Love Me Do

Trevor Horn, who in November 1963 was inspired to become a producer when he noticed the difference between the Beatles “error-strewn” live performance (that turned them into multi–media stars in the UK) on the Royal Variety Show compared to the exuberant polish of their studio songs, observed that there is always one weak member of a group when it comes to recording; which is why he says he never recorded U2 (Mojo June 2010). George Martin thought the same with Pete Best and, sadly, I think that Pete was a live rock n roll drummer and not cut out for all the studio work supporting the song that Ringo delivered at Abbey Road; check this out as The Beatles try to find their recording feet whilst auditioning with Pete Best on Love Me Do. There is a version of this post on the Beatles YouTube Album. To my ears Love Me Do is the transition song between the live rock n roll band Beatles and the first self-contained rock band which had unparalleled domination of the pop singles world during 1963 & 1964. Deni includes it as key live track in The Beatles live show late ’62. They weren’t moptops yet.

How Do You Do It?

The Beatles most significant act in 1962, apart from George joking about Martin’s tie, was insisting on recording their own songs. This was to transform popular music in the 1960s. But even the polished final version of their Love Me Do didn’t strike gold dust and Martin, the ambitious Head of Parlophone Records as well as their creative producer, insisted that The Beatles should record the future number one (for Gerry and The Pacemakers) How Do You Do It. When you compare the breezy piano-driven performance that Gerry Marsden eventually turned in, to The Beatles own exuberance on Please Please Me, then this polite demo for Martin, in September 1962 can only have been a kind of lazy protest to avoid recording it as a single.

Please Please Me

One of my tenets about the Beatles creativity is that they are collaborative craftsmen, a Unit 4 plus too many to mention; a collective of Fifth Beatles. But at EMI George Martin started off by giving them an education in making hit singles. They had great musical ears, were quick studies and didn’t suffer fools gladly. But they recognised that Martin had something to teach them and they were diligent. And intensely ambitious. Martin himself in All You Need is Ears says that he was “like a school teacher with them”. Determined to write their own hits The Beatles upped the tempo of the self-penned Please Please Me and offered 1′ 10” of energy. Martin responded by putting the chorus up front, the band put the excitement of their live performances into the music and boom! They had learnt how to please please us; their listening public; finally The Beatles were the Merseybeat kings of the transistor radio.

P.S. I Love You

But whilst they were being schooled in the arts of hit singles the Beatles were also learning a range of musical tricks. Their early B-sides were Latin flavoured, P.S. I love you and Ask Me Why, and they were developing their musical skills in the studio. Ringo quickly became “Master of the Beat” for George Martin, unerringly picking rhythmic approaches that amplified the song. George Harrison with his new guitar learned that less is more playing lead. Their apprenticeship as a live band happened in Hamburg, especially in 1960, now during the long and miserably cold winter of 1962/63 they were classroom apprentices to recording sorcerer George Martin. Martin is the under-praised musical wizard who demanded from his pupils that they took their O level exams early (Please Please Me album), did an extra A-level (From Me to You) and, whilst they were first team stars at school (She Loves You), take those elitist Oxbridge entry exams (I Wanna Hold Your Hand). The playground scruffs with street smarts turned out to be even better than the Teacher’s Pets (Brian Poole and the Tremeloes). In the meantime apprenticeship calls. P.S I Love You is one of their minor songs, but one where they all pushed their skills on just a little.

She Loves You

By the spring of 1963 with From Me To You, the follow-up to their first Number One, they had nailed Merseybeat as a recording phenomenon. So much so that it sounds like they are already repeating the hit single formula; intro as hook, chorus up-front, catchy harmonica, Me/You lyrics topped off with with those trebly harmonies ideal for the kids cheap transistor radios. B-side similar but uptempo. Whilst being possibly the only original single where the Beatles were treading water, it worked; From Me To You was Number One in the UK for 7 weeks. By the time they came to record the follow-up George had a new guitar, Ringo was leading off with his brand new, iconic, Ludwig drum kit and John and Paul were evolving their lyrical focus to the third person (Paul’s strength). So well were George Martin’s pupils learning that when he commented that the closing note didn’t work as it ripped off Glenn Miller, The Beatles, who discovered this unresolved sixth by themselves, scoffed knowingly that “the kids will love it.” And we did. In the UK nothing matches the joyous impact of She Loves You. This was the biggest selling UK single ever until 1977. And, yeah, they also created a teenage catch phrase, Yeah Yeah Yeah! And ended sensationalist media interest in Mandy Rice Davis and replaced it with real Beatlemania. She Loves You was such a phenomenal smash hit that it stayed in the top three for six months and inspired the BBC to introduce the TV show Top of The Pops.

It Wont Be Long

The massive pop success of the Please Please Me LP and She Loves You put pressure on the Beatles to record a follow-up album quickly even though the LP was number one in the album charts for 30 weeks. Stretched and pushed for time With The Beatles was partly a polished retread of Please Please Me and partly experimental as they had more studio time (such as on All My Loving); it became the biggest selling album of 1963 in just six weeks. The covers were well worked and well sung (You Really Got a Hold on Me), at Martin’s direction they repeated the big finish with Money, but their self-penned stuff is the most interesting. The opening trilogy easily outstrips their debut album by highlighting the quality of their emerging songwriting especially All My Loving which was an airplay hit and released as an EP; and they gave I Wanna Be Your Man to the Stones. So good was their developing writing that they can provide a classic Merseybeat track as an opener and it wasn’t even a single; they were treading water with panache – look no hands! It Wont Be Long was simply comforting their fans with its reassuringly familiar earthy transcendence; Yeah!

I Want to Hold Your Hand

I’d always accepted the story that the Beatles broke big in the USA because Amerians were ready to be cheered up after Kennedy’s assassination. Certainly the end of Mad Men Series 3 leaves the protagonists very uncertain about the future at the end of 1963, and February 1964 may have been the point in a long winter when people want to be cheered up. However Kenneth Womack points out that Brian Epstein asked Lennon and McCartney to write a song to crack the American market and they spent all of two hours on a piano in Jane Asher’s house until Paul found a chord and Lennon said “that’s it!” That’s the way you crack America. Such good students of the hit singles that they are fine-tuning them for the different markets. George Martin says something else but his was how they they took America by the hand and left them in love for ever. Loaded with two very good albums and four great singles the Beatles were equipped to cheer up teen age and old age America, helping them forget Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. In February 1964 they conquered the States via TV via the most watched TV programme ever, the Ed Sullivan Show. The rest of the world then just fell. Returning to Abbey Road to complete Can’t Buy Me Love studio engineer Geoff Emerick commented on how their confidence had changed and the record just oozes it. Now a jazz standard thanks to Ella this lead The Beatles charge to the top 5 singles in the USA in April 64. And to the Top 6 places in Australia a week later.

Hard Days Night

They had mastered chart-based poppery and were beginning to extend its vocabulary, grammar and timbres. And then came Hard Days Night, the first single I personally heard the first time it was played. Phoney Beatlemania had bitten the dust and real Beatlemania had set in permanently. Was it imitative or did we all want to be Beatlemaniacs? This time the director Richard Lester was making demanding requests on the Beatles creativity. Big song to open the movie and creation expectation. Hard Days Night was a multi-media gem of a creation, meet the Fab Four – who’s life do you want to share; John Paul George and Ringo? Box-office second only to the definitive Bond film Goldfinger in 1964 and listen up! Here’s that gloriously hanging Hard Day’s Night open chord.

I Should Have Known Better

Hard Days Night was identified by Q in 2003 as the fifth best British album of all time, which might come as a surprise until you listen to all of its Lennon and McCartney compositions. It is a complete representation of all The Beatles had learned by the middle of 1964. Bursting with pride and confidence after conquering the very USA that they had worshipped and adored, they creatively poured their enthusiasm, craft, musicianship and pop-nous into all the film tracks on Side One and the bonus cuts on Side Two, turning the souvenir soundtrack into a Be Here Now authentic album just fifteen months after Cliff’s Summer Holiday had perfected the souvenir experience. I Should Have Known Better is both the first pop video by the “father of MTV” jazzer Richard Lester and an acoustic precursor of Rubber Soul (and even George’s marriage). Turn left at Marylebone for the very clean Liverpool Shuffle.

And I Love Her

They had moved on from the early aspirational songs, beyond the formulaic Mersey hit Beat and were starting to try fresh approaches. After surprisingly covering five girl group songs on their first album the macho sex warriors revealed their feminine side on several of the movie songs. John wrote If I Fell and “lucky guy” Paul composed Things We Said Today for Jane Asher so they could remember their love in the 21st Century. Kenneth Womack rates “And I Love Her” as the first of Paul’s long tradition of great ballads. It is an open feminine ballad and you can hear it any time at all.

Long Tall Sally

Amazingly on June 19th, just two weeks before Hard Days Night opened The Beatles released one of their classic EPs with four new tracks, perhaps reminiscing about Hamburg. EPs were critical elements in cementing The Beatles popularity in the UK as they were much more affordable than albums, which were often bought at Christmas, like With The Beatles, or as presents in the early sixties. In Australia the All My Loving EP topped the singles charts in April 1964 ahead of five other Beatles single. Long Tall Sally is in some ways their most democratic recording, they all get a song, it rocks like crazy and sounds like they are a real band. I’m guessing it is a long hard days yelp of release to show they can really move when set free from the repetitive limitations of package tours. Paul in simply awesome voice on Long Tall Sally.

Toppermost and Poppermost

The Beatles, who on their return from Hamburg were asking “what’ve you got?” to rebel against, now super-ceded Martin’s requests with “is that all you want us to do?” Their pop smarts were so good after one year that when in October 1963 Epstein asked them to write a song to crack the American market, they could write “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” Lester asked them for a song with a climactic start for their first film and they wrote Hard Days Night. They had completed the “pedagogic” phase of their learning to be creative in six months. Call them feral, call them provincial but their liminal abilities were focussed for one year on writing perfect hit records and they graduated with 110% or even more; they rewrote the stylistic and sales records book with 15 separate million-selling records in 1964 in the USA alone.

