The Beatles remain topical and continue to sell more records than most contemporary stars

Whatever happens in pop music during any year it somehow always ends up with The Beatles. This year, just as we started to think about another sad anniversary of John Lennon’s slaying, George Harrison departed. And then, The Beatles’ compilation ‘1’, issued in November 2000, was named the best selling album in America during 2001 by the Billboard magazine.

They are still referred to as ‘The Fab Four’ and have become popular music’s equivalent to Zeus. The Beatles were the Liverpool band that changed the face, image and sound of popular music forever and are doubtlessly the most influential band on the planet that exercises its inspirational curse so crucially over more than three decades after disbandment. Their name is mentioned in interviews as regularly as weather reports and a tonne of tomes has been written about them.

Each of their albums is regularly refreshed with anniversary re-issues and we’ll reach the 40th year of their debut single, ‘Love Me Do’, hitting the streets in October. Even before that, this January is the 40-years since the band’s first recorded sounds emerged as they backed Tony Sheridan on ‘My Bonnie’, as well as Ringo Starr’s joining. How was it in Liverpool all those years ago? We reminisced with a couple of people who were associated with the band in its earliest days, publisher of the ‘Liverpool bible’, Mersey Beat and their producer, Sir George Martin.

Even before The Beatles promoted Liverpool to the centre of the musical universe an enterprising youngster saw the emerging scene’s potential and started a magazine Mersey Beat, a fortnightly (later weekly and it lasted for 90 issues) publication to chronicle the vibrant local scene. The Beatles were obviously heavily featured in every issue and Lennon often contributed to its pages, with Paul also penning a couple of articles.

The first issue of the magazine, dated July 06th, 1961, carried a column ‘Being A Short Diversion On The Dubious Origins Of The Beatles’, by-lined by Lennon, on its cover! The founder and editor of the mag has a vivid recollection of those days and witnessed the development of the ‘Liverpool sound’ that was simply Anglicising influences from America before spreading to conquer the planet as the Mersey Beat sound became the property of the world.

“The Beatles were heavily influenced by American Rock stars of the 50s,” Mersey Beat founder and editor Bill Harry recalled at the end of the last century, “particularly Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins but, alike other Merseyside bands they didn’t necessarily slavishly copy the American records, rather they adopted them to the Scouse style, which generated far more excitement than the home-grown record industry had experienced. Another outside influence crept in during the early part of 1963 that affected Mersey groups, including The Beatles, in a big way. It was the Oriole-American early Tamla Motown records.”

“Virtually unknown in the rest of Britain, Liverpool was a large port and sailors used to bring over records, the Tamla catalogue became immensely popular with the Liverpool bands who took the essence of the records, rearranged them and produced a unique fusion of a Mersey-Motown sound. Numerous Liverpool bands were to record their own versions of Tamla material, the Beatles covered ‘Bad Boy’.”

“What happened on Mersey in those early years was an unforgettable experience for those who lived through them. Beatlemania was very descriptive of the fanatical fervour that swept in their wake, first in Liverpool, then throughout the country and eventually the world. Merseyside in particular seemed to be in a state of ecstasy. The scene covering their Civic Reception at the Town Hall brought nearly 200,000 people onto the streets to see them drive from Liverpool Airport to meet the Lord Mayor. Shades of a Roman triumph at the time of the Caesar’s! You could almost dig the atmosphere as if you were present at some great historical event.”

“The whole city was Beatle-mad. All the clothing stores had window dummies holding guitars, Beatle pictures and posters were on display by the thousand and the range of Beatle merchandise included Beatle boots, Beatle wallpapers, Beatle caps, Beatle wigs and Beatle cakes. The latter were party-sized cakes in the shape of a guitar with photographs of each member of the group on them. There also were small cakes with individual pictures of members. Within 12 hours, 25,000 cakes had been sold.”

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In part two, on Thursday, we’ll find out about who really made Brian Epstein, the band’s manager, aware of the quartet, about Pete Best’s ousting from the line-up and whether they ever smoked vaccy-baccy in front of their producer, Sir George Martin.