— Marti Pellow
"I hate Paul McCartney — his records are crap."
— Tommy Cunningham
"I have a soft spot for Paul McCartney because he's a bass player like me." (?)
— Graeme "Graham" Clark
"..."
— Neil Mitchell
4, 29, 40, 45, 62, 53, 52, 65, 70, 86, 79, 78, 63, 65, 47, 63, 67, 52, 74, 84, 84, 78.
If I told you that these were the chart peaks of a certain band's twenty-two singles, you probably wouldn't be overly impressed. Just one big hit and only two more in the top forty (and one of them only just barely) and then a lengthy procession of flops. You might wonder just what such an unsuccessful band was doing being signed to the same record label that whole time — even if the eighties were a different time and awash in record company money. But this was no ordinary group: The Beatles could get away with such poor results since they all did much better the first time round — and who's going to drop the biggest group that ever lived from their label?
A revival in interest in the Fab Four was probably the one positive effect of John Lennon's murder at the end of 1980. Their legacy had been overshadowed by the hit and miss quality of their solo works and the culture was gradually discovering that it was possible to move forward without them leading the way. It's likely that many people had taken them for granted and didn't realise how much they meant until one of their key members was gunned down.
Lennon product selling in the aftermath of his death brought back the commercial viability of The Beatles as a whole. In the wake of "Stars on 45" and the early eighties medley craze, "Beatles Movie Medley" was released and was a hit in spite of its poor quality. The twenty year anniversary of their debut single was approaching and it was decided that their records would be re-released over the course of the rest of the decade. The first single did well, providing "Love Me Do" with the top five hit it had been denied previously but interest rapidly dwindled. It probably didn't help — though it would have been far from the only reason — that Smash Hits had next to no interest in giving these reissues publicity. After Fred Dellar gave a short but terse critique of "Movie Medley", there wouldn't be another Beatles single reviewed until Roland Orzbal of Tears for Fears practically begged the reviews editor to give him their copy of "Ticket to Ride" (he wouldn't name it SOTF, giving the crown instead to XTC's extra curricular project The Dukes of Stratosphear, citing his approval for how much they'd been "studying The Beatles!"; please see my piece on "The Mole from the Ministry" for my theory on what it ended up doing for Orzbal's career). At the beginning of 1987, Lola Borg took a look at "Strawberry Fields Forever" / "Penny Lane" and advised readers not to bother buying it and that they should "nip down to Woolworths instead for a peek in the bargain bin where you will no doubt find both these songs on a compilation LP for an absolute snip". Probably sound advice.
"Strawberry Fields" only got to number sixty-five, a routine showing for their eighties reissues. Yet, "All You Need Is Love" did considerably better and it nearly got them back in the top 40. It was re-released in the summer of 1987 at a time when The Beatles' favourability was on the upswing. Their catalog had finally been issued on compact disc and the June release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the new format did particularly well. This was still the time in which it was the consensus 'Greatest Album of All Time' and its anniversary was celebrated with the It Was Twenty Years Ago Today documentary. These factors probably contributed more to the respectable chart performance of "All You Need Is Love" than the recommendation of a current pop group. Still, I'm sure it didn't hurt.
During the summer of '87, Glasgow's Wet Wet Wet were on the rise. Though they would soon release a series of grim singles (the first of which, "Sweet Little Mystery", came out just two days prior to publication of this issue of Smash Hits; it was reviewed in the previous issue), their debut in the spring, "Wishing I Was Lucky", was uncharacteristically decent. Keen to play the pop game, singer Marti Pellow and co. agreed to have a crack at the new singles. They aren't terribly impressed with what's on offer for the most part, with positive words saved mainly for The Beatles and fellow re-release "Lovely Day" by Bill Withers (a full year prior to its 'Sunshine Mix' revamp which became his biggest hit in the UK; this version did rather less well). The four do have their disagreements, with Pellow, Graeme Clark and Neil Mitchell disliking The Beastie Boys' "She's on It" (the latter's comment that he doesn't care for "white guys doing that sort of music" is rather amusing considering how the Wets were all about mining soul and R&B for their own benefit) while drummer Tommy Cunningham enjoys it. They don't even appear to be in unison about the SOTF, with Mitchell offering no comment, having previously praised Withers as his favourite.
The Wets were the sort of eighties pop stars who seemed to have excellent record collections yet struggled to create great music of their own. They were born during the sixties pop boom and would have been exposed to much of it from a very early age. They would have been children during the heydays of Slade and T.Rex, approaching adolescence during punk (in some ways, the perfect age for it: old enough to find it exciting but young enough not to be turned off by its negatives) and set for adulthood at the time of New Pop. You're talking about a vast twenty year window of outstanding music to cut one's teeth on. Too much in fact. It could be easy to get overly comfy in these environs with little to object to. Great pop attempts to fill a void but there was no such emptiness for this generation. Rather than carving out their own place in music, they seemed happy churning out substandard soul and Motown tributes.
