it was a mixture really for me

in terms of enjoyment,

enjoyment of the sounds that I produced, yes,

in Rubber Soul.

Quite impressive.

But disappointment and upset

in terms of the relationships.

And I could foresee, quite honestly,

it was the beginning of the breakout of the end of the group.

Well, the bunch of us were in Abbey Road Studios recording

My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies.

It was a very, very silly song.

And it required obviously a lot of sound effects.

And while the guys were figuring out what a razor scraping noise would be

or steam escaping,

I went down the corridors.

And I was all the way back.

And the layout of the building is such

that you come back up the main corridor and you're facing

the front door.

And they're in the front door.

Silhouetted from the sunlight outside,

were four guys with very distinctive haircuts

and pointy shoes and dark glasses.

And, you know, two big minders.

And of course, it's them. It's the Fabs.

So I did. I snuck out the corridor later on

to see what they were up to.

They were working on one of George's songs.

It's funny because I was telling him about this,

you know, years later

and and he immediately remembered the riff,

you know, this wonderful riff.

[piano music]

♪ I want to tell you ♪

♪ I feel hung up, but I don't know why ♪

I know they're not the right words, but this piano going...

[piano music]

It was probably one of the most exciting things I'd heard at the time.

You know, it's quite bizarre, because then I had to go back into our studio

and finish off My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies.

A wide range of music available there in 1966.

Up until 1966, every time George Harrison came up

with a song, everybody laughed at him.

Particularly George Martin, The Beatles producer,

who would always sort of pat him on the back patronizingly and say,

"Well, it's not bad, but go away and do something better".

And I think John and Paul were also very, very cynical about

their younger brother as they would have seen him.

Because don't forget he's three years younger than John Lennon.

They're very cynical about the idea

that he suddenly wanted to be a songwriter as well.

And in fact, in '65, he'd already started to write

interesting, unusual songs.

And he had a very sort of cynical, open-eyed, realistic take

on romance as well.

And that came through in '66

with the three great songs he wrote for Revolver.

Where he he really started to exert his influence on the band.

The most important way in which he changed The Beatles' songwriting

was by introducing the Indian influence.

Not quite the first time it had been done on a pop record.

The Yardbirds, and maybe The Kinks got there first.

But as far as the outside world was concerned,

he was the one who was leading the world

into some sort of Oriental mysticism

and the whole sound of the sitar and the tabla and so on.

And in 66, for something like Love You To,

George Harrison's Indian song to turn up on the Revolver album,

I think it opened people's eyes, amazingly.

And I think people couldn't really believe what they were hearing.

I think George was very underestimated and had

tremendous talent.

And unfortunately, because John and Paul,

historically, I think you've got to put this into context.

John had started the band.

Paul had joined the band later,

but became very much an integral part of it.

And George,

it might not seem a lot,

but I think when you are 19, 20,

and somebody's only 16,

they're the little kid.

And George had joined the band even younger than that,

when he was about 14 years of age.

And John was very reluctant to take him on because of his age.

And I think, in John and Paul's eyes,

he was always seen as a little kid.

Now, consequently,

he didn't have the greatest singing voice, George,

but he could write material and was a very, very talented man.

But he would only get the statutory, sort of obligatory, two tracks

if he was lucky on an album.

Now, the interesting thing is

that when The Beatles disbanded,

George really I think in came into his own.

Really came into his own.

With his own work.

Right through to the end of his life, you know,

the stuff he was doing.

But when he was with The Beatles, I do think he was seen

as sort of the young one.

It's quite striking that the first song on Revolver

is a George Harrison song. Taxman.

John, he always used to claim he wrote half of it

and George should have given him the credit,

but it is very much George.

It's about money.

It's about worrying about what was going to happen

to him as a person if all the money ran out on him,

because The Beatles were paying, I think it was 98% of their income

at that point to the Inland Revenue.

