Tomorrow never knew

Ask anyone with an opinion on The Beatles to name their favourite Fab Four album and you will never get the same answer twice. One fan’s Sgt. Pepper is another’s Abbey Road; ‘The White Album’ can be interchanged with Rubber Soul; Help! for Let It Be, and so on.

By any measure, the band’s career arc - from their debut single Love Me Do, released 60 years ago this month, until Let It Be, their final record - is one of extraordinary evolution. In just eight years of recorded music - eight years! - they evolved from chirpsome arrival to the wearisome The Long And Winding Road. Between those points they more or less invented progressive rock. I don’t mean songs with interminable guitar solos about ancient myths written in obscure time signatures, but music that ignored the structural, lyrical and instrumentation conventions of pop that had been established by ‘beat music’ and the original infusions of jazz, blues, soul, country, folk and rock and roll that emerged from 1950s America.

The Beatles’ history is a compressed one. By their third album, A Hard Day’s Night, they had already introduced a harder edge to their infectious pop. By their sixth, 1965’s Rubber Soul, the pressures of relentless touring in their initial ascent found some release in their writing. Coinciding with their recreational introduction to LSD, the record - sometimes melancholy, sometimes whimsical - featured far greater experimentation, such as George Harrison’s use of a sitar on Norwegian Wood or a fuzzbox on Nowhere Man. Lyrically, too, the music was now less about young love and more about adult perspectives on life itself. Rubber Soul wasn’t so much the blueprint for what came next, but it demonstrated a clear desire to exceed the boundaries of conventional pop in the mid-60s.

On Wednesday 6 April, 1966, the greatest creative entity in the history of popular music entered Studio 3 of Abbey Road to commence work on their seventh album. It was to become the record that critics and fans alike would regard as the Looking Glass moment. It was Revolver. It would establish The Beatles as the pre-eminent studio band of their era. They would, of course, give up touring altogether that summer (on the back of the US tour on which John Lennon declared the band “more popular than Jesus,” a remark that didn’t go down well in the Bible Belt). But with the intention to withdraw into the studio already made, the 300 hours they would spend at Abbey Road making Revolver turned Studio 3 into their personal sandpit.

Although Revolver was recorded much as its six predecessors had been, with the band facing each other in a circle on the studio floor, recording ‘as-live’ straight to tape, it’s what came out of those sessions that was less than conventional. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the track that closes Revolver, Tomorrow Never Knows. The basics of it were recorded on that very first day at Abbey Road. Its reverse tape effects, droning background and one of Ringo Starr’s most idiosyncratic drum patterns made a clear statement, from the outset, that the Fabs were searching for alternative experiences, both musically and socially. Remarkably, just three years separate its opening line “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,” from She Loves You, placing down a marker for 1960s counter-culture. “We did [Tomorrow Never Knows] because I, for one, am sick of doing sounds that people can claim to have heard before,” Paul McCartney told the NME at the time the album came out. He could well have been talking about the entire record itself.

Today we get the chance to experience that magic all over again with its reissue as a ‘super-deluxe edition’, curated by Giles Martin, son of George, as he has done for Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles (AKA The White Album). Available in various packages, the reissue expands the original 14-track line-up with the customary phalanx of extras which, to some critics, provides further example of ‘heritage acts’ gouging the hopelessly devoted with baubles like studio outtakes and demos that were left on the cutting room floor in the first place for a reason. 

Revolver maybe the difference. If the exhaustive, engrossing Peter Jackson documentary Get Back demonstrated anything, it was opening the lid on the sometimes laborious work that The Beatles applied to writing their apparently simplistic, sometimes child-like songs, which in reality were anything but simple.

The Revolver reissue contains a brand new stereo mix of the original album produced by Martin and Sam Okell, and it is this that provides the centrepiece attraction. Remixes of classic albums - often by people like my friend Steven Wilson to produce ‘multi-channel’ surround sound versions - are designed to create a different aural experience to the original. Martin’s new Revolver mix cleverly lifts out instrumentation and the band’s individual contributions that had been buried in the original recording due to the fact that in 1966 studios didn’t have the seemingly endless multi-track capabilities they do today.

Revolver’s interest isn’t, however, just about The Beatles’ instrumental creativity taking on a new life, but also their songwriting freedom, too. A good example is the opening track, Taxman. Anchored by McCartney’s metronomic bassline (later borrowed wholesale by The Jam on Start!) it was a George Harrison song that made a dig at the-then government of Harold Wilson’s tax regime which saw the highest earners paying rates of 90%. It also set the tone of an album Giles Martin has described as “not very happy” lyrically, reflecting a band already growing wan with the adulation of Beatlemania. This continues with the wistful Eleanor Rigby, with its staccato, Hitchcockian strings painting a greying portrait of a lonely woman McCartney had encountered, drawing on the band’s growing interest in Indian culture to influence the orchestration.

