May 31, 2025 • 16 mins
George Noory and author Mark Brake explore the enduring popularity of the Beatles, their innovative musical styles, their impact in popular culture on television and in the movies, and the "Paul is Dead" conspiracy theory that McCartney had been replaced by a body double.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Man, Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Mark break with us as we talk about the Beatles.
His book is called The Science of the Beatles. Mark,
in your opinion, what made the Beatles so successful? Was
it timing, was it the era? What do you think
it was?
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Well, I think a lot. I mean I read recently.
I don't know how true it is that they're very
different people. Lennon was associated with Wit McCartney, with charm
Allison with spirituality, and Ringo was the joker of the band.
You know, he was the guy to American reporters when
(00:43):
they asked, how did you find a medic accent? We
just turned left at Greenland, you know, that kind of
that kind of gaga to come up with. Whereas in
the sixties only five percent of people could name all
the Rolling Stones, ninety five percent of people could name
all the Beatles. So it's a lot to do with
sheer personality, and then again it's to do with innovation.
(01:06):
The catchy melodies, the simple hooks and harmonies, and the songs.
I think that ensured mass appeal. There's a lyrical maturity
later on in the kind of topics they titled in
the songs that they made. I heard a little snippet
of yesterday just now on your radio, and I was
thinking about eleanor Rigby that I like Yesterday used a
(01:29):
string quartet in the production to make the thing dramatic,
and one of the innovations and the use of strings,
and Elan Rigby was actually borrowing the kind of jagged
sound of the strings in Psycho. You know how many
of your listeners were aware of that, but they deliberately
tried to make Elan Ribby sound dramatic by adopting this
(01:52):
kind of psycho string effect. So it's a number of
things to do with, you know, the way they may music,
the recording techniques, the personalities and the Beatles themselves, and
also tackling universal themes in their songs. As the decade
of the sixties wore on, you know, love and then
(02:15):
counterculture and all that kind of stuff made them, I
think popular.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
What were so popular about the Beatles in terms of
the age brackets? What age brackets do you think really
like them?
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah, that's a good question. Ed that they seemed to
have appealed to all brackets, didn't they From young to old.
They seemed to have a very very wide demographic. I
think that must have something to do with the way
in which they borrowed from all these different subgenres of
music something for everybody. You know, they ex expanded pops
(02:48):
boundaries by dabbling in all these different musical forms. And
of course the fact that it's some melodic and catchy
I think has a lot to do with it. Scientists
found out out there were scientists working on the Max
Planck Institute in Germany who listened to about seven hundred
of the most famous and popular songs and came to
(03:10):
the conclusion that the most scientifically catchy addictive song is
Oh Bloody or bla dar, the Beatles song from nineteen
sixty eight on the White Album as we now call it.
So there's obviously something that makes you wonder what scientists
are doing when they just sitting around listening to albums
and listen to the songs. But it's that element of
(03:30):
surprise which lends itself to the catchiness of a song,
and they say, if you want a catchy song, you know,
a very infectious song from intro to outro, then the
Beatles are going to do it, and Oh Bloody of
Bladar is probably the most catchiest, so that's another element
to it.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
They're still popular today.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Why, I think it has to do with those elements
that we went through, because they if you listen to
the album now, a lot of people listen to the
more sophisticated albums Rubbisto, Revolver, Sergeant Purpose and so on,
but the early albums are very infectiously enthusiastic and like
(04:11):
Joyce experience to listen to, so they seem more perfect
than ever. And they also represent a very positive decade,
don't they. The Beatles are synonymous with the nineteen sixties,
so it's like a moment in time to a certain
extent that particular decade. You're right about them being still popular.
