For no raisin

A list of known planets and their attributes...

Amazonia: is a planet covered in rain forests and lakes. It is inhabited by giant man-hating women, ruled by a femputer who is really a fembot. 

Amphibos 9: is a hot and steamy swamp planet. It is inhabited by Amphibosians.

Byoria 6: home of the Quantum Lichen people.

Chapek 9: is a small, featureless planet colonized 600 years ago by robots who hate humans. The surface of Chapek 9 is extremely barren with a few species of plants being the only native and organic lifeforms. The atmosphere of Chapek 9 is extremely thin, enough to see stars during the day.

Decapod 10: is an Earth-like planet covered in sandy islands and oceans. It is the home of the Decapodians, a lobster-like species of alien.

 Earth: is the homeworld of the humans and is a major planet in DOOP. It is extremely technologically advanced and has millions of native animals. Earth is mostly covered in some form of water, with continents and islands making up the rest of the surface.

Fedex 8: homeworld of the Upsilons.

Jupiter: a gas giant located in the solar system.

Klingon: has an embassy on Earth.

Mars: Mostly made up of farmland owned by the Wong family also home to the famous Mars University.

Neptune: location of Santa’s ice fortress.

Omega 3: is a desert planet where last tapes of Star Trek were kept, along with the crew. It is the homeworld of Melllvar, his parents and possibly more of his species.

Pandora: is a stereoscopic 3-D planet.

Spa 5: where visitors do forced labour, recommended by Dr Zoidberg.

Thuban 9: is the ninth planet of the Thuban star. It's inhabited by the Thubanians and the Chicken-Salmon. Long ago, life there was ideal for cats.

Venus: Home to the Venusians. Its surface has apparently been developed to support wildlife, and may contain gardens.
  

For no raisin

While we try to block the triumph of meat-headed provincial fascism in Britain you never know we might not win and may have to flee for our lives. Here are some names you could use for your fake passport, you never know, they might work:

Dr Jordan Edilstein
Professor Baxter
Krispy Kreme McDonalds
Kevin Bacon
Horse Renoir
Predator
Chilly
Cousin Phil
Parker Peters
Laura Vanderbooben
Luke Fondleberg
Scotch Bingington
Sholanda Dykes
Mr Mustachos
Warren Beanstalk
Ricky Spanish

Actually existing songs

Actually existing songs available as sheet music in the British Library:

Ball Tossing
Both Old Men or Young
Fair Cloris in a Pigsty Lay
Fixed in His Everlasting Seat
Galloping Dick
A Handy Little Thing to Have About You
I'll Place it in the Hands of My Solicitor
I'm a Very Potent Queen
I Smote Him on the Boko with My Whangee
A Lap Full of Nuts
A Large Cold Bottle and a Small Hot Bird
Miniwanka
Open Thy Lattice Darling
Say Mama, If He Pops Shall I Send Him to You?
They've All Got Sticky Backs
You Do Keep Popping In and Out

David Bowie enjoys a good list too

This is, apparently, the flowchart of David Bowie’s most recent album, The Next Day. Enjoy:

Effigies
Indulgences
Anarchist
Violence
Chthonic
Intimidation
Vampyric
Pantheon
Succubus
Hostage
Transference
Identity
Mauer
Interface
Flitting
Isolation
Revenge
Osmosis
Crusade
Tyrant
Domination
Indifference
Miasma
Pressgang
Displaced
Flight
Resettlement
Funereal
Glide
Trace
Balkan
Burial
Reverse
Manipulate
Origin
Text
Traitor
Urban
Comeuppance
Tragic
Nerve
Mystification

In other news, the fantastic blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame has just reached the end of another epic chapter, Bowie song-by-song 1992-1995, which included the great lost and found avant-album Leon, from which this indescribable song comes.

Lists etc

Tallest mountains (base to peak) in the solar system according to planet/moon/asteroid:

Mercury - Caloris Montes
Venus - Maxwell Montes
Earth - Mauna Kea
Moon - Mons Huygens
Mars - Olympus Mons
Vesta - Rheasilvia
Io - Boosaule Montes
Mimas - Herschel Central Peak
Titan - Mithrim Montes
Iapetus - Equatorial Ridge
Oberon - Limb Mountain

For no raisin

French words or phrases in English that either mean nothing or something different in French... you heard me...

Agent provocateur
Apres ski
Bete noire
Cause celebre
Cri de coeur
Demimonde
Double entendre
Encore
Fin de siecle
Homage
In Lieu
Marquee
Negligee
Outre
Portmanteau
Reprise
Seance
Vignette

Thoughts for the Brain - Sherlock

Apropos of nothing, except perhaps finding out the new series of Sherlock goes into production next month I decided to scan various online theories about the Final Problem, the Reichenbach Fall and how Sherlock escaped death. It also helps because it means after this little blurb comes a list… great.

The mechanics of Sherlock’s faked fall are still unclear, but there is a wonderful section in the middle of this post, which very convincingly unpicks the Final Problem and the origins of Jim Moriarty. It’s not spoiling much (because it’s really excellent detail) to say the headline is Jim Moriarty is the fake identity while Richard Brook is real. It also explains why Moriarty/Brook, a man with very high self-regard, ends up committing suicide on St Bart’s roof.

It’s worth emphasising that show like Sherlock would not have been made 15-20 years ago. It is a product of internet culture, the now instant pooling of popular expertise, and the DVD. Sherlock rewards repeated, detailed viewing and lateral thinking. Video cassettes could not offer the same level of viewer scrutiny. In McLuhanite terms, Sherlock is the medium of television warming up (we are talking here of the dialogue and visual tableau), changing from broad effect to fine detail. Nothing can be taken simply as random. The narrative however cools everything down. We see at the end Sherlock died yet is clearly alive (Schrodinger’s Detective).