Go through all 14 of Revolver’s tracks and you draw conclusions about where The Beatles were at in 1966. John Lennon’s I’m Only Sleeping is, according to Martin, “classic John” in that it expressed not the compliant, mop-topped pop star of Please Please Me, but the wry individual that became his public stock-in-trade. Equally, McCartney’s Here, There And Everywhere put down a further market of his trademark romanticism. The same can be said for Yellow Submarine, a Ringo Starr song born from a Lennon idea, and would go on to become the standard bearer for opinions of The Beatles that they were simply purveyors of ‘children’s music’. Be that as it may (and no long car journey in my childhood was complete without a sing-song of it) it’s a remarkable song for a pop act fast becoming a rock band to have committed to record. I can’t imagine David Bowie - another considered an originator of progressive rock - would have considered doing The Laughing Gnome if it wasn’t for the novelty of The Beatles getting away with Yellow Submarine.

Revolver isn’t so much of an invention that it’s without outside influences. Some, like The Kinks and The Who, closer to home, while others, like The Byrds, from further afield. Martin says that Lennon was a huge fan of the latter’s Roger McGuinn and his signature Rickenbacker guitar sound, to the extent that early demos of And Your Bird Can Sing were “almost too Byrdsy”. On the feelgood Good Day Sunshine and Got To Get You Into My Life, McCartney drew on more soulful influences, with Motown in particular making its mark.

But the track that stands out more than any other for its sheer singularity is the aforementioned Tomorrow Never Knows. “What’s extraordinary about this track is it’s the first thing they did for Revolver,” Martin recently told the NME, revealing that when they started recording the album, they’d just returned from their first holiday with a load of ideas. Paul, in particular, felt that they were becoming individuals. Discovering cannabis and other recreational diversions had helped. Lennon come into the studio saying “I’ve written this song, it’s just one chord, and I want it to sound like I’m in the Himalayas singing from a mountaintop”. Martin says that for his father, the somewhat urbane and straight-laced George, to go “alright, let’s go and do that” was “amazing”.

If Revolver has remained a landmark for the last 56 years, the expectation is that Martin’s work on it today will add dimensions not even imaginable with 1960s recording technology. That certainly seems to be the result of his new mixes. “People forget that it’s just a young band playing in the studio,” Martin recently told The Times. ”Everything is fairly aggressive. Everything is in your face. Everything The Beatles recorded is a little bit louder than you think it is.” 

There is, inevitably, a cabal of fans who regard Martin’s remixes to be acts of heresy, even undoing the groundbreaking his father did as ‘the fifth Beatle’ in the studio. “I kind of embrace them because, in a way, they’re absolutely right,” Martin said to The Times. But he also says that no one is compelling anyone to listen to the new mixes. But there is room for them. I personally enjoyed the revision of the Let It Be, which had originally been over-embellished by Phil Spector, when it was reissued as Let It Be Naked - stripped back and sounding more like a rock album should do as the 60s gave way to the 70s.

Martin says his work is, essentially, a form of time travel. You can argue whether it is needed. Some will be happy with their original copy of the album from 1966. But you don’t have to be a scholar of music to enjoy the experience of hearing one of the breakthrough albums of the rock and pop era though ‘new ears’, even if you need a healthy bank balance to afford it. It may even help conclude the debate on which Beatles album was their best. Because it probably is. 

Pigs might fly

Roger Waters is a miserable bugger. That much has been perennially true. The founder member of Pink Floyd has recently been resolutely ignoring the generally wise advice that when one finds oneself in a hole, stop digging. Having railed, in recent years, against everything and everyone from Israel to Donald Trump, the 79-year-old has recently dismissed claims of war crimes in Ukraine by Russia as “lies”, and wrote an open letter to Ukrainian first lady, Olena Zelenska, calling on her husband Volodymyr Zelensky to reach a peace deal with Vladimir Putin. No wonder the good people of Poland have called off Waters’ tour dates there next year.

As much as I hold my hat high to the work of the Floyd, Waters’ relentless misanthropy is exhausting. In 1977 he was just as splenetic. In fact, he has long maintained that by the time Pink Floyd’s album Animals came out that year, the band was already in decline, having peaked with the juggernaut that The Dark Side Of The Moon became, and capitalised on with its reflective follow-up, Wish You Were Here.

