The beatles were fucking fantastic!

[Brian Peacock]

Macca's remixes are wrong.

[tattuchu]

Macca's remixes are wrong.

What's this? Please tell me he's not pulling a Jeff Lynne?

[Tero]

Beatles may have inspired some experimentation amongst their contemporary mates, would have happened anyway with lots of new kit becoming affordable and may even have been more interesting without them, they also lead to a stale repetitive format reminiscent of the thirties/forties and fifties big band era that record companies flogged to death.

So you are saying you would rather have had Bobby Vee and Rubber Ball? Or that the Beatles were equal to Rubber Ball in flogging a disposable genre to death?

[Hermit]

The Beatles were not much more than good pop musicians, but my appreciation of their appearance on the music scene is heightened by the fact that now there was almost no alternative to Mantovani's cascading violins and the fucking typewriter song. Yes, I know, there also were Bill Hayley, Elvis Presley (before he went all Heidelberg), Little Richard, but until the Beatles came along, none of them got much air play where I lived. It was wall to wall middle of the road music.

[Tero]

I had three or four 45s, my friends had the EPs. None of us owned an album. No Beatles were on my radio till about 65. No rock or pop to speak of. Finnish folk groups doing Kingston Trio songs in Finnish...cotton fields!!!....was about as exciting as the radio got. The occasional Shadows tune squuzed between the Mantovanis. Acker Bilk, trad jazz.

[Brian Peacock]

Macca's remixes are wrong.

What's this? Please tell me he's not pulling a Jeff Lynne?

Not quite.

Let It Be... Naked is a 2003 album by English rock group The Beatles. It is a remixed and remastered version of their 1970 album Let It Be. The project was overseen by Paul McCartney, who felt that Phil Spector's production did not accurately represent the group's "stripped-down" intentions for the original album. Let It Be... Naked presents the songs "naked"—without Spector's overdubs and without the incidental studio chatter featured between most cuts of the original album. Let It Be... Naked also replaces "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae" with "Don't Let Me Down", originally featured as the B-side of the "Get Back" single...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_It_Be..._Naked

There's also this interesting article on the remastering of the mono and stereo complete boxsets: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct09/ ... asters.htm

[Audley Strange]

Would anyone be surprised to find out Macca paid Mark Chapman and Michael Abram?

[Brian Peacock]

I'd like to see Macca play with The Bootleg Beatles, who've been playing together for longer than The Beatles were.

[devogue]

The Beatles were not much more than good pop musicians

Oh, but they really were.

Beatlemania and the sex appeal has long gone (two of them being dead doesn't help), and the fascination and enduring love for their music transcends generations and is not carried by anything as transient as nostalgia, so what is going on?

The hype surrounding the four men's personalities, personal lives, peccadillos and movements has now largely subsided and the Beatles canon is now more or less captured in amber. Their body of musical work, in terms of absorption (some people ludicrously describe the Beatles' genius magpie collecting of contemporary influences as a negative thing) expression, melody and creativity is without peer - a collection of songs so magnificent that they resonate massively with great swathes of humanity 50 years after they were written, music so powerfully brilliant it continues to entrance and delight new generations of listeners (how many new listeners for ragtime were there in 1963?), music borne of a singular age, so of its time, but so clearly for all time.

[Hermit]

Their body of musical work, ... expression, melody and creativity is without peer - a collection of songs so magnificent that they resonate massively with great swathes of humanity 50 years after they were written, music so powerfully brilliant it continues to entrance and delight new generations of listeners (how many new listeners for ragtime were there in 1963?), music borne of a singular age, so of its time, but so clearly for all time.

Love the hyperbole, Devogue. I daresay when it comes to that, more people listen to Led Zeppelin, Chopin, W.A. Mozart or J.S. Bach than The Beatles for the exact reasons you have listed, and Bach has been decomposing for over a quarter of a millennium now. So, no, the moptops where not without peer at all by any measure of listenership. They were tops in their time. The resonance of their creativity has all but ebbed away.

[devogue]

Their body of musical work, ... expression, melody and creativity is without peer - a collection of songs so magnificent that they resonate massively with great swathes of humanity 50 years after they were written, music so powerfully brilliant it continues to entrance and delight new generations of listeners (how many new listeners for ragtime were there in 1963?), music borne of a singular age, so of its time, but so clearly for all time.

Love the hyperbole, Devogue. I daresay when it comes to that, more people listen to Led Zeppelin, Chopin, W.A. Mozart or J.S. Bach than The Beatles for the exact reasons you have listed, and Bach has been decomposing for over a quarter of a millennium now. So, no, the moptops where not without peer at all by any measure of listenership. They were tops in their time. The resonance of their creativity has all but ebbed away.

They are peerless within their genre, just as Bach is peerless within the Baroque, and Mozart in the Classical era. Creativity, innovation and courageous musical exploration while in the middle of extreme, widespread popularity is extraordinarily rare - my admiration for Queen is well documented - because the risk of becoming unpopular and losing one's core audience is often too difficult to contemplate, and that invariably does happen when a musician heads off on a tangent. The tangent the Beatles took was indeed extreme, just three years between the poppy I want to hold your hand and the gothic I am the walrus...it's just such a gigantic musical leap. My mother gave up on them but they pulled great swathes of the general public with them on their journey because while their output was so strange and outlandish their innate genius as musicians carried the day.

I defy you to name a single act in the history of music in the last 100 years that changed direction so radically but still garnered massive popular and critical acclaim.

[Hermit]

They are peerless within their genre.

A bit less hyperbolic. Bravo.

I defy you to name a single act in the history of music in the last 100 years that changed direction so radically but still garnered massive popular and critical acclaim.

Stravinsky

[devogue]

I defy you to name a single act in the history of music in the last 100 years that changed direction so radically but still garnered massive popular and critical acclaim.

Stravinsky

Critical acclaim, yes, but the Paris riots over The rite of spring in 1913 illustrate how Stravinsky did not carry his audience (I'm not saying he wasn't brave) and Stravinsky never had the massive popular acclaim of the Beatles anyway - they endured a completely different and unique pressure. Besides, Schoenberg was the real breaker of the tonal mould.

[Hermit]

Oh. You asked me about who broke the tonal mould? I thought you defied me to name a single act in the history of music in the last 100 years that changed direction so radically but still garnered massive popular and critical acclaim. Stravinsky did, and not only did he become the most popular composer of the 20th century, but today more people listen to The Rites of Spring than Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da or any other Beatles hits.

[devogue]

Oh. You asked me about who broke the tonal mould? I thought you defied me to name a single act in the history of music in the last 100 years that changed direction so radically but still garnered massive popular and critical acclaim. Stravinsky did, and not only did he become the most popular composer of the 20th century, but today more people listen to The Rites of Spring than Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da or any other Beatles hits.

More people listen to The Rites of Spring than Hey Jude, Yesterday, Here Comes The Sun etc?

I don't believe that for a second, and I also don't believe that Stravinsky could ever be accused of having garnered "massive popular acclaim", especially massive popular acclaim that has extended across half a century.