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The Beatles

 

It has been said that the "generation gap" was an invention of the 1950s. Parents and children are always going to have their differences, but the invention of a phrase must be significant. As Ian Macdonald writes in his book on the Beatles: "In effect the 'generation gap' which opened in the Fifties turned out not to be a quarrel between a particular set of children and parents, but an historical chasm between one way of life and another... The truth is the Sixties inaugurated the post-religious age."(Revolution In The Head P25 - 26) Of course the scientific discoveries that brought about the new age already had a long history by the time the Sixties came along. In the early sixteenth century Copernicus had written On The Revolutions Of The Celestial Spheres and had taken Earth away from the centre of the solar system. In1859 Charles Darwin, after years of nervous prevarication, had finally published The Origin of Species and taken away divine superintendence of life. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw almost a dry run for the Sixties in the work of the Romantic poets; Wordsworth, Coleridge, then Keats, Shelley and Byron. In an intimation of things to come people clamoured outside bookshops for Byron's poem Childe Harold, written by a man who many a Sixties rock star would recognise. Still, in those days books were expensive and education patchy. This inevitably was going to have an impact on the way a culture developed. There was another dry run in the 1920s, but still the Sixties social characteristics of novelty, drugs, change, were confined to the privileged set. (Interestingly when they finally came, the Sixties had fashions influenced by the romantic period, and by the 1920s.) World wars also got in the way. Some commentators suggest that war shakes up social structures, and in some ways this is obviously true; but on the whole a country in wartime is going to be conservative, cautious, with tight control from central government. Two huge wars in quick succession tended to maintain social inertia. But once the austerity of the 1950s had passed, and the prosperity of the 1960s arrived, the power and potential of slowly gathering change erupted in an unprecedented display of creativity. This time the development of communications had reached the stage where almost anyone could be involved. With young people inevitably leading the way, almost all of them had access to a radio and record player.

Interior of HMS Ocelet, At Chatham Dockyard

It was with this supremely inclusive nature of 1960s culture that we reach the great contradiction of the decade. Most people had the potential to be involved, but they were allowed to do so by devices that tended to leave them on their own. Modern technology had been moving in that lonely direction generally, with people living in their own little homes, with their own labour saving devices. In these homes people would all be listening, generally in isolation, to their radios or record players, or watching their televisions. There were occasions when vast displays of physical togetherness occurred, most famously in the Woodstock festival of 1969, and the monster festival on the Isle of Wight in 1970. But the half a million people at Woodstock and the one million people at the Isle of Wight, were dwarfed by the hundreds of millions going through their days at home or at work, listening to the radio or to records. This was an isolated generation inspite of the unprecedented sharing of culture. There is a spy submarine from the 1960s preserved at Chatham Historic Dockyard. After spending ten minutes inside the boat, it seemed that the global Cold War, fought out in secretive, claustrophobic places like HMS Ocelot, was a fitting kind of struggle for the times.

In the Sixties we find the greatest artists of that decade writing about, and involved in its contradictions. Of the many artists you could mention the Beatles must be seen as having led the way. In 1967 they encapsulated the 1960s, and the rest of the twentieth century, in their wonderful album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This album supposedly is set at a concert, in front of a live audience who we hear clapping and cheering together at the beginning of the record. In reality of course the record is being played to an audience scattered in times and places all around the world. The band might say that "it's wonderful to be here," but in reality we have no idea where here actually is. The band say that it was exactly twenty years ago today that they learnt to play. Once again this special anniversary day is also any day that the album is played. It could be today, always or never.

Zebra Crossing at Abbey Road

We might now find that no time or place provides what we need. Equally in this new democratic world, it could be that the potential for what we need lies anywhere and anytime. "There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be." The Beatles made famous a zebra crossing in St Johns Wood, and a suburban street in Liverpool. The childhood homes of Lennon and McCartney are owned by the National Trust, which puts their ordinary little houses on a par with Blenheim Palace. You could stand in any ordinary place and say it is wonderful to be here.

 

And now we have the internet used by isolated individuals, giving unprecedented opportunities for like minded people across the world to get together. Sergeant Pepper would have like that.

 

Abbey Road Studios

 

Beatles locations such as Penny Lane, Abbey Road, and 3 Savile Row can be visited. If the wonderful "here" on Sergeant Pepper can be anywhere, it is fitting that the Beatles were able to find the bigger picture in small and apparently ordinary places. Visiting these places is a moving way of experiencing this quality in their work. Paul McCartney's childhood home at 20 Forthlin Road, and Mendips where the young John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi are both owned by the National Trust and are open to the public. I understand there were some in the National Trust who objected to properties such as these being taken on, but a looser conception of what is important and unimportant is a crucial characteristic of the world that emerged in the Sixties. Some dismiss such a openness as a loss of standards, as Charles Curran did in 1964 when he wrote of Lennon's In His Own Write: "He seems to have picked up bits of Tennyson, Browning and Robert Louis Stevenson while listening with one ear to the football results on the wireless." In a sense this was true. As the writer Ian Macdonald has observed, the Beatles enjoyed living amongst scattered newspapers and magazines, with TVs and radios burbling constantly in the background. They enjoyed the coincidences and strange comings together that emerged from such a mix, using unpredictability to keep their music fresh. They expressed the great possibilities that could come out of the new loss of boundaries, even though, as with all things in life there was a flip side. As Kipling said, sometimes you have to put up with the truth you've spoken being "twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools." That does not diminish what the Beatles did. Visiting the ordinary places they celebrated is a great way to experience the specialness they found it what might seem ordinary and everyday.

Beatles memorabilia can be seen at the Beatles Story exhibition in Liverpool. Original hand written drafts of the Beatles lyrics can be seen in the galleries at the British Library in London.