The audience is invited to peer deeply at the detail of the show, the norm under modern mass culture, yet is compelled to fill in key narrative details as the story is left unexplained. In a whimsical way it is an example of the mass critical intellectualism engendered by capitalist culture. Whether they write about Sherlock or Doctor Who or David Bowie  or whatever, people are out there examining whole topics, illuminating subjects and doing it for free. The barriers between manual and intellectual labour have long since been removed. There is one enormous obstacle left, namely private property.

  

1. There are two SherlocksWe were all a bit confused when that little girl went mental upon seeing Sherlock in Sunday’s finale. Some people are suggesting that she was actually one of Moriarty’s youngest employees, or that she had been threatened with dire consequences like the jury before her, but some of you are convinced that Sherlock has a doppelganger. The fact that this lookalike apparently co-operated with Moriarty’s plans makes him even more of a mystery, yet it is possible that Holmes talked him round and persuaded him to commit suicide on his behalf.
Likelihood – 2/10 

2. A Sherlock Mask on Moriarty’s Body.
This theory fits in nicely with the idea that the name Rich Brook (Moriarty’s alias) is loosely German for Reichenback and as such the title of the episode falls into place, yet there are plenty of unanswered questions. Most theories hold the delay between Dr Watson seeing Sherlock fall and him reaching the body as crucial, but this one utilises the gap between the point when the Napoleon of crime shot himself and Watson arrived upon the scene. The bus that drove past after Cumberbatch threw down his phone could have been the point when Holmes pushed his dead adversary over in his place, yet it doesn’t explain why the person falling seemed to be alive on the way down.This theory fits in nicely with the idea that the name Rich Brook (Moriarty’s alias) is loosely German for Reichenback and as such the title of the episode falls into place, yet there are plenty of unanswered questions. Most theories hold the delay between Dr Watson seeing Sherlock fall and him reaching the body as crucial, but this one utilises the gap between the point when the Napoleon of crime shot himself and Watson arrived upon the scene. The bus that drove past after Cumberbatch threw down his phone could have been the point when Holmes pushed his dead adversary over in his place, yet it doesn’t explain why the person falling seemed to be alive on the way down.
Likelihood – 5/10 

3. Mycroft Was In On It
Mycroft Holmes is certainly a cold fish, but we thought the reaction to his brother’s demise was dislocated even by his standards. He even looked a bit bored during the scene in which he read about Sherlock’s death in the newspaper. If you also consider the way he completely sold his brother out to his most deadly enemy, something doesn’t quite fit. Maybe Sherlock realised that his death would be inevitable as the scandal rose and enlisted Mycroft to help him out by planting an idea in Moriarty’s mind. But what? And how?Mycroft Holmes is certainly a cold fish, but we thought the reaction to his brother’s demise was dislocated even by his standards. He even looked a bit bored during the scene in which he read about Sherlock’s death in the newspaper. If you also consider the way he completely sold his brother out to his most deadly enemy, something doesn’t quite fit. Maybe Sherlock realised that his death would be inevitable as the scandal rose and enlisted Mycroft to help him out by planting an idea in Moriarty’s mind. But what? And how?
Likelihood – 7/10

4. MollyBy far the most popular theory is that the often-sidelined Molly helped Sherlock fake his own death. There are two cast iron pieces of evidence for this. First of all, she had a stack of corpses at her disposal and could have fixed any autopsy. Secondly, Sherlock called her back and told her that she was important just before his death. The second part of that conversation should explain everything when it’s revealed. Also she fancied his pants off and would have done anything for him. That’s actually four reasons now we think about it..
Likelihood – 9/10 

5. Sherlock was the bloke on the bike.How exactly this would work is unclear, but a large proportion of the internet community are determined that Holmes was actually the bloke on the bike who bumped into Watson, delaying him from getting to the body. The question of how he got down from the roof break-neck speed (you know what we mean) is another puzzler. Hmm..
Likelihood – 2/10 

6. Dummy from their roomIf you watch the episode again, there are countless references that appear for mere seconds, but could be crucial in the final mystery and one such prop is the mannequin hanging from a noose in Sherlock’s flat. When you remember that it was Holmes who suggested that he and Moriarty meet on the roof of St Barts, it becomes clear that he could have prepared the location in advance with all manner of tools to kid us. Much is also being made of the rubbish truck which was seen hanging around just before his fall and the fact that Sherlock wanted Doctor Watson to “stay exactly where he was!” Obviously his location was vital if he was to believe that Holmes was dead. Maybe Sherlock dropped into the rubbish truck as the bus passed and then Watson saw the dummy falling. Sherlock then swapped places with the dummy as the bike hit Watson. Yet if Sherlock jumped before the dummy – who pushed it off the roof?
Likelihood – 6/10

7. All people on the pavement – including cyclist – were Sherlock’s peopleIf any body-swap/de-masking/dummy-replacement took place then Holmes would almost certainly have needed help from those pedestrians, who could have aided him while delaying Watson from getting to the scene. Why would he trust a load of people and not Dr Watson though? Possibly because he knew that if the Doctor believed him dead then everyone else would as well. Some boffins have also pointed to the squash ball that Homes was playing with and suggested that he could have used the ‘Squash ball in the Armpit’ trick to disguise his pulse from Watson. Points for cleverness.
Likelihood – 7/10 

8. Baskerville Drug administered to WatsonThis theory suggests that Holmes administered the drug from the previous episode to Watson and put the idea of him killing himself in his head. As such Watson was hallucinating when he saw Sherlock fall. Plausible, but it doesn’t take into account the fact that Moffat, Gattiss & Co would consider it the height of laziness to use the same ploy in two separate episodes. For that reason, probably a non-starter.
Likelihood – 1/10 

9. ScotomaScotoma essentially refers to the power of suggestion and the affect it can have over what a person thinks they have seen. Related to the previous theory, many have suggested that when the Beeb give us the big reveal in 2013, it will actually transpire that someone completely different was standing on top of St Barts and we mis-saw him. There are two ways of doing this; with skillful filming and clever editing or by simply showing us the correct thing and then telling us we were mistaken at a later date.
Likelihood – 6/10 

10. Moriarty Is Not DeadWe really hope this one’s true – how good was Andrew Scott? Anyone who has read the books will know that the idea of one of Holmes or Moriarty striking such a winning blow (ie. killing the other) was unlikely to happen, as Conan-Doyle emphasised how closely matched they were. Essentially they were both struggling for an edge, so if Holmes can return from beyond the grave, why not his arch-enemy?
Likelihood – 5/10

A little bit of space filling

Ten Unpleasant Facts About John Lennon: not all of them are facts, some of them are opinions, and some of them I don't agree with (I think the Black Panthers were a noble cause, but that's just me). But it's part of what makes John Lennon such a compelling figure, everything that he was he was also the opposite, often at the same time.

