By Mark Hooper

Visiting Liverpool again recently made me realise there’s probably no other city in the world (with the possible exception of Memphis) that is so dominated by its association with a single band or artist.

Thanks in no small part to the memorialisation in song of many of the landmarks of their childhood, it’s hard to escape the link between The Beatles and their hometown. Statues, shop and bar names, yellow submarines, Magical Mystery Tour buses doing the rounds from Penny Lane to Strawberry Fields – there are constant reminders and references to the Fab Four everywhere.

Growing up surrounded with so much Beatlemania rammed down one’s throat, it’s little wonder that many of the locals rebel against such over-saturation. It’s exactly for this reason that my friend Andrew, Liverpool born and bred and with an encyclopedic knowledge of music far deeper and wider than mine, hates The Beatles with a passion. He’d far rather there were statues to Liverpool’s legendary Crucial Three – Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch and Pete Wylie – or to OMD’s Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey.

While of course he has every right to not like their music – subjectivity is everything – there are certain undeniable facts about The Beatles that I will argue about until I’m blue in the face. Put simply, they frame the very way we think and talk about bands. They laid down the blueprint for all pop careers that came thereafter.

Before The Beatles downed tools after Candlestick Park (or, to be more accurate, devoted themselves to adopting a whole new set of tools), the very concept of a popular music group band having to develop, experiment and grew simply didn’t exist in the way that we understand it today.

Look at Sinatra, Elvis, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons… you didn’t mess with the formula. You appealed to your fanbase by giving them more of what you knew they wanted. Granted, over time all of these acts would evolve in their own ways – but the radical changes came after The Beatles had created the template. Elvis famously namechecked the Fab Four (alongside The Byrds, which he hilariously pronounced as ‘The Beards’) in his 68 Comeback Special – his attempt to bury the schmaltzy musical water-treading of his movie years and re-set his career. Likewise, the Four Seasons stuck to their tried-and tested doo-wop pop until it dawned on them that Valli’s falsetto was perfect for the disco era.

As for Sinatra, the late period Ol’ Blue Eyes persona was carefully re-adopted after his most leftfield career turn – 1970’s Watertown – bombed commercially. Cleary his fans weren’t ready for an oppressive, claustrophobic concept album – closer in mood to Lou Reed’s Berlin than it is to Songs For Swingin’ Lovers! Who knows what he might have come up with if he’d stuck to his creative guns.

Today, we expect our bands to grow – to adopt string quartets, to embrace electronica, to hire avant garde producers, to commission remixes that reveal there was always a dance element to their sound. Standing still doesn’t cut it. 

When we (and yes, that includes you, Andrew!) criticise a band for repeating the same tired clichés and not developing from one album to another – we are implicitly accepting that The Beatles way is the only way. Great tunes and riffs aren’t enough. We demand a career trajectory.

When U2 moved to Berlin, wore bug-eye glasses and sung about lemons, they were following a familiar pattern – do something new, wrongfoot your audience. Sure, you can still play stadiums, but try and keep it interesting. By contrast, Oasis fizzled out into a parody of ever-decreasing circles while Damon Albarn went off and wrote Chinese operas and invented a constantly morphing cartoon band (talking of which – The Beatles did that first, too). While the commercial results of those projects may have varied, Albarn is the one who earns the most respect, because he embraces experimentalism rather than resting on his past laurels.

The nature of stadium rock has evolved accordingly. These days, Coldplay reserve Yellow for the mid-set smartphones-in-the-air moment, in between rolling out the church bells and the superproducer dance collaborations.

You could even argue that, after the constant experimentation, The Beatles also introduced the idea of the unplugged / back to basics approach with Let It Be. While it’s true that the first half of the aforementioned Elvis Comeback Special – performed with his original band, whooping and hollering and stamping their feet as they sat in the round in a boxing ring, predates the release of Let It Be, the Twickenham sessions for that album began in February of 1968. Elvis didn’t start rehearsing his show until May, before its airing as a Christmas special.

Like it or not, we judge a band’s worthiness for serious attention by their ability to ape The Beatles’ progression from mop-topped teenyboppers to the innovation of their later years. Yes, there were other artists inspiring them and helping to push the envelope – not least Brian Wilson, whose creative rivalry with McCartney in particular provided one of the most fertile periods in the development of pop. Talking of which, for anyone in need of a quick endorphin rush, I’d highly recommend the fifth episode of the Anthology TV series – which starts with the Shea Stadium concert in August 65 and ends with the backwards guitar and tape loops of Rain – it’s like witnessing ‘the Quickening’ in Highlander, with better haircuts.

It’s a perfect example of how, for all the hindsight theorising, The Beatles’ forged a new career path simply by being themselves – endlessly curious, enquiring, innovative artists