Behind the Wall of Illusion E-Book

Sean MacLeod

• Herausgeber: Clairview Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 456

Beschreibung

The Beatles brought colour, joy, freedom and love to a grey, post-war world. But the most successful group in popular music history also harboured hidden, sometimes darker worlds and influences that are often downplayed by their biographers. In their career, the Fab Four were to cross paths with many spiritual movements, religious groups, esoteric philosophies and mystical teachings. Inevitably, their thinking was affected by the ideas they encountered. These ideas in turn helped shape their music and – given their vast popularity – the public consciousness. Behind the Wall of Illusion examines the spiritual inspirations that the Beatles brought to the changing cultural landscape of the 1960s. From the popularization of the new religion of rock 'n' roll, Beatlemania (the 'new Cult of Dionysus') and John Lennon's explosive statement that the Beatles were 'bigger than Jesus', Sean MacLeod takes us on a tour of Indian ashrams, questionable gurus and hallucinatory drugs. He also studies the secreted 'clues' in the Beatles' album covers and films; the growing rumours that Paul had been killed in a car crash and covertly replaced; and the tragic assassination of John Lennon and the unknown perpetrators behind the crime. This is an indispensable book for any lover of the Beatles.

Leseprobe

BEHIND THE WALL OF ILLUSION

The Religious, Esoteric and Occult Worlds of the Beatles

Sean MacLeod

Clairview Books Ltd.,

Russet, Sandy Lane,

West Hoathly,

W. Sussex RH19 4QQ

www.clairviewbooks.com

Published by Clairview Books 2023

© Sean MacLeod 2023

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers

The right of Sean MacLeod to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act, 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 912992 50 8

Cover by Morgan Creative

Typeset by Symbiosys Technologies, Visakhapatnam, India

Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd, Essex

Contents

Chapter 1

In the Beginning...: The Birth of the Beatles

Chapter 2

A Shot of Rhythm and Blues: The New Religion of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Chapter 3

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah: Beatlemania and the Cult of Dionysus

Chapter 4

Nothing Is Real: Esoteric Beatles

Chapter 5

Christ, You Know it Ain’t Easy: Bigger than Jesus

Chapter 6

I’d Love to Turn You On: LSD and the Mystic Tradition

Chapter 7

Here’s Another Clue for You All: Album Covers, Films and Videos

Chapter 8

He Blew His Mind Out in a Car: Paul is Dead

Chapter 9

Ja Guru Deva: India and Spiritual Regeneration

Chapter 10

The Dream Is Over: Assassinations, Murder and Mind Control

Conclusion

And in the End... – The Beatles’ Legacy

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 1

In the Beginning...The Birth of the Beatles

Victory Day

On 7 May 1945, a great euphoria spread over Britain as World War Two came to an end and the country celebrated their victory over a fascist regime that was considered a major threat to mainland Europe. The end of the War meant that normal life could resume, while the sense of camaraderie that had emerged throughout the War remained, despite government imposed policies of austerity. The government had enforced strict rationings along with slogans like ‘make and do’ to encourage the population to ‘do their duty’, and pull together in an effort to restore the country to its former glory. Popular ditties like the following were also used to cajole the people to conform to the government’s post-war policies:

Those who have a will to wincook potatoes in their skinknowing that the sight of peelingsdeeply hurts his majesty’s feelings.

Old fashioned values, almost Dickensian, of Britishness were instilled after the War, while children were encouraged to conform through mottos, like that at Paul McCartney’s school — ‘NON NOBIS SOLUM, SED TOTI MUNDO NATI’ (‘we’re not born for ourselves, but for the good of the world’) — or through corporal punishment,1 dished out regularly at John Lennon’s Quarry Bank School by headmaster, E. R. Taylor, a lay preacher who instilled high ‘Christian’ morality into his pupils with the aid of his cane.2 The motto of the Quarry Bank School was ‘from this quarry, virtue is forged’, while the school anthem, which every school boy at Quarry Bank was expected to know by heart and sing at the beginning of every school term, with ‘vigoroso’, went something like:

Quarry men old before our birthStraining each muscle and sinew.Toiling together, Mother EarthConquered the Rock that was in you.3

Ironic in a way, since the school’s most famous pupil of the post-war Fifties did just that (conquer ‘the Rock’ that was in him) but in a manner totally unintended by headmaster Taylor and all the other Quarry Bank teachers who ‘toiled’ to ‘forge’ the virtue in each of their pupils. Lennon – never too enthusiastic to forge any kind of ‘virtue’ while a pupil of the school, and more intent on causing trouble – with his group The Quarrymen, would play one of his first public performances, at the annual Woolton Parish Church Garden Fete, where he first met Paul McCartney, under the ‘benign eye’ of Reverend Morris Pryce-Jones and his committee, while ‘smiling church ladies poured tea’.

