The Beatles - If I Fell

 The Beatles were over-rated. To say as much in an age where blasphemy might not be an offence in itself but has been replaced by 'cancel culture' anyway might be taking a chance but idolatry gets out of hand whether it's applied to Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, Mozart or Bach. And Tamla Motown made consistently better records than the Beatles did, as they should have. There were more of them.

I was a fraction too young to be actually there at the time but, thanks to my parents doing their best for me, I had Beatles wallpaper on my bedroom wall at the age of 5, a framed picture of them by my bed, a plastic guitar on which to do 'yeah, yeah, yeah' and a metal drum-kit on which to be Ringo. George, the thoughtful, possibly the most sensitive and the youngest one was the only one I never thought was me.

The likes of She Loves You, I Wanna Hold Your Hand or Please, Please Me were a 'big bang' that no new thing in pop music before or after could equal. The impact of any would-be revolution since, even including the Sex Pistols, has arrived with diminishing returns.

Great artists will improve, and so they did, arriving at Revolver and Rubber Soul, but it might also be true that becoming too famous while you're still at it makes you feel a bit too god-like, as if your every thought was a gift you had a duty to pass on to your worshippers.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is not, as it is so often listed, the best pop album ever made. To misquote John Lennon on the subject of Ringo, if he ever said it, it's not the Best Album Ever, it's not even the Best Album by the Beatles. 

Success has its end in its own beginning and the Beatles spent nearly as much time 'making it' in Hamburg and the Cavern as they did at the top of the world, by all means more important to a lot of people than Jesus, before imploding, but it's not easy being that big. I don't think it was Yoko's fault- people always need somebody else to blame- and I don't think it was Paul's fault. He would probably have carried on and we would have been saved from Wings. It was John's fault, always the difficult one, the not quite as talented one, even if his solo efforts, not necessarily including Imagine, might outweigh Paul's.

But nothing lasts forever and a better reason for finishing in 1970 was that there wasn't much left for them to do. Motown had hit records before they did, and after, but whether it's the money that confuses them, the egos involved or simply that you've done as much as you could have, there might not have been much more to come.

There are any number of highlights. To ascertain the strength in depth of artists like Lennon-McCartney, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Smkoey Robinson, Carole King or Stephin Merritt, you see what no. 30 is in a list of their best records and see how good that is. The Beatles could easily be Top 5 at that but, in a competitive heat heat for no. 1 involving  I Should Have Known Better, Yesterday and She's Leaving Home as well as those early classics and a couple of cover versions, Baby, it's this. 

    You can see where Doherty and Barat got the idea of singing at the same microphone, loving each other and falling out, from.