By the summer of 1964 The Beatles had used up all their ears had taught them as an audience-responsive live band and then recycled it back creatively as a pop singles machine. They had answered calls for a UK number one, an American number one, a movie theme tune, a classic rock n roll EP and also, in delivering a soundtrack album with six bonus tracks, accidentally invented the modern rock album. The studious Beatles were bored. And then Bob Dylan turned up.

In the next six posts I will be looking at the Beatles creativity in terms of the six phases identified in Learning from Learning…With The Beatles. In keeping with the social construction of Popular Music I will tell these stories through six Top Tens of Beatles songs. Consequently, as with many of the posts on this blog, there is an accompanying post with videos on a Beatles YouTube Album; specific videos are linked to from the paragraph headers. The first period discussed here is about how John, Paul, George and Ringo became The Beatles and looks at The Beatles Live 1957-1963. This is the same period as that identified by Malcolm Gladwell when The Beatles were unknown unknowns, or Outliers, and in the process of self-creation.

That’ll Be The Day

The pre-Fab Four were feral and provincial, outlawed themselves to Germany and worked in Hamburg’s red light district to make live music for significant periods in the early sixties. Bob Spitz in The Beatles Biography identifies the Litherland Hall Concert in Liverpool on December 27 1960, after the Beatles had returned from Hamburg in Wild Ones black leather, as the point at which they became legends in their own backyard. Nice short film about Litherland made by their manager of the time Allan Williams, which captures this confusion about their provenance. But even legends started small and the craft collective known as The Beatles started as The Quarrymen.

The most significant date in early Beatles history is the Woolton Fete on July 6th 1957 when John Lennon and his rabble-rousing mate Pete Shotton took their band The Quarrymen to play live skiffle on the back of a truck. The sometimes cutesy but always solid tunesmith McCartney was impressed by the band and the dangerously quixotic Lennon. On that day or the next (disputed), he joined the band and eventually replaced Shotton as Lennon’s conspirator in chief. Lennon and McCartney were to become the most successful songwriting partnership of the twentieth century, 80 of the 250 most covered songs of all time are written by them. Robert M Pirsig in Lila argues that change comes out of the interplay of both risky dynamic quality and safe static quality and Lennon and McCartney had that yin and yang. The film Nowhere Boy captures this dynamic well in the intimate scenes between Lennon and his “little friend” as Lennon’s Aunt Mimi called McCartney.

Raunchy

Paul had “passed the audition” to play with The Quarrymen in July 1957 (still going strong) by playing Eddie Cochran’s 20 Flight Rock, from the seminal RnR film The Girl Cant Help It, for John. In February 1958 Paul brought along his friend George Harrison, whom John originally dismissed as being both too young and too small to be a Quarryman. George, like Paul, had to play some good rock n roll really well to show John his worth, the instrumental Raunchy; suddenly he was in the band. Here are the grown up Beatles in retirement playing it easy with Raunchy. The fact that John Paul and George naturally developed three-part harmonies, which reflected doo-wop, and which were to propel Beatles songs out of the transistor radios that every sixties kid owned helped.

Roll Over Beethoven

Three quarters of The Beatles were in place by Spring 1958 and they soon recorded Buddy Holly’s That’ll Be The Day in Percy Phillips living room studio. It sounds like the fifties; tentative, earnest, faraway and lost. It was played in an easy skiffle style, the play-in-a-day entry-level music of the fifties that turned thousands of kids into proto-musicians. However it was rock n roll that took the restlessness of fifties youth and put their frustrated energy into the music. The Beatles played a lot of rock n roll, especially in Hamburg for their very first fans; the Art School exi’s. They learnt how to “make a show,” entertain, amuse and to give it up with Rock n Roll Music. The Beatles version of Chuck Berry’s great 1956 song Roll Over Beethoven was selected by Daniel Levitin as one of the 6 tracks that sum up rock music in This is Your Brain on Music.

Blue Moon / That’s Alright Mimi

But most of all they were inspired by Elvis Presley. John went crazy when he first heard Elvis and drove his Aunt Mimi, with whom he lived on Menlove Avenue, where his mother Julia would eventually be run over, sufficiently bonkers to buy him a guitar. Great scene in Nowhere Boy showing them buying Lennon’s first guitar. What would ultimately differentiate the group The Beatles from their Beat Boom peers was their song writing. The scene in Nowhere Boy pretty accurately (thousands of boys bedrooms unwittingly recreated this scene for years) captures Paul (dismissively introduced by Aunt Mimi) teaching John the chords to Rodgers and Hart’s Blue Moon, in the rock n roll adaptation doo-wopped to the top by the Marcels, but made famous by Elvis.

Solid-Gold Red-Hot Rockabilly

Still they weren’t quite The Beatles yet. They started with low-cost skiffle, added no-cost doo-wop, street-corner barber shop harmonies from urban America, but now they were in the some-cost territory of being a rock n roll band and needed real money. In 1959 Lennon had started Art School and had fallen under the creative influence of Stuart Sutcliffe (Eduardo Paolozzi’s favourite pupil) and Royston Ellis (the Paperback Writer of later years). Moving out of Mimi’s house Lennon lived in a squat with them which was exposed as part of the Sunday People’s Beatnik Horror “silly season” series in August 1960.

After Stu Sutcliffe (the James Dean of the group) joined them in January 1960 the Quarrymen evolved into the late great Johnny and the Moondogs and then the Silver Beatles. Finally in August 1960 they became The Beatles adding Pete Best as drummer later that month. The Beatles foetus was complete. They were improving musically, were cooler stylistically, but it was getting hard to play live. Best’s mum Mona ran the Casbah Club giving them some guaranteed dates in Liverpool. They were ready to be a real live rock n roll band and manager Allan Williams sent them off to Hamburg.

Pete Best helped The Beatles become a driving live club band, as good as any other at the time, with five good-looking lads to attract the girls, some wit and sarcasm from Lennon, bonhomie and cheer from McCartney and his driving drum sound to drown out the shake of the dancers, the rattle of the glasses and the rolling of customers. Rockabilly was a good way to impose yourself on an audience and they learnt a lot of music that helped them manage the roudy customers they played for.

Rock n Roll Band; Made in Hamburg

Thanks in part to Best in Hamburg they became the raving rock n roll band that was to triumph in Litherland five months later. However George was so young on their first visit, seventeen, that he was expelled by the immigration authorities, which almost broke up The Beatles.  But late 1960 was the critical time when they were both a great little rock n roll band and arty beatniks and  who were adopted by German exi’s, Hamburg art students. Lennon was attracted by genius and this arty period help extend and clarify their group identity. Sutcliffe’s gift was to make them attractive to the exi’s; Astrid Kircherr gave them Beatle cuts and with Klaus Vormann, who was to draw Revolver, developed their androgynous image.  Their musical range was also unusually broad as they also covered girl group songs as well, creating a complex identity that would eventually mature fully in 1964/65 as their songwriting became more reflective.

Cry Me A Shadow

As well as developing their uniquely sixties beatnik rocker (“mocker”) identity The Beatles were so successful musically in Germany from 1960-62 that they were asked to back English singer Tony Sheridan, the top star in Hamburg at the time, on a Polydor recording session for the great Bert Kampfert, a major German producer and songwriter. This wasn’t so sweet a session overall but The Beatles did get to sign their first recording contract and even record their first composition the Harrison-Lennon instrumental Cry Me Shadow, ironically partly in tribute to The Shadows, which opens this lovely little film; full of wonderfully relevant black and white photos from Hamburg; But Hamburg did improve The Beatles as a rock n roll band. As showmen apprentices they played six times a week often for 10 hours per day. They put in the 10,000 hours of live performance that made them the craftsmen of popular music we came to know and love. They had to draw on skiffle, show tunes, rock n roll, rockabilly, country, pop hits, easy listening lounge, burlesque, instrumentals, military tunes, pub songs, and Goon-like humour; everything they could find to fill the time. If you knew the name they looked up the number. This was the origin of their musically diverse 1968 White Album. One of their live classics, Hippy Hippy Shake, later a hit for the Swinging Blue Jeans whom The Beatles really liked.  This was recorded in Hamburg but is fitted to the film of Some Other Guy made in the Cavern in 1962 by Granada TV from Manchester. Word was spreading;

Besame Mucho

The Beatles, big fish in two little pools in 1961, were now both treading water professionally whilst improving in various ways as a band. Signed by Brian Epstein to NEMS in 1961, because a fan asked for a copy of the Kampfert recordings at his shop, Epstien looked to get them a UK recording contract through auditions, first at Decca, and then at EMI. Fatefully at EMI George Martin asked for Pete Best to be replaced as drummer after his poor performance on Love Me Do. The band believed they were on the verge of becoming EMI recording artists and so sacked their live drummer, bringing in the “best drummer in Liverpool” instead. The musical instrument known as The Beatles was now complete. So let us offer a tribute to Pete Best, who helped The Beatles become a live rock n roll band, but who was not to be part of their fabulous recording history (see next post) with Besame Mucho; both on the Decca Audition (his best recorded performance) and live. Besame Mucho resonates with Pete Best.