Animals, however, was certainly not a happy record. Loosely based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm - itself a statement about Stalinism - Waters used the album to lay in to the perils of being a fabulously wealthy rock star, something he has continued to do into his eighth decade while continuing to be...er...a fabulously wealthy rock star. It was in Montreal, on the Animals tour in 1977, that during a performance of the album’s Pigs, Waters spat at an over-exuberant fan, leading to his feelings of alienation in the spotlight, which part-inspired the cheerful narrative of The Wall in 1980. Animals is not a bad album, by the way. Part of my musical upbringing, in fact. It has also just been re-released with the usual super-deluxe package of remixes and surround sound goodies. 

But that isn’t, you might be surprised to learn, the point of this post. Animals’ cover art remains distinctive, in the great gallery of 1970s albums, for its depiction of Battersea Power Station with a pig flying above it (geddit?). It was Waters’ idea to use the distinctive Grade II listed building, dating back to the 1930s, as he used to drive past it on the way to his-then Clapham home. Hipgnosis - Floyd cohort Storm Thorgerson and partner Aubrey Powell’s legendary design studio - developed the concept further. With the inflatable pig, Algie, still aloft for a second day’s photography it slipped its moorings and floated off, first interfering with incoming flights to Heathrow Airport before veering south-east to land in Kent. There is a story that Floyd’s management had hired a marksman to take out the pig had it had been necessary, but that he didn’t turn up for that fateful second day of pictures, allowing Algie to escape.

Picture: Battersea Power Station Lrd

Today it is the power station itself, not Algie, that is returning to prominence, with the formal reopening of the complex as a retail, hospitality, residential and office working venue, following a £9 billion, ten-year project to transform the art deco building and its surrounding site. At its peak of operations it supplied a fifth of London’s electricity before being shut down permanently in 1983, laying idle beside the Thames for commuters to glance at out of their train windows as they make their way into Waterloo Station. Various ideas were floated as to what to do with it including, at one point, a plan for Chelsea to build a new stadium on the site, clearly on the opposite bank of the Thames to the club’s Stamford Bridge ground today. 

Picture: Battersea Power Station Ltd

Ten years ago a Malaysian property developer plunged in, launching an ambitious plan to repurpose the distinctive structure - one of Europe’s largest brick buildings - hollowing out the main turbine hall and, over six floors, installing offices (including Apple’s new UK headquarters over six floors), flats, restaurants and shops belonging to brands like Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Nike, Mulberry, Uniqlo, Mango, Superdry and Levi’s. It’s not the first time a sizeable Thameside industrial property has been reborn like this: the former Bankside Power Station in Southwark became the Tate Modern. But thanks to Battersea’s prominence on the London skyline it has, for its 80-odd years, been one of the most recognisable fixtures of the capital’s topography. Helped in no small measure by Pink Floyd, it even worked its way into the celebrations of London’s hosting of the 2012 Olympics.

While it may not be a landmark in the same realm of architectural marvel as the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral or Buckingham Palace, the Malaysian investors clearly saw Battersea’s potential, prompting a daily outlay of £2 million at the height of construction work. When architects WilkinsonEyre got to work in 2012, the main building was lacking a roof and grass was growing on its floor. It was a mouth-watering creative challenge. “We were stunned by the scale of the building,” project director Sebastien Ricard told The Guardian. “We wanted to retain it. We didn’t want to over-restore it.

The mammoth nature of the project also involved extending the London Underground’s Northern Line to a new, dedicated station serving the site. This was key to the project’s evolution, says Simon Murphy, chief executive of the Battersea Power Station Development Company. “Without [the Tube station] we wouldn’t have brought our office occupiers, we wouldn’t have brought the retailers. Neither project could survive without the other.” The station also serves the vast new American embassy less than a mile further along Nine Elms Lane, along with the forest of new residential towers that have sprung up in the area.

So, what can the visitor expect from today? Journalists have compared the reborn power station to a cross between a Westfield shopping mall and the aforementioned Tate Modern, but along with the shops and restaurants there’s a much more on offer, including a cinema and a theatre, a gym and a health club. On 11 November (my birthday folks!) a 1200 square metre ice rink will open in time for the Christmas season. There is even a glass lift that’s been built into one of the power station’s four iconic chimneys, which takes visitors up 109 metres to a 360-degree viewing platform.

Some of the original power station’s original spaces have been cleverly repurposed, such as the art deco Control Room A, which is available to hire for events (and has already been used for the film The King’s Speech), while other features and even machinery of the once-working facility have been kept intact to enhance the industrial appeal of the building. Control Room B has been turned into a very cool bar, making good use of the stainless steel control panels and instrument panels. Elsewhere there are art deco designs and traces of 1950s functional industrial chic.

