All My Loving Standing There at the top of the Australian pop charts were 6 Beatles singles each celebrating 2 great Beatles songs from their Top of the Pops Golden age. Well Twist And Shout and All My Loving were both EPs with 4 tracks on them for those of us too poor to buy the first and second albums. My mum bought me Twist And Shout as a Christmas present in 1963 and despite my brother and I also getting bikes (and a Terry’s Chocolate Orange) it’s The Beatles EP that lives in cherished memory. Twist And Shout also marked the shift of my focus from Paul (as the pretty boy Cliff Richard of the group) to the scallywag of nonsense Jono Lennon.
In the U.K. in 1963 me and my mates, fellow Beatles fans, would grab their latest album and play a game of “spot the single” guesstimating which wonderful album tracks could easily have been an alternative hit single. In 1963 in England their three biggest selling singles weren’t even on albums; She Loves You, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, From Me To You. Not least because single records cost more than a cinema ticket (whereas in 2024 cinema tickets are 10 times the cost of a single download) and The Beatles were concerned that their fans weren’t charged twice for their music.
So great was The Beatles impact on British culture in 1963 that BBC TV, who had studiously ignored pop music in 1963, not least because Steve Race, Head of Music and a jazz fan, despised skiffle and pop, introduced the legendary Top of the Pops on Thursday evenings. The first programme was on the first Thursday January 1964 and its Top Twenty format featured 5 Beatles records. I Want To Hold Your Hand and She Loves You as singles, Twist And Shout and All My Loving as EPs were both selling more than most singles and, at Number 19 the album With The Beatles. In 6 weeks at the end of 1963 With The Beatles sold more than any other album including Please Please released 7 months earlier. It was the Christmas present of choice that year. Top of the Pops wasn’t taped as the Beeb thought that the transient popularity of The Beatles only needed to be suffered for 6 weeks. Instead Top of The Pops lasted for 42 years. Sales were spectacular…
Just before Christmas 2023 I set a tricky Beatles Quiz for friends of mine who were avid Beatles fans of long standing. The catch was that the answers weren’t obviously to be found on the Internet. Most of my super knowledgeable friends couldn’t answer any of the questions, so one of them stuck the questions into ChatGPT. Whilst ChatGPT insistently provided 20 responses (full of guesses, as though it was for a mid-term exam in any American University) it was mostly wrong; but it didn’t let on that it was guesswork, nor provide some qualifying framing of its repeated inaccuracies.
ChatGPT almost had 3 “correct” shots in the dark out of 20 questions; but only if I’m generous and after some prompting too (that’s cheating in academia obviously). That is a very bad fail in most educational high-stakes assessment contexts. ChatGPT, an example of generative AI, has been termed a stochastic parrot, meaning that if it is actually clueless about a “correct” answer it will stump up with its “best” guess camouflaged as an answer, however low the probability of being correct! If the possible answer has a 17% chance of being correct ChatGPT will provide that “answer” with 100% confidence. Whilst this might be a sensible strategy in a multiple choice quiz for a poor student (unless the marking scheme marks down guesses like GPA) it is not what we expect in an answer from a putative authority. ChatGPT is a clueless scattergun which simulates authority whilst exhibiting the profound digital arrogance that it’s one’s and zeros build into their systems. For example in answer to the question “which French Nobel Prize winner wrote “the Beatles were full of joy?” ChatGPT guessed Albert Camus who had died before they became The Beatles. ChatGPT is just a rough and ready matching machine. To paraphrase Robert Wyatt.
But if ChatGPT is to be authoritative then it’s algorithm cannot just blitzkreig the reader with any random guess from its combined harvesting of data, unless it also reveals at what level of probability that guess is provided. Parrots might provide voicings of words, well-trained parrots might provide voicings of “answers” but the simple follow up question “how come” ends discussion with any parrot; dead or alive. M$ (Microsoft) won’t do this because, as Jim Clark (Netscape) pointed out in the last century, Microsoft wants vertical integration in any market it enters and with ChatGPT we are talking about Education as a market. The point of ChatGPT for M$ is to render teachers redundant in high-stakes assessments education systems.
Education is no longer a place of knowledgeit’s merely a stack of vertically integrated products, as longed for by Harvard University’s own Clayton Christensen who wanted to disrupt the classroom in order to make it a global product which American institutions can dominate. Death of a salesman replaced by death of the teacher. The Professor might just be retained in order to manage the always on switch, more probably to flash perfect white teeth in the prospectus.
The Beatles Questions
I’ve been a fan of The Beatles since January 1963 and I’ve been writing about them since 2009, including a novel, 63/68 A Visceral History and a number of blogs, including a song-by-song guide to the White Album that Google has now badged as authoritative. Try a Google search for “Bungalow Bill review” This means that snippets of our work (each song on the blog was reviewed by a different member of our Brainsrusting group) are now part of the core reference model that ChatGPT relies on. It’s data is partly formed by Google’s snippet answers. Some of its data is hoovered in from Wikipedia (3%), much of it from opinionated blogs that still think Kasparov can’t beat a computer at chess.
