All You Need Is The Beatles

Now And Then, the Beatles last ever single, is the warm and misty-eyed hug that many of us need right now. It’s a haunting and beautiful postscript to the band who were the 20th century’s greatest explosion of creative energy.

The Beatles have always been the sound of humanity falling in love with itself. The heart-thumping thrills, the infinite worlds opening-up, and the floating daydreams of sunny tomorrows. The world turning from black and white to glorious colour.

The brilliant Caitlin Moran once said "there are only three stories worth knowing in the last 2000 years. The story of Jesus, the story of Mohammed, and the story of the Beatles." As someone who makes and sells stories for a living there’s a few more I would throw in there, but the story of the Beatles is still worth passing down in eager and fevered tones from generation to generation - a perfectly formed arc from the frenzied early explosion that ruptured pop culture to the acid-saturated flowering of love and peace during their most daring years to the wistful, autumnal sadness of their final songs. They captured the seasons of life in an astonishing seven-year outpouring of creative wonder. 

Whilst their technicolour beauty still sounds fresh and vital today, how they made those songs has so much still to say about the creative process. For those of us fortunate enough to earn a living in a creative industry, the lessons learned from the Beatles are base camp. You can’t get higher without starting here. Here are five thoughts about their process.

1. Start with endless curiosity.

The Beatles sucked up cultural influences with alarming force. They borrowed, stole, tapped, and lifted from everyone. 1920s music hall, Indian ragas, Shostakovich string quartets, Victorian children’s stories, Elvis and Chuck Berry, Stockhausen’s tape loops, Bob Dylan, Tin Pan Alley, They had no boundaries and no rules. Lewis Carroll was as important as Jerry Lee Lewis. Everything was fair game. Everything. A drowsy John Lennon was woken by the dull, two-note drone of a police siren wailing down the road and wrote I Am The Walrus. Beat that. 

2. Stay restless.

None of The Beatles ever said, ‘let’s not fuck with the formula chaps’. Not even Ringo. Having created a once-in-a lifetime magical alchemy of ingredients, they kept adding more with a restless daring that unfolded more of pop music's map with each new song. Of course, the fact that some of those ingredients were chemical played its part, but throughout their short career they refused to keep going back over the same ground. That wasn’t born out of a wilful stubborness, but rather a rush of excitement at the vast possibilities still to be explored, 

3. Embrace competition.

As everyone knows, the rivalry between Lennon and McCartney was the electrical storm that fired their music. Without the intense eyeball to eyeball competition, they often drifted as solo artists. Their early days writing together were a partnership the fizzled but as they started to write independently, trying to outdo the other, it crackled and ignited into a luminous burst of creativity. No Penny Lane without Strawberry Fields. And of course, on the side-lines a steely competitive Harrison was watching the bar being raised and determined he would write ‘something’ before it vanished out of sight. 

4. Sometimes, let it happen.

Their best ideas often were conjured from nowhere – effortlessly plucking songs out of thin air. The two-minute sequence of Paul bringing Get Back into life, from Peter Jackson’s mesmerising film, is jaw-dropping. Care-free and playful, he spontaneously finds the source of earth-shaking creative power that lies deep within. It’s all inside, he just needs to tune in. The Beatles would often pull songs out with abandon. McCartney dreamed Yesterday, Harrison kept Something from the group because it came so easily he assumed he had ripped it off somewhere, and much of Lennon’s best songs were like musical tourettes, free and unfettered. They wrote with childlike curiosity, entirely without self-conscious interference. 

5. Capture the universal.

The best art always speaks deeply and widely, saying something profound to all of us. When the Beatles began, they were raw energy - a flash of lightning across the grey post-war world. As the years passed the songs become more sophisticated but they were always about the most human of themes – love, friendship and loss (Ok, except for the one about wanting to be a walrus). Their songs of hope, often tinged at the corners with gentle melancholy, spoke to everyone. The complexity of their tunes never stood in the way of their simple humanity. Their final recording, Now And Then, is a man in his eighties, singing back across half a lifetime to his loved and lost best friend - ‘I want you to be there for me, always to return to me.’ Even in their final moment, they distil the beauty and the anguish of life