Looks at the current state of Beatles Studies and outlines the chapters in the book.

While Lennon and McCartney’s class affiliations are ambiguous to degrees that should remain debatable, the depth and the detail in which working-class life defines their work have been overlooked, thus misrepresenting The Beatles’ cultural significance. As Collins (2012) critiques, initial New Left criticisms of The Beatles – almost exclusively in response to one composition, ‘Revolution’ (1968) – have recently been adapted by commentators eager to portray The Beatles as a culturally and politically conservative force. I argue that early Left-wing and recent Right-wing criticisms of The Beatles’ legacy are misleading, because both overlook Lennon and McCartney’s different relationships to working-class culture. I also emphasize an importantly related, even more marginalized aspect of The Beatles’ history: the significance of black musical and cultural influences from Liverpool. The article seeks to offer new interpretations of songs including ‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Revolution’, ‘Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da’ and ‘Working Class Hero’

‘The Beatles are a very important element in showing how the best of white musicianship has been influenced by African American musical heritage’, Mark Christian importantly points out. In addition to publishing extensively on Africana Studies from both sociological and cultural studies perspectives, Christian (born in Liverpool in 1961) teaches undergraduate courses on The Beatles and has conducted tours of Liverpool for US visitors. In this online interview, Mark Christian reflects on the personal, musical and historical significance of The Beatles in his life and work. As a member of one of Liverpool’s most distinguished musical families, and whose brothers formed the band The Christians, the author details here some of the many important links between The Beatles and Liverpool’s various Black music scenes. Our discussion encompasses tourism in Liverpool; the value of listening to The Beatles’ work chronologically; and the question of whether the band are over-rated. Most importantly however, Christian emphasizes the frequently overlooked influence of African American country/soul singer-songwriter Arthur Alexander on The Beatles. Taking Alexander’s legacy as just one starting point for such discussion, Christian points out: ‘It is incredible how racism impinges on this history of a band, yet so much is owed from them to Black music’. Christian also shares memories of knowing Harold Phillips (Lord Woodbine) during the later years of the Trinidadian-Liverpudlian musician’s eventful life.

In 1966, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ closed The Beatles’ seventh album Revolver, suggesting spectacular new horizons not just within the group’s own work, but in the musical and cultural outlook of The Beatles’ audience. Sharif Gemie’s chapter details John Lennon’s various inspirations for the composition, and Paul McCartney (aided by George Martin) brought to these. More extensively however, the author contemplates the fusion of Eastern and Western musical traditions within the song. Rather than marking some sort of cultural rupture, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ can instead be seen as an example of cultural continuity. It can be situated within the broad confines of the ‘Orientalism’ identified by Edward Said (1978). Orientalism could take many forms: sometimes a blatant racism; sometimes an articulate, pragmatic argument to rationalize imperialist expansion; sometimes an attitude resembling an admiration or even an affection for ‘eastern’ forms. The aspect which is most relevant here is the latter: those educated Westerners who looked eastward in search for some form of intellectual enlightenment.

Taking Richard Lester’s movie A Hard Day’s Night (1964) as The Beatles’ definitive film and a centrepiece for discussing their legacy, this chapter explores converging influences on the band’s career and image, including Music Hall, the Goons, and suburbia. Evolving themes are traced across The Beatles’ recorded output, and the author considers the role of the group’s retrospective comments in constructing a grand but nuanced narrative. The artistic impulse of the 1960s ‘to hold the moment, freeze it, show it and let it melt’ (Melly 1970: 167), must be interpreted in a spatial as well as temporal sense. Similarly, if rock is the music of growing up that promises the possibility of not growing up (Frith 1978: 209), it expresses the condition of containment and prospects of perpetual motion. The Beatles then exemplify the oppositional moment of youth, articulating precisely the impossible desire for the fully self-conscious experience of a temporal-spatial moment that is always already becoming another: for the pleasures of adulthood desired by youth, and the prospect of the city’s freedoms viewed from the suburbs. Constantly reinventing themselves and on the move in response to a sense of social and spatial entrapment, The Beatles sought not to last in the establishment sense, but to escape and so sustain an intense experience of temporal and spatial transience.

Although, in post-Leary psychedelic parlance, The Beatles had `tuned in’ and `turned on’ by 1967 (as was apparent in their interest in drugs and their modes) they had in various ways ‘dropped out’ of mainstream years earlier. This chapter considers The Beatles’ relationship to various countercultural influences and the broader terms of the ‘bohemian’. The group’s relationship to scenes and movements including the Beats, Hipster-Rockers and later, the Continental avant-garde. However, Colin Campbell argues here, it is a something of a mistake to conceive of the Beatles as having become bohemians. Rather it is suggested that, to a significant extent, they always were bohemians, or at least that bohemianism was a crucial part of their identity, and what is more, that this helps to account for their phenomenal success.

