While reviewing Marcus Collins's richly documented portrait of the Beatles and the reaction they provoked, I was also reading Craig Brown's One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time (Fourth Estate 2020). The two books provide very different perspectives. Brown's is a roughly chronological, but often anecdotal history of the band, written largely from a fan's eye view. We are taken on tourist trips to the former Beatles’ homes in Liverpool and to Hamburg; we meet the hangers-on (such as Magic Alex) who spent the Beatles’ cash and created the chaos that was Apple. Brown plunders the vast Beatles bibliography to re-fashion their story in often quirky and insightful ways.
Collins's approach is the polar opposite. The Beatles and Sixties Britain is a careful work of history and culture politics. It is based on detailed scrutiny of the archives. Where Brown locates the Beatles in a soap opera of their own making, Collins is determined instead to provide an account that is ‘historical, broad, empirical and dispassionate’ (p. 13). He ‘is concerned with the past, not the present: with them, not me’ (p. 17).
His argument is that the Beatles ‘were iconic, divisive, atypical and prefigurative’ (p. ix). And in making his case, he sets himself against those who speak of the Beatles only in terms of their genius and against the revisionist historians – Dominic Sandbrook and David Fowler, for example – whom he labels as engaging in an ‘ideological enterprise’ (p. 22). Collins is interested in how the Beatles were seen and discussed within Britain, and how they chimed with, and deviated from, their times.
So, for example, he uses polling data to trace the extent to which the 1960s was indeed an era of permissiveness, or rather where that permissiveness was experienced and expressed. Then, as now, the UK was a nation divided. Collins characterises the UK in the 1960s as an ‘anti-permissive permissive society’, and the Beatles as an ‘atypical’ product of it (p. 45) – or, as he puts it: ‘unrepresentative representatives of sixties Britain’ (p. 47).
In reaching such conclusions, he reads the Beatles through the reaction they prompted. Beatlemania (1963–1965) is understood not as a sign of transformation in society, but rather as a catalyst for discussion of new ideas and issues, opening up generational and gender differences. An iconic moment for this discourse is the award of their MBEs in 1965.
After that, the group transitioned from the lovable moptops of Beatlemania to confused signifiers of social change and political unrest. As the Beatles began to engage with the emerging counterculture, their ‘transformational’ projects – Apple, Magical Mystery Tour – were seen as failures that elicited ‘public scorn’ (p. 90). They confronted their public, rather than comforted them. ‘Being successful and iconic’, notes Collins, ‘did not make the Beatles generally liked or appreciated’ (p. 111).
The first part of the book is taken up with chronicling the changing views of the Beatles (and their response to those changes). The second part is devoted to assessing their cultural and political impact.
‘Were the Beatles artists?’, asks Collins (p. 113). He answers this by documenting the very diverse evaluations offered by their contemporaries – from the plaudits in William Mann's articles in The Times or in the scholarship of Wilfrid Mellers, to the dismissive barbs of Paul Johnson and Lord Goodman. These views reached across the political spectrum, and circled around ‘class, generational and aesthetic arguments’ (p. 127). Collins monitors evolving views of the Beatles’ artistic status, and how, crucially, changes in journalism and media more generally fuelled those views. The debates about the value of the Beatles mapped onto the new career possibilities opened up by the emerging pop–rock divide, and the cultural judgements that likened the latter to classical music and to jazz.
Collins does a brilliant job in capturing the swirling, highly charged discussions of the Beatles, evoking an earlier version of our contemporary cultural wars. The snobbery and elitism clash with claims of artistic genius. Even the Sunday Times Insight Team, best known for exposing the Thalidomide scandal, pronounced on the (‘modestly accomplished’) musical skills of Ringo Starr and George Harrison. The Beatles are made to symbolise every manner of social and cultural threat.
Nonetheless, concludes Collins, the critical reception accorded the Beatles ‘reconfigured debates over the relationship between high and low culture’ (p. 148). He reveals that this process was not begun or ended by the Beatles, nor was it about the left vs. the right, nor the establishment vs. the rest. What he shows is how many different people and groups engaged in the argument about the Beatles. Much was at stake: ‘To accept the Beatles as artists meant revising many of their [the commentators’] most ingrained assumptions not simply about art, but their own status as artists, critics and intellectuals’ (pp. 149–50).
Collins conducts a similarly meticulous analysis of the Beatles’ political impact. In the early 1960s in the UK, the political and the pop worlds existed separately. The political left were much more interested in the Beatles than mainstream politicians, although, as Collins shows, when Parliament did discuss pop, the Beatles dominated the discussion. There were 30 references to the Beatles in Parliament in 1964, but only five in 1968 – the year of civil unrest in France and elsewhere (pp. 155–6). The Beatles’ ‘power’ was a source of interest to MPs. Tony Benn speculated as to whether they might undermine the Soviet Union by performing there. Otherwise, discussion focused on the length of their hair (and whether soldiers and prisoners might be allowed to grow theirs), and about their tax status, and whether arts subsidies might be used to counter the group's malign effects on culture. They were debated as role models and referenced on the campaign trail.
The complicated and contradictory responses to the Beatles by the political establishment were matched, in Collins's account, by those of the Marxist left, partly reflecting the ideological divisions between the Communist Party of Great Britain, the emergent New Left of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and others, and various Troskyite groupings. These debates were made more complex by the crosscutting cleavages inspired by jazz and folk-loving Marxists, and made more profound by the interventions of the Feminist movement and writers such as Sheila Rowbotham and Elizabeth Wilson.
Collins offers much more detail than I have referred to here (there are nearly 100 pages of footnotes). His book may be less fun to read than Brown's, but it does indeed provide the ‘historical, broad, empirical and dispassionate’ account that he promised at the beginning. And in doing so, it sets an example of how we might research and assess popular music's place within social and political change. ‘Sometimes explicitly and sometimes unwittingly’, concludes Collins, allowing himself a rare moment of rhetorical extravagance, the Beatles ‘created a distinctive vision which critiqued society as it was and imagined society as it could be’ (p. 197).