And so not surprisingly, it was a very major preoccupation,

particularly for George who already had

the reputation of being the one member of The Beatles

who was interested in the business affairs.

But for the youngest member of the band,

and the one who had been treated as the joke,

to suddenly have the lead track on the album

was quite a breakthrough for George, I think.

Okay, okay.

Yellow Submarine was written by Paul.

It was all about a dream that he had had.

He always thought it was, you know, a kind of a children's song.

Again, it was written specifically for Ringo to sing it.

And so the vocal range is very narrow.

And they would deliberately do that when they wrote for Ringo.

George Martin helped out, he had a closet

he showed The Beatles full of all kinds of different weird, instruments

they could use, and they used tons of sound effects.

It was just time for them to have a lot of fun in the studio.

That was one of the joys of The Beatles.

They could be a group for all seasons

and appeal to so many different social groups.

It wasn't just a band producing clever music

for the critics to mull over.

They would come up with these daft little ditties now and then,

and that's certainly a daft little ditty. [laughs]

So if you look at the album as a whole,

they take a number of different approaches,

and are opening wide the possibilities of what

a popular song can take on in terms of subject matter.

Yellow Submarine is simply one of those.

It goes on an album that's packed with classics.

I mean, Revolver, nearly the best album they ever made.

May be the best album they ever made.

Eleanor Rigby. Here, There and Everywhere.

She Said She Said. I'm Only Sleeping.

I mean, that album has 14 classics on it.

[man] Do you consider that now

since you've been here in the United States for almost a week,

that this religious issue is answered once and for all?

Would you clarify and repeat the answer that you gave in Chicago?

[John] I can't repeat it again because I don't know what I said, you know.

The most traumatic occasion, from my point of view,

in the 6 years that I was with The Beatles as their PR,

concerned, again, John and his outspoken interview

with the London Evening Standard's Maureen Cleave,

who as part of a series of in-depth profiles

of each of The Beatles for the Standard,

spoke in depth to John.

And John, at one point in the conversation,

talking generally about religion and social circumstances of the era,

made the remark The Beatles are more popular than Jesus now.

He didn't say bigger.

An awful lot of people have misquoted that,

saying in a boastful kind of a way,

"We're bigger than Jesus now". He didn't say that.

He said, "We are more popular".

And by this, he meant that more people

were going down to the local Empire theaters or the ABC cinemas

to see concerts by The Beatles

than were going to their local church or chapel

or whatever, to worship God, worship Jesus Christ.

And it wasn't so much a boast at all

as very valid social comment,

buried way down in the Evening Standard article.

It raised no eyebrows at all.

But I guess silent nods of approval amongst the readership.

Certainly, it didn't startle me as the group's PR anyway,

it didn't worry me greatly.

And in fact, I've never talked about this before,

but I can say that I was actually

directly instrumental

in helping to get that story reproduced in America,

which became the cause of a massive furor

were Beatles albums were burned.

There was a threat that the whole of the tour that year of America

would be called off because of the Ku Klux Klan

and all kinds of threats,

death threats were coming particularly

from the religious zealots

in the Deep South, the Southern states of America.

And I was directly concerned in that, in that,

in the pre-tour months, when the Beatles were extremely busy

and doing lots of other things,

I was unable to get them as much as I would like to have got them

for interview time with American journalists for American magazines.

But I appreciated that the buildup in America was crucial

to this massive tour that we were about to undertake.

And when the publisher of Datebook Magazine,

a guy named Art Unger,

when he came on to me and said

there was a chance he could do some interviews with the Beatles,

I said," No, it's just going to be impossible at the moment, Art,

to meet your deadlines,

but what I can do is put you on to Maureen Cleave

at the London Evening Standard.

She just did a series of superb in-depth profiles of The Beatles,

which I think would sit well in Datebook Magazine...

And he negotiated to get hold of that material.

[man] Well, would you clarify the remarks that were attributed to you?

[John] You tell me what you think I meant,

and I'll tell you whether I agree or not.