Some Mendies, the Oscar winning film director, is making four
(04:35):
movies of the Beatles in twenty twenty seven, and he's
got to be You would have thought that the film
studio would have been pretty confident even in twenty twenty
seven the Beatles would be popular enough for them to
be able to make four individual movies, one from each
of the band members' perspectives. So that's an indication I think,
of course, people are still re recording Beatles' classics. Beyonce
(05:01):
recorded Blackbird on her recent cow By Carter album, which
I think I'm right in saying. The acoustic soundtrack on
Beyonce's cover is the same soundtrack from the original song
that the Beatles recorded in nineteen sixty eight. So I
think it's very much part of our story in the
West from the nineteen sixties to today. It's one of
(05:26):
the great stories of the last century, I guess. So
it's timeless as well, which helps. So everybody's got a
kind of personal relationship with the Beatles and their music,
which I think makes it so popular.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Mark in nineteen sixty six, a rumor started that Paul
McCartney had died in a car crash. I remember that
explicitly from a radio station in Detroit w kN R
at the time, where Russ Gibb, one of the DJs,
started part of that story. Do you remember that, No, I'm.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Sorry the second and to it. I mean, I know
the theory and I know the story, but I don't
remember from the time. I often think that if that
were true, they did incredibly well to find another extremely
good looking, an incredibly talented Liverpudlian who looked exactly like
McCartney and had all his talents, because McCartney is an
(06:24):
incredibly When Obama presented McCartney with in twenty ten a
George Gershon Award, he pointed out that McCartney was the
most successful songwriter in history. I thought, if you're going
(06:45):
to replace him with somebody similar, that would be some
incredible feat. Wouldn't it To get somebody as talented to
do the same thing would make it less likely that
he'd been replaced.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
In fact, the I Buried Paul Rumor was genius for
marketing because it sold records like crazy.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah, I suppose that's true. By the way, Obama. When
Obama's presenting McCartney without a war back in twenty ten,
he pointed out that McCartney had composed nearly two hundred
songs that had made the charts and stayed on the
charts for a combined total of thirty two years. I
(07:27):
mean that's something, isn't it In terms of longevity?
Speaker 2 (07:32):
It's huge. How old is McCartney now?
Speaker 3 (07:35):
I think he's in is it eighties? Isn't he in
his midd he was one and about forty two, I
think right in the same so he's about eighty three
or four. Also, I should say.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
His birthday's coming up in June.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
I think, so is yours, George, Happy birthday?
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Thank you mine the next week? Yes, I know, truly remarkable,
and I mean in Paul's still performing as is Ringo, right.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
That's right. They were both recording performing recently. McCartney himself
headlined Glastonbury just a couple of years or so ago.
And what's neat about that performance in Glastonbury Because Peter
Jackson made the Get Back documentary and they were able
to isolate John Lennon's voice using AI, McCartney and Lennon
(08:24):
were able to sing together as it were in real
time by using film footage and a recording of Lennon
and McCartney being on stage and singing along with him
at the same time. I thought that was quite a
neat trick. And of course they used AI, didn't they
last year to release that Beatles record now and then?
So these were which is really appropriate when you think
(08:47):
about how pioneering the Beatles word and recording technology for
them to be the band the ROLESO associated with an
AI track seems really fitting.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Movies? Were they in mark? I remember the Yellow Submarine?
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yeah, there was Hard Days Night, wasn't there? That was
unusual as well? Talking about Beatle first, I think that's
apart from the Elvis movies, of course, that's I think
the Beatles might have been one of the first bands
to be in their own movies. So there was Hard
Day's Night, and there was Help, wasn't there? There was
the Yellow Submarine. Magical Mystery Tour was a television movie,
(09:26):
so that isn't quite the same, And then there was
also Let It Be It was. There was about half
a dozen I think altogether.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
They were on the Ed Sullivant Show at least twice.
Weren't they astrid?
Speaker 3 (09:39):
When you were playing yesterday? Just now, I was thinking
about the fact that McCartney was on I think one
of the American chat shows. It might have been Stephen Cobert.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Is that his name called Cobert?
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Yeah, Cobert. I think he was on that, or maybe
he was in Letter on Us, I can't quite remember.
And he was talking about the fact that one of
the stage hands said to McCartney, because McCartney sung yesterday
on Ed Sullivan, it wasn't the first appearance. It was
the second appearance, I think, and he was a little
(10:15):
nervous because he was performing by himself for the first time.
