taylor-mayed's Full Review: Beatles 1 by The Beatles
Whatever your own personal taste in music or opinion of the The Beatles, you have to admire their abilities as the most consistent hit makers ever. For virtually the entirety of the 1960s they were able to continuously churn out a parade of smash hit songs, one after the other, that not only firmly cemented their reputation as one of the greatest bands of all time, if not the absolute greatest, they also became anthems that came to define a whole era in the eyes and ears of generations to come.
Nowhere is this hit-making ability better showcased than on the “One” album – a kind of lap of honour for the group, containing all 27 of the UK and US No. 1 hit singles, a compilation that topped the charts in just about every country on the planet and made The Beatles the biggest selling musicians of the year 2000, some 30 years after they split up.
The album gives perhaps the best possible cross-section of the band for a newcomer, as it runs the full gauntlet of their abilities from the lightweight sing-along pop of songs like “She Loves You” and “Can’t Buy Me Love”, as well as spanning the length of their career from 1962’s chirpy “Love Me Do” to 1970’s poignant “The Long and Winding Road”.
The album’s first nine tracks are all instantly catchy, throwaway pop records, the 1960s equivalent of an S Club 7 or a Steps, nice inoffensive music with great youth appeal and a beat you can’t resist tapping your feet to. This is not meant to sound disrespectful to The Beatles – throwaway pop is great entertainment and no small thing to be, but that’s all it is, entertainment, wonderfully free from any hidden messages or meanings or subtexts, just standard boy-meets-girl love songs. What lifts the Beatles above all teenybopper groups that have followed them in the past 35 years is, of course, the fact that they wrote all their own songs, played their own instruments and were there first, with a brand new style of music that no-one had ever done before.
The type of songs takes a turn when we come to the album’s tenth track, “Help!” one of the band’s most famous songs that nearly everyone has heard of and can quote the chorus of off by heart. This song is the first indication of a more serious tone to the band’s music, with the days of happy-go-lucky pop gone to be replaced with records that have a slightly harder edge to them.
“Help!” is followed by “Yesterday”, perhaps one of the most iconic songs ever written, and only a Beatles song in the same sense that “Careless Whisper” is a Wham! song – it was performed solo by one of the group members but included on one of the group’s albums. Here, McCartney plays an acoustic guitar and sings, backed by a string quartet with none of the other Beatles taking part. It’s well known that this tune came to McCartney when he woke up with it running through his head one morning, and he initially refused to believe that he hadn’t copied it from somewhere else. For me, however, the song is ruined by a very annoying and ugly-sounding string on McCartney’s guitar that makes an irritating, amateurish ‘thwack’ sound throughout and makes it sound like one of the strings on his guitar is in fact an elastic band. Why George Martin let that one pass is a mystery to me.
You could make a case for saying how limited the band’s subject matter in their earlier songs was compared to some of the other great groups such as Queen when you consider that it takes until track fourteen for a non-love song to appear. “Paperback Writer” is a song with a lot of ‘go’ to it, a cracking pace and an energetic vocal, it is one of my own personal favourite Beatles track and because it is not a love song it makes a refreshing change on this album.
Perhaps the Beatles became more cynical about love and affection in the second half of their career, as the second half of this album is peppered with non-love songs, making it seem as if “Paperback Writer” represented as significant a sea change for them as “Help!” did.
Ringo Starr is a man you can either feel sorry for because he is always the lowest-rated of all the Beatles, or envious of (especially if you’re Pete Best perhaps) because there is the temptation for any half-decent drummer to think “I could have done that!” Starr is certainly a long way from being the best drummer in rock history, he’s not a legendary songwriter by any stretch of the imagination and certainly no one could accuse him of being a great singer. George Martin rated him so lowly that he kicked him off the drum kit for “Love Me Do” and put session drummer Alan White in his place, but Starr survived to tell the tale (albeit not on the US release of the single) while White later surfaced in the Plastic Ono Band.
Nonetheless, Starr’s plodding but infectiously listenable lead vocal on “Yellow Submarine” very much fits the tone of this cheerful children’s song – he does seem to have a voice that appeals to young children, hence his later employment as the narrator of the Thomas the Tank Engine TV series.
However, the cheerfulness of “Yellow Submarine” gives way to the icy poignancy of what is perhaps McCartney’s greatest song, “Eleanor Rigby” – ironically these two very different songs, showing two completely differing sides of the band’s character, were released as a double a-side. A sense of poignancy and sadness permeates this song, which like “Yesterday” sees McCartney backed by a string quartet, to great effect, with no elastic band guitar to spoil things this time!
“Penny Lane” is another of the most famous songs that the Beatles ever wrote, and like “Help!” can be quoted by a large proportion of the population, like a kind of modern folk song. It’s interesting to note, however, that by 1967 The Beatles position as unassailable Gods of Music had fallen to a stage where such an iconic song was kept from the number one spot by… Ingleburt Humperdink. It makes it onto the “One” compilation by virtue of its single week at the top of America’s Billboard Magazine Hot 100 singles chart.