I Saw Her Standing There

By 1963 Ringo Starr was in, they had a recording contract, they had a post-beatnik, post rock n roll, softer identity. They were the Mop Tops, a brand, a set of attitudes and behaviours that could be easily copied; or consumed. They had a recording contract and a hit record but they still played 246 live performances in 1963. Their opening tune live was I Saw Her Sanding There sometimes a jam lasting up to 10 minutes, but now the opening track to their first album which George Martin had designed to mimic their live show. And this was the first of a series of transitions as the Beatles moved from being a live rock n roll band to a pop singles band

A Great Beatles Live Show 1962

I have tried to pick a Top Ten of songs here that reflects the Beatles journey from schoolboy Quarrymen to red-hot live combo direct from Germany. Then I asked a friend, Deni Lavender, who heard The Beatles live perhaps 100 times between 1962 and 1964 to pick ten tracks that summed up the Beatles live and she said two intriguing things. Firstly, why only ten? Secondly her list of the 13 songs she would really want The Beatles to play live isn’t obvious at all. Here is a great show by The Beatles by someone who listened to them at the time; I Got a Woman, Young Blood, A Shot of Rhythm & Blues, Sure to Fall (In Love With You), Johnny B Goode & Roll Over Beethoven!, Besame Mucho, That’ll be the Day, Memphis Tennessee, Lucille, Dizzy Miss Lizzy, I Forgot To Remember To Forget, Love Me Do… I have created a Beatles YouTube Album Post called Beatles Live! Show London 1962 which includes videos of these songs and more.

In 1969 the Art Collective known as The Beatles imploded; more precisely the “Musical Instrument known as The Beatles”, as Brian Eno would characterise them, no longer had Brian Epstein to care of the business. In 1968 they really had taken care of the music and taken care of business, after a fashion. The Beatles had triumphed musically, but it hadn’t really been recognised; Lennon, left fuming at the end of 1968, shared his pain in a lengthy interview to a student, recently published in New Statesman. They had taken care of Business by launching Apple Corps and Apple Records, but they couldn’t hang on to the money they were making. Despite making the music/business equation work in 1968 it was to tear them apart during 1969. Not least because their work as creators of, and commentators on, the sixties was done. They didn’t fully understand how they had achieved that, and we didn’t get it at the time either.

A few years ago Mojo magazine devoted a whole issue to 1969, pointing out how The Band and others promoted a post-psychedelic back to music-making ethos that George Harrison particularly picked up on. However in 2009 Mojo produced a special edition celebrating 1969 in terms of the emergence of Led Zeppelin. Uncut recently celebrated 1969 for the quality of albums released that year and, although Abbey Road is rated highest, the range of music on album in 1969 is impressive. Woodstock also happened putting another of the trends of the seventies in place and The Beatles were becoming irrelevant to the rich tapestry of downer stadium rock that was emerging.

The advent of the Musicians Collective

Ironically the Beatles and other musicians were drawing up the threads of an alternative history that never happened. In reviewing the way the Beatles made albums, their enduring contribution to rock history, the White Album particularly stands out as it represents a way of working as an Art Collective, what I call an Atelier studio model, releasing music under The Beatles brand on Apple, and others on Zapple, reflecting their diverse range and interests. Interestingly both Cream and Jimi Hendrix were moving to a similar approach at the same time. Undoubtably the Stones Rock n Roll Circus also fits this collaborative Musicians Collective approach with Lennons Dirty Mac exemplifying this model. Unfortunately the Stones own performance suffered in comparison to Jethro Tull and especially The Who so, sadly, they never released it at the time. Mick Jagger never made the same mistake again and crossed over to the other side.

In Composing Myself Jack Bruce suggests that all three members of Cream found it limited their broader interests in music making. He argues that his own interest in jazz, Clapton’s in less ego-driven music and Baker’s in World Music could have been framed under the Cream banner with a concert of four parts, concluding with a Cream improvisation. Like The Beatles their final tour of America tore them violently apart and it never happened. Ironically Jimi Hendrix got closer to achieving this Musicians Collective approach in his final concert as the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Royal Albert Hall on February 24 1969 where Fat Mattress, his bassist’s group, was a support band. Hendrix, like Cream, wanted each musician to play their own music on the undercard (like his own Gypsy, Sun and Rainbows at Woodstock) with the Experience climaxing the show. Sadly Cream and Hendrix had even worse management than the Allen Klein directed Beatles and these music-oriented solutions had no chance in the business conditions of the time. However as well as the White Album Jack Bruce presented a version of this approach successfully on the over-looked classic Songs For A Tailor, and Hendrix died whilst he was trying to complete his own First Rays of the New Rising Sun. These albums are all tight musically with arrangements and playing that serve the song rather than flaunting the egos of the musicians. Although Rock albums they complement the approach pioneered by the Band in Big Pink, and Fairport Convention on Leige and Lief, which took old songs and radically refresh them with a rock sensibility and that creative sixties “lets start over” vibe. Sadly it turned out we preferred the spectacle of rock stars in their pomp with our lighters raised in the air in supplication.

Let It Be

My opinion concerning the Get Back project is that it was a brilliant idea but way too much, far too soon after the White Album, and crucially they situated the recording in entirely the wrong place. The Beatles were consummate craftsmen in Studio 2 at Abbey Road, and the neat idea of showing their creativity in action was scuppered by locating it in Twickenham to allow for the cameras. Right idea; creativity. Wrong context; aircraft-hangar film studio. Wrong time too, January 2nd 1969 just 6 weeks after the White Album launch, and lacking preparation and time for reflection, just like their other comparative failure Magical Mystery Tour.  And as with HELP! they were dependent on the working processes of the film crew. Critically they were working without George Martin. The Beatles strength was when they were working collaboratively as a group in the studio, specifically Abbey Road Studio 2, without the distraction of business affairs. None of these features were in place on Get Back. In the end The Beatles effectively knocked the Let It Be album out in four days in the studio and 45 minutes on the roof, whilst the film failed to reveal the creative process that had produced so many great albums. But a contract obligation to United Artists had been fulfilled…

Funny Papers

In my opinion The Beatles broke up at this time. George, Ringo and John had quit in different ways and at different times before the Get Back debacle. I still think it was a genius idea of McCartney’s but it wasn’t thought out and McCartney foolishly continued to act as the Brian Epstein of the group, thus breaking the species barrier between musician and businessman. The problem with this is that The Beatles needed to work collectively on their music as a group, that was their genius. But with the advent of Apple and the re-negotiation of The Beatles contracts, the arrival of Robert Stigwood and Allen Klein meant that the biggest cashcow in entertainment was up for grabs and, in the main, they were no longer in charge of their destinies; the Funny Papers had been served. In 1969 The Beatles weren’t taking care of business, whilst back at the store the Longest Cocktail Party in History was in progress. TLC and support for the Fabs was distinctly missing. Perhaps even Brian Epstein couldn’t have stopped them being colonised by the vulture capitalists who had arrived to gain access to their unprecedented cashflow, but Apple wasn’t set up to resist a hostile take-over.

Abbey Road

Abbey Road was a coda, the reunion album produced before we even knew that they had spilt up. Finally they weren’t pushing the boundaries any more, they made tracks in the epic style that they had perfected on the White Album, and were back working in Craft Central with George Martin pulling bars and scraps of inspiration together with their group genius for music making. The collaborative creativity of the group however was in full flow; Harrison was supreme and the final Medley also allowed Martin to realise his vision of an operatic Beatles, which he was to fulfil on Love. Abbey Road is The Beatles album that is the most respected in the 21st Century, but in the end it was a valedictory act not a rebirth.

Bye-Bye

So in the end John, Paul, George and Ringo left the fifties boys club known as The Beatles and went off to live their lives as grown ups in the socially changed landscape they had help create. The love they made has been remastered and you are still free to take it and enjoy it; anytime at all…

When I’m 64

And it is Happy Birthday to Kevin Donovan who is now happily 64;

]]> http://fred6368.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/were-leaving-home/feed/ 4 fred6368 http://fred6368.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/we-are-the-beatles/ http://fred6368.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/we-are-the-beatles/#comments Sat, 03 Apr 2010 15:38:06 +0000 fred6368 http://fred6368.wordpress.com/?p=986 ]]> After Learning…With The Beatles

After Geography, their decision to stop touring, and After Math, the necessity to look after their own business affairs, for The Beatles it was also After School; time to be mature and make their own business decisions. They might have appeared like omnipotent masters to their fans, but from late 1967 they had to take all the decisions about their ever-expanding business affairs without Brian Epstein’s support; and work out how to realise their increasingly complex approach to music-making into something marketable.

On September 1st 1967, whilst the public still thought that The Beatles had reached yet another unparalleled peak of fame after Sgt Peppers, John, Paul, George and Ringo gathered at McCartney’s house in St Johns Wood to discuss how they would proceed after the death of their manager Brian Epstein. Twenty four days later they had finished primary production on Magical Mystery Tour. Epstein’s death meant that the support network that had enabled the three phases of their learning and creativity had gone; brutally severed as they were cast out of Real Love. Lennon said they knew “they were fucked, basically” and, arguably, the perceived disaster of the psychedelic Magical Mystery Tour being shown in black and white on BBC TV confirmed that premonition.

On the other hand the “cathartic” Magical Mystery Tour was rushed into after Epstein’s accidental overdose, unlike their previous three albums where they were allowed preparation time, and was probably designed to prevent them being “extras in our own movie” as Lennon described HELP! Paul’s touchingly naive description of how he and John tried writing a play in 1961, “we thought it would be stream of consciousness,” which produced one brief scene after 20 minutes labour, hints at the hubris they brought to their first screenplay. Unlike when George Martin took the 1′ 10″ of Please Please Me offered to him and created the signature studio sound of the Beatles in 1963 neither Willy Russell (of John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert), nor Alun Owen (of Hard Days Night), were around to transform the sketch of Paul’s magic circle diagram into a decent screenplay. Notwithstanding this early failure the Beatles now looked to take their mature creative nous into every domain they were involved in, including management, and on November 17th 1967 Apple emerged from this furiously sad chaos.