They wanted to do yesterday on the stage hands said
to him something like, oh, don't worry about it. Last
time only seventy three million people were watching, McCartney said,
made his nerves even worse, as you can imagine.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
We led Sullivan did the same with Elvis Presley. You
put him on there and the skyrocketed after that.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Yes, I remember the stories about after that appearance they
would only form Elvis from.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
The waist up.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
That's how talented were the Beatles in music? Did they
have lessons? Were they trained?
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (10:59):
No, Actually that's a great question. They weren't trained, and
I think the fact that they weren't trained is one
of them. May sound odd, but it's one of the
main reasons they were so successful. There's an interesting ted
talk on YouTube by a British educationalist called Ken Robinson,
(11:23):
and he talks about the fact that he quotes Picasso
as saying that Picasso said all children are born artists,
all children are born creative, but they're educated out of it.
So the challenges to remain an artist despite your schooling.
I think that's important with the Beatles because they had
(11:45):
an untrained capacity for innovation and creativity. They weren't educated
out of it by being formally trained, even though George
Martin was formally trained so could show them a few tricks.
I think that's an important contribution to the fact that
they were you might even say naively, George Martin bleeding
(12:07):
experimentation anyway, so the Beatles would go up to him
and say, as John Lennon did in a song called
Tomorrow Never Knows. He says, George, I want the sound
which sounds like a thousand monks chanting on top of
a mountain, which is a bit of a bit of
an ask. So they had that kind of creative spirit,
(12:28):
and they weren't trained in a formal way to kind
of take that creative spirit out of them. So I
think that's important, the fact they weren't. They couldn't read music,
so they were given these different ways.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
You know, Ringo came in later after the fact that
he know he did, Yes, who is the drummer before Ringo?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
A chap called Pete Best. I think that George Martin
and some of the engineers and some of the other
people in the music industry didn't think that Pete Best
was good enough to be the drama with the Beatles,
and Ringo had a lot of experience playing with other bands,
(13:15):
and I remember McCartney saying an interview that once they'd
had Ringo behind them, it made an incredible difference that
they could hear the difference straight away.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
I remember the first song that Ringo sang as a Beatle,
was it They're going to put Me in the movies?
Was added?
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Oh, yes, that's right as a country in Western Didy,
isn't it.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
I was baffled because I said, how can a drummer sing?
But he did? Okay, yeah he did.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I mean I think they picked songs which suited his voice,
didn't they.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
And of course Octopus's Garden there's a funny story. I
mean Octopus's Gardens the song that Ringo wrote, and we
see him experimented with a song and to get back documentary,
it's a song he wrote when he temporarily left the
Beatles because he was a bit annoyed about the arguments
in the studio and he went off to Turkey and
(14:16):
while he was on holiday. I think it's Turkey. He
was on some kind of submarine tour and somebody and
somebody was talking to him about the life of an octopus,
the way that an octopus in terms of sexual selection,
presents a kind of garden of things for its mate.
(14:40):
And that's why Ringo wrote the song in the first place.
There's a line in it which talks about there's no
one there to tell us what to do, which seems
to be him talking about arguments back in the recording studio.
But yeah, he had he had a voice which suited
the songs that they gave Ringo to sing.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
What made the Beatles change from the Beatles that they were,
these young kids from Liverpool to the Sergeant Pepper's lonely
hard Club's band type people.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
I think that's evolving with the decade itself. I think
it's a lot to do with the friendly cultural competition
between the Beatles and the Stones and the Beach Boys
and all those other bands. I think that friendly competition
drove them forward. Also, they seemed to have they didn't
(15:31):
really want to repeat themselves. They didn't want to get
stuck in a reta. I guess also when you're taking
influences from so many different forms of music and so
many different sub genres of music, and you're looking for
new stuff that's going to make your sound rather fresh.
(15:52):
On an ongoing basis, I.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Think Frank Sinatra's initial reaction to the Beatles was not positive,
but later on they grew on him.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Didn't they the strike I think he said that George
Hardison's Something, which is a love song on the Abby
Road album, I think I'm writing saying that Sinatra said
that was the greatest love song ever written.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah, he did. He did say that.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
And of course, even though Lennon McCartney are the famous
songwriting partnership, I think I'm writing saying that Here Comes
the Sun is the most downloaded beatless track on the
likes of Spotify and Apple Music and so on.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Man, Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Mark break with us as we talk about the Beatles.
