The children of the 21st century are still listening to The Beatles

It’s more than half a century since The Beatles broke up, 43 years since John Lennon was murdered, and almost 22 since George Harrison passed to the next world, but in that time the Fab industry has been relentless, respectfully - mostly - but efficiently mining a legacy generated in those ten years between 1960 and 1970 when they were originally making music together.

Next Thursday we’ll get to hear what has been pitched as the band’s “final” recording with the release of Now And Then, an apparently lost demo that Lennon recorded onto a cassette at home in New York in 1977. In 1994, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono gave the tape to then-surviving Beatles Paul McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr, who were able to recover their bandmate’s voice from other demos, add their own and instruments, and release the songs Free As A Bird and Real Love as singles in 1995 and 1996, part of The Beatles Anthology project. 

Now And Then was also on the tape, but technical limitations at the time prevented Lennon’s vocals from being adequately recovered. But now, using the same AI technology Peter Jackson used to isolate dialogue in Get Back, his epic 2021 documentary series about the making of the Let It Be album, it will be released next week as “the last Beatles song”. It features Lennon’s original vocals from the tape, along with guitar added by Harrison in 1995 (before the project was abandoned in the belief that the track was unsalvageable). Last year, Starr recorded the drums with McCartney adding bass, guitar and piano. String arrangements from Eleanor Rigby, Because and Here, There And Everywhere were worked into the mix. 

The finished track will be officially made public next Thursday, with a full release on Friday. A 12-minute film - Now And Then - The Last Beatles Song - will premiere on The Beatles’ YouTube channel on Wednesday, telling the story of how the single came about.

There had been rumours for a while of an unreleased Beatles song coming out, and a rough version of Now And Then was said to be available online, but next week’s official release of the single commences a new wave of commercial activity for the Fabs, which will see fifth - and expanded - reissues of the legendary ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Beatles compilation albums, respectively covering 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, going on sale on 10 November (handily the day before my birthday... 😉). 

Originally released in April 1973, the new, improved and expanded editions of the albums will include Now And Then and comprise various packages, including a six-LP 180g vinyl option and a four-CD version. All 75 songs have been newly remixed in stereo by Giles (son of George) Martin and Sam Okell at Abbey Road using the ‘de-mixing’ technology used for the recent reissues of individual Beatles albums. Of course, with the exception of Now And Then, everything on the two albums will already reside in most Beatle fans’ record collections, but that won’t stop them being acquired again for some 35 extra tracks not included in previous releases, with greater inclusion from the Revolver, ‘White’, Abbey Road and Let It Be albums.

Of course, this is another cash grab by a band that, despite existing for that relatively brief ten-year period, and disbanding more than half a century ago, has become one of the most enduring franchises in entertainment. Which isn’t all that new: in 1964, their canny then-manager, Brian Epstein, negotiated a $10,000 fee for the band to make three appearances on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show. Even in 1964, that wasn’t a particularly large sum of money, but Epstein’s deal ensured that their US TV debut was seen by a record 73 million viewers, giving the band unprecedented commercial exposure and launching the ‘British Invasion’, from which they profited handsomely (though, you could argue, costing John Lennon his life just 16 years later).

Interviewed by CNBC a few years ago, former Philadelphia news anchor Larry Kane, who covered The Beatles on their 1964 and 1965 US tours, said the band could never have imagined how long - or how lucrative - their careers would turn out to be. “It was always a big question for them: when was the bubble going to burst? I don’t think they had any idea it would go on like this. I asked Brian Epstein in 1964 how long it would last. He said ‘Larry, the children of the 21st century will be listening to the Beatles.’ He was right.”

Experts will attribute this longevity to the fact that The Beatles were, to use marketingspeak, ‘first movers’, establishing their brand in a way matched only by the Rolling Stones. Following that Ed Sullivan debut, Gretsch and Rickenbacker guitars, as used by the band, flew out of American musical instrument shops, the start of an entire industry in replica Beatle ‘mop top’ wigs, collarless suits, Yellow Submarine toys - you name it. Now, however, we’re well used to bands manufactured for pure profit, but even if, in hindsight, The Beatles were the marketeer’s dream back in October 1962 when Love Me Do came out - four clean-cut young lads from working class Liverpool, singing simple songs about romance. When billboards started appearing in America saying “The Beatles are coming”,  a commercial phenomenon as powerful as Coca-Cola, Ford or McDonalds was about to be unleashed.

63 years after the group’s formation in Liverpool, global Beatlemania has never bitten the dust. The relentless re-releases, compilation albums, physical and multimedia projects and even the incredible Cirque du Soleil Love show in Las Vegas have not only kept the legacy alive, but the tills making money. In fact, taken as a whole, The Beatles’ financial impact continues to eclipse anything or anyone else the music industry has ever produced, with McCartney, Starr, and the estates of Lennon and Harrison, together with The Beatles’ holding company, finding myriad opportunities to leverage the Fab brand that were never available to the band when they were formally together.

The Beatles continue to be the biggest selling music act of all time. Data a decade ago put their total worldwide album sales at more than 600 million (177 million alone in the US, with Elvis Presley behind them on 135 million). Even in 1964 they made the equivalent of $188 million. Paul McCartney is today worth around £650 million, with Ringo Starr worth £247 million, by default making him the world’s wealthiest drummer (though compare this with Taylor Swift who, according to a Bloomberg report yesterday, has just become America’s first billionaire pop star by value).

It was, though, business that contributed to The Beatles’ original collapse as a band: Epstein’s death from an overdose in 1967 let to the organisation behind them entering a tailspin, even if the creativity relented. The year before, the exhausted band had famously given up touring in order to focus on the quality of their music, much to Epstein’s annoyance, who saw them cutting off their noses to spite their commercial teeth. 

Following his death, they lacked the business acumen to manage their finances. The Magical Mystery Tour film was a whimsically distracting box office dud, while the loss-making Apple Boutique took the quartet further into internecine sensitivity (Abbey Road’s You Never Give Me Your Money could well have been a boardroom comment). The looming denouement would come to a head in September 1969 when Lennon informed McCartney and Starr, amid discussions with businessman Allen Klein over renegotiating the band’s contract with EMI, that he was leaving. Just not straightaway. The following April, McCartney counter-announced that he was going to leave. Such discord, of course, is now long forgotten.

“It was the closest we’ll ever come to having [John] back in the room so it was very emotional for all of us,” the now 83-year-old Ringo Starr told journalists about their work on Now And Then. “It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.” McCartney - still considered by many The Beatle who broke up the band - was equally as emotional: “There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” he said of the AI-rendered production. “And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”

The world will have to wait until next Thursday to hear the song and judge for themselves whether it is a worthy addition to the Beatles canon, or just a sentimental paragraph in their lengthy history. It is, though, a history that shows little sign of ending. “Kids are listening today who never have seen Paul or me, they're into the music,” Ringo Starr  told USA Today a decade ago, and he’s still right. “The thing I’m most proud of is the music, not the haircuts. The music is it. That's what will last.”

He’s right. Contrarians will readily say that so-called ‘legacy’ acts like The Beatles are holding up the production line of new music, but I would counter by saying that their music is timeless and artistically classic. Shakespeare may have written his last play 400 years ago, but his work is as relevant and loved today as it was then. Perhaps pretentiously, I’d say The Beatles should be given the same consideration.

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. 

Getting back to when they really were Fab

At risk of appearing late to the party, I’ve finally found the time to consume all eight hours or so of Peter Jackson’s sumptuous Beatlesfest, Get Back. You’ve surely heard about it by now: the first part appeared on Disney+ last Thursday, with parts 2 and 3 released progressively over subsequent days, and given its collective length it’s been quite a challenge to find so much time to indulge it. 

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m not trying to confect an image of a busy urban sophisticate with little room for frivolities like a mammoth documentary about a pop band, but you find anyone with so many spare hours with which to sit exhaustively through as much 52-year-old footage of musicians sitting around smoking and strumming. 

That last statement, however, fundamentally misses the point of Jackson’s incredible project. It also brushes aside the justifiable deification of the four musicians themselves, but I’ll get to that later. Because Get Back transcends any experience or expectation you may have of a music documentary. It is more than a biopic, more than a concert film, more than a retrospective. It is, perhaps inadvertently, a near-forensic examination of a band, but conducted through the narrowest of apertures - just 29 days in January 1969. 