I don't expect the members of Wet Wet Wet to match the output of The Beatles or, indeed, any of the acts they reviewed this fortnight. They provided their thoughts on some new singles and that's fine. But I don't think it's asking too much for them to show some understanding of what was so brilliant about The Beatles — and, even then, I don't expect it to be expressed on the pages of Smash Hits. The following year they participated in the NME's Sgt Pepper Knew My Father charity album. It's a collection that has its moments but their take on "With a Little Help from My Friends" isn't one of them. Even by Pellow's lofty standards, his vocal is cocky and it loses the vulnerability that Ringo's workmanlike singing provides (you need to believe that singing out of tune is a distinct possibility for this to work). With his voice and his looks, does Pellow even need any friends? Yes, he loves their music but what has he learned from them? Why did he record this cover version when it shows no trace of its prior inspiration?
In the context of the their many remarkable singles, "All You Need Is Love" is nothing special. While I wouldn't quite agree with Ian Macdonald's assessment that it's one of their "less deserving hits", there's nothing thrilling about it like "She Loves You" or "A Hard Day's Night", nothing spectacularly inventive about it like "Paperback Writer" or "Strawberry Fields Forever". It doesn't have a bridge and it glides along happily without even a key change. Pretty substandard work then.
(Lennon's famous wordplay is nowhere to be found and this composition marks the point when he began favouring simplistic chants repeated over and over. It was just under two years later that he assembled another large group to record "Give Peace a Chance" for yet another orchestrated media event. Having put some thought into its predecessor, "Peace" is slapdash by comparison, with lyrics about how everyone is talking about various movements and people though his lists are frequently hard to comprehend with a shambolic crowd packed into a Montreal hotel suite not aiding the audio. "Power to the People" from 1971 actually addresses issues (including the worthwhile observation that feminism had a part to play too) but it lacks a hook and the singalong quality that makes both earlier attempts so special. (Lennon didn't simply reserve his new found sloganeering for his agitprop. "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", his plea to Yoko Ono, lacks any semblance of verse structure and amounts to eight minutes of him wanting her - wanting her so bad, it's driving him mad. It's a better record than it probably ought to be but it's certainly guilty of hammering the point home) Though "Come Together" would be a successful attempt at combining his poetic imagery with a chorus to chant on football terraces, "All You Need Is Love" would be his best simple singalong)
This being The Beatles, however, there's still lots of magic involved. It is now impossible for many people to hear the start of "La Marseillaise" (ie the French national anthem) and not go into a swaying "love, love, love". The brass response to Lennon's cries of 'All you need is love' is one of the most familiar musical passages in their entire repertoire. It's use of various musical quotations lends it an instant familiarity but the deliberately simplistic chorus does so as well. It is one of those songs that feels like it has always been around. I might find myself singing along to it without even knowing.
The ubiquity of The Beatles could turn people off and I remember a time when there was something vaguely shameful about exploring their music. Due in part to the Sgt Pepper documentary, I went through brief phase of listening to them at around this time. Pepper was a record I looked at much more than put on the stereo and I was happy to play my mum's Rock 'n' Roll Music cassettes. This period led me towards getting into the Pet Shop Boys, INXS and Terence Trent D'Arby and on to becoming a pop music obsessive. The next time I really got back into them, however, was six years later when I began to tire of everything going on at the time. (1993 was a favourite year in music for some but not me) Listening to The Beatles at that point was tantamount to conceding that things were better then, at a time before I was even born, and that I was ready to give up on my own music - and, worse still, that my parents had been right all along.
The Beatles would gradually take their permanent place as a group for all generations with the Anthology series but some of us continued to carry around an uneasiness about getting into their music. A number of years ago, I was in a pub with some friends and we bumped into Owen, an old schoolmate who I had always been friendly with. He was a hip hop kid and I was into alternative music back in junior high school so our tastes differed but we still sometimes talked about what we were listening to. "Well, it's a bit embarrassing", he said, sheepishly when the subject turned to music, "but I've been listening to The Beatles a lot lately". I knew exactly what he meant. There's no getting rid of them.
~~~~~
Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Suzanne Vega: "Tom's Diner"
"Actually, I think it's really brilliant," muses Cunningham, "it won't be a hit though 'cos the radio won't play it". Well, quite. The Housemartins had enjoyed a near-Christmas number one with their acapella rendition of "Caravan of Love" a few months earlier but they were a four-piece and some of them filled out the sound with backing vocals; Suzanne Vega, on the other hand, is on her own and doesn't appear afraid of dropping several seconds of dead air throughout. The song's iconic 'doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo' only comes at the end too! Some electronic boffins need to sort this thing out, pronto! Oh, and Neil: some of us like librarians!
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