If I ever got the chance to do the Beatles, this is the order I’d do them in: Ringo, then Paul, then Ringo again.
"You are a liar! A liar! I knew John Lennon and he was a lovely man!" That’s a dude who claimed to have been a close personal friend of John Lennon screaming at me on a TV show after I trotted out default Beatles opinion No. 4: John Lennon was not a plaster saint, he was bitter, twisted punk bastard and that’s what made him so cool as opposed to Paul who was actually a quasi-lesbian public school head girl from a 1920s jolly hockey sticks novel trapped in a man’s body.
The 10th of July has been declared Beatles Day, It’ll be like Red Nose Day except with £16.35 Beatle wigs and will be celebrated by thousands of Japanese tourists and plastic mickey-mousers with quizzes and rooftop concerts and mass cripple mockings and wife abusings and gay baitings and – it says here – "TV presenters will read the news wearing their wigs!"
Right. So that’s the day there’s another 9/11 or 7/7 or Liverpudlian toddler murderer and the BBC Merseyside anchor brings you the news looking like the bewigged little baldie bloke of Benny Hill.
This is what you expect me write, isn’t it? You want me to bang on about the heroic student radicals of 1968 who battered the crap out of the pigs and war-mongers on four continents – hang on – three continents while cheerfully whistling Beatles songs, and how Beatle Day is a plastic mockery of everything that made the Beatles great (default Beatles opinion no. 5).
Or maybe I should point out that the Beatles are overrated rubbish and that the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is better than any Beatles album and anyway the Byrds were way better (default Beatles opinion no. 1). But I can’t. Because that would make me a cunt.
Firstly, only senile idiots think of pop in terms of albums. Secondly the Byrds sucked and led directly to the abomination that is Teenage Fan Club. Thirdly if you don’t like everything the Beatles ever did apart from some of the filler on the White album then you have the cocks of 50 corpses in your mouth.
These are some of the suggested Beatle Day activities:
Shave your head for charity and cover it up until it grows back with the Beatles wig
Play ‘HIDE YOUR LOVE AWAY’ – you could hide him/her in the cupboard
Cook a ‘Beatle meal’: Starter – Onion Ringos; Mains – Sgt. Peppered Steak; Dessert – Strawberry Fool
Keep Fit – you and 3 mates have a ‘Band On the Run’ from the Beatles Story at Albert Dock to the Cavern on Mathew Street
Use the wig to take really embarrassing photos of your mates you can upload on Facebook
Spring Clean your house using your wig as a duster
When you’ve finished with your wig – recycle it! Use it as a hairy handbag or someone (sic) to keep your eggs warm … you are the egg man!
All the ideas the organisers have come up with are so horribly Vicar-Of-Dibley-esque that you suspect a spoof. Wait a minute, let’s check. No it’s legit. Obviously every single person involved in Beatles Day is the most appalling square.
But I will not drop the already primed thermonuclear device the editors of this page have given me into this conveniently placed barrel ram-packed with thrashing cod. Because the straights are not the enemy, man. They never have been. They have the most exquisite taste in pop music: The Beatles, the Sex Pistols, ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’, Right Said Fred, The Beautiful South, T’Pau, Billy Idol, Queen, Status Quo’s ‘Deeper and Down’, Avril Lavinge’s ‘Girlfriend’, Jilted John’s ‘Jilted John’, Ashlee Simpson’s ‘Pieces of Me’ and on and and on. The unpretentious mob gets it right way more often than they get it wrong and they always have done.
Meanwhile the average rock-snob has entire rooms ram packed with fifth-rate rubbish: Genesis, Pink Floyd, The Pixies, Sonic Youth, the Wedding Present, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Belle and Sebastian, the Decemberists, the Stone Roses, Los Campesinos! and on and on and on. There’s a reason all your favorite bands are massively unpopular, it’s because they’re shit. (Unlike the massively unpopular bands I like who are unpopular because they’re too damn nasty for the squares to handle, man.)
In 1964 the hideously bearded jazz and blues snobs – the direct cultural ancestors of today’s indie snobs – stood with arms folded and sneered as the Beatles put the double barreled shotgun of sex and killa toons in authentic music’s mouth and blew its fucking head off.
That’s why neither the jazz snobs nor their feeble indie offspring are allowed to sneer at, mock or in any way comment on this Beatles Day party the squares are organising for themselves. You were wrong then, Pointdexter, and you’ve been wrong about everything ever since.
And they were right. They’ve earned this. So piss off and leave them alone.
