The Culture Club

Tag: The Beatles

  • Analysis: Here, There and Everywhere by The Beatles

    Here, There and Everywhere is one of the best songs on The Beatles’ Revolver and its brightest affirmation. Paul McCartney is the song’s sole writer (despite the Lennon/McCartney credit), and it is suffused with his inveterate sentimentality. But it is sentimental in the best possible way, balancing finely ordered poetic thought with an intoxication that suggests the writer…

  • Analysis: Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles

    Eleanor Rigby is perhaps the Beatles’ most shocking song. Not simply because of the sound of it, which was an abrupt departure for its time, but because of its theme. It is hard to think of a more desolate statement in any work of art, let alone popular music. This song marked a sudden break…

  • Leonard Bernstein: From Mahler to the Beatles

    For our discussions on The Beatles’ Revolver album I dug out the clip below from Leonard Bernstein’s celebrated lecture series The Unanswered Question, Six Talks at Harvard. This short extract is from Lecture 5: The 20th Century Crisis, in which he focuses on Mahler’s 9th Symphony. He sees this great symphony as a prophetic vision…

  • The Beatles’ Revolver and the Universal

    In his book The Sixties, an exhaustive history of the 1960’s, Arthur Marwick introduces his subject as follows: If asked to explain the fuss, both survivors of the decade and observers of the repeated attempts subsequently to conjure it up again could probably manage to put together a list of its most striking features, which…

  • The Beatles’ Yesterday and the Nature of Belief

    As a non-religious person, I’ve always struggled with the concept of ‘faith’. It’s not that I disagree with it or oppose it, it’s just that I’ve never been able to fully understand it. Whenever religious people talk of their ‘belief’ and their ‘faith’, they seem to mean it in a different sense to the way…

  • Happy Birthday Sgt. Pepper

    I feel the need to throw my penny into the pot and publicly celebrate the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the seminal album by the Beatles that was released 40 years ago today. So much has been written about this album, but here are some of my own personal highlights of…