His book is called The Science of the Beatles. Mark,
in your opinion, what made the Beatles so successful? Was
it timing, was it the era? What do you think
it was?
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Well, I think a lot. I mean I read recently.
I don't know how true it is that they're very
different people. Lennon was associated with Wit McCartney, with charm
Allison with spirituality, and Ringo was the joker of the band.
You know, he was the guy to American reporters when
(00:43):
they asked, how did you find a medic accent? We
just turned left at Greenland, you know, that kind of
that kind of gaga to come up with. Whereas in
the sixties only five percent of people could name all
the Rolling Stones, ninety five percent of people could name
all the Beatles. So it's a lot to do with
sheer personality, and then again it's to do with innovation.
(01:06):
The catchy melodies, the simple hooks and harmonies, and the songs.
I think that ensured mass appeal. There's a lyrical maturity
later on in the kind of topics they titled in
the songs that they made. I heard a little snippet
of yesterday just now on your radio, and I was
thinking about eleanor Rigby that I like Yesterday used a
(01:29):
string quartet in the production to make the thing dramatic,
and one of the innovations and the use of strings,
and Elan Rigby was actually borrowing the kind of jagged
sound of the strings in Psycho. You know how many
of your listeners were aware of that, but they deliberately
tried to make Elan Ribby sound dramatic by adopting this
(01:52):
kind of psycho string effect. So it's a number of
things to do with, you know, the way they may music,
the recording techniques, the personalities and the Beatles themselves, and
also tackling universal themes in their songs. As the decade
of the sixties wore on, you know, love and then
(02:15):
counterculture and all that kind of stuff made them, I
think popular.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
What were so popular about the Beatles in terms of
the age brackets? What age brackets do you think really
like them?
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah, that's a good question. Ed that they seemed to
have appealed to all brackets, didn't they From young to old.
They seemed to have a very very wide demographic. I
think that must have something to do with the way
in which they borrowed from all these different subgenres of
music something for everybody. You know, they ex expanded pops
(02:48):
boundaries by dabbling in all these different musical forms. And
of course the fact that it's some melodic and catchy
I think has a lot to do with it. Scientists
found out out there were scientists working on the Max
Planck Institute in Germany who listened to about seven hundred
of the most famous and popular songs and came to
(03:10):
the conclusion that the most scientifically catchy addictive song is
Oh Bloody or bla dar, the Beatles song from nineteen
sixty eight on the White Album as we now call it.
So there's obviously something that makes you wonder what scientists
are doing when they just sitting around listening to albums
and listen to the songs. But it's that element of
(03:30):
surprise which lends itself to the catchiness of a song,
and they say, if you want a catchy song, you know,
a very infectious song from intro to outro, then the
Beatles are going to do it, and Oh Bloody of
Bladar is probably the most catchiest, so that's another element
to it.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
They're still popular today.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Why, I think it has to do with those elements
that we went through, because they if you listen to
the album now, a lot of people listen to the
more sophisticated albums Rubbisto, Revolver, Sergeant Purpose and so on,
but the early albums are very infectiously enthusiastic and like
(04:11):
Joyce experience to listen to, so they seem more perfect
than ever. And they also represent a very positive decade,
don't they. The Beatles are synonymous with the nineteen sixties,
so it's like a moment in time to a certain
extent that particular decade. You're right about them being still popular.