To this end, it is no more than a blood sample drawn over the course of one month in the entire lifetime of The Beatles, so it shouldn’t be construed as an attempt to tell their story in its entirety. It's like carbon dating an oak tree by a tiny sample of one of its rings. But in capturing even a brief window of time in The Beatles' history, Get Back depicts the state of a band that would, officially, split up just 15 months after Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot the original footage, 56 hours of which have been distilled by Jackson down to the eight.

From one angle, it depicts the mundanity of life in a band (there are plenty of shots of Ringo Starr watching on while John Lennon and Paul McCartney finesse a new song, reflecting the famous Charlie Watts quote about life as the Rolling Stones’ drummer comprising of five years’ work and 20 years spent hanging around). From another angle, Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras capture the dynamics between the quartet. There is the still-symbiotic relationship between Lennon and McCartney, with one scene depicting them discussing leadership of the group, the seemingly unspoken hierarchy that relegated the younger George Harrison to a lesser writing role, and the older Starr to, at times, merely making up the numbers (which isn't true, but there goes another well established Beatle trope).

In this mix we see Yoko Ono, rarely not at Lennon’s side, and studio visits from Linda (Eastman, as was) and a delightful cameo from her daughter Heather. Maureen Starkey and Pattie Boyd, then wives of Ringo and George, also make appearances. They provide, somewhat, glimpses of normality, of domestic maturity in stark contrast to the screaming adulation that met the formerly fresh-faced Mop Tops with their cherubic smiles, bum freezer suits and polite bowing after each number. Now, they’d become shaggy-haired men in the second half of their 20s (Lennon was 29 at the time), with kids and a collective business interest, Just seven years separate these two images.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In case you’ve missed the memo, or have been self-isolating to hermit-level media avoidance, the premise of Get Back is that it depicts the band supposedly writing, rehearsing and recording what was meant to be their eleventh studio album, while - perhaps not explicitly - opening themselves up to the possibility of live performance again. It opens on 2 January 1969 with the band assembling at Twickenham Film Studios where, on a chilly, cavernous 7,500 square-foot sound stage (the same space where they had earlier made Help! and A Hard Day’s Night) they sit in a semi-circle and attempt composition in a ‘live‘ setting. But the atmosphere appears febrile, not helped by the cold of the studio, with Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras and microphones picking up every comment, every sideways glance, with unrestricted access.

To some extent, the exercise was envisaged as a tentative return to the live performances they’d given up at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966. That had left them jaded, but the net result was that concentrating on work as a studio band alone focused The Beatles on what is now considered their most creative, free-wheeling phase, which led to the critical high of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the childishly enjoyable Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, their retreat to India, the supposed ‘grown-up’ step of forming Apple Corps, and then the eclectic brilliance of The Beatles, better known as ‘the White Album’.

As Get Back captures, Twickenham proved to be unfulfilling, even if there is oodles of output (and embryonic snippets of songs that would eventually find their way into solo repertoires, such such as Lennon’s Jealous Guy and Harrison’s All Things Must Pass). However, Twickenham established the principle of returning to a more stripped-back rock sound, with a simpler set-up in the film studio - Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sat in a semi-circle, Starr completing the arrangement, with guitars plugged into amps. No embellishments. But, as transpires, there’s an uneasy vibe, which culminates in Harrison standing up and declaring “I’m leaving the band,” and walking out muttering “I’ll see you in the clubs.”. The remaining Beatles respond by going for lunch. “We may as well get in Clapton,” jokes Lennon uneasily as they return to work, unwittingly and ironically referencing the-then hottest British guitarist who would eventually fall in love with, and marry, Harrison’s wife Boyd. 

Productivity shifts up a gear when they leave south-west London and reconvene in Mayfair, in the basement studio of 3 Savile Row, their ‘corporate’ headquarters. Harrison returns (Savile Row was his condition for doing so, along with the inspired addition of augmenting their sound with keyboard player Billy Preston, who not only relieves any residual internecine tension, but adds soul to the music, giving it a looser feel).

That, then, is ultimately what Get Back is about: the music. Before our very eyes, we get a unique insight into the gestation of what would much later become the Let It Be album. We see and hear McCartney inadvertently strum the opening chords to the song Get Back on his iconic Hofner Violin bass, and he and Paul spar gently over various attempts to arrive at the line “Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner…”. But what’s even more remarkable is that we are ultimately watching something of a failure. Even after the work at Savile Row had ended, the album ended up on the back burner, and here might lie the source of the popular belief that it was a process beset by acrimony.

Much myth and falsehood has been generated about The Beatles’ demise. Even now, Fabologists debate the sequence of events and who said what to whom during the denouement. There is, though, little-to-no traces of true discord in Get Back. If anything, it depicts the dull normality of life in a band making records. No wild and crazy drug and booze-fuelled sessions - just endless cigarettes, and copious trays of tea and toast. Band members turn up for work in the morning, break for lunch, go home in the evening. They chat, they joke, they play endless arrangements of their songs, adopting Goon-like funny voices (Peter Sellers makes an awkward appearance in the Twickenham scenes) and lark about with much the same banter you find in any office. There are tedious repeat attempts at playing songs, with arrangements being tweaked and phrasing adjusted, interspersed with impromptu jams of rock’n’roll standards like Twenty Flight Rock and the ribald Liverpudlian folk song Maggie Mae. Even when looks are cast at each other, the body language suggests nothing more sinister than the mild irritation of disagreeing with a colleague over how a PowerPoint presentation might be structured.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In fact, amid the clouds of cigarette smoke, the Fabs looked like they were having fun. Towards the end we see the infamous rooftop concert, staged at 3 Savile Row in lieu of an earlier plan to perform the new songs at an open -air show on Primrose Hill. The performance is, notoriously, interrupted by fun-free PCs Ray Dagg and Ray Shayler (other christian names were available in the 1960s to Met officers…) from West End Central nick to shut down what a couple of local numptys had branded a breach of the peace. It marks the end of The Beatles as a performing entity, but you can see in that footage of them, carefree and taking them back to Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller and Liverpool’s Cavern almost a decade before.

If there were cracks, Get Back doesn’t really depict them. But something was up. Glyn Johns was given the task of assembling the album from the combined Twickenham/Savile Row sessions, but things started unravelling. The album was abandoned (although the single Get Back was released in April 1969). Four weeks after the rooftop concert the band reconvened at Abbey Road, to make the record that would take that studio’s name. In the orthodox chronology, Abbey Road became the final album to be recorded by The Beatles, but the product of their work in January 1969 would eventually be released in May 1970, nominally one month after McCartney had declared himself out of the band. To boot, the tapes Johns had worked on had been handed over to Phil Spector to ‘re-produce’, adding elements that McCartney would eventually strip out with the Let It Be…Naked album released in 2003. Some - me especially - will maintain that it’s the better album as a result.

There is, though, probably more to The Beatles’ end story than Jackson’s epic captures. John Lennon, for example, had brought in the New York businessmen Allen Klein to manage the band’s affairs, against McCartney’s knowledge. Klein gets no attention in Get Back, which leads to some suspicion of Apple Corps’ creative control over the project. Then again, Get Back is not about the break-up of The Beatles. either. Ultimately, it’s a snapshot (albeit a gargantuan one) of 29 days in January 1966 when the Fabs got together and produced music of a richness and longevity that can be enjoyed almost as new today. We get to appreciate, through raw, unedited scenes, unencumbered by voiceovers or cutaway interviews, just what John, Paul, George and Ringo brought individually to the band, arguably dispelling some of the convenient, cartoon-like tropes that we’ve conditioned into accepting down the years. That Lennon was the caustic rocker, that McCartney was the benign, anointed one, that Harrison was the ‘Quiet One’ with the uncanny gift for song, and that Starr was that drummer’s cliche, the class clown who sat at the back and didn’t get involved. 

Get Back shows them all in a much more engaging light: Lennon was cool and surprisingly warmer than we’d expected (his interaction with the young Heather McCartney is delightful, as is Ringo’s). McCartney was and is blessed with a unique ear for melody that comes out with The Long And Winding Road and his improvised Get Back riff. You see how Harrison contributed far more than the few songs that made it onto the albums, but you also see a somewhat diffident soul. Starr was (and could still be) a remarkably exquisite drummer, capable of fills and improvisation equally as good as the more lauded tub thumpers of the rock era.