[man] Well, some of the remarks attributed to you

in some of the newspapers, the press here,

concerning the remark that you made

comparing the relative popularity of The Beatles with Jesus Christ,

and that The Beatles were more popular.

This created quite a controversy and a furor in this country,

as you are obviously aware.

[Paul] Did you know that, John? You created a furor.

[man] Now, would you clarify the remark?

[John] Well, I've clarified it about 800 times, you know.

I could have said TV or something else, you know,

and that's as clear as it can be.

I just used Beatles because I know about them a bit more than TV.

But I could have said any number of things.

I remember seeing John Lennon beforehand.

It was my job to kind of prepare him for this

very unusually serious press conference,

which we were holding on the eve of the tour in Chicago,

at which the world's press would be represented.

And they were there for one purpose.

Not for a lighthearted, show-business style

party come press conference at all,

but a very serious interrogation-type press conference,

where they would be all sort of saying,

"John, you've got to apologize, you've insulted the church," etc.

And I remember sitting in Brian Epstein's hotel suite with John.

And John was saying,

"I will say whatever you tell me I should be saying.

I don't feel I have to apologize, I should apologize.

I've said nothing blasphemous or intentionally blasphemous,

but I will say whatever you want me to say...

And at one point during our conversation,

John was sitting there most uncharacteristically,

with his head actually down in his hands,

and he was sobbing, he was weeping away.

Not at the prospect of the press conference itself so much

as the fact that he realized that if he didn't get it all right,

the tour might be canceled, you might be letting down the group.

[somber music]

This is cited as one of the reasons why they stopped touring,

apart from the boredom of it, as well, you know.

They will cooped up in hotel rooms and you know,

they couldn't get out of theaters and walk around

like they used to do.

Like the Paul McCartney design, you walking down Matthew Street,

pass it all go.

And John Lennon in particular didn't like the fact

that you couldn't hear them.

You know, all you could hear was this den of screaming.

For a lot of people, Beatlemania was for life.

I mean, even now, in every major city across the globe,

people have Beatle festivals regularly.

And The Beatles are acquiring new fans all the time

with every successive generation.

But I think that it was starting to ease up a bit

by about 1965, 1966.

For example, when they toured the States,

I mean, they wasn't always guaranteed that, you know,

when the stadium would be full anymore.

That was very much an attitude of, you know, it was like London buses.

If you missed one Beatles concert, there'd be another one

if you waited long enough.

But at the same time, I think that touring was becoming

almost, well, very definitely dangerous at the time.

Certainly very tedious for them.

I saw The Beatles twice, at Hammersmith Odeon

on their Christmas shows.

You couldn't hear anything.

The noise was mental.

The girls were wetting themselves.

It was all getting silly.

You got to remember back in those days,

guitar amplifiers were 30 watt.

You didn't really have the amplification systems that you have now.

You didn't even have the amplifications you would have at the end of the 60s.

So really, when it came to playing live,

The Beatles were always on to a loser.

In a lot of cases,

they had to just kind of wing it

and hope that they were all playing together.

When you listen to the old tape recordings

of these performances,

they did pretty darn good.

You know, considering they couldn't hear themselves.

It was an event, you know.

Musically, maybe you probably didn't couldn't even hear The Beatles.

I mean, The Beatles couldn't even hear themselves play.

So I mean, you went there to be there kind of thing.

I think that was the whole idea with The Beatles concerts at that time.

So you know, what are your criteria for a great live band?

If the criterion is was somebody who can whip up

a hell of a lot of enthusiasm, they didn't even have to play a note

in order to do that.

So yes, they were a great live band,

but were they great musicians on stage?

Um... possibly not.

They were a very good band,

but they were never given the chance to be a good band

once they became really popular,

because you could just hear nothing but screaming.

I only saw them when everyone was going mental and potty.

And it was a great privilege to say I've seen The Beatles,

but I didn't actually hear them.

The Beatles played rock and roll very well.