After the War, Liverpool was a virtual bombsite with little prospects for the city’s young talent, and the outdated Victorian values still attempted to keep the populace in its place. Liverpool, like much of the rest of British society and culture, was full of secrecy and hypocrisy (culminating in the Profumo scandal, in which the Secretary of State for War had an extramarital affair with a 19-year-old call girl) that imbued the post-war atmosphere, which many of the post-war generation were aware of to some extent.4 ‘Was it any wonder’, Lennon would later observe ‘we all went raving mad in the Sixties’.5

Growing up in Britain during and immediately after the War, as all the Beatles had, was, for most young boys, probably both exhilarating and frightening. Air-raids, curfews and bomb shelters, mixed with stories of bravery and trepidation by British soldiers, painted an exciting image of war, while newsreels and films of British heroism, like The Wooden Horse (1952) and the Dam Busters (1954) — ‘were a comforting reminder of the reasons the British had for feeling proud of themselves – and self-sufficient… they cultivated the myth of Britain’s War, paying special attention to the importance of comradeship across class and occupation’.6

Despite the austerity and the expectation for everyone cheerfully to weather the hardship, the country still willingly supported the same group of politicians who had not only imposed the austerity but who had also led the country to war in the first place. Such figures included Winston Churchill, who had replaced Neville Chamberlain just after the outbreak of World War Two. Churchill was considered the ‘great’ leader who, with the determination of a British bulldog, guided the nation safely through the War to victory. Families, just like that of George Harrison’s, would gather around the radio eagerly listening as their Prime Minister exhorted the people to be brave in the face of Hitler and the buzz bombs of the Luftwaffe. John Lennon was even given the middle name Winston in honour of the War leader, while his aunt Mimi, who became John’s primary guardian and with whom he lived from about the age of five, proudly displayed The Complete Works of Churchill on the family bookshelf.

Churchill came to represent the idea of British determination, strength and sturdiness. To those living through the War, the sense of the old British values, with its traditions, institutions and modest way of life, were celebrated and cherished. After all, it was to preserve this way of life, this sense of ‘liberty, fraternity and democracy’ against the tyranny of the Nazis, that many young British men had given their lives.

Immediately after the War, due to the feeling of national pride, most people in Liverpool continued to conform to traditional British values, and on 2 June 1953 they, like the rest of the country, happily celebrated the Coronation of their new Queen, Elizabeth II, every aspect of which they could observe closely on their new television sets. The Coronation was a day when a sense of monarchy and Empire were firmly inculcated in the people of the nation, but also one when austerity finally ended for Britain and a consumer culture, coming from America, mainly through the medium of television, began to find its way into modern British society. The arrival of American soldiers also had a profound influence on British culture, as they brought with them a sense of wonder, newness and excitement that filled the decimated and drab world of post-war Britain with colour.

Though America had also suffered in the aftermath of the War, the country was able, largely due to industry, to create a flourishing economy based mostly on the production of domestic products that encouraged a new consumer culture. The American youth saw the old traditions and attitudes being wiped away after the War and replaced by a whole different attitude. One commentator observed that, ‘It wasn’t long after World War Two, from which America emerged victorious, that things began to change quite dramatically at home. All sorts of forces were at work to make the Fifties and then the Sixties a time of enormous social upheaval.’7 By the mid-Fifties, these attitudes began to make their way across the Atlantic, while American loans helped to restore the economies of Britain and Europe.

Angry Young Men

Since Liverpool was Britain’s principal port for bringing in supplies from the Irish Sea, as well as a major manufacturing centre for armaments, Hitler’s tactic was to starve Britain into submission by bombing the supply lines, and as a result the city became a prime target for Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe. After London, Liverpool was the hardest hit city during the war8 with almost 27,000 inhabitants evacuating the city to north Wales. By the end of the War much of the neoclassical city had been destroyed, while city planners’ unimaginative restoration attempt more or less destroyed any last remaining beauty the city had, carelessly ‘throwing up entire, prefabricated neighbourhoods on old bomb sites’. ‘Clearance’ was the word, and the result was drab, pitiful communities, ‘full of fear and people smashing things up’.9 One district typical of this type of planning was Speke, where all the Beatles except Lennon had spent some, if not all, of their childhoods growing up.10

Although Liverpool had incurred tremendous civilian casualties and architectural devastation,11 the first few years following the War were probably the hardest of the twentieth century, and clothing coupons and food queues became a way of life. As the injured and broken soldiers returned home from the War and active bombs still lurked under the rubble where the children played, the long struggle that lay ahead and the massive debt that would have to be paid back in order to rebuild – not to mention the fact that the country was just beginning to heal itself from the devastation of the First World War only a generation earlier – people began to ask serious questions as to why these wars had started in the first place. Soon the feelings of victory and greatness in certain sectors of both British and American life began to fade, as despair and anger set in.

In America, those who questioned the War, primarily the beatnicks and bohemians, saw a soullessness in the consumer culture that had become dominant in its wake. Black Americans (or ‘Coloureds’, as they were referred to then12) who had displayed their patriotism by risking their lives on the battlefields of Europe and Asia, were also discontent following the War and cried out for their equal rights in peacetime, considering they were treated equal enough to kill and be killed during wartime. The women who had served in the War also demanded equality on the same grounds, while the youth of the post-war generation, living in the shadow of the atomic bomb, were apprehensive about the type of world they would inherit. Many of these grievances found expression in art, music, literature and cinema.

Rock ‘n’ roll and jazz were a reaction to the establishment, while the beat poets and young American film-makers like László Benedek, The Wild One (1953) and Edward Dmytryk, The Young Lions (1958) – along with modern film stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean, with their ‘What are you rebelling against? What have you got?’ attitude – represented the individual, who struggled against the soullessness of the post-war consumerism in favour of ‘authenticity’.13

Across Europe there was a similar reaction. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), for example, created a whole new style of theatre, itself growing out of the emptiness and alienation of war. The so-called existentialist philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, art movements and new musical forms from the avant-garde, like the Neo-Futurists, Fluxus (who emerged in the 1960s), John Cage and the Darmstadt School, decided the old forms had to be destroyed and that the world needed to start from year zero, destroying all values of pre-war attitudes and lifestyles, which they saw as responsible for the terrors that had been inflicted on humanity.