1968

On reflection, for me, 1968 was The Beatles most fascinating year because, for the first time, they were on their own; and they rose to the challenge. From the perspective of this analysis of their learning I would argue that they were no longer in an evolving learning phase and September 1967 to September 1969 represents the mature phase of the Group Genius known as The Beatles. The End was recorded on August 18th 1969, Abbey Road mastered on August 20th, and Lennon premiered Cold Turkey live in Toronto on September 13 1969. Just like I Am The Walrus and Revolution it never did become a Beatles single, and is now part of the endless analysis about the acrimonious end of The Beatles. As I mentioned before, as the quintessential sixties band The Beatles splitting up at the end of the 1969 was at exactly the right moment. Allocating blame to that process is just perverse, based more on retrospectively applying what is now known about the Beatles personal and group narratives to their music rather than actually listening to it.  Such that on The White Album, Jerry Zolten in 2009 says that “the break-up of The Beatles can be heard.” Stylus Magazine’s “Second Thoughts” (2003) however is a truly insightful re-evaluation of the quality of the music on The Beatles, which I wish I had written.

Conversely I think 1968, whilst clearly containing the seeds of destruction, contained the Beatles greatest triumphs. They launched the insanely ambitious Apple Corps and released their greatest single and album. Well this is an endless debate with several of their albums and singles having their champions. However many people, including producer George Martin, think the White Album should have been a single album. There is even, in 2010, an online game where you can select your own version. (Just create a playlist lads; and then change it tomorrow). Myself, I’ll go with Galactic Ramble’s riposte to George Martin’s desire for a tight single album. “The greatest group in the world at the height of their powers and you want a single album? No way! We want a triple album with the out-takes and the single, please.” Amen to that!

Here they are; “The Beatles”

I think the White Album displays three key characteristics;

1. proper preparation time, out of the public eye in Rishikesh and then at George’s house, allowing them to produce 30 songs before recording even started.
2. an “atelier” approach to recording whereby the group genius of The Beatles also encompassed their work for Apple and their burgeoning solo work. Apple became the new NEMS…
3. yet another fresh concept underpinning the album, this time the idea of each track as an album itself.

The real title of the White Album is “The Beatles” and I think this indicates how it was perceived as representing a fresh start for them; compounded by the bitter-sweet lapsarian bite of knowledge that calling their label Apple represents, and the tabula rasa that the plain White sleeve intimates. Furthermore this was the first time in two years that they didn’t cope with their ridiculous fame by presenting themselves through a colourful metaphor; Lonely Club Band members, Mystery Tourists or Yellow Submariners. Instead they declared plainly and simply; We Are The Beatles. And they backed it up with the longest, most fecund and diverse album yet released.

1. The Beatles time in Rishikesh in the Himalayan foothills was a long time alone together out of the public eye, even though Ringo left after ten days. Donovan taught them finger picking and its rural influence runs like a spun thread through the album, summed up best perhaps by Mother Nature’s Son. In May 68 they spent 2 days at George’s house Kinfauns and put together 27 tracks which they presented to George Martin when they began recording on May 30th 1968.

2. Despite Studio 2 being “craft central” at Abbey Road, Martin opened up 3 studios as they had so much material to work on, which was often done in parallel. To me this represents the evolution of The Beatles to an Atelier craft-based style of working under the Beatles brand, not four guys each with a backing group, certainly not a catastrophic breakdown. It represented yet another new way of working and the challenge helped keep them interested.

3. The creative burst of songwriting that came from Rishikesh meant The Beatles went into the studio with all the songs in place and spent time, like Revolver, in developing a specific soundscape AND style for each song. This time they recorded 14 different styles of music (Ian Inglis 2009), making the album sound like it lacked the coherence that the clear sonic unity of earlier albums suggested. Actually I think this recording in parallel came from a surfeit of creativity, symptomatic of the newly mature Beatles as professional recording artists, rather than reflecting the personal disunity that was developing in their private lives. It is the sound of The Beatles at the height of their powers as creative professionals.

Count Us Out

So for a brief time the collaborative artistic collective known as The Beatles, working for Apple achieved a creative intensity that represented their work as mature professional musicians and which possibly could have contributed to changing the world which was Worry Number One in 1968. As the completely bonkers music critic David Quantick argues in articulating his belief that this is the greatest album of all time, “the White Album is both a snapshot of the time it was recorded and a piece of music that stands alone, outside time and fashion”. In my opinion this was the last time that they tried to re-imagine and invent the future and present its possibilities to us, their fans and contemporaries, offering something for our imaginations to play with. As it turned out 1968 was to be their high-water mark rather than the continuation of the endless new possibilities they kept offering us.

As I will discuss next week they weren’t the only ones. Cream and Jimi Hendrix had similar ideas about re-imagining music in the Atelier style, and The Band were doing something similar. Sadly we didn’t understand what we were being offered. We wanted the Situation to remain the same, better albums lasting 35 minutes, and we preferred to be entertained spectacularly rather than investigating our own creative possibilities. (How do we create for ourselves oh Beatles?). Nonetheless 1968 represents The Beatles at a creative peak, even without the full panoply of support they had been graced with previously.

Bookending the Beatles heutagogic period were twin attacks on print formats. In Paperback Writer Paul boasted that if you liked the style he “could turn it round” and in Walrus John delivered a nonsense poem about nonsense poems, containing probably his most visceral attack on the British Establishment. Heutagogy is about playing with form and The Beatles did this explicitly and implicitly within this period which lasted from 13th April 1966 to 27th August 1967.

If we use metaphors to characterise The Beatles “learning” periods then the Pedagogic phase was their formal time in the classroom of George Martin, the Andragogic phase was their time in the playground learning informally from their peers and friends and the Heutagogic phase was their time in the workshop of Abbey Road. They were skilled studio craftsmen working in the R&D labs inventing new processes (and products) and this hands-on time in the studio is why, unlike George Harrison, I separate Rubber Soul from Revolver. Revolver was when they started playing the studio and building unique soundscapes for each song, creating a qualitative difference from Rubber Soul, where the folk-rock inspired sounds remain essentially the same, with some additions like the sitar in Norwegian Wood. Moreover Revolver, unlike Rubber Soul, sustains this invention right to the end.

The Andragogic, or “Fifth Beatle” phase, preceding Revolver, saw The Beatles aggregate a greater range of support, and support is a critical element in learning. The Beatles, almost uniquely fortunate in this in the sixties, had Brian Epstein, George Martin, Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, and many others supporting them. Critically for Revolver “Golden Ears” Geoff Emerick joined them as a studio engineer and immediately began extending their sonic range.

The Golden Sounds of Revolver

And it is Revolver’s sonics that allow it to shine on brightly down the years. On Harrison’s Taxman, the sound of the bass comes from using a loudspeaker as a microphone, giving the song a satisfying “whump” in the background, Eleanor Rigby features a double string quartet, I’m Only Sleeping, has backwards guitars and sitar like sounds whilst, just four tracks in, a real sitar track Love You To (is George driving the album?). Then Here There and Everywhere, Emerick’s favourite, features Alan Civil’s French horn before everyone has lots of sonic fund simulating life underwater in Yellow Submarine. Side One of Revolver is their most sustained and inventive side of music, yet Side Two matches it for creativity before climaxing with the endless 2’01″ of Tomorrow Never Knows. Finally a Beatles album that was complete from beginning to end.

Although Rubber Soul’s sonics are relatively limited by its folk-rock concern it was a big step forward lyrically. Revolver’s sounds are particularly more polished but lyrically it also builds on their emerging Romantic vision, more in the sense of the uniquely British concern with the dreamily mythic Albion that Michael Bracewell discusses in “England is Mine“. And, as any Surrealists knows, “In Dreams Begin responsibilities.” Revolver was very English, very universal and with  a wholly unusual world view located across the twentieth century.

Heutagogy in the Studio

It was just as well that they had become studiosmiths because after the disastrous World and American Tours of the summer of 1966. where they found that you can insult Imelda Marcos and Southern Baptists without even trying, they quit touring. Luckily for them the Fabs not only had a new Abbey Road-sized toolkit to play with, but Paul had invented an alter-ego for them, John had a Mellotron delivered, and George had a whole new culture to play with.

In All You Need is Heutagogy I made reference to the Dutch soundscapes research on The Beatles creativity, their “experimental style,” which is fascinating, but somewhat quantitative in focus as it measures being creative with form as being the degree to which you differ from your starting point. (For the Beatles this is the signature Merseybeat sound of Please Please Me). From this perspective creativity could just be characterised as simply being different to what you are expected to be. Whilst ongoing change did characterise The Beatles, this approach does a lack of service to the depth of their creativity, and also the context from which it emerged.

Nonetheless soundscapes identify the most creative period of The Beatles recording life as being very precisely from Strawberry Fields Forever to I Am The Walrus (full soundscapes discussion here). Interestingly the album of Magical Mystery Tour, a release oddity, has sold enduringly well and indeed contains the single Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever making it as representative of the Beatles creative “experimental style” as Sgt Pepper’s; they each contain five of the Beatles ten most creative tracks. MARSZ for example, calls it his favourite Beatles album, reflecting what soundscapes noticed, that this heutagogic creativity was also deeply satisfying to the listening public. All You Need is Heutagogy indeed…

Creative Nostalgia

Kenneth Womack in “Long and Winding Roads” argues that the Beatles were primarily concerned with “musical creation” whilst Tim Riley in Tell Me Why suggests that the subject of their work is “nostalgia” and Strawberry Fields Forever is, of course, about both; from the opening Mellotron flutes to its eponymous location.  Strawberry Fields is still seen as a musical benchmark by Prog Rock fans. Ironically this nostalgic reflection on their origins, initiated with “In My Life,” was matched by their greatest phase of musical experimentation and enabled their greatest re-invention.

Sgt Peppers was itself was a creative metaphor that allowed The Beatles to transform themselves into something completely different. Rubber Soul was The Beatles folk-rock album, Revolver was their psychedelic album, but on Sgt Peppers they were playing someone else’s album. Their dream-like responsibilities had produced ghosts from twenty years ago free to be someone else entirely. Curiously the album from which their scouse character was the most absent provided their greatest success with the cultural elite in London. However they did extend their creative palette and their ability to play with form whilst Sgt Pepper as an album was seen as a cultural artefact and also as a media event. With no World Cup to distract the media from promoting the “Summer of Love” in 1967 Pepper become its own high-water benchmark.