For no raisin

Except we haven't had a good list in a while. Here is a sample of German words borrowed/adapted into English. Like most lists they fall apart somewhere around Q or at the latest X.

Abseil
Alphorn
Ansatz
Biergarten
Bratwurst
Blitzkrieg
Crumhorn
Diktat
Dachshund
Delicatessen
Doppelganger
Eisbrecher
Eidelweiss
Frankfurter
Flak
Flugelhorn
Gesundheit
Gestalt
Glockenspiel
Hamburger
Handstand
Inselberg
Jugendstil
Kaffeeklatch
Kaput
Kitsch
Kindergarten
Katzenjammer
Lager
Lebensraum
Leitmotif
Muesli
Mitteleuropa
Noodle
Nein
Neanderthal
Nazi
Oktoberfest
Putsch
Pretzel
Poltergeist
Quartz
Rinderpest
Rucksack
Rottweiler
Sprechensang
Schadenfreude
Strudel
Stein
Spritzer
Takt
Urtext
Unheimlich
Uber
Volkswagen
Wiener
Wanderlust
Wunderkind
Zugzwang
Zweiback

Day 7 - the world's BIGGEST post

The Big Easy 

The Big Sleep 

The Big Lebowski 

The Big Three 

The Big Five

The other Big Five 

The Big Yin 

And we used him last time but he’s just soooo great, Biggie Smalls in House of Rock!

Help for Lazy TV Executives

After the success of Sky TV's On the Couch with Peter Crouch, TV execs are doubtless looking for follow-up. Based on this winning formula, we've come up with a number of ideas, all as groundbreaking as the original. Ta for all contributions.

On the Toilet with Junior Hoilett
At the Sink with Jan Venegoor of Hesselink
In the Shed with Jonathan Stead
In the Bath with Steve and Garth - presented by the Spurs early 80's strike partnership of Archibald and Crooks
In the Bracken with Gordon Strachan - where the former Scotland international takes us on his favourite hillside walks
In the Shower with Lee Power
Under the Stairs with Stephen Pears
In the Cellar with Kasey Keller
On a Scooter with Batistuta
On a Ferry with Chris Perry
On the Telly with Stephen Kelly
On the Piss with Matt Le Tiss
On a Plough with Ken Monkou
On a Cycle with Peter Schmeichel
On a Bus with Steve Anthrobus
In the Car with Van der Sar
On the Train with James McLean
At the Door with Agbonlahor
Playing Jenga with Arsene Wenger
After Dark with Ji-Sung Park
By the Fire with Kieron Dyer
On the Floor with Darren Moore
On the Pier with Peter Fear
On the Stretcher with Gary Taylor-Fletcher
Out to Play with Emenike
In a Ditch with Mark Bosnich
Buying Knickers with Steve Vickers
Growing old with Steve Bould
On the Loo with Alan Pardew
Talking Crap with Harry Redknapp
On the Roof with El Hadji Diouf
Playing Sudoku with Efan Ekoku
Walking the Dales with Barry Hayles
At the Bar with Grobelaar
On a Ranch with Michael Branch
Down a Hole with Ashley Cole
In the Park with Ciaran Clark
Being Chucked off a Ferry with John Terry
Through the Void with Walter Boyd
At the Fridge with Wayne Bridge
Up the Chimney with Emmanuel Omoyimni
On the Stair with Frank Sinclair
At the Fair with Brian McClair'
At a party with Christian Abbiati
Swapping Paninis with Paolo Maldini
In the car with Niko Kranjcar (mispronunciation but whatever)
Having a Pee with AVB
Under the Sink with Nigel Spink
On the go with Tore Andre Flo
Listening to Geese Honk with Steed Malbranque
Getting Blotto with Assou-Ekotto
Home Alone with Huddlestone
Out the back with Rodney Jack
Building a fort with Carl Cort
In the Study with John Ruddy
In a Van with Sylvain Distin
In the Bin with Cliff Bastin
Talking Shite with Ian Wright
Acting crazy with Linda Buthelezi
Being a Pest with Taribo West
Art Nouveau with Celestine Babayaro
Ringing a Bell with John Obi Mikel
Down a shot with Joleon Lescott
Having a Piss with Filip Kiss
At the Deli with Balotelli
Having a Ramble with Frazer Campbell
Having a Wank with Hasselbaink
Fly Away with John O'Shea
Getting Hyper with Matt Piper
Lighting a Firecracker with Per Mertesacker
Riding a Pony with Benito Carbone
Smoking a Bong with Sebastien Bassong
Eating Linguine with Perpetuini
Sorting Files with Dean Shiels
Raking Leaves with Jimmy Greaves
Fitting a Bolt with Grant Holt
Having a Tinker with Regi Blinker
Moving on a Bosman with Leon Osman
Growing Barley with Hossam Ghaly
Playing Pool with Younes Kaboul
Drinking Cocoa with Ibrahima Bakayoko
Going loco with Tonton Zola Moukoko
Fleeing Sharks with John Harkes
In a Cab with Phil Babb
On the Hunt with Kenny Lunt
Playing Snooker with Corluka
On the Bed with Pavel Nedved
Wearing a Sou'wester with Iniesta
Doing the Haka with Kaka
Eating an Aero with Sergio Aguero
In the Sky with former Brazil captain Rai
Underwater with Gary Porter
Lighting a Fart with Joe Hart
By the sea with Robert Lee
On the Phone with Steven Stone
In the Yard with Steven Gerrard
Visit Kent with Darren Bent
The Valley of Rhondda with Pascal Chimbonda
In some Pain with Harry Kane
On the Dole with Andy Cole
Covered in Fluff with Damien Duff
Going to the Doctor with Michael Proctor
Learning to Sail with Gareth Bale
Meeting a Farmer with Carlton Palmer
Things that are Scary with Paul Stalteri
Wearing Bling with Ledley King
Using a Dagger with Daniel Agger
By the Side with Brian McBride
Telling Fibs with Kieron Gibbs
Looking at Venus with Jermaine Jenas
Eating a Bhaji with Gheorghe Hagi
Behind Bars with Overmars
Seaman's Seamen
In a Barrel with Andy Carroll
At the Bar with Stephen Carr
Over-eager with Christian Ziege
Threading a Needle with Brad Friedel
Up a Cliff with Peter Shirtliff
In a Lorry with Peter Storrie
Telling a Story with James McGrory
Using a Breville with Philip Neville
Rearing Pigs with Ryan Giggs
The Norman Conquest, with Norman Conquest
Picking up Sticks with Julian Dicks
Spinning Yarns with John Barnes
Talking Twaddle with Glenn Hoddle
On the Roster with Rui Costa
Make a Wish with Mark Fish
In a Box with Ruel Fox
In the Sewer with Iffy Onuoha
Using a Shaver with Lucas Leiva
Wearing a Bowler with Gianfranco Zola
Eating Mayo with di Matteo
In Rio with Dominic Matteo
Using a Welder with Glenn Helder
Justin Edinburgh's Justin Ed-inbred, where the former Spurs donkey meets families who are very inbred, but just in Edinburgh
Cooking Pork with John Wark
On the Bog with Ugo Ehiogu
Having a Feed with Andy Reid
Keeping a Turtle with Martin Skrtel
Cooking Mutton with Chris Sutton
Art Attack with Pogrebnyak