Machine Reading not Machine-Learning
ChatGPT is just a data resource notable, however, for its scale. Similarly Google is a search tool notable for its speed. Neither are particularly accurate but both are acceptable and fast enough for those who literally believe “time is money”. Discussing the amazingly clueless ChatGPT results to my Beatles Quiz with a friend I realised the answers revealed that they were based on machine-reading not machine learning, whatever the AI experts are saying. After all even more data is just more data, it’s certainly not knowledge, far less wisdom. Machine reading data doesn’t even create useful information; that’s left to the algorithm and its fast stats probabilities concerned with guessing what an answer might be. To ChatGPT, concerning The Beatles it seems that Happiness is a warm guess…
In 5 Years Time? Better models…
In the many years since 1984 that I was teaching about or researching AI I noted that the AI fanboys were always saying it would arrive in about 5 years. Ever since Donald Michie opened the Machine Intelligence Unit in 1948 at Heriot-Watt University the benefits of AI have been over the hills but not far away. Five years is into the next funding cycle, so it means our inevitable AI research conclusion will be more research or, just keep funding us please! Rarely do useful applications emerge but interesting outcomes of research do. I particularly like Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind because it attempts to model how the human body uses the brain. I recall Minsky saying we each have around 400 “brains” controlling the multiple functions of ourselves, which is why we can chew gum and walk at the same time.
Better models of learning
Rose Luckin’s Ph.D, which informed her Homework project (where she built an iPad 2 before Apple launched its pocketful of eyes), modelled “learning” based on evolving Vygotsky’s constructivist model of learning for the resources rich age of the Internet. Both these useful outputs of AI research were concerned with deepening our understanding of ourselves in useful ways. They were heuristics. Heuristics can help us think better for ourselves, by providing us with constructive insights. They don’t replace us thinking for ourselves, far less offer algorithms that are presented as better thinkers than how we might think.
False correlations and false metaphors…
So the major criticism of generative AI In general, and ChatGPT in particular, is that they are statistical systems passing themselves off as truth-tellers. A critical flaw in using statistics to provide the truth about anything is something called a false correlation. Matching this pattern with that pattern seems to tell us something meaningful about their connection, but if we say “this causes that” it may not be true. Statistical results still rely on human interpretation before they become meaningful. However with generative AI we now have a far bigger problem than a simple false correlation. We now have the potentially devastating problem of false metaphors starting with the biggest lie that AI is a form of intelligence, exhibiting sentience and, possibly is wiser than us. It’s just a high-speed matching machine useful only to people who can’t distinguish a fact from an assertion. So this is wisdom! What have we done?
Finally a real digital remix rather than a mere digital remaster (of 4-track analogue tapes) of the wonderful Sgt Pepper. Listening again, and really enjoying it for the first time in years, after just one hearing this is what I can say… Thank you, Thank you, Giles Martin. I think this outstrips his brilliant work on Love by actually taking a revered national treasure, ignoring the pitfalls that might bring, and simply improving it sonically. First George Martin, now Giles; oh how well we Beatles fans have been served by the brilliant production work of this amazing family. Every track sounds like Giles Martin has said “one more take and this time sound like you mean it!”
Rather than sounding like a fascinating set of pop curios left over from some mythical Edwardian era Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band actually sounds like a great rock band embellishing their core sound with fabulous sonic explorations and colourations that, as was customary, serve the purpose of the song, whatever the original quality of the writing. The Beatles now rock fulsomely and several tracks reveal a big difference in the mix. If you loved a track before you’ll find it amplified, with many surprises across several tracks. I can now listen to Sgt Pepper for pure pleasure rather than for nostalgic reasons, as it sounds rich, layered and musical, rather than quirky and psychedelic.
Mojo4music have always maintained that this is Ringo’s best album for drumming and the drums sound just *great* here. The explosive shock of how hard he hits them in With A Little Help from my Friends (the boys and various Fifth Beatles) banishes all wet wet wet thoughts.
Key revelations, as well as Ringo’s drums and Paul’s Bass, are Good Morning Good Morning (thumps), Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite (swirls mesmerically), Lovely Rita (roars away from the meter maid), and Lucy…
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds has moved out of its newspaper taxi version and into a machine-tooled Halewood Evoquation of the summer of love, and kids drawing at school. Lucy’s gold painting never sounded so glossy. The Beatles never sounded so fulsome…
It’s really getting better all the time, the production no longer keeping us apart from the things that we love…
The 2-track sorcerers apprentice has finally followed the Beatles self-help advice and fixed the hole where hand-made EMI technology had left the future brilliance of Peppers’ sonics languishing. For me the simply “good” tracks like Fixing A Hole are burnished afresh and pull you in with their wealth of fresh detail.