After Pepper

Whilst Pepper featured five of The Beatles ten most “creative” tracks, they continued playing with form and appeared on both the first global TV programme, Our World, with All You Need is Love, then started to prep Magical Mystery Tour (based on the Merry Pranksters own Magic Bus). They also linked up with the Mahesh Maharishi Yogi to take up meditation. The pace of experimentation was set to speed up; then Brian Epstein died. (How could you top the multi-media success that was Pepper, and why would his fabulously successful boys need him in anymore in the future?) From the 27th August 1967 onwards The Beatles would have to make their own business decisions and just as Lennon was singing “I am he as you are me as we are altogether,” they weren’t anymore. The support network of collaborators and contexts from which they grew their most succesful creativity was rent asunder. Learning was over. Thereafter everything changed.

Having proved themselves in the school of hit records, by narrowing their focus and delivering to EMI’s template, The Beatles grew in confidence between the return from their first visit to the USA and the end of their second visit in August 1964. They met Dylan at Delmonico’s, who dismissed their silly love songs and gave them a greater Romantic vision of their possibilities. And so they embarked on the andragogic phase of their learning.

By the summer of 64 The Beatles, supported by a nation of Fifth Beatles, had created a new context in which they could operate, by extending the expectations of the fifties rock n rollers they so admired. By linking up with George Martin and Richard Lester they produced records and albums that went beyond what Cliff Richard had created with the more traditional Norrie Parrimor at Columbia, and a film that seethed with the cool sensibilities of nouvelle vague rather than looking to stage opportunities for young people to demonstrate their music hall abilities through music and dance routines; Una Stubbs was not the harbinger of a more self-conscious sixties.

So just a year after the peak of Cliff’s old-style success with Summer Holiday they had accidentally created new commercially creative ground through fortuitous collaborations with other ground-breaking artists. In this they were far better served than, say, Ray Davis who in 1964 was fighting Pye, and his own group The Kinks, to get the right sound to his own ground-breaking single You Really Got Me.
The golden USA, the land that had produced the hit singles and the, usually black, artists, that had transformed The Beatles, and many others, had been conquered and they bestrode the world of hit singles; whilst under constant demand for even more golden hit records. After 6 straight massive number one singles, they knew they had graduated from the school of hit records magnum cum laude, with several enduring distinctions and even MBE‘s from the government.

The andragogic phase of The Beatles was mostly about them relaxing and being allowed to be the explorative fans of music they really were, rather than pupils taking instruction from Monseigneur George Martin.
I also think that the court of Scotch and Coke in St James (London), where they mixed with their musical peers and social equals, the Stones, the Moody Blues, the Who and the Animals, along with the consequent raising of the musical game by everyone in 1965, as more and more groups broke through with new ideas, from Art Schools, Ealing, the Thames Delta and elsewhere (even Manchester), allowed the Beatles to mix up their ideas anew and transform MerseyBeat into rock music.

But most of all The Beatles reconnected with MUSIC. Pop Superstardom is all very well but its essential hysteria isn’t very satisfying. Kenneth Womack in the excellent Long and Winding Roads, sees the focus of the Beatles work as being “musical creation” and in their andragogic phase this is what The Beatles turned to, first exploring paths suggested by others, taking on their pretenders, especially The Byrds and Dylan, but also the Stones and The Who, and synthesising something beyond Merseybeat into arguably the first rock album; Rubber Soul. And then trumped it with arguably the best rock album of the sixties; Revolver. So obviously the best that Pitchfork magazine wont even discuss favourite sixties albums. George Martin’s work too can also be characterised as being about musical creation.

Dylanesque; with friends…

The Beatles played Shea Stadium on August 24th 1964 to close another triumphant American tour and went to the legendary Delmonicos to celebrate, where they met the wordsmith Bob Dylan, who was probably the only person who could challenge their success for being shallow and stay in the room. George Harrison had played his first two albums relentlessly until both Lennon and McCartney became fans. Harrison had also befriended Dave Crosby of The Byrds whose folk-rock sound would make them America’s answer to the Beatles and ultimately influence Rubber Soul. Folk rock comes from a tradition that is more concerned with social protest than moon-in-june romance. As a result of the meeting with Dylan the metacognitive inventiveness that they had applied to their music began to be applied to their lyrics.

Their next album, the ironically entitled Beatles for Sale featuring an exhausted looking foursome on the cover, opened with the Dylanesque “Lennon Trilogy” including their scheduled next single “I’m A Loser.” At the last minute EMI demanded a happier tune and overnight, again, Lennon reeled off the cheerfully classic I Feel Fine which, coupled with She’s A Woman, also reflected the minor Beatles trope of outstanding B-sides to great singles.

Andragogic Excellence; In The Lands of the Fifth Beatles

This relatively short-lived Andragogic phase was one of trying new things out, extending the range of Merseybeat, collaborating with others, looking at ways of developing their skill as musicians, lyricists and songwriters as well as exploring the studio. Whilst at the same time of course still fulfilling their obligations as the worlds greatest group  and also living up to the ridiculous expectation of their fans to remain godlike entities.  However, somehow, the witty and creative Beatles almost always had the British public on their side, largely because they were working class boys who had made good nationally, whereas previously being a senior manager in a minor company would have been the limit of our ambitions. And also because, for the first time since World War Two, after all those years, Britain was demonstrably better at something than the rest of the world;  thanks to our very own Beatles Band…
As well as being a nation of Fifth Beatles the musical competition raised its game and 1965 saw a string of awesome hit records. Dylan, influenced in part by The Beatles, went electric and released the awesome Like A Rolling Stone, the Rolling Stones released their own She Loves You and went global with Satisfaction and The Who burst through with the climactic rock single My Generation. Arguably 1965 was the best year for “pop” “hit records” ever (see Rolling Stones 500 best songs for a discussion) and for the first time a Beatles single wasn’t a shoo-in for best single. HELP! had to some extent sidelined them as the leading creative pop musicians and it even seemed they might be resting on their laurels; or just giggling their life away with waccy baccy rather than gigging their life away. It was their turn to spoof James Bond after Sean Connery had dismissed them in Goldfinger. Arguably Richard Lester used HELP! to further his own career more than The Beatles; which would have been reasonable given that they were “extras in their own movie”.

Bringing the future back home for us

The Beatles response to being encouraged by others, and their peers, was Rubber Soul. The finest album of the first half of the sixties offered a new template; the self-contained rock band consciously producing the album as cultural artefact. I remember thinking at the time that The Beatles were the scouts of popular culture. It was them who explored the R&D of fellow and outre artists on our behalf, brought back what they had learnt and developed a fresh synthesis for “one and all” of us.
We all benefited from their experiments. Or rather, in Open Context Model speak, they went to the heutagogues, learnt something new and represented it as a new orthodoxy; they synthesised the future and created a fresh present we could build on… How exciting was that?
Contrast this to the musical situation today where Simon Cowell synthesises an old past, coats the present with the proven dog-turds of history and makes us despair for the future.

And the Beatles taught us well. No wonder in the sixties we felt that we were capable of building a new future; The bloody Beatles did it every time they released a new album. The one time they failed to re-invent the future (Get Back) they split up as they had finally let their standards slip. How bloody awesome is that? No wonder Brian Wilson had a nervous breakdown trying to follow Revolver. No wonder the Stones reverted to their rhythm and blues roots with the great Beggars Banquet after the humiliations of Requesting a Satanically Majestic follow up to Sgt Pepper; then again at least they tried. And great musical artists usually bounce back. They reflect on their failures and learn from them.

Consequences and Follow Ups
Rubber Soul was a great rock album where The Beatles synthesised Dylan, The Byrds, themselves (Lennon on ballads, McCartney on rockers), the Kinks, The Who, The Animals, The Moody Blues (the leading scenesters in Soho), new instruments (electric pianos, acoustic guitars) and new studio affordances.  At the time I remember endless discussions concerning specific tracks with my friends. Our debates had moved on from which track could have been a hit record in its own right, to what was the meaning of each song; little universes were being opened up. At least eight tracks were endlessly debated amongst us and whilst we were admittedly a bunch of fourteen and fifteen year old lads, we were united by The Beatles in a way that nothing else did in either our comprehensive school or private lives. Rubber Soul represented The Beatles as a rock band who had learnt from their friends and were also playing songs for their peers. Because the bloody fans wouldn’t shut up screaming whilst they played, and the sexual courtship of stardom wasn’t quite so necessary any more.

Learning from Learning…With The Beatles
Having had to prove their pedagogic worth with “hit records” (George Martin’s proudest boast is that he produced the number one single for 37 out of 52 weeks in 1963, Parlophone’s cup was brimful) The Beatles had some space for musical development, where their schedule allowed it. In the andragogic phase of learning we look for a greater range of collaboration and partnerships but arguably this characteristic, which I see captured in the term Fifth Beatle, was something that was to some extent suppressed in the early days whilst they made their name in London, Britain and the World, but had been a ongoing element of their career. They had developed support networks from early on, and from Stuart Sutcliffe onwards people had joined with them to enable the next stage of success. Some of them stayed with The Beatles, like Niel Aspinall, some of them fell by the wayside like Allan Williams. Mostly they were well-served by the members of their developing support networks and this contributed to their ongoing development and to their ability to weather setbacks. The Beatles who signed for Parlophone were not the Beatles who became mature album artists with Rubber Soul.