And finally... not a footballer, but another great idea:

In the Garage with Nigel Farage - note - will only be acceptable if said garage is filling with exhaust fumes

To round it off!

Yellow Submarine



The best Beatles film, the one true masterpiece, and they weren't in it. The Beatles were immortalised in cartoon in 1965 for American TV, the show took the band's public personas, established by the film A Hard Day's Night, and made them even broader. The film Yellow Submarine was somewhat of a correction. The new, pepper-fied personas were the Far-Out one (check out John's opening, chemical transformation), the Debonair One, the Mystical One (it's all in the mind) and the Downbeat One...

OK so Ringo didn't change that much. It's worth noting that John first rejected the Showbiz Beatles then he rejected the Psychedelic Beatles as equally potent fictions, before finally idea of The Beatles itself. They were variations of the bourgeois conventions of the entertainment industry. His first gesture was of course the nude cover of Two Virgins, literally stripping away everything. Whether he achieved sincere reality in art is another matter.

The song Yellow Submarine is a gem. Paul wrote it as a children's song and a feature for Ringo in 1966. By 1967 it was already being included in songbooks, alongside music hall, nursery rhyme and folk song classics. The lyric was written in a similar manner to Eleanor Rigby, starting with Paul and ending with a committee. Instead of achieving clarity it got cloudier as it went along: an early sign, perhaps, of the slackening that would later overtake The Beatles lyrics.

Z... Zed... Uh, Zebra Crossing



We made it, just... Don't applaud then, sheesh! There are no Beatles songs beginning with Z. Z of course marks the end of the alphabet. Abbey Road was the final album recorded by The Beatles, ending with a song called The End. It also featured a cover showing the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road. So, here, enjoy one of The Beatles finest achievements, the bittersweet end to their career. The Abbey Road medley.

Mo Beatles...

Within You and Without You

This is practically the same song as Tomorrow Never Knows. They have a similar lyrical subject, a similar musical foundation1, similar structure (verse/chorus followed by an apparently free section before returning to the verse/chorus) and they are almost in the same key. No surprise then that a mash-up (eww – hate that phrase) was eventually made from the two songs.

Within You… does not have raw excitement of Tomorrow Never Knows. It is emphatically not a rock song. Calling the lyric didactic would be like calling the Sun hot. The true beauty is in the middle section, the musical dialogue first between the sitar and the dilruba, then between the Indian and Western classical instruments together. It is beautiful music made for stereo, hi-fi sound.

Xmas records

Another tough crowbar, but it’s worth it. The Beatles management set up a fan club for the band. The club was soon overwhelmed by correspondence. The tradition of the Beatles Christmas Flexi-Disc was established in 1963 as a way to reach all the fans personally.

The records were quite informal affairs. To begin with they were a mixture of seasons greetings, carols and Christmas songs. As the years went by the band started introducing poems, short comedy songs and skits. 1967’s fan club record was a mock-radio play. It also featured a complete song, Christmas Time Is Here Again. Not a masterpiece, a deserved rarity.

An offshoot of the Christmas albums was a bootleg called A Laugh with The Beatles, which also featured outtakes from the Christmas records and other sessions that are inchoate, risqué but often hilarious.

1. The tambura, a stringed instrument, similar to a lute, used in Indian classical music. It is played with open strings and produces an overtone rich sound by intermittent contact with a wide, arched bridge.

More derivative Beatles stuff

Quinn the Eskimo

When I said almost this is the proof. There is nothing out there remotely related to The Beatles in any way beginning with the letter Q. This is it, a fragment of a song from rehearsals in January 1969 for the abandoned concert.

The song was written by Bob Dylan, originally recorded with The Band in what became The Basement Tapes. The Tapes… are an odd collection. The album was released eight years after the songs were recorded. They were laid down in the informal setting of The Big Pink, a country house in upstate New York. The recording was primitive too. Sometimes just a single microphone was hung out to catch the music going on, the music which seemed reflect a return to roots.