© Simon Poulter 2022

When my wife and I visited the site in April - with the power station’s main building not yet reopened - it was clear that it was a ‘destination’ in the making. The few riverside cafes already open on the site were still getting used to business. There is, though, already, a sizeable number of people living in the development. “In the past 18 months we’ve sold over £600 million of residential [properties], largely to Brits,” Simon Murphy told journalists, explaining that the first of the entire power station site’s 4,000 homes was occupied in May last year. Filling all of them, with prices starting at just over £800,000, is going to be a challenge given the cost of living crisis, inflation and an expected pressure on the housing market. 

Indeed, as so often is the case with modern developments, there is little at Battersea to address the lack of affordable housing in London, although the developers have promised 386 such homes, representign less than a tenth of the project’s total residential stock. “The number of affordable homes in the plan had to be revised down because of the massive cost of restoration and because the developer was expected to provide the infrastructure,” Patricia Brown of the British Property Federation told the Evening Standard. But, she added: “This project has had so many false dawns. It is a brilliant addition to London and in a few years’ time people will be flocking there.”

A large part of that attraction will be the retailing operation, with the dizzying array of brands moving in. That, though, provides a further challenge to the site’s operator, given the rate of shop closures on our high streets and the looming recession. That said, the developers are hoping to attract up to 30 million visitors a year. It’s a gamble, for sure, but while you can surely question the wisdom of such an ambitious and expensive project - especially through the current economic despair - you do wonder whether a white elephant, and not a giant inflatable pig, has been installed on the Wandsworth stretch of the River Thames.

Picture: PinkFloyd.com

Perhaps prophetically, Pink Floyd returned to Battersea Power Station for the reissue of their album Animals. Designer Aubrey Powell took new shots of the complex, including the cranes of urban development that weren’t there in December 1976 when the original cover art was captured. “With the original album cover being such an iconic piece of stand-alone art, I had the chance to update it, which was a rather daunting task,” Powell said recently, adding that the new photography allowed him to reflect a changing world.“By using modern digital colouring techniques I kept Pink Floyd’s rather bleak message of moral decay using the Orwellian themes of animals, the pig ‘Algie’, faithful to the message of the album.” A somewhat miserable thought, given the regeneration of Battersea Power Station that has been achieved. Roger Waters would surely approve of that sentiment.

A step back in time

© Simon Poulter 2022

In 1978 Genesis had a hit with the love song Follow You, Follow Me, which marked a sea change in their concert clientelle. At a stroke, the band have noted, there were exponentially more women at their gigs. For the previous ten years, they’d been mostly patronised - again in their words - by men wearing army surplus greatcoats and carrying notebooks in which to record their thoughts about the noodly progressive rock they’d come to consume.

From that moment, Genesis would go on to become one of the biggest pop-rock bands in the world, still rooted in the progressive genre, but with shorter, MTV-friendly songs leading their repertoire. Steve Hackett, who until 1977 had been the band’s highly innovative lead guitarist (he invented the ‘tapping’ technique later made famous by Eddie van Halen and numerous other long-haired headbanging axemen), had left to pursue a solo career, just before this transition in the band’s fortunes. And, yet, for those still attached to the band’s arguably most novel era - with Peter Gabriel as its frontman, replete with his costumes, characters and penchant for lyrical theatricality - Hackett continues to keep the flame alive.

© Simon Poulter 2022

Which is why the crowd queuing outside the Eventim Apollo (the venue better known to old heads like me as Hammersmith Odeon), appeared to be 50 year-aged versions of those earnest young men in their army greatcoats. Paunches were in evidence, while some of those who still had hair had it tied in ponytails, despite expanding bald patches. This meant invariably finding yourself standing next to someone looking exactly like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Man. I do say this from a point of smugness at having a full head of hair.

Once inside, however, with the lights down, such cosmetics count for nothing. Hackett and his band - which includes longstanding keyboard stalwart Roger King, second guitarist Amanda Lehmann, bassist Jonas Reingold, flautist/saxophonist Rob Townsend and drummer Craig Blundell - launched into a first half of songs from Hackett’s early solo ventures, such as Ace Of Wands, The Devil’s Cathedral, Spectral Mornings and Every Day. All very good, but it was, I suspect, the second act of the evening that most punters had come to hear - the 1972 Genesis album Foxtrot performed in its entirety.

Being only 5 at the time it came out, I would have missed the original tour for this album, which included Gabriel’s notorious (and, to his bandmates’ surprise) appearance in Dublin wearing a scarlet dress and a fox’s head (a literal representation of the Foxtrot album cover), commencing the costuming that would become the hallmark of his time as Genesis frontman until his departure in 1975. So it would be fair to say that my interest last night at the Apollo/Odeon was to experience something of the magic of an album that, while not changing the band’s financial fortunes, is still held in the hearts of fans as being one of considerable virtuosity, with a still-young band of gifted musicians writing complex songs about complex subjects.