“We only think we know The Beatles,” director Peter Jackson recently told Uncut magazine while discussing the project. “We’ve seen A Hard Day’s Night and Help! We’ve seen them perform on stage in The Cavern [Club] and Shea Stadium. We’ve seen interviews or press conferences. When you think about it, those are all performance situations.” Get Back, he says, presents things differently. “When they don’t know they’re being filmed you are getting a 100 percent pure look at the real guys, which doesn’t really exist on film, particularly, anywhere else.”

Pictures: Twitter/@TheBeatles

Ultimately, Get Back is a masterclass in music making. The Beatles are or were musical deities, and over the 29 days Jackson has condensed into his film, even the most seasoned fan will come to appreciate their music even more. I won’t, though, leave it just there. Because the other thing about Get Back is that it shines a light on the accelerated timeline that The Beatles’ career ran on. When they walked into Twickenham Film Studios on the second day of January in 1969 it was less than seven years since Love Me Do. Seven years. Don’t know about you, but I wasn’t all that different in 2014 to how I am now. But in October 1962, The Beatles’ music, their haircuts, their suits, everything was in stark contrast to the beards, long hair and maturity of the men seen approaching their 30s in 1969. 

Paul McCartney and his daughter Mary at the London premiere of Get Back
Picture: Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Disney 

Stretch their timeline to its full extent, and just ten years, more or less, separates their formation in August 1960 and McCartney’s announcement in April 1970. Ten years in which they evolved from chirpy beat poppers into prototypical rock stars, a transition that, arguably, enveloped the most remarkable library of popular music that the genre has ever experienced.

51 years on, we’re getting to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, what a band of brothers The Beatles were. You could argue “So what?”. Five times more years have elapsed since they split up as they were together. But the influence The Beatles have still today is almost immeasurable. Some misanthropes will still dismiss them as purveyors of children’s songs, but in the grand scheme of things, their body of work remains beyond comparison with anything past, present and, probably, future. Get Back is not the key to understanding that bold statement, but over eight utterly engrossing, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck hours, it goes a long way to reinforcing it.

The Beatles: Get Back is streaming now on Disney+

Imagine Lennon at 80

Picture: Iain Macmillan/Yoko Ono

Today would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday, which would have been a curious prospect at the best of times. The thought of him today, in the age of Trump, coronavirus, Twitter and any one of the myriad cultural earthquakes since his murder on 9th December, 1980, is somewhat mouth-watering to consider, and mind-boggling at the same time.

The most startling reality, however, is that it is indeed almost 40 years since Lennon was taken from us, three months after his 40th birthday, by psychotic fan Mark David Chapman who shot the Beatle four times in the back, outside his Dakota Building apartment in New York. Plenty of our greatest rock and pop icons have been taken too soon - no need here to reel off membership of The 27 Club - but with no disrespect to, say Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix - Lennon was out there in an echelon of his own. Being one of The Beatles, alone, made him a deity: even if you disregard his arguably patchy post-Fab solo career, the body of work Lennon contributed to in just the briefest window of time that he, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were a creative entity transcends almost any other recording act I can think of. A grand statement, I know, but sometimes consideration of their contribution to music history is so awe-inspiring that it can make your head spin. That's not to say that anyone else isn't good. It's just that very little comes close, whatever your viewpoint or degree of objectivity.

The tragedy, here, is that in terms of time, Lennon would only live a further ten years after the breakup of The Beatles. Ten years. Some artists go that long without releasing anything. He would, though, like all three of his former bandmates, continue to be productive, producing the albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, Some Time In New York City, Mind Games, Walls And Bridges, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Double Fantasy (the posthumous Milk And Honey was released in 1984). Each contained no shortage of memorable (if slightly derivative) songs like Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) and the perennial festive hit Happy Xmas (War Is Over). These can all be reassessed today with the release of Gimme Some Truth, a sumptuous, reissued greatest hits selection which now contains multichannel, high-definition remixes of Lennon's best solo work, from Jealous Guy to the withering, McCartney-targeted How Do You Sleep?, as well as rockers like Whatever Gets You Thru The Night (featuring Elton John) and one of my all-time favourite Lennon solo pieces, Watching The Wheels.

The conventional wisdom, such is the perennial journalistic need for competitive comparison, is that the post-Beatles creative spoils were shared by McCartney and Harrison (let's leave poor old Ringo alone), and that even as a foursome, the sum of the parts was never greater than the whole. But that belies the truth that revolutions generally only happen once. The legacy of that whole is immeasurable, given how much of music since 1970 still owes a debt of gratitude to what the Fabs delivered in the eight years between Please Please Me and Let It Be. Lennon's own legacy becomes, often, complicated by his personality, his passions, his interests. And that makes contemplating how he would have spent the last 40 years such a head-shrinkingly impossible task.

One thing is for certain, and that is that he wouldn't have been able to escape his former band. Just as McCartney and Starr, today, and Harrison until his death in 2001, can't (or shouldn't) escape the its shadow, it would have been interesting to think of how Lennon would have dealt with The Beatles never-ending tail. The wide hypothesis is that a reunion, of sorts, would have taken place, perhaps at Live Aid, though this is not a forgone conclusion. Led Zeppelin have had vast sums of money dangled before them to reform, but Robert Plant, mainly, has not given in. Likewise Pink Floyd - with Roger Waters - reformed for Live 8, but with Richard Wright's demise, and little signs of Waters and David Gilmour's frosty relations warming up, that ship has probably sailed. McCartney and Starr have reunited regularly, usually at all-star charity events, but it's not quite the same. Not that McCartney hasn't sat still, creatively, which makes you wonder what it would have been like for him and Lennon to have returned to writing together, even as they reached their respective dotages.

By the time Lennon was giving his final interviews in 1980, seemingly more contented with life, living with Yoko in New York, there appeared to be a mellowing. While traces of his acerbic, sometimes cruel wit remained, you could imagine an eventual reparation in his relationship with McCartney. He is, though, unlikely to have eased up on the social injustices that fired him so. Even at 80, he would have a point of view about the environment and Black Lives Matter. He would have opposed both Gulf Wars. He would still be maintaining that we should give peace a chance. It would have been fascinating to hear his thoughts on the death of his great friend and fellow-adopted New Yorker, David Bowie. Conceivably they would have worked together several times beyond their collaboration on Bowie's Young Americans album and the hit Fame in particular. The pair first met at a party in Los Angeles in 1974, and hit it off. Bowie revealed in 1995 that he thought they'd be "buddies forever", drawn to a similar sense of humour as much as anything else, though strangely they had differing views on each other's work ("I asked [John] what he thought of what I was doing, glam rock, and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s great, but it’s just rock and roll with lipstick on’.").

Lennon was, in Bowie's view, "probably one of the brightest, quickest-witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life," qualifying the statement with: “Socialist in its true definition, not in fabricated political sense, a real humanist." In the same interview, Bowie - of all people - nailed what it was that kept the Beatles' legacy in universal consciousness. "They gave the British the illusion we meant something again and we love hearing that, boy do we love hearing that.”

Like Bowie, it's probable that Lennon's career would have dipped in the 1980s and early 1990s. Even with the patronage of upstarts like Liam Gallagher, with his allusions of being Lennon himself (even naming his son by Patsy Kensit after the Beatle), the creative fires within are unlikely to have dimmed. Contemporaries, like Paul Simon, for example, have continued to produce intelligent while hardly radical music long into their 70s. McCartney himself is still making albums which, but comparison with younger, lesser acolytes, are still on their game. The flames of anger, too, would continue to flicker, just as Roger Waters continues to rail at pet causes.

The most obvious touchstone here are the Rolling Stones. In the 60s it was a binary choice between them and their Fab rivals (which, like most battles in pop was entirely confected, and they were all, actually, good friends). But whereas The Beatles came to a halt, the Stones have rolled on, doing their thing and doing it well. They still hold the title "Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band In The World" with aplomb, and with little sign of relinquishing it, even as their eighth decades on this planet beckon.

And that's a good place to leave this. John Winston Ono Lennon was, from the outset, a rock and roller: "I only liked simple rock and nothing else," he told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in an interview published in his book Lennon Remembers. Rock and roll - even at its most essential, with Little Richard screaming "a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!" - was, for Lennon, a vessel that got directly to the point.  It's quite possible, that at 80, he'd be still getting directly to the point on many things.

