The Beatles 65 Up To 67

The Beatles 65 Up To 67

These were the years of dash and daring. Sweeping out of the final (and wonderfully old-fashioned) 1964 family Christmas Shows into the wider world of 1965, The Beatles would soon find themselves figureheads of a movement far beyond “pop” where a counter-culture / alternative society was made flesh. National boundaries were presumed to be doomed. Millions of minds were to become expanded and many trousers would soon be spandex though the music would continue to pour out of them breaking in great waves over uncharted, challenging Reason and warming the heart, the Beatles would tire of those great sweating stadiums where they now played to screaming crowds who could no longer hear them. In the studio years (1966 onwards), supported by the steady hand of the great George Martin, they would produce songs which would be forever fresh and which still set the standards against the newcomers have to test themselves. Greatly turned on by the Spirit of the Age and by the “tea-parties” of those times, the Beatles provided a sound-track for the plottings of the baby boomers – millions of them – whose enlightenment (however compromised it may have been by the material world in the harsh times since) still provides a hedge against humankind’s grosser instincts.

They go into the studio which brings an amazed world the mighty whirligig of Sgt Pepper, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields here on the screen in surreal and glorious colour. They sing Baby You’re A Rich Man and they all are, but they don’t buy an island in Greece. It was the great glory of The Beatles that they could absorb and transmute so much, first in those tiny houses in Liverpool, listening to eclectic 1940s wireless, then to r’n’r and r&b and to Dylan and the poets and soon to music and messages from India. Unafraid of growth, dogged individuals with a powerful devotion to the group ethic, The Beatles accepted each other’s offerings and really “cooked” to make each record a feast that left us breathless with admiration. They never stood still.