Though he seemed to be abandoning the scene just as the counterculture was taking a beating on the streets, Dylan was ahead of the game in some respects in retiring to Woodstock. The fall out from the ruling class assault on the counterculture led some into cultism, some into terrorism, and some into a back-to-the-land rural communism, though these elements were often jumbled up. To American musicians a rootsy, laid-back sound suggested an attempt to connect with tradition as well as heartland culture. In Britain perhaps it suggested a less hectic, more soulful alternative to urban pop and psychedelia1.

The Basement Tapes were passed around the rock elite as a bootleg. George Harrison in particular was a fan, though The Basement Tapes clearly helped form the idea that the band should get back to some kind of simplicity after recording long and complex albums.

Despite being fairly well wrung out The Beatles recording and touring career still yields a fair few bootleg records. Of course there were hours of music recorded during the Get Back/Let It Be. Most of it like the music above, stray fragments. There are plenty of live recordings and new studio outtakes still occasionally appear, like Revolution (take 20), the missing link between the original Revolution and Revolution 9 (more of which next).

The glittering prize is a genuine version of Carnival of Light; an audio freak out The Beatles recorded and gave to an early hippie gathering, The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream April 1967 in Alexandra Palace. One copy exists with Paul McCartney, another was reckoned to be somewhere in the United States. There have been numerous fakes made, based on a written description by a writer who was allowed a listen to the master tape. They may well be superior (if you like audio collages) to the original.

Revolution (1, 9, 20 and unnumbered)

The worldwide youth counterculture, such as it existed, was already under attack in 1966. January of that year western governments began proscribing LSD. There were battles in numerous American cities, where the state tried to close young people’s clubs and drive them off the street. Britain experienced its own mini-counterculture clampdown in 1967, with a peppering of high-profile drug raids. The International Times, which had been set up as the paper of the UK underground was raided2 (The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was a benefit to pay for IT’s legal costs). The Beatles were MBE inoculated. The raid on the Rolling Stones that saw Mick Jagger and Keith Richards jailed has to wait several hours for members of The Beatles to leave the premises.

This was going through John’s mind as he sat in Rishikesh writing songs. Despite the undoubted turn toward confrontation, John Lennon would have had to have been positively psychic to have written a commentary on 1968, the year of revolution, in January of that year.

To start with an obvious point, while it’s not the Internationale, Revolution is not an anti-revolutionary lyric. It is a dialogue with the left (as Lennon saw it) and it starts with a gesture of solidarity, “we all want to change the world”. The first two verses are understood to have been written in India, the final verse back in Britain.

The first verse is Lennon the hippy idealist. He wants peaceful change. The second verse is a mixture of Lennon the skeptic and Lennon the realist: “we all want to see the plan”. The last verse is the pay off. Lennon, the rich counterculture figure is being bugged by young Maoists pleading with him for support. Lennon acknowledges them but distrusts them at the same time.

The song may have been a “lamentable cry of petty-bourgeois fear” as the Black Dwarf described it, but we know being determines consciousness. John was temperamentally a socialist but an artistic intellectual. He was neither practically or politically capable, and therefore not cut out for political struggle. By 1968 he was a very rich man with almost incalculable mechanical royalties. As acute as he may have been Lennon could not have predicted how profound and potent the word “revolution” would become that year. He was proud of the song and wanted it to be an A-side. Having deferred to McCartney during Sgt Pepper Lennon had come awake in 68. By not backing down he painted himself in a corner. His commitment to peace and a series of clownish stunts to promote it began here.

None the less as the band was laying down the backing track on the night of May 30^th-31^stParis was still a cauldron3 and British students were beginning a wave of their own occupations. After one particular take The Beatles settled into a two chord groove and just kept playing, lashed on by orgasmic rasps from John. The track was now over ten minutes long.

Excited by the result John and his new partner Yoko Ono worked on the song, adding layers of effects and vocalisations, trying to create what he felt to be the sound of revolution. This version lay buried until Take 20 appeared on Youtube three years ago.

The luxury of second thoughts led John to excise the anarchic groove and rerecord the original portion of the song at a faster tempo, which became the single version.

The anarchic groove, as I’ve now called it, ended up as the basis of Revolution 9.

Revolution 9 is far from a chaotic mess or worthy but grim piece of art it is often taken for. It is not chaotic but built round a tonal axis of Bb/Eb. It has a number of repeated motifs, the most obvious being “number 9”. It even has published lyrics. The revolution it suggests is the Revolution in the Head, the countercultural/Freudian theory of emancipation, the potential lying dormant in each individual, a potent mixture of memory, sexuality and creativity, waiting to be unleashed. We can pass over whether this was a realistic model of revolution and, if so, whether Beatles records were an appropriate agency. The White Album has sold tens of millions of copies over the years. Even if they only listened to it once millions people were exposed to avant-guard symphonic music and the ideas associated with it they might otherwise never have come across.

Revolution 9 is perhaps the most significant cultural act ever carried out by The Beatles.

1. It was also just about this time rock stars started buying up country mansions, mobile studios and whatnot.
2. An interesting story (at least I find it interesting) there was a retaliation raid by the New Left paper, the Black Dwarf. Wikipedia describes how: “The paper… published a detailed floor-by-floor guide to Scotland Yard, complete with diagrams, descriptions of locks on particular doors and snippets of overheard conversation in the offices of Special Branch. The anonymous author, or "blue dwarf," as he styled himself, described how he perused police files, and even claimed to have sampled named brands of whisky in the Commissioner's office. A day or two later the Daily Telegraph announced that the "raid" had forced the police to withdraw and re-issue all security passes”. How cool is that? Anyone who genuinely knows more about this please get in touch.
3. Though the French right, which had been in hiding for two weeks during the general strike, had literally just got back on the streets. The revolution in France, such as it was, was on the wane, even if no one realised it at the time.