Sunset boulevard - Paul Weller’s West Coast album

You know, it's actually become boring to talk about Paul Weller’s rich vein of form. Because, for a purple patch, it's been going on a mighty long time. His 15th solo studio album, On Sunset, continues an output that has averaged an album every two or three years since his self-titled solo debut, incredibly, 28 years ago. It's a rate that puts most of his contemporaries - even an Elvis Costello - to shame. Much, I suspect, has to do with the restless spirit that has always charged Weller’s creativity, not just in having something to say, but also a yearning to try something new each time, dipping a quill into the different shades of ink from which the now 62-year-old has drawn his influences.

On Sunset marks another change of course, veering from the reflective, folky vibe of 2018's pastoral True Meanings, to a decidedly sunny, open-topped outing. As the title might allude, it’s an excursion into the blue skies and free'n'easy living of 1970s Los Angeles: effortlessly cool, intriguing by turns, melodically pleasing and incongruously soulful for an album crafted in deepest Surrey (Weller’s work-from-home location, Black Barn Studios in the village of Ripley - Eric Clapton's birthplace).

“Everybody likes a good tune, regardless how it’s dressed up,” Weller told GQ’s Dylan Jones recently. “Luckily, melody comes relatively easy to me – it’s a very natural part of the writing process. You’re often trying to find new ways of saying the same thing, but I can always rely on melody to see me through.” And thus it proves, with 10 tracks (15 if you buy the ‘deluxe edition’) of joyous songcraft, most making authentic nods to the '70s soul and R&B influences that, like the more orthodox mod traces of The Who and Small Faces, have fed Weller’s musical subconscious.

Perhaps, most surprising, is the unabashed West Coast association. The likes of Down In A Tube Station At Midnight and Stanley Road may have given the wrong impression of a narrow, Anglo-centric scope, but a visit last year to his son in Los Angeles brought about a reawakening to the City of Angels. “I stayed at this funny little hotel just off the Strip [Sunset Boulevard],” Weller told Jones, “and while I’ve been to LA a lot, I hadn’t spent any time on the Strip for years and so it all came rushing back – the Sunset Marquis, the Rainbow... I couldn’t believe how quickly everything had gone. I love the West Coast: not the psychedelic Grateful Dead but The Beach Boys, especially the later period. Be warned, though, this isn’t my West Coast record.” That’s as maybe, but from the cover art to the title, and from the title track’s strings, lusciously arranged by Game Of Thrones composer Hannah Peel (and with an ebbing seashore sound effect in the outro), to it’s references to palm trees, the warm breeze and drinks “in the Whiskey” [A-Go-Go] (with an unashamed touch of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord in the intro), it’s as West Coast as Steely Dan’s Hey Nineteen. And that’s no bad thing.

It might be corny to suggest, but the warmth I know, love and, frankly, miss about California - the endless days of sultry sunshine and freshening winds blowing off the Pacific - is present throughout this record. Written and recorded before the lockdown, it nevertheless exudes freedom. The kind of freedom you get from cruising through the Santa Monica Mountains in a vintage '70s Pontiac convertible, as Weller appears to be doing in the album’s artwork. It’s there in the woozy funk of the album’s seven-minute opener Mirror Ball, with its nods to the Isleys' Summer Breeze. It’s there in the wistful thoughts of Old Father Tyme, which presciently - pre-COVID - makes the statement: “In this time of confusion, hang on to what is real. Hail the love around us, see how deep it feels.”

The contemplative frame of mind that Weller has attached to his work of late is patently age related. Though not obvious, the death of his father John - who’d managed his son’s career from the beginning (instilling in him the relentless work ethic) - might still bear presence. Certainly he is not afraid of his past, both in re-signing to Polydor, the label Weller Sr. helped sign The Jam to in 1977, but also in drawing on the organ talents of former fellow Style Councillor Mick Talbot, who appears on Baptiste and Village. Earth Beat, while we’re at it, swings like the Council’s Speak Like A Child, with the giddiness of pristine ’80s pop wrapped in modern sonics. Nor is he afraid of casting out widely into his vast pool of historic reference, calling on Slade’s Jim Lea to provide a rakish violin to Equanimity, one of several Beatley tracks which include the acoustic guitar-driven melancholic beauty, Rockets (featuring some pristine bass work by Andy Crofts).

Picture: Lee Cogswell

Looking back over the last fourteen Weller solo albums, it’s hard to truly find any which waste your time. In fact, looking at the bigger picture, most conform to an unbelievably high standard. He’ll probably hate this, but I don’t think Paul Weller ever gets enough credit. Some, lazily, still think of him as the angry young man, of Red Wedge, of Town Called Malice or ‘A’ Bomb In Wardour Street. Others go to the Paris Match posing of The Style Council. All of which were a long Weller time ago. “You’ve got to keep your tools sharp,” he told GQ. “The world is full of people who made great records and then tailed off, but maybe I care more now because I wasn’t as good as they were when I started. With me it’s probably worked in reverse, but there are still some great performers who are doing great work. The things Robert Plant has been doing have been really, really good; I’ve seen Macca and The Stones play live recently and both were absolutely brilliant.”

Frankly, he should be held in the same reverence. It might be tempting to think that On Sunset points to a career winding down, but with Album 16 already on the sketch pad, Paul Weller is showing no signs of his 28-year purple patch ending any time soon. Even if, for me, On Sunset is an absolute career high. Maybe, even his best to date.

Guilty as charged: Jeff Lynne’s ELO at the O2 Arena

Picture: Jeff Lynne/Carsten Windhorst

Being, obviously, a metropolitan elitist, I’ve never fully understood those cultish British provincial practices like line dancing. Quite what makes folk living in, say, Droitwich want to dress up as farming types from the great American frontier before driving home in a Vauxhall Astra is genuinely baffling. But, then, this is clearly a somewhat snobbish statement on, basically, people having fun. Same goes for those who dress - still - as teddy boys, mods, rockers, headbangers or any other sub-culture deemed uncool by tastemakers. They’re having fun, it’s harmless and most of these pastimes are, at heart, celebrations of music. I defy all but the most curmudgeonly to not go to a party and singalong to classic pop, to Hey Jude or Club Tropicana or, I don’t know, you name it, so these purveyors of guilty pleasures are entitled to knock themselves out to whatever is their thing.

If I was to be a little critical, the problem with patronising a music cult is that they are, for the most part, self-satisfying and comforting. You want to hear the hits that made the genre your own, you want to test your ageing memory by singing along (or, in that tradition of Dad participating, at least mumbling along to an approximation). Thus, the entire reason we were at the O2 Arena last night was for Jeff Lynne’s ELO to deliver an hour-and-a-half of the familiar. Nothing else. No “here’s a suite of thematically-linked songs from our new album”. No thank you. Such is our affinity with Lynne’s ELO work that I could have just posted the set list here and you'd get a pretty good idea of the evening. No shocks, no surprises, and not much experimentation, either. This was, as Lynne’s musical director/guitarist Mike Stevens explained during the band introductions, “a celebration of the man who wrote all the songs, Jeff Lynne”.

You will notice that this was “Jeff Lynne’s ELO”, not “Jeff Lynne” or “ELO”. Legalities, no doubt, have played a part here. The ‘classic’ ELO line-up of Lynne, Bev Bevan, Richard Tandy, Kelly Groucutt, Mik Kaminski and others is long gone. But, then, after Roy Wood left the band at its outset, it largely became Lynne’s own entity. Lynne himself has always been something of a musical brand in his own right, with his writing and production for ELO almost indistinguishable from his production work with the surviving Beatles or The Travelling Wilburys. This is underlined by the latter’s Handle With Care being seamlessly segwayed between ELO’s Livin’ Thing and Rockaria!, and Do Ya from Lynne and Roy Wood’s ELO predecessor The Move the sandwich filling between Showdown and When I Was A Boy.

For the most part, this was an extended version of the Glastonbury heritage slot, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Even the snippiest of Glasto patrons have lapped up sets from Barry Gibb or Nile Rogers’ Chic, putting cynicism and even irony aside to just have a good old singalong. And so Lynne’s extraordinary history of hits kept coming: Evil Woman, All Over The World, Last Train To London (somewhat inappropriate yesterday if you’d been trying to get to Paddington…), a particularly rocky 10538 Overture (with that guitar riff shamelessly plundered by Paul Weller on Changingman), Shine A Little Love, Wild West Hero, Sweet Talkin' Woman, Telephone Line, Don't Bring Me Down, Turn To Stone… Of course, this was about nostalgia - these were songs from mid-70s albums like Eldorado, A New World Record, Out Of The Blue and Discovery that were part of my musical upbringing. ELO were, then, a band lumped in with prog giants of the time like Genesis, perhaps due to their conceptual album artwork but also because they were pretty unique. Even now, thinking about last night’s show, I can’t think of another rock band to combine orchestral instruments, 4/4 disco, Beatley melodies and rock and roll traditions and not come out like some awful end-of-pier novelty act. Perhaps that is, then the absolute definition of 'guilty pleasure'.