Some Mendies, the Oscar winning film director, is making four
(04:35):
movies of the Beatles in twenty twenty seven, and he's
got to be You would have thought that the film
studio would have been pretty confident even in twenty twenty
seven the Beatles would be popular enough for them to
be able to make four individual movies, one from each
of the band members' perspectives. So that's an indication I think,
of course, people are still re recording Beatles' classics. Beyonce
(05:01):
recorded Blackbird on her recent cow By Carter album, which
I think I'm right in saying. The acoustic soundtrack on
Beyonce's cover is the same soundtrack from the original song
that the Beatles recorded in nineteen sixty eight. So I
think it's very much part of our story in the
West from the nineteen sixties to today. It's one of
(05:26):
the great stories of the last century, I guess. So
it's timeless as well, which helps. So everybody's got a
kind of personal relationship with the Beatles and their music,
which I think makes it so popular.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Mark in nineteen sixty six, a rumor started that Paul
McCartney had died in a car crash. I remember that
explicitly from a radio station in Detroit w kN R
at the time, where Russ Gibb, one of the DJs,
started part of that story. Do you remember that, No, I'm.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Sorry the second and to it. I mean, I know
the theory and I know the story, but I don't
remember from the time. I often think that if that
were true, they did incredibly well to find another extremely
good looking, an incredibly talented Liverpudlian who looked exactly like
McCartney and had all his talents, because McCartney is an
(06:24):
incredibly When Obama presented McCartney with in twenty ten a
George Gershon Award, he pointed out that McCartney was the
most successful songwriter in history. I thought, if you're going
(06:45):
to replace him with somebody similar, that would be some
incredible feat. Wouldn't it To get somebody as talented to
do the same thing would make it less likely that
he'd been replaced.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
In fact, the I Buried Paul Rumor was genius for
marketing because it sold records like crazy.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah, I suppose that's true. By the way, Obama. When
Obama's presenting McCartney without a war back in twenty ten,
he pointed out that McCartney had composed nearly two hundred
songs that had made the charts and stayed on the
charts for a combined total of thirty two years. I
(07:27):
mean that's something, isn't it In terms of longevity?
Speaker 2 (07:32):
It's huge. How old is McCartney now?
Speaker 3 (07:35):
I think he's in is it eighties? Isn't he in
his midd he was one and about forty two, I
think right in the same so he's about eighty three
or four. Also, I should say.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
His birthday's coming up in June.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
I think, so is yours, George, Happy birthday?
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Thank you mine the next week? Yes, I know, truly remarkable,
and I mean in Paul's still performing as is Ringo, right.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
That's right. They were both recording performing recently. McCartney himself
headlined Glastonbury just a couple of years or so ago.
And what's neat about that performance in Glastonbury Because Peter
Jackson made the Get Back documentary and they were able
to isolate John Lennon's voice using AI, McCartney and Lennon
(08:24):
were able to sing together as it were in real
time by using film footage and a recording of Lennon
and McCartney being on stage and singing along with him
at the same time. I thought that was quite a
neat trick. And of course they used AI, didn't they
last year to release that Beatles record now and then?
So these were which is really appropriate when you think
(08:47):
about how pioneering the Beatles word and recording technology for
them to be the band the ROLESO associated with an
AI track seems really fitting.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Movies? Were they in mark? I remember the Yellow Submarine?
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yeah, there was Hard Days Night, wasn't there? That was
unusual as well? Talking about Beatle first, I think that's
apart from the Elvis movies, of course, that's I think
the Beatles might have been one of the first bands
to be in their own movies. So there was Hard
Day's Night, and there was Help, wasn't there? There was
the Yellow Submarine. Magical Mystery Tour was a television movie,
(09:26):
so that isn't quite the same, And then there was
also Let It Be It was. There was about half
a dozen I think altogether.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
They were on the Ed Sullivant Show at least twice.
Weren't they astrid?
Speaker 3 (09:39):
When you were playing yesterday? Just now, I was thinking
about the fact that McCartney was on I think one
of the American chat shows. It might have been Stephen Cobert.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Is that his name called Cobert?
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Yeah, Cobert. I think he was on that, or maybe
he was in Letter on Us, I can't quite remember.
And he was talking about the fact that one of
the stage hands said to McCartney, because McCartney sung yesterday
on Ed Sullivan, it wasn't the first appearance. It was
the second appearance, I think, and he was a little
(10:15):
nervous because he was performing by himself for the first time.
They wanted to do yesterday on the stage hands said
to him something like, oh, don't worry about it. Last
time only seventy three million people were watching, McCartney said,
made his nerves even worse, as you can imagine.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
We led Sullivan did the same with Elvis Presley. You
put him on there and the skyrocketed after that.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Yes, I remember the stories about after that appearance they
would only form Elvis from.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
The waist up.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
That's how talented were the Beatles in music? Did they
have lessons? Were they trained?
