![]() ![]() ![]() The words are most deliberately simple-minded – one song is just called ‘Birthday’ and includes lines like, ‘Happy birthday to you’ another just goes on repeating ‘Good-night’ another says ‘I’m so tired, I haven’t slept a wink.’ The music is likewise stripped of all but the simplest of harmonies and beat – so what is left is a prolific out-pouring of melody, music-making of unmistakable clarity and foot-tapping beauty. There is a quiet determination to be rid of the bogus intellectualization that usually surrounds them and their music. The voice – particularly that of Lennon – is just another instrument, wailing, screeching, mocking, weeping. They bend and twist rhythms and phrases with a unanimous freedom that give their harmonic adventures the frenzy of anticipation and unpredictability. The Beatles are competent rather than virtuoso instrumentalists – but their ensemble playing is intuitive and astonishing. Lennon sings ‘I told you about strawberry fields’ and ‘I told you about the fool on the hill’ – and now? References to or quotations from Elvis Presley, Donovan, Little Richard, the Beach Boys, Blind Lemon Jefferson are woven into an aural fabric that has become the Bayeux Tapestry of popular music. Full orchestra, brass, solo violin, glockenspiel, saxophone, organ, piano, harpsichord, all manner of percussion, flute, sound effects, are used sparingly and thus with deftness.Įlectronic gimmickry has been suppressed or ignored in favour of musicianship. The skill at orchestration has matured with finite precision. The subject matter ranges from piggies (‘Have you seen the bigger piggies/In their starched white shirts’), to Bungalow Bill of Saturday morning film-show fame (‘He went out tiger hunting with his elephant gun/In case of accidents he always took his mom’) from ‘Why don’t we do it in the road’ to ‘Savoy Truffle.’ Almost every track is a send-up of a send-up of a send-up, rollicking, reckless, gentle, magical. The lyrics overflow with a sparkling radiance and sense of fun that it is impossible to resist. The extra-ordinary quality of the 30 new songs is one of simple happiness. It’s not as if the Beatles ever seek such adulation. There are heroes for all of us, and better than we deserve. In the Beatles’ eyes, as in their songs, you can see the fragile fragmentary mirror of society which sponsored them, which interprets and makes demands of them, and which punishes them when they do what others reckon to be evil Paul, ever-hopeful, wistful Ringo, every mother’s son George, local lad made good John, withdrawn, sad, but with a fierce intelligence clearly undimmed by all that organized morality can throw at him. ![]() Called simply The Beatles (PMC 7067/8), it’s wrapped in a plain white cover which is adorned only by the songs titles and those four faces, faces which for some still represent the menace of long-haired youth, for others the great hope of a cultural renaissance and for others the desperate, apparently endless struggle against cynical so-called betters. If there is still any doubt that Lennon and McCartney are the greatest song writers since Schubert, then next Friday – with the publication of the new Beatles double LP – should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making, which only the ignorant will not hear and only the deaf will not acknowledge. Now Derek Taylor used to be the Beatles press agent and then, in America he became the former Beatles press agent (having left them) and now Derek Taylor is the press agent for the Beatles again so when he was asked to write the notes for “Yellow Submarine” he decided that not only had he nothing new to say about the Beatles whom he adores too much to apply any critical reasoning, and by whom he is paid too much to feel completely free, ad also he couldn’t be bothered, and also he wanted the people who bought the Yellow Submarine album to buy and enjoy the really wonderful “The Beatles” album out in the month of November ’68 so here and now, unbought, unsolicited, unexpurgated, unattached, pure and unmeasurably favourable review of “The Beatles” (the new Apple/EMI album) from the London Observer by Tony Palmer, a journalist and film-maker of some special distinction. My name is Derek but that is what mother called me so it’s no big thing, except that it is my name and I would like to say I was asked to write the notes for Yellow Submarine. Tracks 7 – 13 Original film score composed and Orchestrated by George Martin ![]() © 1968 King Features Syndicate - Subafilms, Ltd. ![]()
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