And they also came out with all these extraordinary,

original songs which didn't talk down to people.

I think that's an important thing.

That's why The Beatles struck a chord with so many people.

Not just teenage girls screaming at John and Paul,

but the whole adult world as well loved The Beatles very quickly.

I'm afraid I'm in the school that thinks that

Sergeant Pepper is one of the most overrated albums

in rock history.

Individual songs, I think some of them are wonderful.

I mean, you can fall to A Day In The Life.

I desperately trying to describe what

I think what the other really good songs are.

I think the ones that have stood up best over 40 years.

And they were the ones that people don't really remember,

like, the Paul McCartney songs Fixing A Hole and Getting Better,

which are very concise, tight bits of sort of pop rock songwriting.

But the stuff where they're self-consciously trying to do

something new and make a play,

or a movie or a musical out of it,

The Sergeant Pepper song itself,

and also Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds.

I don't think they've dated very well at all.

I think they're very much of their time.

I think that Sergeant Pepper

was just a little bit self indulgent,

a bit over the top, a bit over-waxed, over-cooked.

I prefer my Beatles music much more raw than that, if you like.

And so mainly, I prefer the earliest stuff.

Although there was an amateur-ishness about it,

Sergeant Pepper was too contrived.

And it was natural that it should go that direction,

because after they came off the road,

all eyes were upon this first product of their studio era.

And the Beatles were producing something

not just for their thousands and millions of fans,

But something I guess, that they felt would be

professionally strong enough to impress their own peers,

ie, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, etc.

One wonders what would have happened if they'd

had the same kind of gear we've got now, you know.

Because Sergeant Pepper, I think, was recorded on four four-track machines.

And it's because of them 24-track machines evolved, you know.

When The Beatles started out, George Martin was the boss.

He had a tie, and he wore a suit.

And they did what he what he told them to do.

Very early on, he started to realize that

there was actually some mileage in letting them off the reins for a bit

and then indulge their ideas.

But he would still very much be there to say,

"I don't think that's going to work boys".

By the time they get to Sergeant Pepper,

I think that relationship has entirely changed.

And George Martin's role is not anymore to direct them.

It's to enable them to carry out the ideas that they want.

And so they would come to him and say,

"Can we make a sound that sounds like

monks chanting, or an orchestra playing backwards?"

And he would then settle down and go,

"Right. I think if we do this and we do that,

we can actually achieve it".

And the result was that then after that, John and Paul

would come in with even more outlandish ideas

and poor George Martin and his staff

would be forced to innovate.

And that actually had quite a big influence on the

development of the recording studio in the late 60s.

The fact that The Beatles engineers

were being forced to come up with unusual sounds

to keep the group happy

actually helped the engineers to create

all sorts of innovations that are still being used today.

Sergeant Pepper fated as The Beatles true masterpiece,

I put it down to one thing and one thing only.

The Times gave it a great review.

Stamp of approval.

For me, bit of a smoke screen.

If you're hip,

then Sergeant Pepper is not the greatest Beatles album,

it's Revolver.

If you're not, and I guess I'm not,

then Sergeant Pepper is, I suppose, the pinnacle.

It's not something that The Beatles themselves had tried before.

The mixture of different images, sound styles.

It really does stand as a one of a kind.

The packaging was unbelievably clever.

It came at you.

It had the whole psychedelic swinging 60s thing about it.

It just came at you.

Them in uniforms, the whole lot.

It was just unbelievably perfect.

You had the lyrics on the sleeve.

You know, this is really the first signal that

hey, when you're listening to this stuff,

you should listen to the lyrics,

as well as just the groove and the melody.

It was definitely a real departure.

It sort of set the standard for other bands to try to come up

with the same standards as what The Beatles were doing at that time.

And it only came about because

The Beatles, I believe, had more free time in their hands

and they weren't touring anymore.

I thought that they hadn't really finished what they set out to do,

which was to write one big piece of music.