Having emerged from the peculiar conjunction of working-class opportunism and middle class aspiration that the welfare state enabled, the Beatles started to build on the devastated bomb-site that was post-war Britain, like protean Romantic artists whose mission was nothing less than “cultural and spiritual renewal” (Dorothy Rowe). Dylan, Crosby, soul and America had widened their horizons and renewed their fuel-load but it was the British context that they were attempting to transcend, and refresh.  And the learning processes that they brought to bear on the tensions that separated metropolitan and provincial England were to absorb them even more in future. They had learnt what their peers, The Goons, George Martin, Richard Lester, Brian Epstein, and their own history, including musical hall and scouse culture, had taught them, and The Word was to become creativity.

This set of posts have been reviewing the The Beatles life story album-by-album, using the Open Context Model of Learning as a framework for evaluating the processes of learning that they went through and how that affected their music. The reason for this is to try and uncover exactly what constituted their enduring creativity and how we might learn from it today. The Open Context Model of Learning is concerned to examine how the education process itself might be structured to enable more creativity to emerge from it naturally rather than being a thing apart uncovered in various culture contexts outside of formal education.

The Beatles themselves, “four underachieving schoolboys” who “changed the world”, seem ideal subjects for such an analysis of how you might learn creativity. Not least as the author is also fan and can bring some additional musical and contextual insights to the analysis. Having written these posts and reflected on the insights provided by them I think there are some real lessons to be drawn out. Most notably in fact that the creative phase of learning is deeply rooted in the collaborative phase. Building meaningful collaborations is the core of creativity. Lets examine how The Beatles work reveals that to us.

Open Context Model of Learning

Firstly some words about the Open Context Model of Learning which posits three phases in learning which will be used as the basis for this discussion.

Pedagogic; when we learn using the focus of a subject discipline to structure our learning.

Andragogic; when we both learn how to negotiate what we want to learn both within and beyond that subject discipline, and how to collaborate with others in that learning

Heutagogic; when we learn what the structure and the form of our learning is and we start to play with the form and create afresh

So the Open Context Model pre-supposes that we need to understand the structures of the subject under study, but also that we need to identify processes of collaboration and strategies for creativity. Fortunately George Martin, who signed The Beatles to his label Parlophone explicitly uses educational analogies in discussing their work together identifying that he was like a schoolteacher in the early days and that after Yesterday they became collaborators, reflecting the first two stages of the PAH Continuum.

The Beatles and the Open Context Model of Learning

This author argued that we could map these three phases of learning to three phases of Beatles music, which I will discuss next. In fact for various reasons discussed below the Open Context Model Phase of The Beatles own learning process as creative musicians ended when they recorded I Am The Walrus on September 1967 and was then followed by a phase of permanent re-invention covering, The White Album, Get Back and Abbey Road. Arguably their ability to continually re-invent themselves ultimately rendered it impossible for them to carry on just as much as the Kleinian motion concerning their finances discussed in You Only Give Me Your Money did.

Pedagogic Excellence; From the Parlour to the Scream

This early phase of The Beatles development concerns the time they focussed on writing and recording “hit records”. The music industry in England in the early sixties basically treated pop music as a “here today, gone tomorrow” concern and the artists themselves were disposable. The smart ones aimed to be all round family entertainers. The real money spinners before The Beatles were soundtrack albums. The biggest selling albums of 5 of the years of the decade (swinging sixties) were very square soundtrack albums. In an irony that he must have lived with ever since Cliff Richard finally hit gold dust with this formula with Summer Holiday in the very week that Please Please Me went to number one and changed the rules of the “hit record” game. Please Please Me was significant for any number of reasons but here are two. The Beatles refused to record potential “hit records” written by songwriters other than themselves, and George Martin, in his words the “school master” of his studio, reshaped the 1′ 10” of Please Please Me that The Beatles offered him, into the signature sound of Beatlemania. Harmonica-driven rising chords, the excitement embedded in the music hitting you even before you get to the “I, Me, You” lyrics. Right through your feet and direct to your heart. 1963 saw the elaboration of that style whilst their other influences emerged and blended into their evolving Mersey Beat sound. Boil Please Please Me down and you have recorded the essence of Mersey Beat.

The massive success of the self-penned “hit record” Please Please Me meant they needed to put an album together to capitalise on this success and George Martin, clearly in charge of directing The Beatles musically in early 1963, astutely decided that the Please Please Me LP would be a version of the stage act that had made their name. The workaholic Beatles played a live concerts relentlessly throughout 1963, and a “fan souvenir” album, not only made sense but tied in with the prevailing notion of albums being soundtracks.

Refining The Subject; With The Beatles

Their second album, With The Beatles, released the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas synchronistically enough, merely evolved the framework of the first album. However instead of being their live act caught in the studio they used that framework and upped their game by writing several new songs. Significantly the first five songs are all Lennon and McCartney originals and the album, only released on November 22nd yet still the biggest selling record of Bealtlemania year 1963, opened with three cracking new tracks, one of which All My Loving would later be released on an EP and then top the Australian charts 6 months later. Whilst this was a better recorded album, and Lennon didn’t have a cold, it didn’t represent any development musically; essentially it reprised the first album with little more care and attention. Culturally however it was a massive event, coming after the media-baptised birth of Beatlemania and their Royal Variety Performance and marked the beginning of Beatles releases being cultural events dominating the media landscape in the UK. And whilst With The Beatles in itself didnt represent a musical or a creative advance on Please Please Me it did contain the track that gave their friends the Stones their own breakthrough and their globally their most significant single I Want To Hold You Hand, was released a week later. So three key tropes of Beatles musical activity, classic singles, great albums and support of fellow artists, were in place by November 1963. It was shortly followed by a fourth trope, dominating Christmas (when albums were more likely to be presents than purchases). And the fifth trope of multimedia, updated in 2009 by The Beatles Rock Band, when Top of The Pops was launched on January 2nd 1964. However most of the events between October 13th 1963 and January 2nd 1964 represented the growth of the social phenomenon of Beatlemania rather than the evolution off their musical abilities. Furthermore the events of February and March 1964 when the modestly triumphant Beatles, “we thought we just would be able to buy some new albums” conquered America; essentially saw them globalising Beatlemania.

What was more astonishing than even this unprecedented global success was that The Beatles then released their first pluperfect album as the soundtrack to a movie devised by United Artists as a scam for them to make money from the attendant inevitable million selling soundtrack album (It sold 5 million). George Emerick commented that when they came back from the US to finish Cant Buy Me Love they had “a new confidence about them” and this revealed itself in their next album.

Allegro Goon Troppo

The Beatles, George Martin and the director Richard Lester, all fans (or collaborators) of The Goons, collectively produced Hard Days Night. A brilliant single, an iconic movie (a Nouvelle Vague tribute, but often with more invention and life) that invented the MTV video format – check I Should Have Known Better, and their first fully self-penned album. All captured in the memorably heutagogic Ringoism of a “Hard Days Night”. Provocateur in Chief Lennon recognised its value and, overnight, wrote the deathless single with the climactic opening chord demanded by Lester (my personal favourite single). In passing the film also captures the social context out of which they emerged. The impoverished black and white of fifties England (cleverly spoofed in Summer Holiday as the film turns colour as the Cliff and The Shadows plan to leave England). The transformation to the more egalitarian sixties is captured in Hard Days Night in the escape from the socially oppressive cocktail party to the freedom of the playground and then in the TV studio where the Beatles musical artistry lets them be themselves. (Because by then the joy playing in front of fans was becoming limited by the adulatory screaming)

So by their third album The Beatles had perfected their apprenticeship in the discipline of making hit records FOR the music business, whilst recording several classics beloved of fans. They transformed the expectations of the music listening public, if not the music industry. They also worked collaboratively as a group with an already sophisticated creative process.Lennon and McCartney working out new songs face-to-face in a style developed at Englin Road and fortified by tea, toast and ciggies. Then demoing it in the studio to develop harmonies with George, who also worked out a guitar solo whilst George Martin worked out how best to record it in terms of musical arrangements and the craft affordances of the magical mystery context of Abbey Road Studio 2. Finally Ringo, weakened by a childhood illness, listened intently before producing rhythms that served the song. The Beatles collaboratively produced perfectly recorded songs, the mark of their crafty pedagogic excellence. And up to now they had focussed on hit records, the terms of their very poorly rewarded deal with Parlophone and EMI.

You couldnt improve on Hard Days Night, it showed that the Beatles had learnt their lessons well, perfected them and in so doing changed the rules of the game. In the summer of 1964 they had provided the template of the self-contained rock band which whilst easing the path of those that followed, also provided a challenge in terms of quality. And as Tim Riley says in Tell Me Why they had move “Beyond Adolescence” with the “idea of an album as…a forum for ideas”

Learning from Learning…With The Beatles.

Baudelaire said that nations get great men in spite of themselves and perhaps that was the case with The Beatles. Growing up in the fifties they were part of a generation in debt to their elders who had won the war but lost a peace measured out in rations and, as Pete Townsend astutely pointed out, never failed to remind the “restless generation” of the fifties about the debt that they owed to their elders and moral superiors. Secondly the 1944 Education Act created the possibility of educational for all but without any real opportunities to take advantage of it. As the Beveridge Report sought to remove “squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease” a burgeoning class of education working class kids entered society. The plateglass universities and the Robbins Report didnt open up Higher Education until the sixties. The Beatles grew up in a social context designed to broaden their horizons educationally, whilst making them feel guilty moral inferiors. Furthermore as Jeff Nuttall argues in Bomb Culture, the Atomic Age had also created a sense that the apocalypse was due right about now so what was the point in obeying rules? Perhaps The Beatles generation had moved from being restless to being socially reckless. The single most significant act in The Beatles creating themselves as a group was McCartney turning down a proper apprenticeship to join the band full time, whatever that meant at the time. That act of McCartney marks a shift to sixties thinking from fifties thinking.

Another factor in this contextual backstory was the long-standing tradition of music making in the home rather than consuming music at home. Combine this with the music hall tradition of entertainment, which still thrived in the fifties and was often the family choice of entertainment when they went out, if they weren’t raucously “rolling out the barrel” down the pub, and music-making was strongly socially embedded in the fifties.