In Britain, there was possibly less reaction, but by the late Fifties there were certainly many who were angry about the War and the lies and deceit they had endured, not to mention the years of psychological, as well as physical, repair that the whole nation would need to undergo in order to get back to any sense of normality. A group of ‘angry young men’, playwriters and novelists, like Leslie Paul, Angry Young Man (1951), Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954) and John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (1956), expressed disdain at the old guard, while film-makers also reacted against the aimless and superficial films of the Forties and Fifties, and against the propaganda films that had emerged before, during and after the War.14 The new playwrights and film-makers offered a new style of social realism — portraying not the happy-go-lucky, shiftless working class or the noble upper-class — but the realism of life as it actually was lived in Britain. These film-makers, such as Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, whose film Saturday Night Sunday Morning (1960) was based on the novel by another ‘angry young man’, Alan Sillitoe, often expressed the discontent of many in Britain, usually working-class individuals who saw themselves as nothing more than servants and cannon-fodder for the ruling class.

In Britain, post-war recession produced groups of disenfranchised, young working-class men, like the Teddy Boys, who had reacted to the post-war poverty by adopting a flamboyant lifestyle and attitude in which they donned the most outrageous clothes dating back to the Edwardian era, which set them apart from post-war attitudes, ‘fusing their own cultural heritage with American beats… pledging their undying visual devotion to American culture — as if by adopting the insignia of the prevailing post-war power, he might adopt some of its confidence for himself.’15 These groups adopted an almost religious fanaticism to a lifestyle of extravagance, although bubbling beneath the exterior of a new kind of ‘gentleman’ was a disappointment and dissatisfaction with their working-class drudgery.

The Teds, as they were called, were often violent and anti-social because of their dissatisfaction and their sense of elitism. Like all British teenagers in the Fifties, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr all gravitated to the ‘hard man’ style of the Teddy Boys, wearing their hair, the obligatory greased back quiff, as a symbol of their rebellious attitudes to the British establishment and class system. Lennon was the local Ted, creating a tough image for himself to hide his insecurities. McCartney said: ‘you saw Lennon before you met him’.16 Lennon dropped out of education as soon as he could, devising his own programme of educational reading – by the age of ten he was reading Carroll, Richmal Crompton, Poe, Stevenson, Lear, Balzac – ‘drawing and soaking up knowledge from the emergent pop culture of Liverpool and Britain in the 1950s’.17

Lennon would later use his song ‘Working Class Hero’ as an attempt to push back at the idea that hard work brings honour to a man, scoffing at the idea that it is the key to success and self-respect, and a form of heroism in and of itself. In the song he turns that cliché́ into a curse, the irony bent by experience: ‘There’s room at the top they are telling you still / but first you must learn how to smile as you kill.’18 This would express Lennon’s contempt for class hypocrisy,19 which was already beginning to form in his early teens.

George Harrison would be as equally disenchanted with the manner in which his class and age group were institutionalized by a system that only prepared you for a life of bondage to full time employment, without any sense of personal satisfaction or self-respect. He had, from a young age, anti-authoritarian feelings and felt the education system set up in England was hell-bent on turning bright young minds into submissive drones.20 He would later sum up his experience of state education at the Liverpool Institute in the following terms: ‘The way they sent you out into the world was miserable.’21 George rebelled, wearing a bright yellow coat, skin-tight pants, blue suede shoes and long slicked back hair. Teachers were outraged by his defiant look and attitude. He had, after all, been brought up to embrace conformity and stability.22

McCartney, though more often seen as the most obliging, conformist and diplomatic of the Beatles, also had a rebellious streak, which began to express itself more noticeably soon after the death of his mother, when he was just entering puberty. McCartney, having fallen in love with the non-conformist sentiments of rock ‘n’ roll, began to reject the steady, secure path that was being set out for him. One biographer noted that, ‘Beyond the sorrow and self-reproach of the moment, the death of his mother was to become one of those pivotal events in McCartney’s life, stirring ambitions and shaping decisions that might have been quite different had she lived’23 – and he soon lost interest in the idea of being a teacher (a career path which his teachers had encouraged him towards) and threw himself into music. It was his mother’s passing that made him do that.24

Ringo Starr, although the last to join the group, and who was not a childhood friend of the others, also rebelled against the norms of British society, particularly against the constraints that would be imposed by his typical working-class background. Having spent a large part of his school years in the TB ward at Heswall’s Children’s Hospital, when he was discharged Starr had decided that school was not for him and soon gravitated towards the new sound of rock ‘n’ roll with an ambition to be a professional drummer.25

By the mid-Fifties a massive cultural shift occurred, creating a split between those of the pre-war years with the generation that followed. The new generation no longer saw themselves as cheeky, loveable-though-lowly working-class figures. They looked to America for their role models and, particularly, to anti-authoritarian individuals like Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando. America was the place the post-war British teenager wanted to be, where the excitement of rock ‘n’ roll and Hollywood promised a world of colour and adventure; a stark contrast to, ‘Britain’s post-war austerity years, when the battle-exhausted, bankrupt nation seemed to have no warmth, no food, no fun, no colour’.26 The Beatles and the rest of Liverpool experienced such a life on an extreme level, since it was there that ‘felt like the austerity capital of the UK with its acres of shattered buildings and gaping craters’.27

The Rolling Stones manager, Andrew Oldham, described the British youths’ disenchantment with its own country and admiration for all things American in his autobiography:

Those of us punters not yet part of the new intelligentsia nurtured the hope that someday soon our lives would resemble the American movies we loved, we’d trade places with a miserable young James Dean in a flash. We had no perspective on Britain’s glorious and unrecoverable past, so we lived in a make believe present time inspired by Hollywood and rock ‘n’ roll. … Dreams were important because our elders had run out of them and therefore aspiration belonged to the young. Rock ‘n’ roll was ours because it was American and our parents didn’t want it.28