“All You Need Is Love” carries on with the iconic songs, and although this song does have an uplifting quality to it, in my opinion it descends into mindless chanting of the title. At the very end of the song, they even find the time to take a cynical swipe at the first half of their own career when McCartney shouts out a monotonous parody of the chorus from “She Loves You”. Perhaps they felt that making music to entertain people was no longer interesting enough for them, and it had to be infused with some pretentious “higher quality” instead.
This idea is refuted by the next song, “Lady Madonna”, another number that moves along at a nice little pace – what McCartney is on about I have no idea, but lots of great songs don’t make any sense and this is perfect clarity compared to what it to come towards the end of the album.
Then follows what may possibly be the most overrated song ever written – “Hey Jude”, Paul McCartney’s ode to John Lennon’s son Julian that John decided he would change the lyric of to be about him instead, hence “Hey Joules” for Julian became “Hey Jude” for John. The first three minutes or so of the song are very good indeed, a simple but effective ballad. However, as soon as all of the “na na na” nonsense begins it takes a dramatic turn for the worse, with the following four minutes being almost entirely superfluous. Oh, and John Lennon’s “f**king hell!” remark comes almost dead on two minutes fifty-nine seconds, but you have to listen carefully, I didn’t pick it up until I was re-listening to the track again just now for this review. I’ll forgive George Martin for missing that one!
“Get Back” is another load of complete nonsense saved by having a very catchy tune and a nice guitar part that makes it sound very atypical of Beatles records and gives it a very American feel, which is in keeping with the American characters and places in the lyric I suppose. “The Ballad of John and Yoko” only has John and Paul with some session players, but is perhaps the album’s best ‘goer’, a song that really cracks along at a fast pace and just runs over with energy, complimenting an entertaining lyric from Lennon. It was also of course the band’s last ever No. 1 hit in the UK.
The best song on the entire album, in my humble opinion, is George Harrison’s “Something”, the only No. 1 hit for the Beatles not to be written by McCartney or Lennon. Harrison’s talents as a singer and, in particular, a songwriter often go unrecognised – particularly by Frank Sinatra, who when he performed “Something” at his concerts used to claim that it was his favourite Lennon/McCartney song! Here, Harrison’s beautiful song-writing skills, exquisite guitar work and sensitive lead vocal all combine to create one of the truly great love songs. That he often had to fight hard to have his material included on Beatles albums is a true crime, but at least he was able to leave this lasting testament to the world of music that will be remembered long after the hysterical nonsense of songs like “Come Together” and “Hey Jude” are forgotten.
Speaking of “Come Together”, that song follows “Something” and was indeed a double a-side with that song, which held the top spot in America only for the single week, qualifying these two hits for inclusion on “One”. “Come Together” is a piece of weirdness this time from the pen of John Lennon, and although the production and musical skill is beyond reproach, the lyric sounds like a guide vocal that should have been filled in with something else only they never got around to it. It’s almost tempting to say that Aerosmith’s version from the Sergeant Pepper movie suits the song better as their hard rock routes are more suited to such random nonsense.
The penultimate song on the collection is McCartney’s “Let It Be”, a song which has justly become famous. This is both because of it being their last truly great hit and also for McCartney’s performance of the number at Live Aid in 1985, his first live performance since the assassination of John Lennon, and despite the fact that his microphone had failed and he didn’t know it, the rendition was memorable for the 80,000-strong Wembley Stadium crowd carrying the vocal for him.
“The Long and Winding Road” is another McCartney number which closes the album, however it is a song he was never happy with. His vocal and piano take, which he wanted to be the final one, was changed by Phil Spector, the producer brought in to handle the “Let It Be” album, and welded to an orchestral score that was intended to increase the emotion of the track and create a Spector-flavoured ‘wall of sound’ feel. However, McCartney was furious with the way Spector handled the song and felt he had ruined it. Nonetheless, it provided with Beatles with their last ever No. 1 hit in the USA. I don’t think Spector’s production is as bad as McCartney felt, but I can understand how he wouldn’t like one of his own songs that he was happy with being so changed from his idea of how it ought to sound.
So then, how do you sum up an album as diverse and powerful as “One”? With such an awesome array of 27 smash hit singles it is difficult to find criticisms for it, and indeed I wouldn’t seek to. For anybody who s new to the Beatles and wants to buy their first Beatles album, “One” would be a very good choice, as it showcases all that is good and – with songs such as “Hey Jude” – bad about the band.
Anybody who feels that the Beatles are overrated should try sitting down and listening to this collection. If they do not change their mind, I will be very surprised indeed – because I did.
This album is a must have for music fans young and old. Never before has one disc by one musical group contained so much musical and cultural history....More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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