© Simon Poulter 2022

Opening with Watcher Of The Skies, a tribute to an Arthur C. Clarke novel with a bit of Holst’s The Planets thown in, Hackett introduces his vocalist Nad Sylvan, the gloriously eccentric Swedish singer who, vocally sits between Gabriel and his successor, Phil Collins, but despite his long blond Scandi hair and somewhat theatrical mannerisms, blends into the band canvas, rather trying to take centre stage, as Gabriel would have done in 1975. 

Foxtrot’s first side is worked through in sequence, including the prescient social commentary of Get ’Em Out By Friday (a somewhat dystopian Gabriel song about a 70s newtown in which the idea is floated to have residents genetically shortened so that they fit smaller homes in order to build more of them). There is, too, Can-Utility And The Coastliners, a rare early Hackett composition, losely based on the story of King Canute who, you might remember, ordered the sea to be turned back in response to lickspittle sycophancy, something rock bands will know a thing about. 

To replicate the flip from Side 1 to Side 2 of Foxtrot, there is a mini interval, after which Hackett is provided with a classical guitar and a stool. Performing alone, Hackett plays Horizons, a beautiful, baroque instrumental which, in Hammersmith, underlines Hackett’s status as an under-appreciated classical guitarist (he has produced several albums of classical playing, alongside his rock releases). Faithfully following the album’s track listing, it’s a precursor to one of the most adventurous pieces of music any band has ever pulled off: Supper’s Ready. 

No doubt part-inspired - or at least encouraged - by the 16-minute, eight-song closing medley on The Beatles’ Abbey Road, over the course of seven parts Supper’s Ready romps through a variety of time signatures and themes, starting with the ghostly apparition Gabriel claimed to have seen, through the Lewis Carrroll-esque whimsy of Willow Farm, to the epic conclusion of  As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs (Aching Men's Feet), with its biblical reference to “a new Jerusalem”. Perhaps, on the original record, it appeared more as a collection of songs, but hearing the enture 23-minute suite performed live for the first time in my lifetime, there is an added power to the song that not even the rendition on the imperious live album Seconds Out (during the mixing of which Hackett quit the band) captured.

Many, many years ago, for only my second live review for the NME I saw Sade at the Royal Albert Hall, and was struck by the somewhat clinical, sterile recreation of the Diamond Life album that had propelled her to stardum. Live performances work best when there is some reinvention, either to mitigate the inability to recreate complex arrangements created in the studio, or simply to indulge the artist’s whimsy, and introduce some riffing. Hackett has no need for either. With a piece as intricate as Supper’s Ready - and indeed the entire Foxtrot album - there was no need for embelishment.

© Simon Poulter 2022

This applied, too, to Firth Of Fifth, the grandiose epic on Selling England By The Pound that opens with an extended piano solo - played by Tony Banks on the original, and here faithfully and expertly recreated by King - before the song opens out, heading towards its somewhat legendary guitar solo. I once made a tit of myself when interviewing Hackett, in which I told him that, as a 13-year-old, I’d learned to play the solo, note-for-note, on my Spanish guitar. He was suitably unimpressed. It is still one of the greatest rock guitar solos of all time, though usually criminally overlooked by Jimmy Page’s on Stairway To Heaven, or David Gilmour’s on Comfortably Numb.

Solos are, of course, one of the nadirs of rock concerts. This Is Spinal Tap captured the indulgent absurdity of it, and there is a taste of this with an extended bass solo by Reingold earlier in the show. Blundell introduces the final song of the night with an elongated workout on the drums, but I’ll give him that for two reasons: 1) Craig is a thoroughly decent bloke who recorded a video of encouragement for a friend of mine after she was caught up in the 2015 Bataclan attack and took up drumming as a coping mechanism; and 2) Collins and his co-drummers (Chester Thompson and, briefly, Bill Bruford) would perform a drum duet as a prelude to Los Endos, the closing song of the Trick Of The Tail album whenever it was played live. And thus, Los Endos closes the evening with Hackett and Co in all its grandeur.

I’ve often maintained Trick Of The Tail and Wind & Wuthering, the albums that bore Hackett’s final studio contributions to Genesis, are two of the band’s best, bridging the lyrical and musical flights of fancy of the Gabriel era, and predating the pop orientation that Collins, Banks and Mike Rutherford as a trio went for in the 80s. There have been claims that Hackett’s contribution to the band, over the six albums in as many years, has been diminished. Part of this maybe due to the dominance of writing by Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford, and then the perceived commercial success that Collins’ higher profile led to, long after Hackett had left. But listening back to the albums he played on, his guitar work plays a much bigger role in the soundstage than is ever given credit for. 