I mean, it's full of marvelous things,

but they don't really link together.

I think it was supposed to be a concept album,

but I mean, When I'm Sixty-Four, A Day In The Life,

they really link symmetrically.

As a concept record, which had never been made before,

yes, it was brilliant.

Rubber Soul and Revolver,

I think, in some ways, they're probably stronger records.

But if you say what was their masterpiece,

I would have to say it would be Sergeant Pepper's,

because it also captured the era.

It's a work of exploration and experimentation.

It could have fallen flat on its face, commercially speaking.

I think the world was shocked by Sergeant Pepper's,

but within months, I think the world loved Sergeant Pepper's,

and it was being hailed as a masterpiece way back then.

Riding on the coattails of Sergeant Pepper's album,

it seemed The Beatles could do no wrong.

[dramatic music]

The Beatles were very much affected by Brian Epstein's death.

And they really didn't want to be managed in full by anybody else.

As I said, they turned down one person in particular.

Who can tell really what would have happened if he'd lived?

Yeah, it wasn't until The Beatles physically stopped touring,

that there was any sort of breakdown in relations with Brian.

It suddenly dawned that you didn't actually need a manager.

If the record contracts and all those things

were already set up and done,

and they weren't going anywhere or doing anything,

what does the manager and an agency can do for them?

I suppose the last job gig production, whatever,

that I saw The Beatles do enthusiastically as a group,

as a team together, working solidly together,

with mutual enthusiasm,

must have been the making of Magical Mystery Tour.

Towards the back end of 1967,

immediately after Brian Epstein's death, in fact.

Now, a lot of people at the time thought that

Paul McCartney was being very callous

in forcing the group to go back to work

within a few days of Brian Epstein's death and few days of his funeral.

But in fact,

if Paul had not pushed them into working at that time,

I believe that they might well have gone off to India,

with their newfound little giggling Guru,

the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,

with whom they wanted to study Transcendental Meditation.

George in particular had got the bug.

The Mystery Tour was like a hangover after Brian died.

Plus hangover after Sergeant Pepper.

The songs that were nearly all written pre-Sergeant Pepper weren't used.

And Your Mother Should Know was a song Paul wrote

as a possibility with All You Need Is Love for the satellite thing.

Because All You Need Is Love was the first one on that one,

so he had that and George had his songs.

And John had written I think Walrus during that time,

but not during Pepper sessions.

And then Paul had this idea to go on Magical Mystery Tour.

They needed to do something to recover from Brian's disappearance.

And the thing with the NEMS people was just unbearable.

There were all those people who instead of holding NEMS together

as what it was, huge, big.

They were blathering about "We still manage The Beatles".

These agents and people and men in suits who worked there,

NEMS had just gone into nowhere, you know.

The Bee Gees, and Jimi,

and The Who, and the Cream and all those good people had left

because of this.

So The Beatles just wanted to get something,

and particularly Paul wanted to get something done.

So they just went off and did Magical Mystery Tour.

There's another way that you could look at Magical Mystery Tour

coming as it did in the immediate wake of Brian Epstein's death.

It was a shattering experience for The Beatles,

because whilst on the one hand they had found him to be

a much less effective, influential or necessary manager,

in the last years of his life they did value his friendship,

and remembered all the things that he had done for them.

And all four Beatles were very, very upset indeed by his death.

You can look at Magical Mystery Tour

coming only a week or so after his death

as being escapist.

It was the Beatles' essential escape route, if you like,

from the horrors of the fact that somebody so close

to them as Brian Epstein, so young, of their generation in fact,

had died in front of their eyes almost as it were like this.

You could see Magical Mystery Tour as

something where they were going to a magical world.

It was a world of magic and mystery.

And it literally transported, it took them away

in a bus down to the West country.

So that they were so busy messing about in the bus,

that they didn't have time to be as mournful

as they might well have been in such serious circumstances.

Everything they'd done from the first hit up till then

had received everybody's praise.

