Is it strange to say only *my generation had the Beatles? Not the younger ones. Not the older ones either. Just that narrow strip of time I happened to stand on. At the time it did not feel strange at all. It felt ordinary. There was nothing unusual about them. They were simply there. As if they always had been.
I was eight when the songs arrived and something in me noticed. Awareness came quietly then. You did not know what you did not know. How the rest of the world was waking up at the same time. The records were already spinning. The television already showed them. Newspapers, magazines, cinemas - all carried the same faces. It seemed fixed. Wasn’t that how the world worked?
Later they called it a Boomer thing. At eight, words like that had no weight. I knew about the big War, even if it had already ended. I knew rockets were chasing the moon. I knew cowboys, Elvis, and the long cold pause between nations. I knew the Light Programme, Children’s Hour, and Doctor Who, when the TV signal held. The Beatles slid into that knowledge without friction. Black and white faces. Scratchy records. Radios humming and glowing in the corners of rooms. They were not separate from life. They were part of it's texture. Like Bible stories or sherbet fountains. They were everywhere without trying to be.
The adults disapproved, or it felt that way. They said the songs meant nothing. They laughed at the words. They said the hair was long and wrong. They said Liverpool had never produced anything good. That was what they said. It did not matter. Everyone else leaned forward. We tested loyalties with pain and laughter, Beatles or Stones and we pretended it was a choice. The Beatles were better, everyone knew. The Stones were dangerous. Their danger complicated things. The adults said it would pass. They were wrong, though some of them understood. The ground was moving. You could feel it if you stood still long enough. But the establishment never believes in a movement until it has already fallen and is a piece of history.
The end, it turns out, is always closer than the beginning. The gods became men. Flesh and failure. They had warned us in the songs, but belief is easier than listening hard. Understanding asks something of you, and most people prefer not to pay.
By the time I'd turned sixteen it was finished. On the skids. The fractures came. Then the departures. Then the scandals. New names in music followed, eager and loud. They could play. They could write. They could perform. But they were not walking into open ground. They followed footprints already pressed into the earth. That walk could not be easily repeated. What came after was a pale imitation, sometimes beautiful, often competent, never the same. An original moment does not forgive repetition. It can only be viewed through glass, thinned and dulled. The world began to spin faster, and our heroes proved not to be bulletproof.
Now machines revive what once lived free. Still photos move again. Voices return without breath. It is something you may accept, but not something you can savour if you were ever there. It is hollow in the way belief becomes hollowed out when it asks nothing back. We watched the progression and sensed where it led. Souls sold cheaply, performing their tributes while everything around flattens into a cartoon form. History repeats, yes, but never faithfully. Time does not always improve what it touches. Small corruptions accumulate into monsters. The Devil stays down in the details. He prefers it there.
You try to tell your version anyway. You have to. It might matter, though few will believe it. Then people age, die and vanish, and the story returns again, edited, softened, looped endlessly for easier consumption. A version of memory becomes content. Context disappears.
The planet does not need more amusement. It needs care. It needs stewards. It needs people willing to serve rather than extract. Once there was a moment when that almost surfaced. Then errant machines closed over it and it was snuffed out. Corporations and governments learned faster ways to take without giving. We arrive at the future we earn. It did not have to be this way.
* I never, ever bought any Beatles records when I was young. No LPs, books or posters either. Nothing, I don't know why. Later on I bought a few CDs and books. There are still some Beatles albums I've never listened to all the way through.
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Sometimes I get my head into knots over imagined desert island options i.e. If you could only take one band or artist's music with you to the island, which one would you choose?
Perhaps: Mozart, Bowie, Gershwin, Tchaikovsky, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, CSNY ... ?
Once the internal pub argument is over, I think ... it's the Beatles.
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