In Hammersmith last night, we were given a highly enjoyable reminder. His solo material notwithstanding, I suspect the majority of last night’s punters were there for a trip down Memory Lane. And they would have been richly rewarded. Compared to the disappointing final experience of Genesis, earlier this year at London’s O2 Arena, this felt like the real deal. A wallow, yes, but a thoroughly enjoyable, comfort food-for-the-ears indulgence, provided authentically by the original purveyor. 

Opening up the window on the world

Picture: Channel 5/ITN Productions/Jaimie Gramston

Let me share a personal secret with you. Some years ago, while living in Paris, I visited a therapist every other Saturday morning for a while. It was no biggie. There was no personal crisis that led me to those hour-long chats. There were, though, two triggers for seeking a friendly ear: I’d only recently moved to France from the Netherlands, separating from my-then girlfriend in the process. I was in a new and somewhat pressured job, while getting my head around a new town and a new language. I wasn’t struggling - living in Paris had been a long-held aspiration (blame a lot of Inspector Clouseau and Alain Delon films) and I revelled in it, but with a lot to process, and no local friends to unload on (and I wasn’t going to burden my new colleagues with any of this), I needed an outlet. On top of all that, The Sopranos had shown that it was OK to talk about ’stuff’, not that I was trying to equate myself with Tony Soprano, or that I harboured any latent desire for my therapist.

So the point of bearing my soul here is that one of the themes that came up regularly in my hour-long Saturday morning chats in the 20th Arrondissement was ‘escape’. To be clear, I wasn’t looking to escape the very city I’d dreamed of living in, but whenever I looked up and saw a plane above Paris it triggered a form of FOMO. I wanted to be on that plane, going somewhere – anywhere. We never did get to the bottom of this wanderlust, and to be honest, newly single I didn’t do badly for travel. 

Whether business trips to New York and Miami, or private weekends in Milan, Hamburg or back home in London, the Air Miles added up. But when I look back on all of that travel, nothing could be classed as adventurous. Even though a week spent driving Route 66, from Chicago to Los Angeles, was a marathon that took me through states and cities I wouldn’t have otherwise found time for, it was America. Familiarity. Chain hotels and drive-throughs, classic rock on the radio.

I never did find out which branch of pyschotherapy my therapist subscribed to (Freudians and Jungists don’t tend to telegraph their associations) but I’m sure she would have readily concluded that I’m a creature of both habit and familiarity. When it comes to travel, I probably still am. Language, culture and now, thanks to a health condition, food seem to present too many barriers. Which, I know, are all ridiculous reasons not to go somewhere in the modern age, and after centuries of human exploration. 

I genuinely wish I could be more dauntless. Television doesn’t help: I’ll watch Simon Reeve nosing around a Brazilian favela and wonder ‘why couldn’t I do that’? The answer is that, probably, I couldn’t. Television makes it look easy. Even if Reeve has the look of a backpacking student, he’ll be accompanied by a film crew, and probably hired security, interpreters, and that sort of thing. But television, to quote Lord Reith, really does provide a window on the world. The trouble is that, in the midst of all the endless celebrity travelogues, few really do open it. 

The exception is surely Michael Palin. For a comic actor many of us still associate with Monty Python, his travel series - ever since his own version of Around The World In 80 Days in 1989, have been compelling, engaging and truly educational without being preachy. And unlike many comedian-driven travelogues, free of over-wry ‘look at that thing!’ wackiness. From travelling between the North and South poles or encircling the planet’s middle, to the Sahara, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe, Brazil and North Korea, Palin has conducted the journeys most of us would or could never do, either because we don’t have the means, or the inclination.

Picture: ITN Productions/Jaimie Gramston

His latest, Michael Palin: Into Iraq, has done it again. Beneath an undoubted affability, Palin found humanity thriving in a country which has a claim to being the cradle of civilisation, and yet has been scarred by frequent bouts of humankind’s destructiveness. The narrative of Iraq for at least the 30 years since the first Gulf War is that it has been one of the world’s great basket cases, much like Afghanistan. But despite the seemingly perpetual turmoil – war with neighbouring Iran, then the first Gulf War and its sequel, followed by the post-Saddam collapse into tribalism and the rise of ISIS - humanity has prevailed. As Palin showed, Iraq is not a bombed out desert land. Travelling the length of the Tigris, from just over the border in Turkey to Basra, one of those names we now only know for its place in conflict, Palin found Iraq’s beauty, its stunning architecture, the culture that made it the centre of the civilised world at one point in history, and most importantly, its people.