Magical Mystery Tour basically was the first full step

where the public and all the critics could have a bit of a go at them.

When it was shown on television in black and white

at Christmas time that year,

it didn't go down terribly well.

The public were confused by it.

The critics didn't like it.

So it was like the first bad reviews

The Beatles had ever really experienced.

It was quite a bit of a blow for them.

And The Beatles were so worried, in fact,

that they had it shown again in color about two weeks later.

But strangely enough, the damage had been done.

A lot of people said, "Well, it would

never have happened with Brian Epstein".

"When Brian Epstein was alive

he wouldn't allow it because it was too obscure".

"It wasn't direct enough", etcetera, etcetera.

They just thrown all these elements together,

got in a bus and driven around and filmed what happened.

And it never really came across as this happy,

magical mystery tour that it was supposed to be.

It came across as a bit of a mess.

People loved it.

The proper Beatle people loved it.

It was just the critics at the time.

But then the Beatles no longer had

that protective wall of Brian around them.

They were open for

this open season on them by then.

They never quite re-captured

that belief that the media had in them after that.

They were pretty unsinkable up until Mystery Tour.

And I think

the critics needed to

give them a little bit of hell.

Consider that for six years I had been part of

the greatest phenomenon of the show- business world

in working at such close quarters

and within the inner circle of the Beatles.

So of course, when that era came to an end,

there was sadness about it.

But I also recognize

that I had been part of the whole Beatles situation,

the Beatlemania situation,

and that was no longer around.

The era had gone.

The Beatles were no longer the Fab Four.

They were individual people.

There was Paul McCartney, John Lennon,

Ringo Starr, George Harrison

going out to do their separate things.

And therefore there was no sadness

in the fact that all that was over

because they had done everything

that they could do as a unit, as a band.

It had been a memorable part of history,

but I was ready to move on just as much as they were.

["While My Guitar Gently Weeps" by The Beatles playing on guitar]

Okay, While My Guitar Gently Weeps starts in C minor.

[guitar playing]

And then he keeps the C minor chord

but he puts a B flat root on it.

And then he keeps a C minor chord

and he puts in an A root in it.

And then it actually changes to an A flat major seventh chord.

And then he plays a C minor chord,

a B flat major chord,

and F major to a G major.

And then you repeat the whole process

[guitar playing]

Except this time he goes C minor,

to B flat,

to E flat major,

to G major.

That brings them to the chorus of C.

So, it's a beautifully constructed piece of music there.

I think the White Album might be the greatest rock album of all time.

Not necessarily my favorite,

but I can't I can't think of anything else

that has so many different styles,

so much pizzazz,

so much innovation, so much intelligence, so much fun,

so much pain, so much pleasure,

all across 30 songs, 90 minutes of music.

And okay, at the time, George Martin said

he wished that he could have compressed the record

and made one great album out of it.

But I think it actually works better

as a sprawling monster of a record with 30 songs.

And often the ones that stick in the mind are the throwaways.

They're the one-minute songs.

Why Don't We Do It in the Road or Honey Pie.

Stupid little things that shouldn't work,

but which is still great fun to play 40 years later.

[hopeful music]

Abbey Road is an unbelievable piece of work.

Absolutely, probably close

to their best piece of work they've ever, ever made.

Everybody talks about the great medley of songs on the second side.

And it's entirely meaningless.

And it's wonderful pop music.

It's the absolute high point of 60s pop production.

ELO made an entire career out of

trying to reproduce it through the 70s and 80s.

It's the last time when John and Paul actually worked together.

John always was very sarcastic about that medley in retrospect,

if you go back to the newspaper cuttings,

it reveals that was actually as much John's idea in the first place

as it was Paul's.

John was equally enthusiastic about it.

And it suited him later when he was writing very personal songs

to pretend that, "Oh, no, I don't know.

I was forced into doing that kind of thing".

The same time you've got George Harrison's real emergence

as a world-class songwriter.

