2012 provided a portentous occasion for the field of Beatles Studies. The 50th anniversary of the band's first EMI single ‘Love Me Do’ (1962) occasioned several early contributions of what I am sure will be an array of conferences, articles and monographs commemorating the first half-century of this remarkably self-sustaining cultural phenomenon. (Fifty Years With The Beatles, the collected papers from a University of Lodz event in 2008, did manage to steal a march on the competition by some considerable margin, however.) We await ‘Fifty Years of Revolver’ and ‘Fifty Years of Sgt Pepper’ with anticipation, but earlier sections of The Beatles' narrative remain less well represented in existing literature. The band's experiences during the early 1960s have attracted attention from numerous documentary and feature film makers (What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., dirs. Albert and David Maysles, 1964; Birth of The Beatles, dir. Richard Marquand, 1979; The Hours and The Times, dir. Christopher Munch, 1991; Backbeat, dir. Iain Softley, 1994; Nowhere Boy, dir. Sam Taylor-Wood, 2009), but few serious authors and biographers (Michael Braun Reference Braun1964; Jim O'Donnell Reference O'Donnell2007; Jonathan Gould Reference Gould2007). That Ian Inglis and Andre Millard have capitalised on such a timely opportunity is a welcome development.
The Beatles composed, recorded and performed some genuinely innovative music, but it was the agility and style with which they rode an unprecedented demographic wave that makes it difficult to conceive how their influence might ever be surpassed. Inglis and Millard's consideration of this and other aspects of The Beatles' socio-economic context provides a strong connecting theme between their texts. Both authors synthesise evidence and ideas from a wide range of sources including a raft of pre-existing biographies, contemporary media sources and recent academic research. In so doing they offer an appropriately contextualised contribution to this familiar narrative path.
In Chapter 1, ‘Hamburg Before The Beatles, The Beatles Before Hamburg’, Inglis outlines the particulars of The Beatles' relationship with a city where they accumulated an impressive 800 hours on stage over six visits and 273 nights. As he notes (p. 12), this was almost exactly the same number of appearances The Beatles made at The Cavern. Inglis then develops a thoroughly historicised account of Hamburg and Liverpool in the post-war era (drawing on sources such as Gould, who has also examined aspects of the band's relationship to place), and includes an incisive analysis of the romantic appeal held by the trio of young visual artists (the ‘Exis’) they encountered in St. Pauli. He also contextualises the extensive literature covering The Beatles' subsequent involvement with LSD and the counterculture by discussing their enthusiastic amphetamine use at this time. Despite the scarcity of reliable data on substance use among performers, some correlations have been established here (Miller), so I am not entirely convinced by the assertion that ‘for every musician who does fall victim to drug abuse, there are many thousands who do not’ (p. 39, my italics). In every other respect, however, Inglis' description of The Beatles' encounter with post-war German culture and his analysis of its impact on their performance and song-writing is an assiduously researched, well-written reassessment of this story.
Inglis' argument rests on the fundamental role played by spatial relationships in the production and realisation of popular culture. Here The Beatles function as a case study in how geography binds or shapes creative individuals and their social relationships, ideas and artefacts. The highlight of this book is Inglis' meticulous advocacy of ‘The Hamburg Sound’ in Chapter 7, where he develops a compelling case for the primacy of what might henceforth be called ‘Elbe-beat’ over ‘Merseybeat’.
Germany, after all, is where The Beatles' identity took shape. They learned to perform on the stages of St. Pauli clubs, purchased their iconic equipment at Hamburg music shops, cut their first hit single with Tony Sheridan and Bert Kaempfert, rapidly expanded their repertoire under the pressure of 7-hour sets, and wrote songs collaboratively while living out of each other's pockets in cramped accommodation. Inglis (like Millard) is keen to challenge the reductionist myth of the ‘Cunard Yanks’ (p. 133), but he also sallies against cynically self-interested elements who allied with the commercial media to co-opt the notion of a ‘Liverpool Sound’ as a marketing tool for regional development. This may prove an unpopular thesis on Merseyside, but its first exponents were actually The Beatles themselves. George Harrison dismissed the idea of a Liverpool Sound as ‘stupid’, while John Lennon distanced himself from a concept he claimed was ‘cooked up’ by journalists (p. 137).