If there’s one ELO song that captures that phrase perfectly, it’s Mr. Blue Sky, the closest Lynne ever got to recreating Sgt. Pepper. Frankly, I would have paid to hear Mr. Blue Sky alone. I’m not ashamed. As it turned out, save for an apparently obligatory encore of Roll Over Beethoven (before which, much of the late-middle age audience had already started heading for the pre-drive home toilets), Lynne could have left it at that. This had been a perfect evening’s music, performed fastidiously by the 12-piece backing band. Even if muso types had hoped for a little variation, Lynne stuck to the script and delivered largely what, over the last 48 years, ELO had committed to record. Lynne himself is a slightly odd character: visually, he looks no different than he did in the 70s, with that shaggy mop of hair and the aviator sunglasses (I once came across a photograph of Lynne without those glasses - it was profoundly weird). Audience interaction was kept to a bare medium - no Phil Collins-style banter or Paloma Faith gobbiness. Just a jukebox evening of songs I now realise are hard wired into my consciousness. And all the more enjoyable for it.

A journalist once described ELO as “arguably the most uncool, even defiantly anti-cool, of the lot”, and if you had to examine that statement, he was probably right. But sometimes, what’s wrong with that? After all, one man’s Mr. Blue Sky is another’s Achy Breaky Heart.

Haters gonna hate

There are people I know who will never abide Phil Collins. Like, really hate the man. I've never been entirely sure what he’s done to deserve it, personally or otherwise. After all, he’s a perfectly affable bloke (though three wives - including the last, with whom he’s back again - might disagree...). But, the fact that Phil Collins is one of only three artists to have had sold more than 100 million albums as both band member and solo artist (the other two being Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson) would suggest, by definition, some degree of popularity. However, there are those who'll just never get along with him. Haters clearly are gonna hate. And this post just ain’t for them.

Collins himself readily accepts that he’s not to everyone's liking. Always a king of self-depreciation, he acknowledges in his highly entertaining - and characteristically frank - 2016 autobiography, Not Dead Yet that his ubiquity in the 1980s and '90s clearly led to familiarity breeding contempt. And he was everywhere: his own solo career taking off in 1981; fronting Genesis as it became a MTV-friendly, Van Halen-rivalling pop-rock monster in sharp contrast to their prog rock origins; singing, drumming and producing collaborations with the post-Led Zeppelin Robert Plant, ABBA's Frida, Paul McCartney, Adam Ant (yes, really), his great friend John Martyn, Earth Wind & Fire's Philip Bailey and many, many more. He even managed to play Live Aid twice, including a drumming set with Zeppelin that, in hindsight, appeared to have not been a great idea.

By the early 1990s Collins was as much a symbol of the age as bankers in red braces had been in the decade before. No coincidence, perhaps, that Patrick Bateman, the psychopath protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho is a fan, pontificating at length on Collins' career in the 1980s ("I thought it was quite funny," Collins has said of the book's film adaptation, "although I don’t know if it was meant to be. I don’t think [Bateman] being a psychopath and liking my music is linked – my music was just omnipresent in that era."). In some respects, Collins was the 1980s, or at least the musical embodiment of the decade. It began in January 1981 with a hissing drum machine and a simple, three-chord hum from a Prophet 5 keyboard. In The Air Tonight was and remains a remarkable song, on a par as an era keynote with Ultravox's Vienna, which was released on the same day. Both songs have mood and gloom (as well as a shared use of the Roland CR-78 drum machine), with one capturing the irreparable collapse of a marriage, the other, a fleeting affair. Only one, however, has that epic drum fill. It appears almost three-quarters of the way in (Collins' US record company had insisted that 'live' drums were added from the outset of the American single release) and, with its legendary 'gated reverb', set the tone for drums on pop records for the decade. Even today, In The Air Tonight is referenced to and even sampled by hip-hop artists. And how much more 1980s can you get than the song appearing in the first ever episode of Miami Vice (in a key scene in which Sonny Crockett's black Ferrari cruises down, appropriately, Miami's Collins Avenue)? The singer himself even landed a starring role in a later episode, playing the crooked game show host 'Phil The Shill'. The '80s, then, belonged to Phil Collins, but it wasn't just his music that became omnipresent, he did too, hobnobbing with Hollywood, picking up Emmy after Grammy after Oscar, and seemingly serving as Eric Clapton’s wingman, all slicked back hair and Versace shirts.

Success can be a strange mistress. Collins' fanbase, up until In The Air Tonight and the Face Value album it was recorded for, had hitherto been constructed exclusively of followers of Genesis who, until they'd had a hit with Follow You, Follow Me in 1978, had largely been long-haired men in army surplus greatcoats listening intensely. A hit attracted women to their concerts, as well as a wider American audience they'd previously only skimmed. With the album Duke and its short, punchy singles Turn It On Again and the Collins-written Misunderstanding (itself a nod to Toto's Hold The Line), the band's trajectory elevated. This ascent had not been without its cost - Collins' first marriage collapsed in the wake of relentless touring, although this led to the catharsis of bedroom-recorded demos that would later become the album Face Value, launching the solo career, launching Brand Collins.

The arc of this career is charted by Plays Well With Others, a four-disc box set which runs from his earliest recording, as a member of Flaming Youth, a constructed boy band that produced the one concept album Ark II in 1969, through side projects like the brilliant jazz-fusion band Brand X, work with Rod Argent and being loaned out by Genesis to work on Brian Eno's Another Green World (reciprocity for Eno contributing noises to the band's The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway album), and then the period when you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing something Collins had been involved in. One common thread throughout the last 40 years has been Collins' friendship with the late John Martyn, a relationship forged in the dissolving of their respective first marriages, writing together at Collins' cottage on the Surrey/Sussex borders, occasionally breaking off for bitter phone calls with estranged partners, before returning to work...or drink. For me, the various collaborations with Martyn are amongst the most enduring on Plays Well With Others: from Sweet Little Mystery from Martyn's Grace And Danger album to Could've Been Me and Suzanne from the trip-hop influenced And, and the posthumous Can't Turn Back The Years from the big man's final recording, Willing To Work. There was a genuine warmth to their relationship that comes across like no other in this collection.

Elsewhere, there are inclusions that might come as a surprise if you'd missed them first time around, such as Adam Ant's Puss 'N' Boots, Howard Jones' No One Is To Blame and Tears For Fears' Woman In Chains, on which all Collins provides his precise, melodic drumming, a signature feature to Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas?, also included. There is also the inclusion of Peter Gabriel's Intruder, a dark song about home invasion made darker by its thumping, cymbal-less drumming (Gabriel had instructed Collins to play without the punctuation of cymbals) in which that gated reverb made its debut, thanks to some experimentation by Collins and engineer Hugh Padgham. Consider this the source of the Nile.

Change can sit uncomfortably with music fans. Just look at how people reacted to Dylan when he went electric. Those who'd followed Genesis from the Gabriel-fronted era of epic, complicated songs like The Return Of The Giant Hogweed and the 23-minute Supper's Ready, struggled with both Collins' commercial success as a solo artist, as well as the nature of his solo music. When Genesis included Earth Wind & Fire's Phenix Horns brass section on the Abacab album, die hards were up in arms, and continued to blame Collins as the band increasingly went down the pop route (despite Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks being equally compliant in the direction). Collins' own argument has always been that people change: "You don't read the same books or wear the same clothes you did years ago," he would say, "so why should I expected to do the same music as I did back then [in his early Genesis era]. Here, though, is where my loyalty began to be tested. His solo albums, up until 1990's But Seriously were mostly brilliant, if - as in the case of No Jacket Required - of their time. But beyond that, not so much for me. Too much repetition, even the impression of a lack of effort (an unfair comment, but perceptions and all that). Collins' soundtrack to Disney's Tarzan, was a high point, if you like that sort of thing (and, again, you don't have to) which, like Elton John's The Lion King work, was perfect for the Disney genre. But, by this point, a duality emerged, two Phil Collins: the gifted, inventive drummer, and the Hollywood star.