Frank Sinatra said that Something

was the greatest love song ever written.

After that, he was used to credit it to Lennon and McCartney,

which was a bit of a shame,

but it was a nice thought.

And it is one of the great ballads,

I mean by anybody, Nevermind a Beatle.

And at the same time, George also wrote

Here Comes The Sun on a day when he had a business meeting

and he got really fed up

and he'd gone back and sat in Eric Clapton's garden

and got his acoustic guitar out and thought,

"I'm not going to get caught in all that Beatles nonsense.

It's sunny. It's lovely".

And amazing song came out of it.

I think by the time Abbey Road came out

The Beatles were really looking into

sort of what they were going to do when they finished as a band.

The end was in sight for The Beatles.

And so although still wouldn't say

they'd run out of steam as writers,

perhaps it is becoming slightly evident

that it was more of a chore really,

it was a lesser kind of inspiration.

They left the best epitaph to a band they could ever leave.

That was probably one of their best records ever,

and it was phenomenal.

If you're looking at the times of recording,

the final Beatles album was really Abbey Road,

but Let It Be emerged after Abbey Road as the final release.

Obviously, that meant that people considered

that the Beatles career ended with Let It Be.

And they by themselves weren't happy with that.

The last thing which, you know, could have been,

you know, thank you. Thanks very much, everybody.

You know, it's been fun, but we're not going to do it anymore.

It ended up being a really bitter and nasty divorce.

It would have been far better in fact, had Abbey Road

been the final release Beatles album but

fate decreed that it wouldn't be but even at the end,

the Beatles are still making great records and still producing

wonderful pieces of music, timeless pieces of music.

And it's quite a sad end

to watch what was an absolutely fantastic career.

I felt sorry for those poor kids who worked out

and all those fans, they're just like, what are they going to do?

It was just a big source of... [scoffs]

The fan club, there's millions of them.

They're going to be so upset. [laughs]

Of course they were.

But is this what happens when people get divorced.

It's always people get to the end.

The whole point is that Let It Be was supposed to be The Beatles live.

They were going to do a concert,

then they didn't want to do a concert.

That was too much effort, they didn't like the fans anymore anyway,

and they couldn't be asked.

So they make a record pretending to be live

and that's why they went up onto the Apple roof and so on.

But the concept got flawed

as soon as they started over dubbing and adding things and so on.

And then it got flawed even more when Phil Spector

came in a year later, and adds orchestras

and girl harmony choirs and so on to it.

So what was supposed to be a live record

of what The Beatles really did sound like,

as John Lennon said, with our trousers down,

got perverted as a concept.

Now the other main problem with Let It Be is that

John Lennon was on heroin at the time.

And so his creative input was virtually nil.

If you listen back to the recording tapes for the sessions,

the number of times you can hear Paul McCartney saying to John,

"have you got anything, you've got anything to offer?"

And John just doesn't say anything, Yoko answers on his behalf.

Or George will come up with a new song,

and George was coming up with a good new song

almost every day at that point.

And he played to John who just go, "Ugh, that's boring."

And start playing an old 12 Bar blues song instead.

So when you've got the person who has been

effectively the leader of the group saying, "I don't care anymore,

I'd rather take drugs than play music with you."

It's very hard to get a cohesive album out of that situation.

I think The Beatles broke a mold

that said that pop music is of its time.

Because for Beatles fans and for pop fans,

Beatles music is forever.

They could rock with the best of them.

But they could do a ballad, as sweet as anybody.

Even if they're playing Rock and Roll,

it's very balanced and tasteful.

That's the trick I think that they achieved, really.

They gave a whole generation a meaning.

And they gave the whole music industry its start.

The world needed something different

and they came around at the right time.

So if you think about it in modern day context,

how long does a band last, two or three years.

Well, the Beatles did that and a bit better than that.

And produced an incredible amount of music.

An unusual request.

I would like to say...

[audience laughing]

[mellow music]

[upbeat music]