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (10:59):
No, Actually that's a great question. They weren't trained, and
I think the fact that they weren't trained is one
of them. May sound odd, but it's one of the
main reasons they were so successful. There's an interesting ted
talk on YouTube by a British educationalist called Ken Robinson,
(11:23):
and he talks about the fact that he quotes Picasso
as saying that Picasso said all children are born artists,
all children are born creative, but they're educated out of it.
So the challenges to remain an artist despite your schooling.
I think that's important with the Beatles because they had
(11:45):
an untrained capacity for innovation and creativity. They weren't educated
out of it by being formally trained, even though George
Martin was formally trained so could show them a few tricks.
I think that's an important contribution to the fact that
they were you might even say naively, George Martin bleeding
(12:07):
experimentation anyway, so the Beatles would go up to him
and say, as John Lennon did in a song called
Tomorrow Never Knows. He says, George, I want the sound
which sounds like a thousand monks chanting on top of
a mountain, which is a bit of a bit of
an ask. So they had that kind of creative spirit,
(12:28):
and they weren't trained in a formal way to kind
of take that creative spirit out of them. So I
think that's important, the fact they weren't. They couldn't read music,
so they were given these different ways.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
You know, Ringo came in later after the fact that
he know he did, Yes, who is the drummer before Ringo?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
A chap called Pete Best. I think that George Martin
and some of the engineers and some of the other
people in the music industry didn't think that Pete Best
was good enough to be the drama with the Beatles,
and Ringo had a lot of experience playing with other bands,
(13:15):
and I remember McCartney saying an interview that once they'd
had Ringo behind them, it made an incredible difference that
they could hear the difference straight away.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
I remember the first song that Ringo sang as a Beatle,
was it They're going to put Me in the movies?
Was added?
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Oh, yes, that's right as a country in Western Didy,
isn't it.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
I was baffled because I said, how can a drummer sing?
But he did? Okay, yeah he did.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I mean I think they picked songs which suited his voice,
didn't they.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
And of course Octopus's Garden there's a funny story. I
mean Octopus's Gardens the song that Ringo wrote, and we
see him experimented with a song and to get back documentary,
it's a song he wrote when he temporarily left the
Beatles because he was a bit annoyed about the arguments
in the studio and he went off to Turkey and
(14:16):
while he was on holiday. I think it's Turkey. He
was on some kind of submarine tour and somebody and
somebody was talking to him about the life of an octopus,
the way that an octopus in terms of sexual selection,
presents a kind of garden of things for its mate.
(14:40):
And that's why Ringo wrote the song in the first place.
There's a line in it which talks about there's no
one there to tell us what to do, which seems
to be him talking about arguments back in the recording studio.
But yeah, he had he had a voice which suited
the songs that they gave Ringo to sing.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
What made the Beatles change from the Beatles that they were,
these young kids from Liverpool to the Sergeant Pepper's lonely
hard Club's band type people.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
I think that's evolving with the decade itself. I think
it's a lot to do with the friendly cultural competition
between the Beatles and the Stones and the Beach Boys
and all those other bands. I think that friendly competition
drove them forward. Also, they seemed to have they didn't
(15:31):
really want to repeat themselves. They didn't want to get
stuck in a reta. I guess also when you're taking
influences from so many different forms of music and so
many different sub genres of music, and you're looking for
new stuff that's going to make your sound rather fresh.
(15:52):
On an ongoing basis, I.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Think Frank Sinatra's initial reaction to the Beatles was not positive,
but later on they grew on him.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Didn't they the strike I think he said that George
Hardison's Something, which is a love song on the Abby
Road album, I think I'm writing saying that Sinatra said
that was the greatest love song ever written.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah, he did. He did say that.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
And of course, even though Lennon McCartney are the famous
songwriting partnership, I think I'm writing saying that Here Comes
the Sun is the most downloaded beatless track on the
likes of Spotify and Apple Music and so on.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
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