Legendary Beatles producer has died at the age of ninety.
It's fashionable to dismiss the Beatles now, but you had to be there to realise the impact they had in the sixties. No other band has ever developed from simple R&R tunes like She Loves You to albums like Sergeant Pepper in the space of only four years.
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My older sis was mixed up in Beatlemania, going to London and to the airport etc for a glimpse. She once had a lock of hair and a bit of windscreen wiper. Still I liked them then and I still like 'em.
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I never thought Oasis stood comparison with the Beatles. To what extent Martin was the fifth Beatle, I don't know. And I'm pretty sure sure I can't hum anything by Coldplay (for example) despite being bombarded with their ditties much more recently.
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Beatles were just the first over-hyped boy band. The proper rock'n'roll was being done elsewhere. Same goes for Presley IMHO - Buddy Holly was the real King of Rock'n'Roll in my book.
But if that's your bag, that's great. There is no good or bad in music, just what an individual likes.
The fact that their solo efforts post-Beatlemania were hardly ever up to much is what condems them for me.
Is that a fashionable view? I wasn't ware of that.
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Yes, but we're talking about George Martin who did so much more over the years than just The Beatles to fully demonstrate his skills.
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Fair dos. I'm not really aware of what else he was involved in, so I'll just say that 90 is a fair innings, RIP.
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>> The fact that their solo efforts post-Beatlemania were hardly ever up to much is what condems them for me.
Tsk... what does that have to do with the Beatles as a group?
I was a snooty snobbish jazz enthusiast. But the Beatles seduced me with their superior bubblegum stuff. They were fabulous, fabulous. The Stones were more my sort of thing, but the Beatles were truly exceptional.
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The Beatles' early work doesn't do much for me - although I can see how it had the impact it did in the context of the early 1960s - but from Revolver onwards they seemed to step up to another plane. Martin's inventiveness in the studio was a big part of that, providing the technical and musical knowhow to put into practice what the band members' fertile imaginations came up with.
Another way to judge his influence is to look at the quality of what the post-1970 Beatles themselves came up with as individuals - without him.
Last edited by: WillDeBeest on Wed 9 Mar 16 at 12:24
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"Another way to judge his influence is to look at the quality of what the post-1970 Beatles themselves came up with as individuals - without him."
And yet another way of assessing Martin is the way his "classical" training (he was at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, for three years, studying piano, oboe, composition and orchestration) helped to blur the boundaries between "classical" and pop music.
"Rock and roll has the same function as classical music," he once said. "To make sounds that are appealing to a mass of people and are of some worth."
Often portrayed as the posh toff (possibly because of his time in the Fleet Air Arm) who contrasted with the working-class background of his protégés, he was in fact of humble origins - the son of a carpenter and a cleaner from Holloway.
I would rate his contribution to twentieth-century music pretty highly.
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>> The Beatles' early work doesn't do much for me
Opposite for me - I love the energy/tunes/rawness of quite a bit of their early stuff (don't disagree with AC's 'bubblegum' description), and don't like much of their later output.
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>>They were fabulous, fabulous. The Stones were more my sort of thing, but the Beatles were truly exceptional.
I'm with ^this gentile.
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Beatles?
Unjustifiably massively overhyped then, and with the benefit of hindsight prodigious output of meaahhhh pffftttt.
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Of an era really. A few good tunes lots of rubbish. Were they better than say the Kinks? Not really.
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>> Unjustifiably massively overhyped then, and with the benefit of hindsight prodigious output of meaahhhh pffftttt.
Snigger... a man of serious musical taste evidently.
Sixties and seventies were a golden time for pop music. You had to be grown up, and to have educated but unsnobbish taste when it came to it.
Really there's no accounting for taste, and Zero's is worth as much as the next person's. I know this because through an accident of age I was at several key events of the time, Roundhouse, Stones in the Park, Blarney Club in Tottenham Court Road, 100 Club in Oxford Street, Ronnie Scott's... but tastes really do differ, and no one likes everything.
Listening to Tubby Hayes in the Flamingo at the bottom of Wardour Street one middle-of-the-night, standing near the front, was chuffed to notice Eric Burdon of The Animals standing quietly beside me. Something or other it was to be whatever it was in that privileged time, or it felt like that anyway.
Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Wed 9 Mar 16 at 14:07
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>> was chuffed to notice Eric Burdon of The Animals standing quietly beside me.
For those too young to remember, the Animals were a Geordie band, very big at the time.
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>> Beatles?
>>
>> Unjustifiably massively overhyped then, and with the benefit of hindsight prodigious output of meaahhhh pffftttt.
>>
1969 - Rolling Stones - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb-JZPmiEOI
1969 - Beatles -www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n3LdjeCK5I
Nuff said.
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The Beatles got rich on bubblegum, shrewd management, talent, and more or less pretty faces. And lovely suits and robes and stuff, OK.
Octopussy's Garden is pure bubblegum. Hey Jude is better, but far from their best.
Of course my own taste then as now was entirely for the wonderfully wicked subversive beat slung out so apparently casually by the Stones.
I still feel privileged to have absorbed all that dross at first hand. Most entertaining it was.
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>> Octopussy's Garden is pure bubblegum. Hey Jude is better, but far from their best.
>> Of course my own taste then as now was entirely for the wonderfully wicked subversive beat slung out so apparently casually by the Stones.
Both the top bands, the bubblegum Beatles and the subversive sexy Stones, went in for serious production values: great big orchestras in the background for the Steatles and hip US sitters-in for the low-down Stones. There was so much money about it was frightening. You could tell by the suits alone.
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Quite liked, never loved, The Beatles. Never really liked The Stones.
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>> Beatles?
>>
>> Unjustifiably massively overhyped then, and with the benefit of hindsight prodigious output of meaahhhh pffftttt.
I'd call it mania rather than hype. They achieved success through their own efforts (and the necessary luck of course).
Comparisons with manufactured boy bands are invalid - albeit with acknowledged influences, they made up their own tunes and words (highly unusual at the time) and served their apprenticeships.
Whether you or I like it is immaterial to any of that.
Compare with the Stones, who did and still do a magnificent job (no sarcasm intended) of exploiting a rich seam of existing material by mainly US black artists (and even Buddy Holly).
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>> Comparisons with manufactured boy bands are invalid - albeit with acknowledged influences, they made up their own tunes and words (highly unusual at the time) and served their apprenticeships.
Yes.
The Beatles were folk musicians, in the English folk tradition. The Stones made a good fist of aping the US s***kicker tradition.
I keep saying we were lucky to have them both at the same time. Embarras de richesses almost.
:o}
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>> made up their own tunes and words (highly unusual at the time) and served their apprenticeships.
Yes, and the words weren't bad. John Lennon was a bit of a poet after all. But the others surely had inputs.
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"It's fashionable to dismiss the Beatles now,"
There seems to be a pattern emerging here; the mean-spirited, miserable, leftist gits amongst us don't know anything about music either ...... but they are very definite and loud about it.
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Yeah, the Beatles aren't a patch on Billy Bragg.
(eye roll smiley)
Those named mean spirited lefties who want the Navy to blow migrant dinghies out of the Aegean, those ones, right?
(eye roll smiley)
I though AC was a leftist git? He's pro-Beatle.
(eye roll smiley)
The only pattern I see emerging here is the vocal, shrill right screaming about nasty Commies on gentle threads about pop music when there's no justification to do so.
(eye roll smiley)
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Still, a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
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"Still, a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest."
Splendid - so you, at least, know a bit about music. Or is it just the pugilist in you coming out?
Last edited by: Haywain on Wed 9 Mar 16 at 16:25
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All I know is that I know what I like.
Cleverly produced, over-hyped and over-marketed jangly Scouse larrikins don't do it for me. One of them can't even hold his guitar the right way up.
Tut.
;-)
Last edited by: Alanović on Wed 9 Mar 16 at 16:35
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"Scouse larrikins don't do it for me"
NoFM will be along shortly to berate you.
;-)
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>>(eye roll smiley)
= 8-)
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The Stones music from the sixties and early seventies has stood the test of time. Much of the Beatles output (The psychedelic stuff) was of it's day, rather like flared trousers. Great at the time but you wouldn't wear them now. Their more basic R&R songs still sound great.
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>> I though AC was a leftist git?
(Eye roll scowly)
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George Martin Has Left The Building - smokie