Goodbye the Old Welcome the New

Though Liverpool did have a large and significant Catholic population, mostly the result of Irish immigrants to the city (George Harrison’s family being a perfect example)29 the dominant persuasion was more towards a secular Protestant liberalism, an ideology largely promoted in the mid-nineteenth century by groups like the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society, who were in favour of a society that was informed by ‘science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogma’.30 Paul McCartney’s father, Jim McCartney, whose family had converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, for example, was a non-believer. ‘The world,’ he was fond of saying, ‘was a clock that God wound up and left to run down.’31 The hypocrisy often witnessed in the Catholic Church didn’t help the cause of religion either.32

Even though McCartney was baptised Catholic, resulting from his mother’s pious Catholic background, later depicted in such terms in his Catholically-tinged hymn ‘Let It Be’, his religious education, at Stockton Road infants school, was ‘exclusively Anglican’33 while both Harrison and Lennon, who was also from a mixed Catholic/Protestant background (who had favoured their Protestant side for purely career advantages), attended the state-run, non-religious primary school of Dovedale.

The Protestant ethos of the country had rejected religious dogma for rationality and free-thinking, allowing one’s own consciousness to determine behaviour and beliefs. Although laws were clearly there to maintain the public good and peace within communities, people’s lifestyle choices and religious convictions were their own to choose and follow. Although the Beatles had grown up after the War in an atmosphere of austerity, by the 1960s a whole new attitude was beginning to emerge, and by November 1960 the Conservatives won a general election on the slogan ‘You’ve never had it so good’ and a policy of making Britain ‘Great again’. The press spoke of consumer demand, while the young were encouraged – by the phasing out of national service – to enjoy their youth.

Like many teenagers of the Fifties, the Beatles found a certain free-spirited element influencing their view of the world, and all of the individual Beatles experienced a certain open-mindedness and loosening up of traditional ways through their immediate environment, signalling the change of attitude that the War had caused in some of the older generation. Paul McCartney found such an attitude in his father Jim, who even though he had tried to instil old fashioned values into both his sons and was unwelcoming to the Americanisms that had crept into British life – particularly through the language of rock ‘n’ roll – was encouraging towards Paul’s interest in music, even tolerating his choice not to pursue a career as a teacher. Lennon, Harrison and Starr also had a liberating element within their lives. Lennon found it in his free-spirited mother, Julia, a stark contrast to his conservative and austere Aunt Mimi, and while Harrison’s father was more traditional his mother, Louise, encouraged his individualism and fostered his interest in the guitar and rock ‘n’ roll — something Lennon’s Aunt Mimi would barely tolerate — and Ringo seemed always encouraged by a single mother who was happy just to have her son healthy after many years of illness.

Though Britain had a tradition of ‘tolerance’ when it came to religious and spiritual beliefs, though this would often give way to bigotry when Catholics and Protestants clashed on 12 July – King Billy’s Day, an important Protestant celebration – it would have looked patronisingly on other outlooks, particularly those of its crumbling Empire, which found their way into British society, along with an increasing number of immigrants during the 1950s. Though their traditions and practices were welcome by some, they were mostly treated as strange and often with suspicion. Non-British ways were often mocked, as McCartney’s description of the Maharishi coming to Britain in the late Fifties (‘a funny little man’) indicates. Even significant cultural individuals like Gandhi were seen in the same way in 1950s’ Britain. However, within a decade the Beatles, as well as a vast majority of British and American society, particularly those of the post-war generation, would happily embrace both figures and much of what India and many other non-western cultures had to offer in terms of art, philosophy and spiritual life.

While there had always been a keen interest in esoteric subjects among the British and American intellectual groups – such as the British Romantic poets, writers such as Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of America’s sixteenth President – this was intensified following the First World War, primarily due to what the writer James Webb referred to as a ‘flight from reason’.34 A society stunned by the horrors of a war, into which the entire ‘civilized’ world had suddenly plummeted, sought meanings in the so-called ‘irrational’.

In the aftermath of World War Two, however, there seemed to be a decline in esoteric and spiritual interests, as the consumer culture of the post-war era, as well as a more profoundly materialistic scientific outlook, held sway. For the most part, religion served only a superficial role which encouraged a conformity to a particular social ethos, influenced by consumerism and other materialistic outlooks, that had emerged after the War. For the vast majority, the established order was to be followed, and dissent only came after the War by the emerging youth groups, who tended to embrace a kind of nihilism that the figures of rock ‘n’ roll and the teen idols – like Dean, Brando and Elvis, at least their on-screen characters, embraced. These were existential characters trying to find their place in the consumerism of American post-war culture.

As the Beatles moved from virtual obscurity to worldwide fame, they became major cultural figures that significantly influenced and changed the world. The 1960s, the decade of the Beatles, underwent a tremendous transformation in relation to religion, esotericism and spirituality, both in personal terms and also in having a great influence on the world in these matters, at least in terms of popularizing and bringing to mainstream awareness issues regarding them.

The Beatles crossed the paths of many spiritual movements and ideologies, as well as religious groups, esoteric philosophies and occult and mystical teachings that acted on them and through them. This variety of ideas shaped their thinking, their music and their way of life, while at the same time influencing the overall consciousness of the culture in which they lived. Essentially the religious, philosophical and spiritual landscape of the western world, particularly in Britain and America, went through a tremendous shift during the 1960s, transforming the philosophical and spiritual thoughts of these two nations. The following chapters in this book aim to examine how pivotal the Beatles were to this cultural sea change.