For the former, Plays Well With Others offers plenty of examples of the gift, even on the all-star live charity performances, such as backing George Harrison, Clapton et al on the live version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, singing and Ringo-drumming on Golden Slumbers, and the ultimate Beatle collaboration, drumming on Paul McCartney's Angry. However, the selection of charity gig supergroup work also includes The Bee Gees' You Win Again and, at The Party At The Palace, Annie Lennox's Why, Bryan Adams' Everything You Do and Joe Cocker's With A Little Help From My Friends, all of which seem little more than namedropping, even if they're simply examples of Collins fulfilling his teenage ambition to become just a jobbing drummer. More curious is There'll Be Some Changes Made with Tony Bennett, and Stormy Weather with Quincy Jones, examples of Collins' switch to big band jazz in the late 1990s, which included an acclaimed set at the Montreux Jazz Festival. There, just a few kilometres down the shore of Lake Geneva from his then-home, Collins did at least appear to drumming for fun, and the inclusion on Plays Well With Others of the staple Pick Up The Pieces and the Brand X track And So To F demonstrates what he did best before various physical ailments robbed him of his considerable ability on the skins.

Thus it's somewhat difficult to conclude who Plays Well With Others is aimed at or what it is trying to achieve, beyond providing a chronology of a near-50 year recording and performing career. There are curiosities that fans of one persuasion might find intriguing, such as Savannah Woman by the late Tommy Bolin or Al Di Meola's fusion-lite Island Dreamer; and there are somewhat stubborn attempts at proving Collins' unrecognised hipness, such as Lil' Kim's In The Air Tonight cover and a disappointing version of If Leaving Me Is Easy by The Isley Brothers.

As this post will hopefully convey, I've been an unashamed Collins fan for the last 40 years, when I bought the Genesis album ...And Then There Were Three, which opened up their back catalogue as well as his associations as a drummer and singer. Through him I became a huge fan of John Martyn - probably my favourite solo artist of all time (not hindered by the fact he was born in the same town as me), and cultivated curiosity in other artists and, even, genres. There's no doubting that Collins became a force majeure in the '80s and '90s and while his output was mostly impressive, Plays Well With Others highlights where quality control could have been applied on both the who and the what. To say Plays Well With Others is a mixed bag is an understatement but, going back to the Not Dead Yet book, it's very clear that the selection of tracks - good and bad - is a very personal statement. Perhaps he's demanding credibility, perhaps he's highlighting authenticity (which he has no need to do, to be honest). Perhaps he's reminding us that, before he 'went Hollywood', he was just a Chiswick schoolboy, child actor and fan of soul, R'n'B and beat music.

Ultimately, perhaps, this 59-track compilation serves as a settlement to the arguments some put forward about Phil Collins: clearly a good bloke, often under-appreciated as a truly talented drummer (up there with Moon and Bonham, both of whom he came close to posthumously replacing), and undoubtedly heartfelt as a songwriter and a singer, but whose work ethic led to overexposure, which in turn bred the kind of vitriol flung at him even now. You can't turn back the years, as he sung with John Martyn, but there are times when even I as a fan would have preferred Collins to have said no, rather than yes. At least, then, Plays Well With Others provides the argumentation for that dialogue. Perhaps that was its intent.

Tomorrow never knew - The Beatles' Revolver turns 50

2016 will go down as the year that began with the death of a rock icon whom people actually believed held the universe together, and that the subsequent procession of celebrity departures, along with enormous political upheavals, has been down to his untimely demise. Those with their heads less buried in the clouds will just put this down to unfortunate circumstance. However, with 2016 being exactly 50 years on from 1966, there is an ornate sense of the circular going on, that somehow we're completing a cycle.

Because '66 was the year which, culturally, launched everything. And it was all thanks to four records: Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Blues Breakers with John Mayall and Eric Clapton, and The Beatles' Revolver.

Five decades on, this quartet - released within three months of each other - remain landmarks in the evolution of popular music: Dylan's for the dexterity of its writing, Blues Breakers for introducing the overdriven, amplified guitar that would shape rock music forever (see my post Breaking blues - the buddhas of suburbia from a couple of weeks ago), and Pet Sounds and Revolver - often seen as direct rivals - for taking pop music, pop music composition, pop music recording techniques and the manifestation of conceptual thinking in pop music to a totally different level.

The Beatles were in total awe of The Beach Boys, but Brian Wilson's masterpiece, released in May 1966, was itself something of a response to their own Rubber Soul, released the year before. While their next album wouldn't be an intentional tit-for-tat response, it was clear that with Revolver - along with Blonde On Blonde and Pet Sounds - mainstream pop was emerging into something else. The Elvis-inspired, stage-driven rock and roll that had breathed life into pop and which fuelled The Beatles at the Cavern and on the Reeperbahn had served its purpose. It was now about storytelling, about songcraft and expanding what was possible, and in The Beatles' case, turning the studio into an instrument in its own right.

Revolver was released 50 years ago today and has been quite rightly feted as pop's Great Leap Forward™. But quite why requires some examination: sequentially sandwiched in the Fab canon between Rubber Soul and the even greater opus of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, John Lennon and George Harrison both saw Revolver as Part 2 of a cycle that began with Rubber Soul. Lennon, typically more colourfully, branded Rubber Soul as "the pot album", but Revolver "the acid album", a clearly tongue in cheek reference to the creative stimuli applied in both.

Revolver was, however, far from simply a trip. Emboldened by their move away from trite Merseybeat on its predecessor, Revolver evolved John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison further as songwriters. And here is where it draws its greatest gasp. Incredibly, we're only talking three years after their debut album, Please Please Me, but Revolver brought maturity, a premature world-weariness, even. McCartney was already contemplating middle age (he'd turned 24 that June) and a life of semi-retirement dressed in tweed and a cloth cap; Lennon - genuinely horrified by the reaction to his 'bigger than Jesus' quip - looked to the studio as a means of escaping the frustrations of live performance (namely the screaming teens who drowned out their music) and somewhat replaced the raw energy of gigging that he'd enjoyed in the early days with the energy of writing without limits. George Martin played an enormous role here in indulging Lennon's whims, knowing full well that Lennon was a huge fan of The Goon Show, of whom Martin had worked on comedy albums with Peter Sellers, and whichnreflected The Goons' own unparalleled "theatre of the mind" inventivenes.

14 songs was a lot for an album in the mid-60s, when bands were churning them out every nine months or so before embarking on tours. But across these songs - some of The Beatles' very best - Revolver established a new role for what a pop band could talk about. On Taxman they took swipes at Harold Wilson's Labour government (one of Harrison's three contributions which reflected his own coming-of-age as a writer), explored Catholic themes with Eleanor Rigby and gave McCartney a platform to expand his musical palette - his whimsy on Here, There And Everywhere, the intentionally childishness of Yellow Submarine ("it's a children's song," he explained at the time) and his sunny disposition (in contrast to Lennon's cynicism) with Good Day Sunshine.

Revolver was unafraid to shoot in different directions - the Motown funk of Got To Get You Into My Life (a track, believe it or not, once covered by Joe Pesci sounding a lot like Neil Sedaka...), the West Coast jangle of Dr. Robert, the anti-pop of I'm Not Sleeping, the rockiness of She Said She Said, and the experimentation with Indian spiritualism on Love You To, creating narratives and soundscapes with sound effects and double-tracking techniques of the kind that progressive rock would build upon in the decade that followed. Actually, it's no great shock to discover that Revolver and Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon were recorded in the same Abbey Road studio, albeit six years apart. Perhaps, then, much of the genetic code in the Floyd's early work, and indeed others, like David Bowie, can be found buried like a time capsule in one song on Revolver, the one that ends the album: Tomorrow Never Knows.

If Revolver as a whole marked a turning point in the trajectory of rock music, Tomorrow Never Knows is the hinge. What had begun as a droning, single-chord song called Mark 1 - strummed by Lennon on an acoustic guitar for George Martin's approval - became one of the most acclaimed album tracks in music history, for its tripiness ("Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream - it is not dying") - which was more a reflection of Lennon's interest in meditation than references to LSD - and its sonic innovation. Using barely new studio equipment, loops of various noises, tracking, compression and a host of other techniques, Tomorrow Never Knows - named after yet another one of Ringo Starr's malapropisms - took listeners into a completely new world, one that beat-obsessed pop was probably not ready for. Lines like "Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void – it is shining." and "That you may see the meaning of within – it is being" were from another universe by comparison to "I wanna hold your hand" and "She loves you - Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!". But, to make the point again, it is truly incredible to think of how far The Beatles had travelled between these two sets of lyrics, and how music was taken along with it.

