Pre-natal nostalgia is a national characteristic (some would say vice, but I am more tolerant). It is hard to find a great writer who does not sometimes yearn back towards an imagined past: Shakespeare pillaged Holinshed’s Chronicles, and Dickens — acute on his own generation’s ills — had a misty gaze back at Merrie England. The Eeyore tone of Housman’s blue remembered hills has infected countless English writers from Waugh to Alan Bennett. We all do it. Just as Seventies’ dandies dressed, inaccurately, in Regency frills, so I, born well after the war, spent my teens longing to be either a D-Day Wren or a 1930s woman out of Dorothy L. Sayers, striking out proudly in a man’s world.
As history speeds up and media proliferate, the gap closes and nostalgia grows ever fresher. Middle-aged people such as myself are unnerved when artefacts, bands and fashions of the Seventies, Eighties, even Nineties get described as “retro”, sometimes before we have even noticed them first time round. As for the Sixties, they are now officially part of venerable history: I have never got over seeing a tin of Beatles talcum powder in a national museum, carefully preserved. It seems only yesterday I finished mine.
Right now, it is the Beatles era that is being chewed over, with dewy young rediscoverers listening respectfully to elderly reporters who were lucky enough to hang around studios and hotels in the days before musicians threw up an impenetrable wall of PRs.
Those seven Beatles years — from Please Please Me to the group’s end in 1969 — have echoed down the decades ever since. I couldn’t be happier: not just nostalgically but because it is so instructive to compare teenage dreams over half a century.
Beatles music was, and remains, terrific: an English renaissance that firmly took back authority from American imports, made skiffle grow up and tamed rock’n’roll to a new gentleness. The young men themselves seemed, when they first swam into my early teenage consciousness, attractively gauche and simple-hearted. Where the Rolling Stones were predatory and sneering, out for their own Satisfaction, and other groups such as the Honeycombs or Freddie and the Dreamers were just plain wet, the Beatles were exactly what girls hoped that boys would be like.
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They were vigorous in beat, dryly funny and self-disparaging in interviews, yet intensely emotional and open in their lyrics.
Lennon’s quirky, alienated odd-boy attitude gave a sharper tang to McCartney’s gentle sentimentality, and built songs that have lasted because they express youthful love with straightforward perfection. They leapfrogged back over the brittle jazz age, past Victorian circumlocution and the wordy Age of Reason, and took us to an older lyricism: to the lover and his lass, the troubadour at the window, the humility of the knight-errant. Their griefs are not angry: “I don’t want to spoil the party so I’ll go, I would hate my disappointment to show” . . . “I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday” . . .“I’m the kind of guy who never used to cry”. Their joys are tender — “Things we said today” . . . “And I love her” . . . “I saw her standing there”.
The lyrics were literate, too: easy to sing and euphonious thanks to Lennon’s gift with words and the uncompromising primary education of the period. No wonder they are pillaged so often by a new generation; no wonder even the staid adults of the time sneakily took to them. In my convent school there was a depressing period when all songs with “vocals” were banned at our dances, after an unfortunately sharp-eared senior nun caught the words of Manfred Mann’s “If you gotta go, go now, or else you gotta stay all night” and then disastrously happened on a Stones album. So we were condemned to bop dispiritedly to a scratchy pressing of Telstar by the Tornados, until some bright spark played her a Beatles album and she conceded that they would do, thanks largely to the lifelong (and presumably marital) sentiments in All my Loving.
Well, it is a long way from I want to hold your hand to Smack my bitch up and the Teenage Dirtbag. At times, contemplating the anxious materialism, drunken excess and predatory sexuality offered as a norm to teenagers today, it is tempting to think of it as a downhill slope. But nostalgia has its dangers too. For one thing, the youthful emotions of gentle, wondering, sacred love into which the Beatles tapped are timeless, and have not faded. The pity is merely that they are often derided and drowned by a cynical racket and a creed of self-centred insistence on the right to sexual satisfaction.
Moreover, the social realities of those seven years in the 1960s are harsher than the nostalgics and the happy lyrics suggest.
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The history of the age is too often written by a small cadre of its liberated avant-garde. For most, it was still a dour time. There was real poverty on the streets where the Beatles grew up, real racism everywhere, canes and rulers wielded in schools, and a heavy intolerance of homosexuality.
Divorce required hard proof of adultery, cruelty or desertion, until 1969 brought recognition of “irretrievable breakdown”. Unmarried mothers — the very phrase is retro now — were still being forced to give up their babies in disgrace; sex was full of fear. The Pill was first approved in 1961 (by the Health Minister Enoch Powell, who remembers that?) but until 1967 it could only be prescribed for married women.
The free-love culture was not widespread by 1965, nor the colourful Quant-and-Biba fashions: we provincial teens came to the Kings Road to press our noses to the windows, envious in our boring clothes, saving up for weeks to buy white plastic boots and a PVC belt.
In the pub or coffee bar, girls were expected to sit in a group in the corner, to be eyed up and vocally critiqued while the boys drank more and laughed louder. University was for the few. The fine mockery of TW3 and Private Eye had not seeped into the mainstream, and the culture of deference still ruled. Numerous MBEs were pompously handed back when the Beatles got theirs (and only in ’69 did Lennon, abruptly liberating himself from the group and the system, return his).
No, it wasn’t an age of gold. But the music was terrific and lovely and innocent. It lasts, not because it was “of its time” but because it belongs to all time.