Elsewhere, Inglis reminds us of undervalued contingencies and their impact upon The Beatles' formative years: the serendipitous encounter between their first agent/manager Allan Williams and Hamburg entrepreneur Bruno Koschmider; Klaus Voorman's spontaneous visit to the Indra; Bert Kaempfert's decision to record Tony Sheridan with backing from the band. Yet he also provides convincing evidence to demonstrate how this narrative was equally determined by its geography, and in so doing Inglis' final chapter (‘The Beatles After Hamburg, Hamburg After The Beatles’) tidily leads us to the central topic of Millard's text.
Beatlemania's essentially structuralist approach characterises the band as a ‘social phenomenon’ that can only be understood with reference to wider developments in the culture industry. This phenomenon was first made possible then defined and determined by the convergence of irresistible tectonic forces such as technological innovation, economic progress and demographic upheaval. Millard does not deny the importance of individual agency, and sets out his stall by endorsing Walter Everett's assertion that his subject constitutes ‘the most important force in twentieth-century music’ (Reference Everett2001, preface). However his approach also offers a more complete and nuanced explanation of Beatlemania, one that neatly sidesteps the conventional claims made for the song-writing genius of Lennon and McCartney. The real brilliance of the band was the manner in which they capitalised on opportunities that arose as a result of underlying structural developments: social and geographical mobility, international communications and evolving media practices.
The book outlines the contribution of these factors to the band's early success in a thematically coherent manner. The support network of creative individuals who contributed to The Beatles' musical and visual appeal (manager Brian Epstein, producer George Martin, the creative marketing team at Capitol Records) are appropriately acknowledged, as are technological advances in tape and disc recording that facilitated such bountiful studio and retail productivity. In Chapter 7 Millard details how shifting paradigms in communications technology resulted in a growing rivalry between the establishment BBC and relative newcomer ITV, and resulted in extensive exposure for the band across the entire UK broadcast industry in 1963. Meanwhile North American radio stations defined their play list according to a Top 40 that was soon to be overrun by The Beatles, inspiring fevered competition and equally concentrated coverage. Such intense formative experiences created popular music's most confident small-screen performers at a decisive point in the evolution of television. While the increasing technical expertise of outside broadcast technicians allowed Beatlemania to be filmed live at airports and stadia across the continent, the simultaneous expansion of air time given to news programming fed the scenes live into the living rooms of millions of teenagers and their parents.
Two en passant references to Theodor Adorno made me wonder if this book was perhaps somewhat under-theorised. With so much space given to the impact of recording technology and broadcast media I was surprised to find no reference to Walter Benjamin or Marshall McLuhan, and this brought to mind excellent earlier work by Janne Mackela (Reference Makela2004) and Henry W. Sullivan (Reference Sullivan1995). I found other quibbles over missing or confused details. It was ‘customary’ (p. 9) to place a band's name at the top of their album sleeve because customers browsed by thumbing through racks in shops. Ringo's ‘habit’ of leaving a cigarette packet on the snare head was a dampening technique, not mistreatment of his drum kit (p. 171). While Millard's index provides copious references for Abbey Road Studios, Capitol, EMI, Geoff Emerick, George Martin, NEMS, and other aspects of The Beatles' recorded output, the structures that administrated and exploited their intellectual copyright such as Dick James and Northern Songs are entirely absent. Yet music publishing remains the most important form of economic activity any songwriter can undertake. Indeed, the system for calculating mechanical royalties in North America was one reason why the band's albums changed so dramatically in that territory. Millard's self-references to the ‘Empires of Sound’ thesis, previously expounded in his detailed work on the history of recorded music in the US, offer clues to this concentration on one area of the industry at the expense of another. (Peter Doggett has provided useful background material on this subject.)
Putting aside my equivocations about such details in the latter text, I enjoyed reading both of these books tremendously. They constitute a valuable addition to any undergraduate or postgraduate popular music or media and cultural studies bibliography, and are useful companion volumes in Beatles Studies literature.
