All My Troubles Seemed So Far Away.

Modest Disclaimer: I haven't actually seen the film "Yesterday" all the way through, so I don't exactly know how Richard Curtis deals with a world where no one has heard of The Beatles, except one plucky chap with an acoustic guitar and a complicated love life. But I saw a lot of the middle and the ending. I know the "turn" and the "prestige", I just don't know what Richard Curtis' "pledge" is. 

Is his thesis, not too grand a term I hope, that the songs don't exist and there's a Beatle's shaped hole in the culture? Or has he looked at the wider phenomenon of the Beatles? The British Invasion? The arms races with The Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys? The way that the band's trajectory is not merely a road map for every rock band of the classic era - the era the Beatles invented - but is a model of the culture itself. They started the sixties as thuggish leather boys, became cuddly mop tops in matching suits and ended the decade as jaded princelings, refusing to play for an audience or each other, tireless excavators of their own fundaments, while they bickered and squabbled, writing nasty songs about each other and becoming obscenely wealthy. That's the story of every band, except the bit about wealth. 

What the Beatles were not is just a collection of songs. They WERE the sixties. Without them the Stones would have been a blues cover band lead by a bloke called Brian, the Kinks would have invented heavy metal, and the Beach Boys would still be dressed as deckchairs, singing songs about engine parts and watersports. Without the Beatles there would be no Sparks! Imagine. 

Culture, like a dog, abhors a vacuum, and just as there would always have been a sort of Hitler if there had never been a Hitler, so there would always have been something like The Beatles. 

Or would there? 

The Beatles seem so monolithic - the Mount Rushmore of Pop - so perfect, and multifaceted, like one of those four-faced angels from the Book of Revelations, endlessly turning upon and reflecting one another. Who else would be a Beatles? The Kinks had some lovely songs but they don't have a George or a Ringo. There's isn't one that kids will like. I can't see Mick Avory on a lunchbox. The Who? Hideous. The little girls wouldn't understand. Herman's Hermits? Sly and the Family Stone? Smokey Robinson and the Miracles? I'd like a world where Smokey Robinson was a dominant cultural force. But of course, racism. The Beatles and the Stones existed because they sold black music to white kids in a way that wasn't Pat Boone. I don't know if the film Yesterday considered any of this. 

Yesterday's position on the Beatles seems to be - they were a repository of good songs that everyone will like. That's it. And that's not how songs work. Even within the Beatles, especially within the Beatles, not all songs are created equal. Helter Skelter is a very different animal to I Feel Fine or Blue Jay Way. You might say that within the logic of the film the man - I'll just look him up - Jack, is only playing the Beatles songs he remembers, so he's not obliged to play You Know My Name (Look Up The Number). But a song without its cultural context, and especially if its the Beatles, who are actively creating that culture in real time, is only half the story. Love Me Do isn't all that on its own: it's basic and stoppy/starty and the lyrics are trite. But that doesn't matter a jot in 1962 - it's fresh, its new, its vital, its novel. Playing Love Me Do to a festival crowd would soon expose the fact its wrong for that environment, where Hey Jude clearly needs that scale - it was written in expectation of a huge audience, and functions poorly without it. The film doesn't seem to address this at all. Every song is just a Beatles song, all the same functional pop perfection regardless of context: beautiful songs all the people must love. 

Anyway...I haven't seen this film. Perhaps Richard Curtis addresses all this with a clever and nuanced hypothesis. 

What he does do is bring John Lennon into the film because, by the film's logic, John Lennon must still be alive. Also, by the film's logic he is the saintly, gentle sage, living quietly by the sea that John Lennon might have been had he not been murdered. But it seems to me the only way John Lennon could have reached that epiphany is through his music. He was a troubled, tough-nut Scouser with mummy issues before music stretched him and gave him somewhere to put his cleverness that wasn't bitterness, sarcasm or violence. He could channel his aggression into getting one over on Paul McCartney. Without music, without escape, he's an angry Billy Liar, he's Albert Finney clocking on forever in "Friday Night, Saturday Morning". 

I mean, I know I haven't seen the movie, so its probably all explained away very neatly. Richard Curtis has been making films for a very long time. The biggest mystery of the film is the massive involvement of Ed Sheeran playing himself, and playing his own songs exactly the way he normally would play them. What Ed Sheeran is effectively saying, in a film that suggests the Beatles are the best songwriters of all time, is they had no effect on his writing at all. Ed Sheeran would be utterly unchanged in a Beatles-free world. None of their DNA exists in his work. Makes you think...

There's no Oasis in this world, which is fair enough. And no cigarettes, which implies that if this is a parallel world, the change must have happened much earlier than the Beatles, and also implies a link between smoking and the formation of the Beatles. Did Macca cadge a cheeky snout off Lennon at the Woolton Village Fete, and history was made? 

But, like I say, I haven't seen the whole film. Richard Curtis knows what he's doing. Safe pair of hands. 

Oh, I've just read about Jack Barth, the 60 year old guy whose first produced script this was based on. You won't have heard of him. In Jack's version - called "Cover Version" - Jack doesn't become a huge superstar - he becomes a cult artist, but he still can't really sell the songs. For all sorts of reasons he's just NOT the Beatles. That sounds a lot more interesting than the film I mostly saw. But, like I say, I didn't see all of it. I'll have to give Richard the benefit of doubt. 

Is there still a Boney M in this world?