Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Width

The Beatles, Genesis and Taylor Swift, all in one

In 1968, The Beatles recorded their classic (what Beatles song isn’t classic?) Hey Jude. At 7’11” length, it’s one of their longer tracks. It wasn’t the longest, but it’ll likely be the longest that you’ve ever heard of.

The longest Beatles track was Revolution 9, not—please, not—to be confused with Revolution. Here’s what the website Tone Start has to say about Revolution 9:

The longest song that The Beatles ever recorded and officially released is “Revolution 9”, which is 8 minutes and 24 seconds long. This is almost unbelievable, especially considering that at the time of its release, long songs were not a thing at all because they would never play it on the radio.

This is just another example of how The Beatles went against the status quo and how they created their own way forward by being truly creative and not letting the dominant culture tell them what to do.

Below is a link to Revolution 9 and, if you click on it, you will very soon understand (a) why you’ve never heard of it and (b) why it would never have been played on the radio, regardless of how long it was. When the website describes the track as going against the status quo, it’s clearly Francis Rossi and his gang they have in mind and, given the fact the track is virtually 100% sampling, I don’t readily agree that the Beatles were being truly creative here. Whether it can be described as a way forward invites the question: would we have heard of The Beatles at all had this been their very first offering to the general, record-buying public? You decide:

The second-longest Beatles track is I Want You (She’s So Heavy), clocking in at 7’47”, in which the first half of the title (I want you) figures 24 times (lest we forget it), the word heavy figures a mere five times and the entire 3’10” wasteland from the 4’36” mark to the somewhat abrupt end comprises a repetitive performance of the She’s so— riff. For the rest, the lyrics also comprise so bad, it’s driving me mad, and babe. That’s it. I cannot really discern why the dialogue changes from addressing you to talking about her in the triplet sections, but it’s probably a track that’s best appreciated when consumed along with an LSD tab, then you don’t worry so much.

If you’re not on LSD, click here to hear the ... I suppose it’s a song ... in its fullness:

And so to more familiar ground, and Hey Jude (which really, chaps, ought to have a comma: Hey, Jude). It was the first song to be pressed under the newly incorporated Apple label, whose premises opened only a short time after the record’s release, so that Paul McCartney went down to the office and announced on the whitewashed glass: Hey Jude/Revolution (the other Revolution, that is: Hey Jude’s B side). Problem was, no one at that time was familiar with the name Jude, and local Jews took it to be an antisemitic slogan (Jude means Jew in German), and lobbed a brick through the window in response. Not that that could happen today: today, Paul McCartney would simply be arrested.

As the third-longest Beatles song, it doesn’t quite beat Revolution 9 or I Want You (She’s So Heavy) for sheer tedium, but it puts in a valiant effort: fully the last four minutes are simply the riff “Na-na-na-na-na-na-na”, over and over again. Sometimes, I wonder if the local Jewish population ought not to have thrown a bigger brick.

Here’s the full, unexpurgated karaoke version (see if you can hit the first note properly):

There, bet that put a smile on your face. Moronic, isn’t it?

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People are all talking about Taylor Swift, who is selling more records in one day than I’ve had hot dinners.

(I have had 22,600 hot dinners (more or less) in my 62 years and Ms Swift’s new album was listened to 300,000,000 times and was sold 1.6 million times on its first day out. Most things, it would seem, have happened more often than I’ve had hot dinners.)

Andre Spicer, the LinkedIn member referenced above, wonders whether Taylor Swift could experience the same phenomenon as Phil Collins, with peaks and troughs of popularity, and I’ve already pointed out to him that one great differentiator is that, unlike Phil Collins, Ms Swift has never been kicked out of a world-beating band.

It’s really Phil Collins’s remarkable vocal resemblance to Peter Gabriel that even saw him step into the lead singer’s shoes at Genesis when Gabriel left in 1975. The first non-Gabriel album brought out by Genesis was A Trick of the Tail, and those who weren’t regular readers of the New Musical Review or Sounds in those days were initially unaware that the lead singer had even changed, so reedily Gabrielesque Collins’s voice was perceived to be.

Wind and Wuthering followed hot on the heels of A Trick of the Tail, which I remember playing at an end-of-term DJ session in English class, to the delight of many form-mates, who clamoured to know who Genesis even were: they were then still a progressive rock band and therefore were rarely, if ever, played on the radio. (Bronx-born Paul Gambaccini did play the entire Wind and Wuthering album, both sides, without interruption on BBC Radio 1 one Saturday afternoon, which is where I first heard it. That’s how fantastic Radio 1 used to be.)

Wind and Wuthering’s track list looks like this:

Eleventh Earl of Mar: 7’46”

One For The Vine: 10’01”

Your Own Special Way: 6’19”

Wot Gorilla?: 3’23”

All In A Mouse’s Night: 6’40”

Blood On The Rooftops: 5’29”

Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers In That Quiet Earth/Afterglow: 11’25” (the title is a reference to the closing line of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights).

When I was still at school (whose prep department is, coincidentally, Brontë House), I won the composition section of a house music competition for orchestrating Unquiet Slumbers, which only receives its lyric as it breaks into Afterglow. Wot Gorilla? is an instrumental, but the rest of these tracks are songs, interspersed with creative music, incredible rhythms, inspiring, surging melodies and tonal developments. Not a lyric is repeated, not a riff is repeated. The tracks are mostly by Tony Banks (keyboards), very little Steve Hackett (guitar) by this stage (Hackett would quit after this album: quite frankly, it’d have been far better if Collins had gone instead).

Into the 1980s, Phil Collins would split his time between the band and his solo career. To be honest, contrary to Ringo Star, Collins was quite a good drummer. (When asked whether Ringo Star was the best drummer in the world, John Lennon famously replied, “He’s not even the best drummer in The Beatles.”) But Collins also wasn’t the best, not by far, even though he could bang his own drum. Thing is, he was never a great singer. I never ever felt that Phil Collins sung to me out of his heart. He always narrated. On A Trick of the Tail, there’s a track called Robbery, Assault and Battery, in which Collins describes a burglary. Although he voices the characters—the burglar, the policeman and so on—what he does in the end is narrates. He narrates to the point where he even sounds as if he’s taking the piss out of the listener.

Whether Taylor Swift follows the same success peaks and dips as Mr Collins will depend on whether and, if so, to what degree, the listening public comes to feel that she is taking the piss out of them. But she doesn’t short-change them at the present time in terms of her emotional output, and that is to her credit.

As for The Beatles and their inadvertent insult to London’s Jewish community, if ever a quip was appropriate for them in terms of long songs, it would be the reference to an old BBC television chestnut from my youth, about two tailors: Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Width.