The experience had a profound effect on him: “By the end of March we were back from battle-hardened Iraq having travelled for almost three weeks and seen things, people and places the like of which I’d never seen before in all my travels,” he wrote in a blog post. “The scenes weren’t always happy. Many of them reflected the violence of the past few decades when Iraq was disfigured by war and the threat of war. But we met some souls who’d been through it all and whose resilience was an inspiration.”

Indeed, amongst the still-chaotic administration, and latent dangers that prevail in areas where the Western military is still present, Palin found reassuring normality. The flamboyant tailor in Erbil running up a smart suit, the café society that draws both men and (surprisingly) women out for tea in the evenings, and the children on a bombed out street in Mosul that reduced the normally genial presenter to blurt out “Fuck me!” at their stoicism. In a classroom, eloquent school kids spoke in perfect English of their desire for Iraq to be treated as a ‘normal’ country, like those in Europe. It was a truly levelling moment.

This, though, is still the contemporary narrative, and here’s what drew me in. Palin admits to having been fascinated by Iraq since childhood, when he was given a copy of Arabian Nights. It’s this connection to history – real history – that should spur us into visiting places that might be unfashionable, that don’t have McDonald’s drive-throughs and familiarities, but which may have contributed more to the world than, to quote Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday, “an ’ot dog.”

Palin’s “relentless optimism” in the Iraq series wasn’t meant to airbrush out the turmoil, and it certainly wasn’t a glorified advert for the country’s tourist authority. In one scene he visits the site of the Camp Speicher massacre in 2014, in which 1,500 Iraqi cadets were killed by ISIS. The undoubted gloom of Iraq’s recent past can’t be undone, but Palin showed that, actually, there should be plenty for tourists to come and see for themselves, if they’re willing and able. 

The people, first. Simplistic to say, I know, but they’re not all Kalashnikov-wielding monsters. They are young, aspirational, ambitious, thriving, even. There is wealth and prosperity amid the prevailing dysfunction. I can’t help feeling that it would be nice to contribute to it, as a Western tourist. Perhaps, for now, we have to accept that modest adventures are our limit, and let television be our gateway to more exotic or harder to reach places. One day, though. One day.

It was 60 years ago today...

And so we reach October, which is quite the month for anniversaries. Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Compact Disc making its debut and on the 18th, the BBC will celebrate its centenary. But as individually momentous as they are, next Wednesday sees the 60th anniversary of a brace of events of such stonking cultural significance that it almost sounds greedy that they should have occurred on the same day at almost the same time.

The events in question are the release, on Friday 5 October, 1962, of The Beatles’ debut single, Love Me Do, which preceded by a matter of hours the premiere of Dr. No, the very first ‘official’ James Bond film. While one would spark a musical phenomenon, the other would create cinema’s first global franchise. The lads from Liverpool would become the most revered, progressive band in musical history, while the spy film would establish a brand as recognisable as Coca-Cola and Ford, and would turn the successive actors who played its lead character into some of the world’s biggest film stars. 60 years on, too, they would still be entwined in the same card-carrying, Union Flag-waving symbolism they helped to build, projecting an image of Britain that continues to appeal across generations and nationalities in equal measure. 

But before we get into that, some context: in 1962 Britain was only just emerging from post-war austerity. Cultural life remained somewhat monochrome. Social constipation was a national trait. Two years in, ‘the Sixties’, in all that entails, had yet to happen. Across the Atlantic, a few years previously, Elvis Presley had appeared on TV’s Ed Sullivan Show. 60 million viewers - more than 80% of American TV owners at the time - tuned in. Rock’n’roll had arrived, giving conservatives in the US the heebeegeebees with its hip-swivelling, sexually-charged liberation. Inevitably it found its way to Europe and into the minds of impressionable teenagers looking for a window out of their drab lives. American music entered via port cities like Liverpool and Hamburg, giving hope to evermore emancipated youths that there was more to musical entertainment than beige acts like the Ray Conniff Singers they’d heard on the Light Programme emanating from their parents’ radios.

In the world at large, the peace that had been won at great expense in 1945 was just about holding at the start of the 1960s, although ideology was still the great international division. By the mid-1950s the United States had, with British help, been embroiled in one proxy war (Korea) and by the beginning of the ’60s commenced another (Vietnam). Unbeknownst to much of the world, the Soviet Union began quietly installing nuclear-armed missiles on Cuba over the spring and summer of 1962, leading to 13 days in the middle of October when the world held its breath. 60 miles from the Florida Keys, America faced an existential threat, the world came close to Armageddon. Plus ça change.