The fuller 2017 sound means that the whirligig Wurlitzer brilliance of Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite is now driven by the band performance rather than the amusingly quirky oddities of the circus poster. Another track now full of depth rather than surface brilliance.
Vinyl Pepper offereda perfect interval after that swirling Sevenoaks souvenir and, shortly after Mr Kite, Pepper started again with the Indian world chill meditation masterpiece of Within You Without You, now clear and lighter with fresh details abounding.
Peppers‘ claim to be a concept album lies more in the emotional journey that it carries you on than in the thematic coherence offered by a “rock opera” like the Pretty Things (quite wonderful) S.F.Sorrow.Perfect sequencing.
When I’m 64 offers a musical pacing that works well in the context of “side 2” (some hip vinyl slang) of Pepper, setting us up for the forthcoming finale rather than being a big tune in itself. It remains solidly in place but lacks any real revelations, other than exhibiting the beautifully rich detail and vocal work the album now abounds in.
Lovely Rita perhaps McCartney’s most Lennon-inspired song of the everyday (and their most “Abbey Road” song) rocks along terrifically. I still don’t know why someone hasn’t looped the riff from 2’13” and turned into a floor filler…
Good Morning Good Morning, which I had always loved for the sound effects of ever bigger animals chasing each other in a crazed stereophonic foxhunt, actually rocks, no thumps, like fury with an unbelievably massive sound. Another track that now sounds like a band playing instruments rather than a production of sonic effects.
A Day in the Life, with its double-decker reflective melancholy, remains timelessly brilliant, and a cut above the rest of the album. It’s deathless genius once again produced fearful shivers down my spine in the orchestral sections. Paul’s perfectly banal everyday comb comedown creating a calm before the climatic piano forte climax of the album; now staggeringly forceful all over again despite its familiarity.
(Mind you I still think McCartney should have waited for George Martin to finish scoring a track for Cilla rather than using Mike Leander on She’s Leaving Home)
My thoughts on first buying Sgt Pepper in 1967 are captured in the story Good Morning Good Morning and for some months this was, to me, clearly the best album of all time (even though I was also given Hendrix’s enduring electric guitar masterpiece Are You Experienced as a birthday present in June 1967). Over time my view changed and it declined in my affections. Recently I would have nominated both Revolver and Abbey Road well ahead of Pepper, and Hard Days Night, Rubber Soul, Magical Mystery Tour, the White Album and Kinfauns as roughly its equal. Pepper, for decades, seemed of its time. This, better revealed version, with its brilliant soundstage now ideal for headphones, should re-establish Pepper as a mighty album, not just of the sixties, but as part of the current canon of wonderfully playable Beatles rock band albums.
Why the Beatles were so #creative – All You Need is Heutagogy;
I have alluded to several books on this blog and so, with Christmas long gone and books, book tokens, book sales and replacements being favoured activities here are some thoughts about books and buying Beatles stuff in. Since I first wrote this blog Mark Lewisohn has published his new meisterwerk Tune-In (2013), which covers everything you ever wanted to know about the Beatles up to Love Me Do. Not only is it a real work of scholarship that moves past the errors in earlier works (by others) to provide both a definitive and balanced account of the flaming pie that gave us The Beatles but it is a is now the key text for fans as he has interviewed many of them to help contextualise the narrative. I will be rereading it for pleasure.
Records; Of course I am assuming that you will have already gotten the remasters, a key topic of this blog, and they produce a great narrative of Beatle life, but if not I would recommend the following five albums in order.
4) Rubber Soul; great folk-rock influenced epic by Dylan & Crosby as they lift off (with one last blast of misogyny)
5) Abbey Road; the most polished and 21st century sounding of their albums; White Album Part 2 meets Love Part 1
Acidheads, mellotron-freaks and prog-revivalists (hello Italy!) should head to the Magical Mystery Tour for a breakfast of semolina pilchards and an English tan. A painless MashUp of all things Beatles for the kids is the wonderful Love! The show in Las Vegas is worth seeing too; it feels just like sitting next to Ringo in Abbey Road studio 2 as the music is from the master tapes 🙂
BOOKS
Before I wrote this blog I thought there were only two Beatles book that anyone would ever need and they were both British. Ian McDonald’s “Revolution In The Head” and Mark Lewisohn’s “The Complete Beatles Studio Recording” (now out of print) which both put you at the centre of The Beatles world in the 1960s. Perhaps that is still all that you will ever need to read however recent American scholarship and enthusiasm pretty much trumps those two, in my opinion. Yes I can’t believe it either! So what are the other books worth buying? Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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 becameThe 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.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Learning from Learning…With The Beatles; from album to artefact
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. Read the rest of this entry »
9 after 909 