The Beatles themselves grew up in music making families, McCartneys dad was even a band leader, but were also in the right place at the right time as Britain, which socially had never had it so good, discovered “hire purchase” and began its long march to consumerism through radios and record players and singles. A friend of mine who knew The Beatles in 1963 and 1964 even thinks that “Beatlemania” after Hard Days Night, signifies the arrival of the music-consuming generation as fans as opposed to the generation of music-making fans who loved listening to The Beatles as live performers of music rather than as a  spectacle previously seen on TV.

Educated, restless and reckless, The Beatles had been socially scaffolded into a nowhere land, but their love of music, and the attendant adrenaline rushes it grants to its successes, suggested trails to blaze which would ultimately lead to EMI, Parlophone and George Martin. The ambitious Martin also wanted recognition for his work as a producer and greater status for his “joke” label Parlophone. The Beatles had conquered Hamburg and Liverpool and wanted to conquer London, Britain and the world of the “Poppermost.” In a marriage made in the listed building heaven of Abbey Road Studio 2 they brought their character, sound, creativity, energy, wit, irreverence and decisiveness (their group identity in fact) and let Martin instruct them in how to take their resources and turn them into hit records. They brought everything they had learnt outside of school and took it to a school of hit record making and, in my opinion, graduated with Hard Days Night.

The Beatles were memorable because they didn’t do what we expected, they didnt play what we expected and they also sounded completely different; or as Monty Python almost said “nobody expects the sixties revolution.”

And in the End their swansong was introduced by a great rock performance as The Beatles did finally Come Together. They returned to their nest at Abbey Road and produced what often sounds like, in the 21st Century, their greatest album, because of the quality of the recordings they captured in Abbey Road Studio 2. Abbey Road was both their spiritual home and their creative playground. It was the very specific place where both their craft in producing music and their accumulated tacit knowledge in playing the studio, produced the universal music we are still listening to today. “Home” had been a key theme of Get Back, for the scousers who had changed the world and had also been our surrogate, provincially English, champions in the class war of the sixties; they needed sanctuary from the forces amassing against them and perhaps became nostalgic for the simple verities of rock n’roll.

Ultimately they did return home; not to Liverpool however but to Abbey Road. They ennobled their prolifically creative craft centre by naming their last album after it. EMI ultimately returned the compliment by renaming their recording studio Abbey Road after the album. It is now simply known as Abbey Road Studios, and remains a key Beatles shrine for their enduring fanbase, a flash mob met there in August 2009 to celebrate the albums 40th anniversary, and the studio has a webcam pointed at the famous crossing where the Fab Four popped outside, as they had done for the rooftop concert, and crossed over into middle age ending their career on a pedestrian crossing.

Working like a pack of dogs

If you look at the record 1969 and 1970, along with 1968, were arguably the period of greatest productivity for John, Paul, George and Ringo. Whilst the public was perhaps in mourning for the Fab Four and their psychedelic teen alter-egos, the four Beatles were getting on with preparing their post-Beatles life in the 1970s. John and Paul cemented their divorce by marrying Yoko and Linda within a week of each other, George traded on his status as a senior alumni of this early School of Rock by collaborating extensively and adding to his stockpile of songs, allowing him to release a triple album, All Things Must Pass, arguably the best of album of 1970; if that honour didnt fall to Lennon or possibly McCartney. Ringo, who always felt lucky to be in The Beatles, was both the first to record a solo album, Sentimental Journey, and the first to become a solo actor, in Candy and the Magic Christian.

Abbey Road; the Album

How to characterise the sonically buffed Abbey Road where The Beatles were finally captured on eight-track so that they would sound perfect to us forever? I would describe Side One of Abbey Road as “The Beatles” Part Two. Even more of that magnificent trick of making individual songs as complex as albums. And Side Two of Abbey Road is “Love” Part One, a brilliant “operatic” mix of songs, bridges, walls, beginnings and endings; unconsciously elegaic. George Martin and Paul McCartney finally got their way over John Lennon and produced the next generation of Beatles music even as they were splitting up, finally fulfilled in Las Vegas by Cirque de Soleil as a tribute to George Harrison. More surprisingly, given that Abbey Road included this final Lennon and McCartney songfest, the star songwriter on the album turned out to be George Harrison. Even the rabidly anti-rock Frank Sinatra was seduced by Harrison’s Something; “the greatest love song of the twentieth century” as he christened it.

From Come Together to Because The Beatles refined the trick of the White Album of producing complex songs that they performed brilliantly, but generally of a higher quality than that achieved on the White Album; at least the classics are! Come Together is glorious swamp rock yet George Martin only recognised how good it was when he was remixing The Beatles body of work for “Love”. McCartney’s took his loving 50s pastiche Oh Darling so seriously he sang for a week until his voice was hoarse enough to achieve the right effect. Ringo’s Octopuses Garden, a highlight of the Love show in Vegas, finally realised his worldview on a Beatles album. As ever kids sing Beatles songs and Abbey Road gave them two more.

Then the summative and elegaic songcycle introduced by You Never Give Me Your Money sends The Beatles out into the World as John, or Paul, or George or Ringo, and ends on the couplet that Kenneth Womack argues is worthy of Shakespeare; and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.

The Beatles have kept our love because they tried to make the changes of the sixties work for us; that they failed says more about us than them.

Learning…With The Beatles concludes with And In The End; the Assessment in two weeks time in late February

The Art Collective known as The Beatles had released their masterpiece, now known as the White Album, but tellingly entitled The Beatles. This virginal white release signified their creative rebirth after Epstein’s death and the hat trick of experimentalist cartoon alter-egos they had donned in the mid-sixties. Having gone to India to clear their heads, regrouped unplugged with a broader group dynamic than ever before, they had amassed a huge swathe of songs and then recorded them, often as leader plus backing band. To me, along with opening Apple and signing and recording many other artists, this indicates that musically they had changed states for the third time. But this time we didn’t get it.

They had formed the twentieth century equivalent to a Renaissance Art School, but led by more than one genius, hold up in their Atelier, Abbey Road; only this time all three studios were pressed into action. Like Andy Warhol with Velvet Underground they were producing music and signing it, and that included Badfinger (especially), Mary Hopkin, and a cast of hundreds. But this time, unlike when they became the “self-contained unit” or created the “album as artwork”, the  new “beat group as Atelier” model never gained acceptance; it was too specific to them; others tried but only the Beatles could pull it off. They had become a new Fluxus, a collaborative co-operative, creative collective, sharing their good fortune, and their fortune with all and sundries (perhaps too many sundries) to recreate the music industry, and just like Shawn Fanning they were taken down. Their reward for this collaboratively heutagogic approach to their profession was what became the contractual obligation album, initially known as Get Back.

The creative fecundity of “The Beatles” album was so rich and diverse that it took me twenty years to get it. Its geographically scaled creative streak was so vast that the continental Americans got it, but we land-locked history-constrained Brits just didn’t get its density all. Nope! Such growth, depth and ambition (as well as generosity) allied to such vision was rewarded in the traditional music industry way; another contractual obligation album.

The Get Back project was triply retro, apart from implicitly rejecting the newly created values of “The Beatles”. Firstly, tragically, it was required to fill the United Artists film contract. Ironically United Artists initially only wanted a soundtrack album from the new overnite sensations, from which they planned to extract a $1m and for which they got the peerless Hard Days Night. Despite this excessive success they insisted that Yellow Submarine was not a Beatles film and demanded the third film required to fulfill the contract. They got it; but finished the Beatles off in the process.

So this IS the picture; You’ve released yet another game-changing masterpiece which contains, within its Beatle collective form, the possibility of you emerging from your gilded chrysalis into a new loose affiliation of collaborators operating under the Beatles imprimatur, and/or the Apple brand. You released two further albums, Wonderwall and Two Virgins, and a Christmas record for fans, had arrests, miscarriages, a movie (Candy), recorded with Cream and the Stones, as well as the media to deal with; oh and got through Xmas and New Year. But, as you are the Golden Goose, you have old, old contracts still to fulfill…

So, on January 2nd 1969, on a cold cavernous soundstage, you found that your newly redefined and freshly declared group genius was rewarded with the requirement to re-assemble for United Artists, in Twickenham far from your Atelier, to go through Groundhog Day and “audition” for your old job back as a nifty little beat group.

To be fair the idea for Get Back was deliciously intriguing, and emerged when the Beatles made live recordings of Hey Jude and Revolution in front of a live audience for the David Frost Show. The overwhelmingly positive response of the audience had excited the Beatles and encouraged them to consider playing live again. They thought that after “The Beatles” they would work on a project to record a bunch of new songs and this time release them first in a live performance; they would fuse creation and performance and so return to live shows in this quirkily unique way.

The problem was both the timing and, to some extent, the accompanying profound denial of their newly evolved form of Beatleness. It was like graduating with a Ph.D and then being invited to a tryout for a part-time job in primary school. The resentment was palpable. Nonetheless the Beatles did enough work for the resulting Let It Be album and film to be intriguingly close to its original artistic intentions; to reveal the Beatles ways of working and recording in extreme close-up. Well we got the close-ups but we lost the context. The Beatles were being recorded in situ for the convenience of bulky 1960s film cameras, and not in that quintessentially Fifth Beatle space; Abbey Road Studio 2. They were craftsmen cruelly deprived of one of their tools; ambience.

So the learning they had gone through in the album phase of their career, that collaboration was creativity, got lost. Ironically it was restated once George Harrison brought Billy Preston in and they knocked off the album we know as Let It Be in a week, as Preston had other contracts to fulfill from February 1969. As Kenneth Womack points out they still produced four Beatles classics in that week, once time was demonstrably running out; maybe that was their key driver, deadlines? So on January 30th, after capturing Dont Let Me Down, Let It Be, Get Back and a number of Long and Winding tracks for the album, The Beatles plus Billy Preston climbed on to the Apple roof and undertook the 45 minutes of live performance which, in the end, closed their career. As a recording group they had started in a Cavern and ended Up On The Roof patently rediscovering their live chops; who knows.

