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).
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..
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