Fifteen years ago a double CD was released called The Beatles Live at the BBC. It comprised some of the 275 performances of 88 songs - mainly by other people - recorded by the Fabs between 1962 and 1965 in various Light Programme shows such as Saturday Club and Pop Go the Beatles, in other words from before the release of Love Me Do, through the growth to insanity of Beatlemania, and on to the tired and jaded patchwork quilt that was the knowingly titled album Beatles for Sale. It also contained examples of the Beatles being larky in the studio, usually in the company of the announcer Brian Matthews and was, it has to be said, a bit of a bore. Early Beatles may have been exciting at the time, but it’s the later stuff that still comes up fresh.
Last weekend, for no obvious reason (unless you include the near-40th anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ last proper album, Abbey Road, in September 1969) Radio 2 chose to designate as its Beatles Bank Holiday Weekend, the centrepiece of which was The Beatles @ the Beeb, which occupied two hours yesterday and was the programme the 1994 double album should have been. It contained many of the songs on the album, it contained even more of the knockabout badinage, but it was so much richer for providing a context. Narrated by the theatre impresario and football club chairman Bill Kenwright - who you just know is far prouder of having gone to the same Liverpool Institute for Boys as Paul and George (no surnames necessary, surely) - here were two hours that brought us close to the biggest band of all when they were still human enough to make contact with the rest of us.
Perhaps it’s the enchantment lent by time, but there was something both charming and bizarre at hearing Paul, George, John and Ringo reading out requests from listeners in their very own Beatle voices. Can you imagine Madonna doing that, or, more to the point, the latest nine-week wonder off the fame conveyor belt, en route to a clothing line, a perfume contract and obscurity before much of the public could pick them out of a lineup? In 1964, with three No 1 hits already that year and with their faces as globally recognisable as the Queen, the Pope and Cassius Clay, they were still putting in the hard yards of not only playing near-live in the BBC studio (letting them go out live scared the willies out of a Beeb decades away from Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross), but introducing the songs too.
As with the double CD the music was not that great, but at least we learnt why. In the early days the band would drive down from Liverpool to the Beeb, and then head off after the session, either back home or on to one of the hundreds of gigs they ploughed through at the time. It was only with the coming of Beatlemania that they were able to stay in a London hotel beforehand. Then, in the studio, it was one quick run through and the song was in the can, no time for any finessing. As a result, while their voices sounded fine, still meshing perfectly in ways that, at times, challenged the harmonies of the Beach Boys, the playing could be distinctly ropey - God knows how George hung on to the lead guitar gig, so plunky and amateurish was his playing, although Ringo’s drumming was deserving of far more respect than history has granted it.
But that was another thing that came across during a fascinating 120 minutes - how low the Beatles ranked in the eyes of those they worked with at the Beeb. One of the producers of many of the shows, a jazz fan, physically hated them. They were servants, there to get in, get cheery and then get out. Many an eyebrow was raised at the fun the band seemed to be having. We know now why the band would spend some time lying on the studio floor, giggling, having crammed into the lavatory and locked the door, but back then, in a far less drug-conscious age, these long-haired young types were just being childish.
Advertisement
As a result they were treated as children. The estimable Matthews aside, the interviewers had little respect for a band that was changing the face of popular music, exemplified by an interview from early 1964, when the Beatles were in the throes of conquering America, in which the band were trotted out to answer questions of an overweening superciliousness posed by a man who obviously felt he should have been doing something more important, such as reading the shipping forecast.
And yet the Beatles put up with it. They even put up with having to sing along as Rolf Harris reworked the lyrics to Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport to incorporate lyrics about the Fabs that gave him great amusement. Inside they might have been near to breaking point; outside they were the loveable moptops doing their job. Beatles for sale at a knockdown price, really. The sad thing is we can only appreciate that now, after hearing a programme that deserves to be on a double CD of its own.