Chapter 2

A Shot of Rhythm and Blues:The New Religion of Rock ‘n’ Roll

A New Era: Teen Disciples

This difference between the pre-war and post-war generation was ultimately something more significant than just a generation gap. In fact, the War distinguished not just the generations, but a whole new consciousness, a whole new outlook on life and the human being’s place within it. The War had unleashed certain forces, almost supernatural cosmic forces, that would transform the latter half of the century. The War had quashed the pre-war generation and left them far behind, but it meant little to the emerging generation of the mid-Fifties. The pop music journalist, Allison Taich, writes in her essay ‘Beatlemania: The Defiance of a Generation’:

The idea of a grace period in life between childhood and adulthood was not recognised pre-World War Two. Suddenly there was an age where people did not identify with the helpless and dependent stages of childhood, nor with the pressures and responsibilities of adulthood. This middle ground of age and responsibility came into its own during the 1950s when it was no longer cool to share the same interests, mores or values of the previous generation. Attention was put more towards socialising with peers, while leisure and entertainment became increasing priorities. Popular music unleashed rock ‘n’ roll to the public, which catered to this new way of thinking and feeling.35

It was because of this, Taich suggests, that ‘popular culture began to shift, and between the advertisement and entertainment industries a new breed was developing: the teenager’.36

Though other eras had had their rebellious elements, like the Flappers of the 1920s, following World War One, that generation underwent great changes, sowing many of the seeds that were halted by the Great Depression of the 1930s and then World War Two, but which would begin to flourish in the 1960s. The teenager was a totally new creation; it was something that had ultimately sprang up in America, particularly with the consumer culture that encouraged the fads and trends of the new generation, rejecting the stifling life of the pre-war generation of their parents, where conformity was expected.

As we have seen, this generation gap was effectively addressed, at least in Britain, through plays and films like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), as well as in the satirical commentary of TV programmes like That Was the Week That Was (1962) and Beyond the Fringe (1960), a stage revue, which included material from some of Britain’s youngest comic talents, including Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, who were deeply critical of certain aspects of the pre-war generation. The cult of the individual, nurtured in the consumer culture of America, transferred itself strongly into the teenager, while American movies, particularly the rock ‘n’ roll ‘exploitation’ movies like Rock Around the Clock (1956), The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) and Jailhouse Rock (1957), as well as its non-conformist music, brought the notion of the teenager alive, encouraging a youth culture never experienced before.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Prophets

While the War ‘had made popular music a vital part of everyday life’, in Britain and America this wartime music had appeal for the young.37 The BBC’s Light Programme, for example, was full of songs with a wartime sensibility but when rock ‘n’ roll hit in the mid-Fifties, with songs like ‘Rocket 88’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’, the time was ripe for a new voice of teen America to express the feelings of the new generation. While most mainstream American radio was dismissive of it, favouring the music of singers like Bing Crosby and Doris Day, and while Britain’s ‘puritanical’ BBC excluded it completely,38 some radio stations, like the pirate station Radio Luxemburg, and American DJs, like Alan Freed, understood rock ‘n’ roll’s attraction to teenagers and championed it. Rock ‘n’ roll not only gave the new youth a sound to go with their new image and lifestyles, but introduced a whole new set of values by which the young could live their lives.

The first prophet of rock ‘n’ roll, Bill Haley, was introduced to Britain in 1955 through the teen movie Blackboard Jungle (1955), a film about the rising juvenile delinquency which was of concern to American society at the time and which caused frustrated Teddy Boys in Britain to rip up cinema seats when it was shown – an experience which the young Ringo Starr said impressed him deeply.39 The War had not made Britain any less rigidly class-bound and the responses to rock ‘n’ roll awoke fears of a juvenile delinquency problem on the same scale as America, not to mention an older, darker fear of proletarian uprising.40 For such reasons the Press and the Establishment hated it, making out that the lyrics were obscene and the rhythm jungle-like – a racist allusion to its black origins.41 The clothes and hair were equally hated by parents, but the kids loved it and its non-acceptance made it even more enticing to teens. ‘Rock radiated the fragrance of escape,’ wrote McCartney’s biographer, Christopher Sandford.

McCartney, like Lennon, had found escape in the new religion of rock ‘n’ roll after they both experienced a deep loss in their respective families. John had lost his stepfather, George Smith, and Paul had lost his mother, Mary McCartney. ‘Paul,’ wrote Sandford, ‘had often stolen off to the Odeon to watch the adventures of Dick Barton or some similar action hero, whose exploits he excitedly re-enacted at the family tea table. He found Haley even more alluring.’42 Rock ‘n’ roll offered Lennon and McCartney solace and belief that nothing else in their lives could give them.

Rock ‘n’ roll appealed to the deep feelings of sexual energy that the new youth were beginning to experience, and the new attitudes and freedoms that were also emerging at the time. It represented the life of a new economic class, both in Britain and America, as expertly captured in Colin MacInnes’ novel Absolute Beginners (1959), which describes the new youth culture that had begun to emerge but which was very quickly hijacked by the business class (in America, this new economic class had, in 1956, a spending power of about seven billion dollars).

Where exactly this attitude came from is very hard to pinpoint, but was probably due to a combination of factors: the War itself; the destruction of countries and people; the post-war shock of a nation too numb to carry on in any real sense; a rejection of past values by the old as well as the young, who had no respect for a country and culture that could produce such a terrible thing as the atomic bomb; the relief that the end of the War brought and the realization that life must be lived and embraced, and that prosperity and happiness were all that really mattered. As well as all this, the post-war stress of the Cold War and of a potentially imminent nuclear war filled people with a sense of dread, which they attempted to distract themselves from with things like music, movies and consumerism.