In learning terms the magic was broken. As Lennon ironically comments at the end of the rooftop concert “and I hope we passed the audition,” which more precisely translates as “what the f*** have we got to prove?” They weren’t building on what The Beatles had taught John, Paul, George and Ringo, as this would have required Apple to function effectively as a contracting framework organisation.

They were badly advised. Klein might get better deals than Epstein but going out on a limb for the world’s biggest group wasn’t the same as gambling on a bunch of nobodies based on a hunch and some word of mouth. In fact in a week they produced a pretty good contract obligation album. They had been producing contract obligation albums for their entire career, but this time instead of their work ethic and creativity letting them get ahead of the obligations they didn’t have a strong enough concept, or enough cohesion to transcend the usual limitations. So much so that Peter Doggett’s “You Never Give Me Your Money” just details the issues and problems that overwhelmed them and finished them off.

Like Jimi Hendrix, who had decided to disband the Experience but maintain links with fellow band members, and others, to present shows with a variety of line ups, the Beatles new Atelier model of working was never packaged by Apple in a way that worked. It is also a tough sell to represent the worlds biggest group as a loose affiliations of goofs and friends. They werent up to it individually and the business certainly wasn’t up to it collectively. Only one thing left to do; go out with a bang In the Court of Abbey Road.

To build the future requires transformation. The future is not “the same as the past only more intense”. As Lennon says in the song Glenn Beck has just attacked in 2010; “You say you want a Revolution well; YOU KNOW”; Answers about the future will not be found in the tramline pedagogies we were raised on. Transformation means qualitative change. A key element of that change however lies within the affordances of new technologies and the interactivity and social participation that they enable.

Social participation is not a phrase that readily springs to mind when talking about education. Education relies on the old certainties of subject disciplines, experts and traditional institutions, none of which are “fit for context” in a participative Knowledge Economy. And education rewards those that follow the old ways of doing things, like learning by rote, and getting A* grades; academics are “A-level students on steroids” not change agents; but they could be.

A lot of my stories reflect the coercive forces always at play in education and how I responded to them. I have been both caned and awarded a year subject prize for my schoolwork so I found education fairly random. A lot of my practice as an educator was concerned with brokering learning opportunities out of education systems. The key moment in my learning life is told in the story Glad All Over and occurred shortly after the BBC TV began Top of the Pops to capitalize on the Beatles phenomenal success. It reflects an argument with a friend who said the Beatles weren’t the best because they weren’t at the top of the charts. After much reflection I realised it was up to me to decide what has value, and that wasn’t a chart, or even a qualification. Consequently I have been thrown out of a few educational institutions as a result. But they were wrong!

I believe that my understanding of learning and education derives from my own experiences, my reflection on that experience and from discussing that experience with others. As a founder member of the Learner-Generated Contexts I was involved in the original two meetings when we both arrived at our formulation of the future of education, “a coincidence of motivations leading to agile configurations” and in doing so shared the guilty secrets of our personal histories of learning.

It turned out that despite our eventual collective educational success we had all experienced pretty bleak learning “failures” from which we had mapped our own ways forward. I notice that this quality is now being actively promoted as “resilience” and we are a resilient group. In fact the back story of the Group, with its dark Dickensian overtones, is possibly more interesting than its theoretical formulations, if perhaps less useful educationally.

lastfridaymob

The Learner-Generated Contexts Research Group has a back story. Originally a number of us were part of the technical group advising the DfES on the Cybrarian project which produced a prototype social media tool in 2003. This was a Facebook for learning produced a whole year before Facebook. The DfES rejected it, partly because the term social networking site didn’t exist but also because nobody in government knows anything about technology. We were outraged and shocked and eventually formed lastfridaymob (named in tribute to Smart Mobs) as a pressure group concerned with identifying criteria which would help government select useful public ICT projects; they need to be interactive, participative and creative.

lastfridaymob was an interesting mix of researchers, social entrepreneurs, policy makers and new media gurus but after a couple of years of being ignored Rose Luckin said that if we refocussed she knew how to make a Research Group work.

A Coincidence of Motivations leading to Agile Configurations

The Learner-Generated Contexts Research Group started with a number of assumptions having evolved from this social media group. Education needed to be creative, interactive and participative and it would be occurring in a post-web 2.0 world with all the tools that provides. User-Generated Content we took as a given, and our work in social inclusion indicated that “access” was just a starting point what mattered was interest and appropriate content. Consequently we decided that what we were interested in was context appropriate learning, what we called a “Coincidence of Motivations leading to Agile Configurations;” a learner-generated context. Actually what we are probably most interested in is in supporting learning-generated contexts.

Some other Underpinning Ideas (for reference)

Learner-Generated Contexts Group ideas didnt come out of nowhere, our ideas were shaped by our earlier work. Between us we have developed or worked on the following ideas and concepts; Social networking, Ecology of Resources and participatory design, Community Development Model of Learning, Participative Media Literacy, An Information Architecture for Civil Society, developmental e-maturity, Metadata for Community Content, the Social Shaping of Technology and the Networks, Services, Users (NSU) model of technology change.

Open Context Model of Learning

We arrived at the formulation that we now call the Open Context Model of Learning online using a pbworks wiki collaboratively, and you can see the draft version and its evolution online. We realized that we needed a learner-centred pedagogy and prepared it for the first Open Learn Conference at the OU in 2007 hopefully to show that community how you could apply LGC principles to their work on Open Education Resources (OER).

John Seeley Brown was the keynote speaker at the Open Learn Conference and I dragged him along to our workshop. He called our presentation “the most exciting thing happening in England!” Yanks, hey; don’t you just love them; it is “the most exciting thing happening in Britain” John! But thanks anyway…

Another LGC back story is that we had each typically worked in more than one educational sector and collectively had worked across all education sectors, so our view of the Open Context Model of Learning is that it is an approach to learning that can be applied in multiple contexts.

But the point of this exercise comes from the belief that understanding learning involves a narrative and I have tried to present a narrative that is about my learning and which also reflects The Open Context Model of Learning. I have tried to select stories that capture something that I learnt at the time, often inspired by The Beatles who presented an alternative narrative of learning to me (see the “Learning…With The Beatles” entries on 9 after 909 for more on this).

The Open Context Model argues that learning is a combination of subject understanding, collaboration, social processes and creativity, and that part of the process of implementation involves addressing what we call the PAH Continuum, as Thomas Cochrane has done at Unitec NZ (image 13 on Prezi).

The PAH Continuum

We argue that teaching to the PAH Continuum means that Pedagogic, Andragogic and Heutagogic issues need to be covered in the learning process. Pedagogy is teacher-lead and designed to inculcate subject understanding. Andragogy, usually associated with adult education, is about developing collaborative learning skills in learners, which is the critical factor in learning to learn. And don’t forget that everyone does want to learn, but perhaps not your subject and perhaps not in your way. Heutagogy is about being creative, about understanding form (or subject discipline) and then learning how to play with it, to create innovation. Normally we only allow artists and post-doctoral research fellows to this and then only a little, but we could all learn how to do this, even if we don’t. Perhaps teach a history of technology with a focus on the innovation process? Maybe require your students to contribute to wikipedia, or spot an error, and substantiate their post.

The Beatles and the Open Context Model of Learning

When I started writing the posts called Learning…With The Beatles I used to think that “all you need is heutagogy,” but in fact I realized that “all we need is andragogy”, and the heutagogy will follow. We need more collaboration-driven learning, we need co-creation and co-design strategies, we need new professional skills in educators and we need to enable learning and creativity in our learners.

The past isn’t linear; the future hasn’t been built

I am interested in understanding the disrupted narratives of our own learning as we turn the past into an arrow and see the present in a predictable arc from the past. It isn’t and it never was. But when we think that way we then see and expect the future to be built in a linear and predictable fashion, yet we study the great disruptions in history, Sarajevo (twice), 9/11 , the English Civil War, the American revolution, 7/7, climate-change, and so on and then produce a smooth historical tapestry. So is the future about One Laptop per Child or One Laptop per Village, embedded or distributed, augmented or virtual, industrial or ecological, nation-state or bio-region, man-made or natural, Examined or Trusted, political parties or mafia driven, peaceful or terrorist, financial or post-financial models of exchange, global or local, representative or participative? If your pedagogy doesn’t provide answers to these questions then I suggest you might need to start using the Open Context Model of Learning, reconceptualising education and becoming more collaborative.

Learning Futures Festival Online – Core Questions for discussion;

Presentation on Slideshare

1. What line most resonates in any story?

2. Why does this line resonates?

3. Tell us what a story about a learning experience this reminds you of.

4. What can we learn from your story?

Process (Stories on Scribd)

Day One; Four Stories, context, characters and engaging with secondary schooling

Day Two; Four Stories, school, friends and achievement

Day Three; Four Stories, school and preparing for life after school

If you enjoyed the stories more than the theory you might like the full version of them in 63/68 A Visceral History.

Resources;

Draft version of Open Context Model of Learning

http://learnergeneratedcontexts.pbworks.com/JIME+paper

Beatles Stories and Discussions

http://fred6368.wordpress.com/; try the tags “Learning…With The Beatles” and “Open Context Model”

LGC Film on yoodoo; “The Future of Learning” http://yoodoo.org.uk/index.php?siid=6461

Interactive Digital Inclusion Centre (click enter); http://www.intomedia.org.uk/silwood/ENTER.HTM

LGC NING site; http://learnergeneratedcontexts.ning.com/

Policy Forest; http://learnergeneratedcontexts.ning.com/profiles/blogs/lgc-policy-forest-results

Comments below appreciated