I don't know about you, but if there had been a world where Lennon and McCartney never met, possibly because they were on different buses, or one lost his threepenny bit and had to walk, and therefore the Beatles never existed, then, at the very least, it would be very difficult to begin an essay like this wondering what the world would be like if the Beatles never existed.
I turned into a teenager in the 1970s when it seemed to some extent an absolute necessity to defy the Beatles, to reject their already pervasive, intrusive and slightly suspect magical powers, because, as becomes increasingly true, if there is no belief that the sound and meaning of the Beatles can be improved or developed then they become not a vital force for uncontrollable, era-defining change and action but a major component of a banal energy that merely conserves the past as a neat and tidy pattern. The Beatles were obviously sensationally pleasing as a pop group and international phenomenon blasting out of the blue – representing a new kind of hope, joy and freedom – but the very nature of the cultural movement and restlessness they triggered meant that by the mid 70s, mere years after they had apparently ceased to be, they seemed part of the old world, an authoritarian institution with its own form of censoring and taming rigidity.
There were newer forms of subversive play, and pop culture, to engage in, and the Beatles had to be made to seem old fashioned. It is a sign of how powerful they were that the strongest reaction against them, and the sharpest rejection of the coalescing pomposity that surrounded them, crystallised as punk and then post-punk, movements dynamic enough to create an equivalent impact on sound, time and meaning. In fact, was post-punk the truest hint of the world that would have existed without the Beatles? If there had been no Beatles could there still have been the Sex Pistols, or was the latter simply another inevitable consequence of the former? Many are convinced that what the Beatles started has made the world a better place. I've never been convinced, not because of the music of the Beatles, not because of their shape-shifting ability to mix vivacious pop music that relished the unexpected with an attractively unreliable intellectual adventure – unlike most groups directly influenced by them, who just steal the pop, hair, boots, sound and cockiness, steering clear of the art, invention, history and curiosity, the learning – but because of the way a docile, distracting culture of acceptance, habit, reverence and wistfulness has been erected around the music and the history that sprang from it.
If there were no Beatles, would it seem achingly obvious that something was missing, even though we couldn't quite explain it, a palpable hole in space and time, a conspicuous lack of another not necessarily better not necessarily worse reality where pop music hadn't consumed the world and then itself as rapidly, as ruthlessly ? Would we still be waiting for something to happen?
If the Beatles had never made it out of Liverpool, and found their lovely new home in history, would we vaguely long for a set of songs that first of all mentioned love an awful lot and then appeared, if only in manipulated hindsight, to prefigure, anticipate or possibly completely invent not just the idea of rock itself as a sophisticated form but many of the genres that appeared between the late 50s and the late 60s - as music moved from the buttoned-up Shadows to the opened-up Jimi Hendrix, from glad-or-sad all-over-in-three minute hits to intrepid intoxicated investigations of a suddenly revealed otherness, from power pop to folk rock to psychedelia to prog to MOR to AOR to Britpop? Would those leaps and diversions, and other leaps and diversions that happened elsewhere because of Kraftwerk, Can, the Stooges, Soft Machine, the Velvet Underground and the Smiths, not have happened because there were no Beatles? Would there have been no Cheap Trick, ELO, Tears For Fears, Oasis or Take That without the Beatles? Would the world truly lose out if those Beatles songs were absent ?
Or would the world be pretty much the same even if the Beatles hadn't made it beyond local status, and hadn't take off for Germany, and how historically crucial was it that they ventured there, a place so recently the enemy, to become men, to take charge of their lives and repair, with self-deprecating, bossy flamboyance, damaged British influence on the world? Were they just a last bizarre spasm of a corrupted Empire rather than a emancipating fresh start? Would others equally as charged, talented and lucky have filled the vacuum, and ensured that an equivalent version of the sweet, sentimental and acerbic Beatles hybrid of jaunty British music hall, taunting American rock'n'roll, country and western and early Motown inevitably emerged? Could it have been anybody, really? What was ultimately extraordinary about them was their ordinariness, and the way they exploited their time and place, and their time and place exploited them, and they played the given role of greatness with the appropriate amount of grace, cheek and abandonment.
The Beatles were compelled to be the Beatles because there was the most extraordinary demand for something that ended up doing exactly what the Beatles did: move from kids looking for kicks to Gods controlling moods, from backstreet nowhere to electronic everywhere, from perky, keen industrious covers band to adept, prolific composers. If it had not been the Beatles, would it have been something else, the same but different, because circumstances, and television, and a new kind of audience, demanded it?
Did the world actually change the way it did because of what George Martin did in the studio, urbanely turning turbulent, articulate post-adolescent angst into a kind of aroused, inquisitive and extremely satisfying poshness? He started making records when electricity was so erratic it was impossible to record sound without it fluctuating, so they would use gravity to power the recording equipment using a series of gears and a heavy ball. To keep up with the Beatles endless ejaculations of turned-on ingenuity he was continually forced – as committed technician and sober aesthete – to re-imagine recording possibilities. Could he have done something similar with other emotional specimens, another gang of competitive, irascible auto-didactic ruffians craving glamour, experience and self-enlightenment? Was it specifically those four scurrilous, quick-witted, goonish, angry young men with their particular features and fancies that changed everything to the extent it's now all so familiar – too familiar, some would say, this world that erupted so tremendously but has settled down a little too complacently, and certainly a little too commercially – and is the world completely different because of who the Beatles actually were or because of who they were made to be? If there had been no Beatles... therefore no 500-plus books written about them because they became the group that would have 500 books written about them, therefore no songs appearing on over 140 formats since 1963, therefore no constant searching for the new Beatles, as if that would solve all problems. And no early 21st century confirmation that all along the new Beatles were always going to be the original Beatles, because once the Beatles existed, once one agreement, or argument, led to another, once they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, the same month that George received his first Rickenbacker 12 string electric guitar, there would always be Beatles myth, hooplah, industry, lark, bank, religion, universe, canon, diversion, dictatorship, merry-go-round, game, souvenir, stunt, reminder, and you can think of a world without the Beatles only because the world is exactly what it is, at least on the surface, because John met Paul and managed to speak a few awkward words and then the world couldn't stop talking about what happened next.