Revolver is, for many Beatles fans, their favourite, though trying to judge them all is a rabbit hole worth avoiding. There will always be merits to the breadth of Pepper, of gems like Julia, Dear Prudence and While My Guitar Gently Weeps on 'the white album', of the closure of Abbey Road and the blueprint for bluesy '70s album rock that was Let It Be (especially if you hear it in its original 'naked' state.

But Revolver remains my favourite for both what it was and what it did. Today, 50 years on, I can listen back to it - as someone who grew up long after The Beatles had disbanded (I was born the year after it was released) - and identify the source code of music I have cherished ever since I became musically of age. It really is that Biblical.

Defending the indefensible: Phil Collins - what's he done to you?

"No wonder people were annoyed with me! And I do apologise!” So said Phil Collins in a 2014 Daily Mail interview in which he was asked to atone for near-ubiquity in the mid-eighties and early nineties that subsequently led him to being charged in Britain with a number of alleged offences, such as:

• Getting married often (true)
• Getting divorced often and writing songs about it (true)
• Divorcing by fax (not true)
• Being a Tory (not true and flatly denied)
• Being mates with Prince Charles (true - he was a trustee of the Prince's Trust).
• 'Going Hollywood' (true)
• Being respected by US hip-hop artists (true)
• Footballer Steven Gerrard being a Collins fan, thus "dragging the game back into the Dark Ages" (partly true)
• Leaving the UK after Tony Blair became prime minister (true - he married a Swiss national)
• Divorcing for a third time...and now, apparently, moving back in with her (true)

Let's face it, not even Gary Glitter and his odious proclivities has been slammed as badly. So, on the occasion of Collins' 65th birthday, it's time to give the man a break because, frankly, all this hatin' is undeserved.

For a start, Collins was, to begin with, a reluctant pop star. This makes his subsequent superstardom (joining Macca and Jacko as the only performers to have sold over 100 million albums as solo artists and as band members) something of a paradox. That's not to say Collins regrets his success, but that his success has only really been a problem in his country of origin.

Despite being a child actor (including the Artful Dodger in the West End production of Oliver! and blink-and-you-miss appearances in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang and A Hard Day's Night), being part of a touted late 1960s band, Flaming Youth, who went nowhere, and then joining Genesis in 1970, the Phil Collins most people know about only came to be at the beginning of the 1980s. 

When Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, Collins was the last resort to replace him as lead singer. He would have been happy to have remained on the drum stool, applying a God-given drumming talent that had seen him play percussion on sessions for George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, would later see him farmed out to play on Brian Eno's acclaimed Another Green World, as well as starting his fusion side project, Brand X.

Joining Genesis to begin with had been an act of professional curiosity. Having seen them as one of those bands that were always appearing in Melody Maker's gig pages, Collins had figured that they would be a good source of regular work when he was offered to audition at Gabriel's parents' house in Chobham, Surrey. While he paddled around in the swimming pool, as you do, listening to the other auditioneers, he absorbed the material, subsequently nailing the job.

Collins wasn't a particular fan of prog rock. His music was soul, R&B and jazz. But with the obscure time signatures and meandering fantasy songs of the early Genesis, Collins' drumming style evolved with intricate, jazz-like flourishes and melodic fills, taking the power of peers like John Bonham and Keith Moon (whom he could have replaced in The Who) and adding a musical 'voice' to the drums.

His contribution to Genesis wasn't, however, merely percussive. With Steve Hackett joining in 1971, the two grammar school-educated West Londoners provided a grounded buttress to the rarified environment created by Gabriel, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, who'd formed Genesis at Charterhouse, the public school better known for turning out prime ministers, archbishops and captains of industry than hairy rock stars.

As Collins has often remarked, band politics were often an extension of school politics, and arguments over pencil cases and protractors, long forgotten, easily erupted again over guitar tunings and piano solos and other petty musical disagreements. Collins, with his stage school self-assurance and considerably greater streetwisery, was the perfect pin with which to puncture the air when things became too overwrought.

But with a new album to record in the autumn of 1975, and no lead singer emerging from 100s of applicants, Collins - who had been coaching the auditions - was clearly better at singing the new material than those trying out for the job.

And so, on February 2, 1976, three days after Collins' 25th birthday, the first post-Gabriel Genesis album, A Trick Of The Tail, was released. Fans had heard Collins' voice before - perfectly complementing Gabriel on stage, as well as providing lead vocals on album tracks like Nursery Cryme's For Absent Friends and More Fool Me on Selling England By The Pound. But with the new album Genesis started to assume a new persona, with Collins its focal point.

With Gabriel out of the picture, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford took on more of the songwriting. A Trick Of The Tail retained much of the whimsy that Gabriel and his Lewis Carroll-like wordplay had laid over complex musical arrangements, and with Dance On A Volcano and Squonk the band's association with fantasy - rather than poppy romance -continued. But in Ripples and Entangled, in particular, Collins' vocals brought Genesis closer to Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the band started to become a little more accessible. Robbery, Assault & Battery also added some levity. No surprise, then, that it was co-written by Collins.

Live, Collins' precocious sense of fun provided a different dynamic. Gabriel had been a relatively shy individual, gauchely telling obscure stories between songs and dressing up in costumes to help illustrate the meandering music. Collins, at a glance, brought another energy and the cheeky-chappiness of an end-of-pier comedian (while not abandoning drumming duties - joining touring drummers like King Crimson's Bill Bruford and long-standing stickman Chester Thompson on the instrumental parts of the so-called "long songs").

When Steve Hackett left the band after the release of Seconds Out - still the best live album ever - Genesis contracted into a trio. Banks, in particular, and Rutherford were still the core of the band's songwriting, but Collins had emerged as the band's personality, and with it had some influence. The irony of this is that the next album, ...And Then There Were Three produced a hit single, Follow You, Follow Me, a love song that introduced the band to a female audience for the first time. And it was, in fact, written by Rutherford.

If A Trick Of The Tail "launched" Phil Collins, to some extent, the commercial success - and enormous US tours that followed - was the making of him. After the 1978 tour, Rutherford and Banks went off to do solo albums. Collins was struggling to save his four-year-old first marriage - arguably the victim of his workaholism - and he offered to move to Canada where his wife Andrea Bertorelli had moved to with their children. It didn't work out, so he withdrew to his now empty West Sussex cottage and started noodling around in a makeshift bedroom studio.

The outcome was only intended to provide catharsis for the divorce he was now going through, plaintive, heart-on-sleeve songs like If Leaving Me Is Easy, Please Don't Ask ('given' to Genesis for their Duke album) and, of course, In The Air Tonight - famously self-described as "not a happy song" about Bertorelli.

It's pioneering use of both drum machines and that now-familiar 'gated reverb' drum sound (created during Collins' contribution to Gabriel's third solo album) turned In The Air Tonight into a huge hit, taking the singer from reluctant front man to Top Of The Pops, famously appearing playing a keyboard on top of a Black & Decker Workmate with a paint pot on it, a dig at Bertorelli who'd apparently run off with the decorator.

This was two of Collins' most enduring qualities at work: firstly, his comic schtick and secondly, his lack of any typical English reserve. What you see is what you get, which is why Face Value's sleeve was dominated by Collins' full moon face on the front cover, and thinning hair on the back of his head on the rear.

The child actor-turned drummer from Hounslow was no longer the reluctant front man. In The Air Tonight would make Collins part of the 80s zeitgeist: Michael Mann included it in the pilot episode of Miami Vice - its hissing Roland CR78 drum machine and simple three-chord arrangement played on a Prophet 5 keyboard underlaying a pivotal scene featuring Crockett and Tubbs driving moodily down - appropriately - Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.

Face Value's follow-up, Hello, I Must Be Going! (a title quoting Groucho Marx) took Collins up another notch, its cover of The Supremes' You Can't Hurry Love - to some, a throwaway retread of an old soul number - becoming a global pop hit in 1982.