The young, not always so worried about the future – though they were certainly aware of what the future could be like if war struck for a third time – made the most of the new consumer products. The consumerism and post-war industrializations of towns and cities brought more employment, which meant people could pre-occupy themselves with their work and, as a result of work, could be further distracted by spending their money and enjoying their free time.

Although rock ‘n’ roll was a fascination for American and British teenagers, on its first arrival to Britain it was too aggressive for many pubescent males who were trying to figure out their place in the world. George Harrison was a typical example of the younger teenagers who felt ‘intimidated by the form … and felt he was not grown up enough to be an active participant’,43 limiting his participation to just listening to the records. Rock ‘n’ roll was also too ‘distant’ and ‘unattainable’ for British youths to aspire to.44 However, when the ‘second prophet’ of rock, Lonnie Donegan, arrived on the scene on 13 July 1954, just a week after Elvis recorded his first record for the Sun label, British teenage boys found a musical hero they could easily emulate. With his unique brand of music, known as skiffle – a form of American folk music which emerged following the Great Depression – Donegan inspired thousands of young British teenagers, ‘poor whites, who couldn’t afford conventional instruments’, to form their own skiffle groups using makeshift instruments out of ‘kitchen wash boards, jugs, and kazoos’.45

The vast number of skiffle groups that formed in Britain as a result of Donegan’s success, like the Vipers, the Nomads, the Hobos, the Streamliners, and of course John Lennon’s first group the Quarrymen, was, as one commentator noted, ‘a way to release their violence. Instead of beating each other to death they beat a drum, and they didn’t have to learn music. It was from the heart and a chance to break away from the poverty that surrounds you … a working class musical revolution.’46

In its British form, it was a mix of blues, country, folk, jazz and spirituals, of which most British teens knew nothing previously.47 There was something ‘primitive and overtly sexual in the music’ that went hand-in-hand with the British adolescence entering puberty.48 ‘The effect,’ suggested Philip Norman in his biography of Paul McCartney, ‘was galvanising on bashful British boys with no previously musical leanings.’49 ‘Rock ‘n’ roll,’ said Lennon’s friend Eric Griffiths, ‘was beyond our imagination, but skiffle was music we could play.’50

Every British teenager had read the story of how Donegan had taken half an hour to record his hit ‘Rock Island Line’, and his first quarter royalty cheque had been for TWENTY-SEVEN THOUSAND POUNDS (always in capitals), and the Beatles certainly wanted some of that.51 It wasn’t just money, however, that drew them to skiffle but the sense of belonging that the music gave them. While Lennon and McCartney found rock ‘n’ roll to be a welcome distraction from their personal pain, George, already disillusioned with established norms like formal education, channelled all his interests into learning the guitar,52 while Ringo Starr had very early on developed a strong passion for the drums (as well as movies and girls). ‘It was in my soul, I just wanted to be a drummer’, he would declare.53

‘The Messiah Has Arrived’

It was due to a mixture of this new sound and lifestyle coming from America that the Beatles, and groups like them, began to form. McCartney put it well when he described this new world, brought to life in technicolour on screen in the classic rock ‘n’ roll ‘exploitation’ movie The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), as follows: ‘The world had suddenly gone from black and white to technicolour.’54 In their hometown of Liverpool, the influence of rock ‘n’ roll and skiffle was immense and the new groups, who were proficiently talented, created their own unique sound, which would later be called the ‘Mersey Sound’. The sound became so popular that the BBC did a special report on it in the early Sixties, before anyone had ever heard of the Beatles. These groups were all richly talented, and apparently not any lesser than or deserving to be global superstars, in the way the Beatles would later be – but clearly something set the Beatles apart; some magical and mysterious ingredient that the other groups didn’t appear to have.

Though Bill Haley and other rock ‘n’ roll pioneers were of tremendous importance in influencing the Fifties’ teenagers, it wasn’t until a young, handsome and extremely charismatic, 17-year-old from the backwaters of Tupelo, Mississippi, called Elvis Presley, came along, singing and dancing in a way never witnessed before by mainstream white culture, that a ‘new religion’, with its own ‘Messianic’ figure, was created virtually overnight. While the establishment were up in arms, Elvis pointed the way for the new generation, and the future seemed bright and positive – a strong contrast to the War and the early post-war years, particularly so in Britain.

While rock ‘n’ roll had a vast number of celebrities, such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly, all of whom were ‘worshiped’55 by the new generation, there was no doubt that Elvis was rock ‘n’ roll’s central figure, and exerted more of an influence on his generation then all those other performers put together. As one commentator observed:

Hair, hips, or feet to pound the old social order into dust. Before Elvis the Fifties culture was to conform. The post-war affluence encouraged people not to rock the boat but Elvis rocked the boat and the youth rebellion that transformed the nation owed a debt to rock ‘n’ roll and Elvis. Elvis emerged from Memphis to shock the sensibilities and transform modern culture.56

While Haley had appealed to the Teds, Presley’s effect on females was uncanny. Females, noted Beatles’ biographer Philip Norman, ‘rousing previously decorous, tight-corseted Fifties’ young womanhood to hysterical screams, reciprocal bodily writhings and an apparent compulsion to tear the singer’s clothes from his back’.57 Branded the ‘disciple of the devil’ by orthodox elements of society, with his swivelling hips some thought Elvis was a black conspiracy, ‘n***er animalistic behaviour’ – which caused youth culture, as well as African-American communities, to support him even more. The ‘innocent rebellious leader’, he told young girls that it was OK to have sexual impulses. Elvis unleashed forces beyond his control. He made girls cry, reaching deep emotions within them. For young men, Elvis, the James Dean of popular music, became a symbol for all those that felt disenfranchised.