More derivative, unnecessary guff

Ob La Di Ob La Da



Paul's approximation of Blue Beat, Ob La Di Ob La Da was one of the first things to sour the White Album sessions. With Brian Epstein dead and George Martin withdrawing from his former role Paul stepped up as an all-purpose leader. The band were moving apart in terms of taste, lifestyle and personal priorities (and just plain growing up). Paul  was not the authority figure who could dragoon through the usual routine, he was just too close to the rest of the Beatles. No wonder the sessions rambled over seven months.

It's also an example of Paul's very different sexism to John. Of course to criticise The Beatles for being sexist is to criticise society for being sexist. Nonetheless John's muse was a woman and his attitude toward women was conflicted and often nasty, which made his art frequently compelling if sometimes queasy. When Paul wrote about women in general1 he was positively foursquare. This is the original song that says "if you like it then you should put a ring on it".

This of course changed with time.The Beatles went through the sixties and encountered the women's liberation movement. A shift perhaps in Paul's writing, Lady Madonna, a song that celebrates, perhaps even sentimentalises, but nonetheless acknowledges the relentless drudgery of working class motherhood, the genius of the mother who somehow makes ends meet.

Penny Lane



What would The Beatles projected album about Liverpool have sounded like or said? It's a fascinating prospect. Penny Lane is of course obliquely about James Penny, slave trader, anti-abolitionist and city father who had an area of the city named after him. Would a Beatles album about Liverpool touched on the source of the city's wealth?

But instead we have a prime piece of psychedelia. Penny Lane is every bit as far out as it's companion Strawberry Fields. As Revolution in the Head so clearly points out, in the lyric it's simultaneously summer and winter, rainy and shiny. The music is built on massed crotchet pianos, whose tone shifts relentlessly: listen next time.

1. His songs about Jane Asher were quite different and quite Lennonish, We Can Work It Out being a prime example.

Mo' Beatles

Love Me Do

Few words need wasting on a gloss interpretation of Love Me Do. The Beatles did not undergo a prolonged public apprenticeship like, say, David Bowie. This is the only genuinely artless song they put out as a single. Its stark baldness made it stand out then, as it does even 50 years later (that and the harmonica hook). From here on in The Beatles recording career is a stairway to heaven.

A small thing can said about sound and their associations. Love Me Do is a dry record, little or nothing in the way or reverb or signal distortion is applied. This was contrary to music industry practice at the time. As their recording career developed George Martin created a sparse and defined sound for The Beatles. The Beatles played on their own records. There were not massed ranks of session musicians to bolster the sound. On stereo mixes instruments were mixed clearly and widely separated. Any effect used was usually brief and for a definite purpose.

The sound of the Beat Combo evolved through the impact of certain drugs into psychedelic rock and eventually progressive rock. I can never find the quote but I remember hearing one of the Grateful Dead describe how they would be playing one of the Merry Pranksters acid tests. They’d drop acid, start playing a song like (I’m a) Roadrunner and 20 minutes later they’d still be playing, wondering where the time just went.

Sounds and arrangements have specific associations that are more than just changing fashion. Recreational drugs are of course crucial. Let’s not forget drug taking does not evolve in an abstract manner. Being illegal they are often subject to dramatic changes in the relation of supply and demand. They also suit certain times and places better than others. For example, who wants to get into consciousness expansion during an economic depression?

There will be changes in sound when there are changes in the use of music. Is the music you generally listen to about private contemplation, e.g. personal sound-tracking, or is it about public congregation, e.g. dance? Dance music, the kind of music The Beatles made early on, is sparse and simple.

Money

In his essay, The Disappearing Decade, Ian MacDonald contended that the Counterculture of the 60s, which overlapped in various ways with the New Left, was a reaction against the actual revolution (for want of a better word) going on in the decade; ordinary people desiring materially affluent and liberated lives. In other words the 60s gave birth to the 80s.

Despite many perceptive observations the essay misses the point. Firstly about the Counterculture/New Left connection, they were not nearly as closely bound as they appeared. Primarily though the problem is with the 80s. It may have seemed to Ian MacDonald, almost certainly a disappointed leftie, that the 80s were when everyone became a suburban scumbag. It seemed that way to a lot of people in the 90s, but that is the official narrative, and history is always written by the winners. Thatcher’s party never won a majority of the public to its agenda. One of Thatcher’s political strengths was realising the uses of active minorities. The Tories prevailed thanks to her official opposition, who spurned every chance to derail her government. The result of Thatcherism was to send Britain on a course of widening class division and growing poverty. The working class lost out thanks to her, if the majority understand that now, many people knew it even then.

This brings us on to one of the best Beatle covers on record: Money. The Beatles transformed the arrangement and thereby the meaning of this song, from a loose swing to an impatient shout. It can be taken as a paean to avarice, but in many ways it sums up what money and fame meant to four (broadly speaking) working class lads: “I wanna be free!” To begin with The Beatles worked on the assumption they would have a few years prime earning ahead of them. If they had not thought about it they were endlessly reminded by journalists, who seemed always anxious to ask “how long do you think it will last?” or “what will you do when it’s over?”

According to Paul, the first thing John did after finding himself truly rich for the first time was buy box after box of Jaffa Cakes and stuff himself silly. That was freedom for John.

Norwegian Wood

I learned only recently that the working title of this song was its subtitle, this bird has flown. It’s a well known exercise in Dylan-esque bluff, about an affair John had with a journalist, with a casually melodramatic ending. There is a theory about the lyric which, if true, makes the song even more acidic.

Shortly before writing the song John was given a present by his then wife, Cynthia, a mechanical bird singing from inside a cage. The bird seemed to sum up his predicament, as he saw it, stuck in his Fat Elvis period. “This bird has flown” in this context means “I’m leaving you”. He didn’t leave for another two and a half years, so mired was he in his life. All in all it’s a stunningly cruel song.

Yet more pretention

Know Her is to Love Her, To

I’ve chewed up the title of this song to crowbar it under K. It’s likely we’ll want another song entered under T.