So, whichever way you look at it, pop culture had an escapist role to play when The Beatles and Bond arrived on 5 October 1962. To one audience, the lovable Liverpudlian mop-tops suggested that you could be successful, appealing and come from an ordinary background. To the other audience, Ian Fleming’s spy - with his air of sophistication, hand-rolled cigarettes and enviously glamorous lifestyle - was a character that few could emulate for real, but could experience vicariously through his jet-set adventures. 

In the 60 years since their debuts, the legacies of both The Fabs and 007 have endured, albeit over different lengths of time. Bond is now heading for his as-yet untitled 26th outing in the official series; and while The Beatles’ actual recording career lasted only eight years and 12 albums, that the 80-year-old Paul McCartney can headline Glastonbury and the forthcoming reissue of the Revolver album is one of this year’s most eagerly awaited heritage releases, shows that their appeal has not abated.

Even now, there is still more to dissect about The Beatles’ music. Peter Jackson’s acclaimed Get Back documentary provided a fascinating insight into the attempted recording of just one of those albums, shedding light on inter-band dynamics and forensically opening up the remarkable creative processes that all four Fabs contributed to. Likewise, the fascination with Bond never fades: as I blogged about last week, even the faint glimmer of a new film, or the whisper of a new star to play 007, generates a tsunami of newsprint (well, bytes in modern parlance).

Apart from a shared initial and a shared birth, at first glance there is little to materially tie The Beatles and Bond, apart from the magnitude of their cultural impact. But in a fascinating new book, Love And Let Die: Bond, The Beatles And The British Psyche, author John Higgs goes in search of hitherto unidentified ties that loosely bind them. 

It is, says Higgs, a story of “opposing values, visions of Britain, and ideas about male identity,” presenting the clash of working class liberation and establishment control, and its global reach. A pop group and a fictional spy might not warrant comparison at first glance but, Higgs demonstrates, their contrasts are striking. 

There was the north-south divide - The Beatles from working class Liverpool, Bond a figure of the metropolitan south; John, Paul, George and Ringo appealed to women, whereas 007 appealed to men aspiring to be him (even if being a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” is not much of an aspiration). Background, too provided another comparison, given The Beatles’ respective family origins and Bond’s - the half-Scottish, half-Swiss, Eton (briefly)-educated orphan elevated to the rank of Commander in the Royal Navy.

There are more tenuous connections that Higgs points out: when The Beatles went to Hamburg in 1960 to commence their apprenticeship on the-then sleazy Reeperbahn, John Lennon’s aunt Mimi and Paul McCartney’s dad expressed concern about what their young lads would be exposed to. Higgs discovers that just before they left for the Germany, Bond author Ian Fleming wrote a piece for the Sunday Times which went into some detail as to the sort of ‘entertainment’ visitors to Hamburg might encounter, including local girls “for sale at a price, I am reliably informed, of twenty Reichsmarks”. If they’d have read it, it’s unlikely that Paul and John’s respective guardians would have approved of their travel.

Higgs finds further connections: The Beatles’ second feature film, Help!, had a quasi-spy theme running behind it, and was clearly influenced by the three Bond films that had appeared by the time it came out in 1965. In 1971 McCartney’s Wings provided one of the Bond series’ best theme tunes, in Live And Let Die. And, even, Ringo Starr would eventually marry Barbara Bach, who played Roger Moore’s Russian rival-come-lover in The Spy Who Loved Me. While these are more coincidence than anything else, Higgs’ main thesis is how, over the last 60 years, The Beatles and Bond have consistently overlapped themselves unwittingly.

And then there’s their enduring role in projecting Britain as vividly as any red telephone box or guard on duty outside Buckingham Palace. No wonder Bond and The Beatles featured in the London 2012 Olympics, arguably one of the finest and proudest jubilees of British culture in a generation. 

After she died, Queen Elizabeth II was frequently referred to in terms of the ‘soft power’ she delivered for Britain. The nation’s arts should be considered in a similar vein. “The British are coming!” declared Colin Welland when he received his Academy Award for Chariots Of Fire in 1982, and they’ve kept coming ever since. British bands continue to compete equally with American for dominance of the music world, while Britain now more than holds its own against Hollywood for film and television production. 

The Beatles may have broken up and, sadly, prematurely reduced by half by, respectively, murder and cancer, but they generate to this day an excitement, interest and reverence experienced by few of their original contemporaries. Bond, equally, is still the most talked about property in cinema. It’s no understatement to say that there is very little of anything from 60 years ago that continues to create expectations and still exceeds them as these two phenomena, six decades after their arrival..