In America, for these very reasons, many (like Ed Sullivan) didn’t want Elvis appearing on national TV, but changed their tune when they saw the ratings he got. When Elvis did finally appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, it signified ‘the minister of morality’, (and the broader adult world) surrendering to the youth culture. Even though Elvis lost some of his ‘revolutionary appeal’ with youth culture through his appearance on the show, he had already ‘harnessed the forces of sex, money, youth, music, technology, and race, transforming our culture, the country, and much of the rest of the western world’.58

Elvis became the instrument from which many became rich; an icon of teen rebellion but also of teen consumerism, and after he died – from exhaustion, drug abuse and mistreatment by those around him – he was virtually canonised by popular culture, becoming a ‘saint’ of modern consumerism and the celebrity culture that has taken a strong hold in our modern world. His home, Graceland, has become a place of pilgrimage of a solely consumeristic society.

In a strange sense, Elvis was a spiritual force, an icon and a ‘Messiah’ for a new era and was sadly sacrificed for it. His influence was so profound that Paul McCartney would claim: ‘This was the guru we were waiting for. The Messiah has arrived.’59 George Harrison, the Beatle often considered to be most concerned with ‘authenticity’, referred to Elvis as, ‘the real one’, who ‘changed the course of his life’,60 while for John Lennon everything was ‘unreal’ except for Elvis, who was ‘bigger than religion’ to him.61 Lennon would make clear the huge impact Elvis had on both him and on modern culture when he stated that ‘before Elvis, there was nothing’,62 almost echoing the notion that, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’

The Four Evangelists

Rock ‘n’ roll and the idea of stardom attracted the four young Beatles to a life of music and entertainment. Harrison, Lennon and McCartney were drawn to the gigging circuit in Hamburg after a short stint in Liverpool, while Starr, who would eventually become friends with the other Beatles, found his way to Hamburg after playing in the national holiday camps of Butlin’s. It was, however, the power of the music, the love affair with rock ‘n’ roll as a meaningful and ‘authentic’ teenage voice of expression, that appealed to the Beatles – not just the trappings of fame or wealth. Even though the band would claim on their second album that ‘money’ was what they really wanted, there was a devout integrity to their music, a sincere connection with its emotional and spiritual roots that really drove them. There was also the notion that they were destined to do something special, not just for their country or their class or their generation, but something that would open up a channel of a new age and era; something that would transform culture and music for the next half a century.

This was clearly shown by the way in which they had presented themselves to their Liverpool public, later then to their A&R man and producer George Martin, their manager Brian Epstein, and ultimately to their record company. They presented themselves as working-class, Liverpool boys, who insisted on offering their music as it was, not content on superficial and insincere tunes that would make them a success. The group had been irreverent towards Martin when they first met, Harrison apparently exclaiming that he didn’t like Martin’s tie, while they were respectful but mildly defiant towards both Epstein and Martin throughout their career. They had refused to record ‘How Do You Do It’ when Martin had procured the song as their first potential No. 1 from local songwriter Mitch Murray. They wouldn’t cover it, feeling it was not a true representation of their sound and style. Lennon would give a less than committed performance when they demoed the track, possibly to appease Martin, but at the same time to let him know that they weren’t going to be music industry puppets for Martin to do with them as he pleased.

They would also defy their record company’s expectations of their artists, as well as the media establishment, particularly in Britain, who would usually attempt to refine their artists’ accents and manners to fit in to the established notions of middle-class entertainment. Granted, they got rid of their leather and donned suits as a theatrical move, designed by their manager Brian Epstein, to make them more accessible, but it was probably – as McCartney and Lennon would later admit – a change that they realized was necessary themselves, the hardcore leather look at this stage being somewhat cliched.63 As well as that, their mop-top hairstyles set them apart from other groups, while their Italian suits and Spanish-heeled boots, later known as Beatle boots, made them seem more cosmopolitan. They were simultaneously commercial and artsy but most of all they had an authenticity that appealed to a younger generation fed up with the phoneyness of the social and class structures of the pre-war era.

The Beatles, like Elvis, had more or less created their own ‘religious’ fanaticism and cult worship, but while Elvis had become a symbolic representation of the new youth movement on a ‘superficial’ level, i.e. through his image and performance, as well as on a primitive level, in which forces of a lower sexual nature sprang forth to awake the sexual instincts of the new generation, the Beatles were something uniquely different. They expressed not just the overtly sexual emotions of the new generation, vented through the screaming and excitement produced by Beatlemania, but also the inner world of the next generation that came to focus their attention not solely on sexual attitudes but on imagination, philosophy and in their intellectual and political concerns. As well as this expression of an inner self, the Beatles, in their presentation as a tightly knit, creative unit, also represented the democratization of youth culture.

The music of Elvis fused the church music of his own culture with the black gospel and blues music from the communities in which he lived. His movements were encouraged by the movements of black dancers, and the shakes and gyrations would emulate the secular music, which inspired the primal forces within the individual. The pelvic movements of Elvis expressed the overtly-sexual tensions that were evident within some communities but which had been deeply suppressed within white culture, at least until they were unleashed for the new white youth groups that were ready to express themselves sexually.

The songs that many white artists recorded were written by Jewish songsmiths, often referred to as the Brill Building songwriters in New York, like Lieber and Stoller or Goffin and King, and were produced by Jewish or black producers, like Phil Spector or Robert ‘Bumps’ Blackwell. This merging of cultures and race created a kind of collective consciousness, a working together of many different elements, although presented to the public through one individual. In this respect, Elvis had spawned the next generation of artists and the new cultural era that pointed in the direction of ‘the self ’, although this was itself a collective consciousness.