It’s important to remember it’s not generally possible to disentangle what was unintentional, what as casual and what was deliberate in The Beatles phenomenon. The Beatles sang girl group songs. Sometimes the lyrics were gender altered, as is here. Sometimes they were not, and you’d have Ringo hollering away about boys. The Beatles sang girl group songs, especially ones with three part harmonies, because they liked them, and you could leave it at if you want to.

The Beatles of course had a profound effect on Western Womanhood, but what about Manhood. In his mini-biography The Summer of Love, George Martin took a few paragraphs to describe the effect of Beatlemania as it hit the United States. He described seeing male office-workers dressed in Beatle Wigs. Grown men pretending to be one of the band: who are you today?

The Beatles were something different, both in appearance and personality. There was an incredible fuss made in the mass media over the length of their hair, bizarre though it may seem now. Hair and headwear continue to be a source of social anxiety, a very closely policed aspect of culture, even today. We just take the rules and norms we are given so much for granted.

This public face was crafted largely by a gay man, Brian Epstein. He took a group of leather and denim clad rockers and put them in matching suits, page boy haircuts and had them bow after every gig. This did not so much tame them as make them enticingly strange and ambiguous1. The legend of The Beatles as family entertainers only arose after other bands came through, specifically the Rolling Stones.

So they were less pioneers than harbingers of something new. Allen Ginsberg described them as evincing a new form of manhood, combining “complete masculinity” with “complete tenderness”. Perhaps that’s not quite right, but something like that.

1. And not just gender/sexual ambiguous. Older people complained they could not tell the different band members apart. Bemused exaggeration, perhaps, but The Beatles contemporaries often described them, especially early on, as being like a “four-headed monster”, a single personality split between four people.

Further pretentiousness

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Is a textbook example of just what John Lennon’s genius was. For a great musician he wasn’t actually that great at music. Amongst other things he was a rhythm guitarist with a poor sense of rhythm. His talent, in terms of composition, was being able to capitalise on his lack of fluency leading him to original ideas that would not occur to more proficient musicians. The Times music journalists famously complimented Lennon on his use of Aeolian cadences, John hadn’t a clue what they were.

Working with Paul McCartney and to a lesser extent with George Martin this tendency was harnessed. As time passed Lennon and McCartney depended less each other1, John’s compositions were offered up metrically dishevelled. He began composing on piano to surprise himself. He started working from words rather than an initial musical phrase. Phrases spilled over bars, sections expanded and contracted when needed (e.g. Revolution – “we-e-ell you know”, an extra two beats latched onto a 12-bar blues). What is Happiness is a Warm Gun? Is it a suite? There’s certainly no verse-chorus structure to it. Try counting the beats at various points. It’s utterly mad and yet the song rings true.

I Want to Hold Your Hand

The blockbuster Beatles single, the vertiginous peak of a chain starting with Love Me Do. Much can be made of how early Lennon/McCartney songs were written to generate white-hot hysteria. There is a contrary undertow in several of their early lyrics.

Please, Please Me is of course about John’s passion for oral sex. Despite being palpably more manic, I Want to Hold Your Hand is lyrically chaste. Can’t By Me Love went one step further in having the singer address object of their affection as “my friend”. These are not necessarily disparate elements. There is of course a cool aspect to sexual liberation, specifically casual sex, disengaged passion. This was almost certainly not considered by John and Paul, whose lyrics at the time were place fillers.

Julia

It’s well established that Julia Lennon was her son’s muse. She was a physical embodiment of the concept of anima, Lennon’s personality reflected back in female form, a role later embodied by Yoko Ono. If you accept that theory you can see Julia cropping up time and again in John’s lyrics, as the former lover, possibly dead in Yes It Is, the symbol of bondage and suffering in Girl, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes in Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, possibly the source of rapture in Across the Universe. There are numerous Lennon-penned songs about betrayal and departure. Lennon’s grief mixed with anger at her loss. All his closest relationships were tinged with violence to some degree2.

This is John’s final song to Julia while in The Beatles. Despite being something of an exorcism, judging by the Plastic Ono Band album it clearly failed.

1. And on George Martin, who began withdrawing from production duties after Sergeant Pepper.

2. For instance it’s reasonable to speculate (while admitting there’s no definitive proof) there was at least a sexual element to John’s relationship with Stuart Sutcliffe and that John felt a degree of guilt over his death from a brain haemorrhage, having had a violent brawl with Sutcliffe years earlier.

A bit of pretentious fun

Can the meaning of The Beatles be summed up in alphabetical order while at the same time making an interesting compilation? The answer is almost. Here goes:

A Day in the Life

Start with a biggie, A Day in the Life is the pinnacle of The Beatles career, according to Ian MacDonald no less. Revolution in the Head practically invented modern rock scholarship, so we should pay obeisance. It came at a point in The Beatles recording career where graft and intuition were in seemingly perfect balance.

Before sound recording recorded music was sheet music. The combination of this and sound amplification expanded the horizon of musical expression; small groups performing together with the possibility collective inspiration, a happening as it was known in the sixties, evanescent moments captured for mass reproduction. The modern musician’s dilemma is between knowing enough to express oneself, whilst not allowing music theory (and standard recording practice) to stifle one’s imagination.

Sequenced at the end of Sgt Pepper, two minutes longer than any Beatles song so far released, with a complex score and involving more musicians than ever before, it appears to be more portentous than it actually is. Each of the verses is literally about something different. Combined with the orchestral production, culminating in the final titanic chord (neither of which was planned when the basic elements of the song were recorded) they seem to hint at a struggle for emancipated perception, to transcend the mundane and violent world. It feels revolutionary, despite some of the lines being humorous babble.

Bungalow Bill, the Continuing Adventures of

I told you it would be difficult. Of course there are other Beatles songs beginning in B, but I want to use them elsewhere. The Continuing Adventures of Bungalow Bill was written at the Maharishi’s camp in Rishikesh by John Lennon. It was recorded late in the sessions for the White Album. Lennon later described it, quite astutely, as a “teenage social-comment song and a bit of a joke”. That it is.

