A small tribute to the works of valuable composers, musicians, players and poets. From Al Green and Alberta Hunter to Zoot Sims and Shemekia Copeland, among many others. Covering songs from styles as different as bluegrass, blues, classical, country, heavy metal, jazz, progressive, rock and soul music.

Thursday, 27 October 2011

Beatles



1957-62


“The story began in Harold Macmillan’s “never had it so good” ’50s Britain. It should be fiction: four teenagers with no more than eight O’Levels between them, running and biking and busing and busking all over Liverpool in search of new chords and old guitars and half-decent drum kit and any gig at all.
They were determined to amount to something – in George’s words “we just had this amazing inner feeling of: ‘We’re going to do it’. I don’t know why... we were just cocky” – and make a record (in Ringo’s words you’d kill for that bit of plastic and make some money and have a laugh and shout. That would do to be going on with.
Six years later, they were the four most famous and musical men on earth, the best dressed and on a good day the most captivating people anyone can remember. The narrative that began where Paul met John and clicked at a garden fete in leafy Liverpool, and ended in high dudgeon in high-end London, is so far fetched that it needs the power of a song punctuating every page to remind you with a joyous jolt that it was all true.
We didn’t dream it... though it came out of John’s dream of the “man on a flaming pie” who said “You are Beatles with an ‘A’”. It did all happen. The whole wonderful thing did happen, a long time ago, on the Mersey, on the Elbe, by the Thames and the Hudson River.
Amazing and marvellous and, nearly forty years on, forever young.