Although they had emerged from a collective consciousness, of the pop music scene of the Fifties, the Beatles reinterpreted the music of girl groups, rock ‘n’ roll, country, and the deeply collaborative and collective approach of Motown and the Brill Building sound of New York. In many ways they reintroduced a lot of subcultural American music to mainstream American audiences, as well as their own British hybrid of skiffle and music hall. Their music would later come to express their own unique style and personal feelings and thoughts, although often mixed with an eclectic sound that would incorporate a huge amount of western musical styles, from classical to folk, rock and pop, music hall, as well as avantgarde and eastern styles.

In other words, Elvis and rock ‘n’ roll represented a naive and primitive culture that was still focused in communities, and which figures like Elvis represented; individuals who led the new youth towards their promised land of self-expression. The Beatles, although a collective group from the outside, particularly in their early days, first mirrored the collective consciousness of the new youth but also represented the democratization of the new form in which anyone, anywhere, of any age or class, could become a worldwide success.

Elvis was beyond the grasp of most young people’s talents; they couldn’t sing like him, move like him or look like him. Incidentally, Lennon would mention this very idea when saying that he and Paul needed each other to compensate for their shortcomings in being the Sixties’ answer to Elvis. The Beatles were ordinary working-class boys, not too unlike the average boy, and so showed how possible it was for anyone to be successful. Artistically though, they were further ahead of the average person and inwardly expressed what many couldn’t, essentially the feelings of a new-found self. The Beatles in essence were a contradiction, familiar yet unfamiliar, the sum of everything that had been, while unlike anything ever seen before. They could be accepted by those who recognized elements of the past and embraced by those who sought a new voice. They represented hope, optimism and wit, and a symbol that anyone can be a success, provided that they had a will to do it. Their capacity for survival impressed people – they just seemed unstoppable. Without anyone getting hurt or dying, it was the longest running story since the Second World War.64

Their days in Hamburg had signified the beginnings of a reconciliation between Britain and Germany and their success at home and abroad – particularly in Germany, Sweden and France and later in America, and finally in Australia and Japan – had, more than any other event since the War, brought much of the world together, which only two decades previously was intent on destroying itself. The young would soon recognize the differences between themselves and the older generation, a generation intent on destruction, while theirs would be a generation that would embrace ‘the other’ with all their differences.

The Beatles were more than just a rock ‘n’ roll group, and although the groups’ members were proudly working-class, they were the first truly global and classless, as well as generation-less, event that had sprung up after the War – right through the negativity of the Cold War era.

By the Sixties, both teenage culture and rock music were in the phase of their second coming. For teens, there was a heightened sense of awareness of their position in life. For popular music, sounds got increasingly louder, amplified, raw and electrifying; recording technology began to adapt, opening the doors for more audio possibilities, and lyrics started to lose their innocence. Suddenly, rock music began to influence girls in strange and odd ways: females began to form mobs, grow hysterical over boys, disregard the law, physically abuse themselves by yanking on their hair, and sobbing until exhausted.

The question was, what were they so hysterical about? Was the progression of time and culture too much pressure to handle? Did the devil’s music, i.e. rock ‘n’ roll, infiltrate their innocent bodies, minds and emotions? Or was it a reaction to the Sixties and the sounds of four charismatic lads from Liverpool?65

The Flight to Hamburg

Hamburg was a period of spiritual incubation for the group. They would learn their craft, while also be thrown into a world of danger – sex, drugs and the darker side of the human psyche. They would consort with prostitutes, sailors, pimps and those that lived during the night – outcasts from German society. It was here they would have experiences not to be found at home, experiences that allowed them to break free from the restraints of English life, of class consciousness and of the pre-war values that still conducted life at home. ‘In Hamburg,’ said, their first manager Alan Williams, ‘we were there at the right time in the right place, people were hungry for this new rawer sound.’66

It was in Hamburg that they learned about the so-called ‘enemy’, the people they were supposed to hate. They became friends with their enemies. They even formed deep bonds with them, bonds that would last throughout their entire careers, physically, artistically and spiritually. The group of artists that they befriended in Hamburg – the Exis (named so after the European Existential philosophers who inspired them), led by the otherworldly Astrid Kirchherr – gave them an artistic slant to their rock ‘n’ roll ,‘and in its own way,’ said Tony Sheridan, a fellow musician and friend of the Beatles while in Hamburg, ‘the music helped to heal the rift that had opened up between British and German people in the Second World War.’ Sheridan had no doubt that the shows they did were about ‘helping people with reconciliation’.67

They came to look like their enemies, mop-tops and polo necks; the uniform of the Exis. Astrid was a mother figure to the Liverpool groups that came to Hamburg, and particularly to the Beatles, on whom she also impressed her unique artistic sensibility. She helped reinvent the group, before Epstein added the last touches, that the world would soon come to know and love. She presented them to the world as something totally new, cutting their hair in the style of the Exis, which would later become known as the Beatle haircut, their trade mark, distinguishing feature. According to Tony Sheridan: ‘She also had an artistic vision… and had an immense influence on the Beatles. The rough edges disappeared. Without her the Beatles would have been a different group.’68 Klaus Voorman, their Hamburg friend, would contribute to their artistic output when he designed their majorly influential album cover Revolver and later played on Lennon’s and Harrison’s solo albums. Stuart Sutcliffe, one of the so-called fifth Beatles, would even opt to stay behind in Hamburg and live with his beloved Astrid, after the group returned to Liverpool.