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The Who and “My Generation,” November 1965

Tweet By Gordon Thompson   Forty-five years ago, in the anarchic world of mid-sixties British rock—with every major British act releasing records and storming the world—a unique record bullied its way into British consciousness that turned the conventions of the pop disk end-for-end.  Pete Townsend had penned a song that cut to the core of […]

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John Winston Ono Lennon, Everyman

By Gordon Thompson
On 9 October, many in the world will remember John Winston Ono Lennon, born on this date in 1940. He, of course, would have been amused, although part of him (the part that self-identified as “genius”) would have anticipated the attention. However, he might also have questioned why the Beatles and their music, and this Beatle in particular, would remain so current in our cultural thinking. When Lennon described the Beatles as just a band that made it very, very big, why did we doubt him?

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George Martin Goes Independent, 2 Sept 1965

By Gordon Thompson
When George Martin first entered the recording industry in the early 1950s, assisting Oscar Preuss at EMI’s Parlophone, he encountered the end of the mechanical era. The company’s facilities on Abbey Road in genteel St. John’s Wood still used lathes to record sound by cutting grooves in warm wax with energy provided by weights and pulleys, like a child of Big Ben. The sheer mechanics of this kind of professional recording demanded large…

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The Beatles Arrive in Hamburg, August 1960

By Gordon Thompson
Although Americans often talk about a “British Invasion” that started in February 1964, the groundwork for that cultural phenomenon may actually have begun fifty years ago this month when, on 17 August 1960, the Beatles began performing at the Indra, a small club in red-light district of the West German city of Hamburg. The van and ferry ride to Hamburg with manager Allan Williams had the Beatles arriving at night in one of Europe’s most decadent enclaves. The St. Pauli district thrived on sex

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The Beatles, Orientalism, and Help!

By Gordon Thompson
At the July 29, 1965 premiere of the Beatles’ second film, Help!, most viewers understood the farce as a send-up of British flicks that played on the exoticism of India, while at the same time spoofing the popularity of James Bond. Parallel with this cinematic escapism, a post-colonial discourse began that questioned how colonial powers justified their economic exploitation of the world. Eventually, Edward Said’s Orientalism would describe the purpose of this objectification as “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978: 3). In effect, Said and others argued that portrayals of the non-Western other

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The Beatles Are Dead. Long Live the Beatles

For Beatles fans, it was like watching mortality embrace a loved one. The spring of 1970 brought news of the dissolution of the Beatles and, with the release of Michael Lindsey-Hogg’s Let It Be in May, fans could see the disestablishment for themselves.

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