Mark and Des have been writing for a living their whole careers.
The Without the Beatles Blog is where you can - for a time -
read all their whispered words of wisdom for free.
And don’t forget to comment if you think they’re just fools on the hill.
And if you want to read non-Beatles
reviews and thoughts:
I started a BS Beatles’ rumour
By Des Burkinshaw
Thirty years ago, in November 1994, I was at an interesting point in my career as a journalist.
My day job was on the Hackney Gazette, covering news and all things local. But I had been doing shifts at the Daily Mirror for over a year, ever since one of my stories went national. I had one of the first Back to Basics scandals that rocked John Major’s government, so I had been headhunted.
I’d always intended to be a political journalist, but landed at the Mirror on the pop page, working for the wonderful eccentric Rick Sky. I was immediately seduced by the showbiz stuff. I’m a musician myself, and suddenly, having access to as many free tickets/CDs/parties as I could handle (a lot), I went to the dark side. I still had 3 years on the newsdesk at The Times lying in wait, my last print attempt to be serious before defecting to TV, but for now, I found myself in the epicentre of the media just as Britpop kicked off. Oasis’ record label, Creation, was in Hackney. I had a front-row seat for all that.
Rock the Casbah
By Des Burkinshaw
Just before we started recording the first podcasts, Mark and I made a trip to Liverpool to visit the true birthplace of The Beatles, The Casbah Club.
I’ve been to many venues associated with The Beatles – from Abbey Road to the Indra in Hamburg. The Casbah is unique, the only one truly preserved in aspic. You can still see and touch the low ceilings painted by John, Paul and George as they prepared the basement of Mona Best’s house for its opening (that’s Mark in the picture, standing beneath John’s Aztec ceiling). John also carved his name into the wall and ceiling, both marks as clear as the days he carved them in 1961/62.
The only thing even close to the Casbah’s authenticity, are the walls of Abbey Road Studio 2, which look identical to the many shots taken there in the 60s. The famous sound-diffusing curtains which hang from ceiling-to-floor have never been cleaned for fear of changing the sound of the room. Truly, molecules of that 60s magic still permeate the fabric. The curtains are nicotine-stained and, if you give them a whiff, stink of almost a century of being left alone. I imagine the average micro-biologist could make a lifetime’s study from them.
As soon as Pete Best was kicked out of The Beatles, Mona closed the Casbah, and the family continued living upstairs.
Liverpool Heroes
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.
Over-produced. Over-appreciated.
By Des Burkinshaw
The Beatles have a (deserved) reputation for being the band that made the recording studio the principal tool of rock music.
Of course, there were great studio rock and pops wizards before them, not least Phil Spector and Joe Meek. Their major contributions, I suggest, were to change the way music was recorded. In Meek’s case, by using unusual spaces for echo, crafting his own compressors etc. And doing it all from home, which has become the 2024 model for almost all music, bar the highest of high ends. Spector’s revolution was in the arrangements. Let’s have 3 different pianos playing in sync, 2 basses, 4 guitars in unison.
However, despite these advances, both of their staggering outputs are still recognisably classic pop songs.
More importantly historically in terms of the radical overhaul of music structure, there were the music concrète experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and associates in France, starting in 1948. Schaeffer’s studio produced highly innovative work, including Karlheinz Stockhausen’s first major electronic work, Konkrete Etüde in 1952.