In 1983, and with another Genesis album behind him, Collins came to work for no less a figure than Robert Plant. Led Zeppelin had broken up following John Bonham's death, and Plant turned to Collins to kick start his solo career. "I was graced by my first two solo records, Pictures at Eleven and The Principle of Moments," Plant has said more recently. "A drummer contacted me and said, 'I love Bonham so much I wanna sit behind you when you sing'. It was Phil Collins. His career was just kicking in and he was the most spirited and positive and really encouraging force, because you can't imagine what it was like, me trying to carve my own way after all that."

Having scored another global hit about divorce with the power ballad Against All Odds, the title song of Taylor Hackford's film of the same name, 1985 came around. He'd begun the year drumming on Band Aid's Do They Know Its Christmas?, but things took off spectacularly with the album No Jacket Required. Its lead-in single Sussudio was a bold, brassy hit of the age - all electronic drums and synths, though it bore great similarity to Prince's 1999 (Collins admits to have been a fan). Still, that didn't stop the album garnering more hits, including Take Me Home, the video for which featured Collins at various points on a world tour that seemed to just say "I'm now a global superstar".

And he was. On July 12, 1985, he managed to be at both the Wembley and Philadelphia ends of Live Aid. In his inimitable manner, Collins maintained that he was just trying to do the cause a favour: originally a number of the London performers were going to try and get over to Philadelphia on Concorde, but in the end it was only Collins. However, what seemed like a good idea turned out to be anything less as, along with doing another solo set, he was asked to drum for Led Zeppelin (who already had The Power Station's Tony Thompson on board). With Jimmy Page apparently "drooling in a corner", what should have been a magnanimous gesture ended up as an unrehearsed nightmare. Not that the crowd would have cared.

That year, Collins even made an acting appearance in Miami Vice, playing dodgy game show host "Phil the Shill". By 1986 - in which Genesis sold out Wembley Stadium for a record four nights - he was, literally, everywhere, even playing Great Train Robber Buster Edwards in a supposed romantic comedy that had largely been written with the singer in mind. Though Collins hadn't signed up for Buster purely to act in it, songs for the soundtrack were inevitable, and the old Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders song Groovy Kind Of Love gave him yet another hit.

At the same time, in Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, we had Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman indulging hypothesising on Collins' career while entertaining a pair of hookers: "I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist", he suggests, having just instructed one of the girls to "eat it". Phil Collins was now an inextricable feature of the era.

Genesis, for much of the 1970s, had been a band that that the music press appreciated, but hadn't always raved about. There were cooler bands, quite frankly, but Genesis were regarded as merely "interesting". That, though, didn't hamper their inexorable rise. But with Collins becoming the band's breakout star on the back of his own solo work, when he returned to the group that had launched him, the trio found a camaraderie and creativity that only they could achieve together. Thus, via the albums Abacab, Genesis, Invisible Touch and We Can't Dance, they became darlings of the nascent MTV, their profoundly American-orientated videos for singles playing on both the band's sense of humour and, in particular, Collins' own love of hamming it up. 

Being everywhere via Genesis, his own solo music, and his myriad side projects created a monster that would always be at odds with the press back in the UK. Things reached their nadir with the NME's Steven 'Seething' Wells writing a vicious piece headlined "Ugly Bald Bastard Speaks (to Phil Collins)". By then, I had possibly been the last author of any review in the NME of a Collins gig. Quite why he'd agreed to speak to the paper baffles me still. The NME and its IPC stablemate Melody Maker had taken to baiting Collins, with the Maker's letters page even printing his home address as an attempt to close off a correspondence that Collins himself had persisted with, such was his anger at comments the paper had published.

With the release, in 1990, of But Seriously, Collins reached the zenith of his fame. An album featuring then-neighbour Eric Clapton, his ubiquity - both in the charts but also at the all-star charity gigs so in-vogue at the time - saw him achieving commercial success few other British solo artists had reached then and certainly not since.

However, the album's hit single, Another Day In Paradise, a song about the plight of the homeless, drew derision. How could a multi-millionaire rock star be claiming to trying to solve the problem of urban homelessness? Undeterred, the Collins machine rolled on, with another Genesis album, We Can't Dance in 1992, more hits and another mega tour.

But in 1993 the machine hit turbulence. With Genesis on hiatus (Collins was never to record an album with them again), he released his next solo album, Both Sides. Recorded mostly at home on his own, it sounded like a collection of bedroom demos. Face Value may have begun that way, but Both Sides was committed to release in that form. It appeared that the man with the golden touch of the previous decade was losing it. A live jazz album - A Hot Night in Paris - followed, featuring arrangements of Genesis and solo songs that, actually, wasn't bad.

Collins was far from over at this point, but even with the next album Dance Into The Light, it felt like Collins was coasting. Towards the end of the 1990s Disney invited him to write songs for the animated Tarzan film, producing an Oscar-winning smash hit in You'll Be In My Heart. This, though, just added to the British disease of sniffing at success, with Collins being regarded at the start of the new Millennium as having "gone Hollywood".

In marrying his third wife, Swiss translator Orianne Cevey, Collins moved to Switzerland, settling down in a small village near Lausanne. This, of course, became interpreted as "Tory Phil leaves UK" in the wake of the Blair government coming to power in 1997. The Sun also claimed that Collins had divorced second wife Jill Tavelman "by fax" (the truth of it was that certain documents had to be sent by fax but this wasn't allowed to get in the way of a good story). Of course, much of this was the doing of the media, a classic case of a Brit being built up and then knocked down. By comparison, the US didn't stop being a fan, though Collins' increasing invisibility while he enjoyed playing dad in Switzerland started to place him on "Where are they now?" lists.

With Genesis reforming for a limited, greatest hits-spinning tour in 2007, Collins was still not committing himself to a major return to the fore. By the tour's end, Collins was having to play drums with the sticks gaffer-taped to his hands, the result of a worsening back problem. More medical problems were to follow, with an infection causing hearing loss in one ear. Not long after the lame Motown covers album Going Back came out in 2010, Collins announced his retirement. By this stage, the music press didn't care. Even some fans were of the view that Collins was no longer the writing, drumming and performing force he had once been. Perhaps success had changed him.

It is, though, time to reassess the album that took Phil Collins from drummer and then singing-drummer with one of Britain's hardest-to-place bands, to becoming a solo star who, in many respects, was the 1980s.

With a hint that he might be reconsidering his retirement, Collins has this week re-released Face Value, adding previously unreleased tracks, and updating the iconic black and white cover shot with a new picture showing the considerably aged and somewhat gaunt Collins of today.

It requires listening to afresh. For an album that was supposed to be about a bitter divorce, once past the truly innovative In The Air Tonight and, later, the quite obvious If Leaving Me Is Easy, This Must Be Love and Thunder & Lightning joyfully celebrate moving on. The album ends with a stunning cover of The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows, embracing all that the studio had to offer the Fabs themselves on the original. Behind The Lines is a cover version of the Genesis song Collins co-wrote for their Duke album, and with the addition of Earth, Wind & Fire's Phenix Horns, it is a totally different song, and even better for it. Likewise, I Missed Again is a riotously uptempo song. The Roof Is Leaking, with its depression era theme and mournful banjo, captures Collins' sadness as well as an expected nod to other musical styles not previously in his oeuvre.

Face Value was, for Genesis fans, a shock, especially when the same horn section turned up on the next Genesis album, Abacab. Those still wedded to 20-minute epics like Suppers Ready and Cinema Show took a while to adjust to "their" lead singer pouring his emotions out in heart-on-sleeve ballads. Even In The Air Tonight, a song which has since found new life in hip-hop (the tribute album Urban Renewal featured artists like Ol' Dirty Bastard, Kelis and Montell Jordan doing Collins covers), sounded like nothing any of his previous outlets had ever produced. And even now, from the first hiss of the drum machine through to the now-famous tom-tom fill, it is a song to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. In the hairs tonight, if you will.

I won't pretend that I went off Collins' music as it lost its edge at the turn of the Noughties. But in Collins himself, his history as one of the greatest rock drummers of all time, the accessibility he brought to Genesis before they became music TV mainstays, and his work as a producer and collaborator with people like my musical hero John Martyn, warrants greater appreciation than the short cuts too many take to ignorantly dismiss him for his supposed politics, his personal life and the unashamedly populist end of his music.

You don't have to love him at all, or at least love the bits of his career you don't have to like, but if you like music and appreciate musicianship, there are parts of Phil Collins' musical history that deserve enormous credit. And I would start by listening to an album that was released 40 years ago next week, A Trick Of The Tail.