A week full of the Beatles

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A week full of the Beatles
Prince Frederick
DECEMBER 20, 2018



Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at the recording of ‘The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute To The Beatles’, in 2014. The two musicians came together at a show recently in London.   | Photo Credit: MARIO ANZUONI

Longing increases love, as the story of the mop tops illustrates

At 3.56 p.m., on December 18, when I jab ‘The Beatles’ into the search box, with the category set to books, at goodreads.com, the trawl throws up 3006 results. Of course, all of the listed books are not exclusive to The Beatles; but a significant number of them are. And I wager that right at this moment, there is certainly someone out there stitching together a fresh insight about “the mop tops”, just to meet that constant demand for information about them — which is the reason I put a time stand to that search.

However, even by Beatles standards, there was information overload last week. Expectedly, there were forwards and pieces about John Lennon on December 8 and the week following it. (Lennon was fatally shot on that day in 1980). There were retellings based on Beatlelore. Here's an example. While narrating the 115th anniversary fete of the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai that took place last weekend, a musician-friend drew attention to a Beatle moment in a documentary that played on the television in his room at the hotel. It was about how Lennon and Yoko Ono confined themselves to their room at the Taj Mahal Palace for the whole duration of their stay, five days by most accounts, to avoid getting mobbed by fans.



Thankfully, a current story about The Beatles emerged last weekend, “scripted” by Paul McCartney as he brought a show at London to a close, with the delicious Beatle song ‘Get Back’. The surprise for the audience was that fellow Beatle and drummer Ringo Starr would join him for it. Even if it is just half the Beatles, it is still news, big news. And this is not the first time that the duo is making such news. They have reunited earlier for a performance, the notable one coming at the 2014 Grammy Awards function.

And for many a Beatle-loving Babyboomer, the one-off Beatle song they chose last weekend would have recreated the wistful longing that characterised the Beatle-less 1970s.



With its easily hummable, spirited and infectious lines ‘Get back, get back/ Get back to where you once belonged’, the song encapsulated the sentiment. The hope that the band would regroup persisted through the decade, till Lennon’s tragic death in 1980. At the least, there could be a reunion on a significant scale, some hoped.

When David Sheff did an interview for Playboy with Lennon and Yoko Ono, around two months before Lennon’s death, he brought up music producer and promoter Sidney Bernstein’s math about what a Beatle reunion can do for global charity, which had it that through joint and individual performances, the Beatles could rack up a whopping $200,000,000 over the course of a single day. The entire interview, published in Playboy in January 1981, a month after Lennon died, can be accessed at John Lennon.com. Do read it; it's brilliant.



The point here is: where a phenomenally successful band or a music-duo is concerned, the demand for regrouping is natural. But it is equally natural and sometimes healthy to turn a deaf ear to it. Reliving the past through little reunions is always a better option, especially when a group has split after having scaled an enviable height.

So, tweaking their own line, it is good that “the Beatles stayed where they once belonged” and we keep making those pilgrimages to their wonderland.