Professor Russell Reising is one of the leading Beatles scholars in the USA, he has written, edited and contributed to multiple volumes focussing upon or relating to the band and their times. This volume’s editors, James McGrath and Peter Mills, conducted a long and winding conversation with him via the internet during lockdown. We make use of segments of it throughout this book. In this first Interlude, the conversation begins by considering how one might ‘discover’ The Beatles – the routes each individual listener takes to their initial encounter with the music and the folk narrative of the band., and how innovation sounds when you hear the work as a whole rather than experience it over a decade in real time.

The 21st century has seen various public initiatives and digital projects led by Beatles fans utilizing both low tech and high-tech approaches. Examples range from the online crowd sourcing campaign in 2008 to save Madryn Street in Liverpool 8 (the location of Ringo Starr’s birth home) from demolition, to the high-tech success of Rock Band: The Beatles (2009), and fan-generated sites such as The Beatles: Live At The Internet. To study the effects of user-generated opportunities provided by digital media on audiences and fandom, an interdisciplinary approach is required, drawing on celebrity and popular music research, as well as performance theory and digital media studies. By using the above examples as case studies of the many ways in which Beatles fandom is manifesting itself in a digital age, this chapter argues that digital media has allowed music audiences a new sense of ownership created through performance and user generated content.

The roles of fans, both collectively and individually, have been crucial to the cultural mediation and even construction of The Beatles. This chapter chronologically discusses key manifestations of such processes. The Beatles Monthly fanzine commoditised the Beatles as four lovable mops tops, while letters published from girls as published in the magazines carried a highly sexualised subtext. Beatles Monthly also provided a space where original meanings of The Beatles’ image and music were translated into various sexual meanings. With Beatles conventions, beginning in 1974 in New York, fans began to take their own forms of ownership over the Beatles’ legacy (at a time when the group itself seemed uninterested). The Beatles phenomenon has also produced the curious hybrid of the journalist/fan, and with further forms of creativity, the work of slash fiction and innovative remixes as disseminated on YouTube, thus experimenting with form itself in new ways of hearing – and in important sense, ‘owning’ The Beatles’ music.

The Beatles Book has been overlooked in both academic research and popular biographies of the Beatles. Over 77 monthly issues between 1963 and 1979, the magazine told the Beatles story at it happened, giving modern readers a unique chance to follow the story without hindsight. This article looks in detail at the content of the magazine and its historical and social context: its beginnings as a form of ‘pop propaganda’, issues of fandom and the communication between fans and the band and the treatment of the change in the Beatles image in early 1967.

As their work progressed, The Beatles’ music offered to its audiences portals to alternative forms of knowledge; but these were only fully accessible to those immersed in psychedelic culture. This chapter considers how a range of listeners – but most notoriously, Charles Manson – interpreted the band as the principal shapers of cultural consciousness in the sixties, and how this burden of significance mutated to configure the Beatles as functionaries of disillusion at the decade’s catastrophic close. Focusing on The Beatles’ 1968 ‘White Album’ as a foundational text, the chapter analyses closely the songs ‘Glass Onion’ and ‘HelterSkelter’ before surveying and comparing Manson’s statements on The Beatles with Lennon and McCartney’s differing responses to radical interpretations.

The second of the three interludes reflects upon the role of the listener and viewer in perceiving and frequently creating frameworks of interpretation and meaning. Special attention is given to the idea of the avant-garde within the structures of the popular musical form.

In an age when the act of creation so often feels subsumed to that of curation, there is no ghost economy more lucrative than that dealing in Beatles ephemera. As their stock rises with each passing year, it feels ever more unlikely that one should encounter anything Beatle under an un-turned stone. The author’s chance encounter, then, with a pristine Box Brownie snap of a pre-fame Paul McCartney – Hőfner in-hand, Beatles’ bob, sporting proto-Fabssuit – in a small Scottish venue is what initiated the work of this chapter. What follows is a picaresque stroll around north-east Scotland during the short Beatles tour of January 1963. Ostensibly, a search for the provenance of a snapshot, the chapter becomes an impressionistic meditation upon the randomness of fame and the prosaic truths that so often prop up our sense of legend. By February of the following year, The Beatles had been on the Ed Sullivan Show and the rest was history.

In this piece the author explores the remarkable story of ‘The American Beetles’, arguably the first ever Beatles tribute act, equally possibly a huge confidence trick played on audiences, promoters and broadcasters in mid 1960s South America – but also one which speaks of the way the music business worked in the mid 1960s and how to some extent it still does. An American entrepreneur put together an act which was purported to be The Beatles without ever actually promising that they were the real thing. Issues of identity, authenticity and audience are all brought to the table in this extraordinary tale which starts with glimpses of unimagined success for the musicians involved and ends with disappointment for band, promoters and audience. The fevered politics of South America in the period also add much to the mix, while a blend of personal reminiscence, contemporary comment and historical perspective allows the details of this little known story to shine through for perhaps the first time.

The final interlude considers the duality of Listening and Remembering via reflections on misheard lyrics, individual responses and the importance of sound, especially in relation to recordings. We ‘remember’ the first time we heard a song, or a band, and other reflections on our lives accrete around those sounds. The recording does not change, but the listener does.