It’s the story of a rich, young American at the camp who took breaks from meditation to go out game hunting. Is that hypocritical? Maybe. The song’s not great, although the chorus is catchy in an irritating way. The White Album itself is like the entire process of record-making laid bare, the rejects and the jokes and the half-formed masterpieces find their place on a double album.

Bungalow Bill is also interesting as it is the first Beatles song released to have a woman’s voice on it.

Can’t Buy Me Love

A slightly obvious choice, but features at a pivotal point in The Beatles’ pivotal film, A Hard Days’ Night.

The film itself is an inspired piece of bluff. Like many other jukebox musicals, Hard Day’s Night is about nothing. It exists to set up the band members as definable, bankable personalities, the sarcastic one, the charming one, the shy one and the down to earth one. Much of their post-touring career was dedicated to busting the image created by this film.

But there’s a cheeky, satiric quality to the film. It is set amongst a typical Beatles touring day, with Paul’s Grandfather as a McGuffin, causing unusual things to happen. Individually and as a group, they run casual rings around everyone they encounter, various figures of establishment, the old man on the train, the pressmen, the doormen, TV producers, Teen culture svengalis, all are perplexed and routed by The Beatles wit and verve. Laving aside the actual backgrounds of some of the members, in the film they represent a rising working class, confident, breezily assuming control and rewriting the rules. As much as this was ever the case we also remember this was before the crisis that mired the second Wilson government, before the bitter struggles of the seventies and eighties.

Against this the Beatles are presented as stuck on a hamster wheel (the old guard are still in charge). They go from a train to a room to a car and a room and a room and a room. They hardly get time to rest. Brian Epstein stipulated that the script must not have a love interest. The film plays on this, I think, by having no female characters with any meaningful dialogue. Women flit past the screen before the lads can so much as talk to them. The film’s sole moment of peril comes when Ringo is incited by Paul’s Grandfather to leave the band for the afternoon, in which time he does more or less nothing.

There is one moment of collective escape. Having caused a ruckus with the TV director by casually wandering on stage to play a song, the band are about to be locked in their dressing room; instead they sneak down a fire escape:

“We’re out” yells Ringo, which is the cue for Can’t Buy Me Love. The Beatles lark about on a playing field for two and a half minutes before another authority figure approaches, the groundskeeper.

“I suppose you realise this is private property?”

The Beatles slope off, though unrepentant:

“Sorry we hurt your field, Mister”.

Drive My Car

This song was the final product of The Beatles brief joke song strategy. As they recorded Rubber Soul they were looking for a way out of their lyrical impasse, running out of variations of love songs. The better songs from the Help sessions, such as Yesterday or Yes It Is, might have been a solution. Both songs touched on mortality and memory. This returned in a big way with In My Life. Before then they had a run of songs that, if they were not exactly funny, had lyrics with a set up and pay off. In Drive My Car the stereotypical roles in sexual banter are reversed by the end, the girl turns out to be sly, deceptive charmer.

Eleanor Rigby

This was a song begun by McCartney but finished by a committee. It is a brilliant song with an exceptional lyric. Not much time needs to be spent on it here, except to say it shows The Beatles were remarkably loveless in 1966. This was their most brutal lyric of the year, a stark description of people wasting their lives in dedication to empty social/religious rituals. It is also an intensely visual lyric, written in the present tense, e.g. “look at him working”. They are like a set of directions, in keeping with Paul’s then current interest in filmmaking.

Flying

We had to go off-piste at some point. There were few Beatle instrumentals issued. They performed plenty in their early career. Later on they recorded dozens of instrumentals, most did not see the light of day. For example, Revolution in the Head describes how in 1967, three days before the band started a formal recording of George Harrison’s It’s All Too Much, they spent an afternoon working on a 16-minute jam, perhaps inspired by Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was recorded in Abbey Road at the same time as Sgt Pepper. The jam was not that inspired however as they never returned to it1.

It’s common to say that a drug inspired relativism set in at this point. It was certainly about. The cultural embrace of ‘random’2 had a socio-political dimension. It was a rejection of the military-industrial prerogative that saw the whole of post-war society strictly ordered, like a giant barracks, with unearned class privilege and persisting racial and sexual bigotry. Gambling with reality by dropping LSD was the ultimate act of randomisation.

I also think after the tension of completing Sgt Pepper there was the release of the Summer of Love. This is palpable in Flying, which is built on 12-bar blues changes but is a gentle, idyllic sounding tune. It served as an interlude in the Magical Mystery Tour film. Typical of how the film was made, Flying was set to pilfered stock footage, various shots of cloud and Arctic wasteland3, which was given psychedelic tints. None of this came across in the first broadcast, in black-and-white, on Boxing Day 1967.

1. Jam based composition makes much more sense in the digital age. It is must easier to edit and combine digital bytes, as opposed to analogue tape.

2. A side note: musicians may no longer flip through the I Ching at random to find a lyric. There is one remaining prominent cultural figure who uses games and systems as an aide to creation, namely Brian Eno, another product of the former Art School system.

3. Taken for the film Dr Strangelove.

Lists from history

Historical Haemorrhoid Sufferers
Alexander the Great
T.S. Eliot
Viv Richards
Marylin Monroe
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Socrates
Nero
Napoleon
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Martin Luther

Historical Druggies (and their drugs)
Admiral Nelson - opium
Lord Liverpool - ether
Tsar Nicholas the 2nd - hallucinogens, cocaine and opium
Winston Churchill - barbiturates
Anthony Eden - amphetamines
Richard Nixon - amphetamines
Leonid Brezhnev - sleeping pills

Historical Phobics (and their phobias)
Nicolae Ceausescu - bacillophobia, fear of germs
Sigmund Freud - siderodromophobia, fear of trains
Samuel Johnson - lyssophobia, fear of insanity
Maximillian Robespierre - haemophobia, fear of blood
Robert Schumann - metallophobia, fear of metal