I have been fascinated by the reaction to the Beatles re-releases.
In particular the perfectly understandable "whats the fuss" from the youth and the "you had to be there" from the oldsters.
What has interested me is the gulf that exists between those who were truly there in October 1962 (I was 14) and the rest. It wasn't just the music that was in the charts that was different it was everything.
Lets start with radio. In October 1962 there were no commercial radio stations in the UK. The only, yes only, radio stations broadcasting in the UK were the BBC stations and, local stations apart, there were three, count em, three stations.
There was the Home service, the Light Programme and the Third Programme. It would be over simplistic to try to map those programmes onto the current output. For instance some of the spoken word material that currently resides on R4 would then have been on the Light, quite a significant part of the daily Light programme output was spoken word.
The BBC at that time worked under two Musicians Union agreements that limited the amount of commercially recorded music they could play.
First was the "needle time" agreement. No more than a certain amount of music, memory suggests 5 hours per day, could be played from records. This limit worked across the whole network including classical recordings. As a result much of the "popular" output was live (or specially recorded in BBC studios).
This had one good result for posterity. For instance the ever popular "Saturday Club", one of a handful of pop programmes broadcast each week, instead of playing records had live recordings by the artists. The long string of "Live at the BBC" releases available today result from that rule.
The bad news was that an awful lot of pop music was performed by dance bands employed by the BBC who could reliably murder any current chart hit. Most of us of a certain age would cheerfully do physical harm to Alan Breeze the vocalist with Billy Cottons band.
You then have to couple this rule with the musicians exchange rule. No US artist was allowed to perform here, in any way, unless an equivalent number of UK artists had performed in the US. Once the Beatles had broken through in the US this wasn't an issue but prior to that it was a considerable limit on exposure to US artists. The US wasn't interested in UK pop artists.
Fortunately UK classical orchestras were popular in the US and one tour by the RPO could allow a number of US artists entry. Inevitably much of the take up would be by established US performers and jazz bands. The chances for a US artist just breaking in the states getting one of the coveted slots was slim.
Since the BBC was limited in needle time and couldn't get access to live US artists our menu was sparse.
A pop music fan would have certain fixed radio slots each week. The aforementioned Saturday Club was one. Pick of the Pops on Sunday afternoon another, one hour to run down the top ten. Many of us would sit with reel to reel tape recorders, no cassettes in those days, and record the whole programme through a mike resting against the radio speaker.
Records would be played each morning on housewives choice, each Saturday morning on children's choice and of course on Sunday on two way family favourites. To request a record on these shows you would write your request on a postcard (not a letter) and send it through the post to the BBC. No email, no text, no phone ins - snail mail only. This somewhat pedestrian process meant that records played tended to be conservative, and that's without producer interference!
Then there was Luxembourg, but there were issues. First there was the simple process of receiving the programme. Even in the Southeast the signal was poor and obviously it deteriorated the further you got from the source.
It came on each night at 7.00, usually I recall with a sponsored US religious broadcast. Since radio reception is better in the dark the early programmes were only really listened to in the winter.
Then there was the content. The whole station was brutally commercial. Each programme, usually 15 minutes long, was sponsored, frequently by a record company, and thus just played a limited choice of records. To avoid losing revenue by home taping only the first half (or so) of a record would be played so we wouldn't know, without buying it, how a record ended.
The good news was that since the programmes were sponsored they would play every release without concern for chart position etc. When a record was covered and became a hit by a UK artist the rival company would play the original on their shows. We got an education in the beginnings, literally, of many US artists.
Then there was television.
Each channel, there were just two, had their specialist teenager programmes. On BBC there was Juke Box Jury which again played just the first half of new releases to a celebrity panel. On ITV there was Thank Your Lucky Stars where artists mimed to their records.
In addition artists would be featured on other shows. My first recollection of the Beatles on the TV is their first national TV appearance on a children's show in December 1962.
Provided they were parent proof pop stars would also appear on general variety shows. In those days pop stars all seemed to profess a desire to be "all round entertainers" and many would happily sing "standards" if asked. This was, prior to the Beatles, good sense. There was no future for pop stars whose life would be limited unless they moved into mainstream entertainment.
I could go on.
It was onto this scene that the Beatles appeared. For whatever reason once they had been accepted their output was everywhere, they were stars beyond anything that we see now. Everybody loved the Beatles, or so it seemed.
Whatever the linkage, subject for much debate, within a couple of years we had a Labour Government, pirate radio, Ready Steady Go and Swinging London.
It is of course possible that the Beatles, and by extension, the "Sixties" are just a result of the baby boom flowing by, but there is no question that everything did really change in so many ways. Chicken or egg? Discuss.
