A new generation of music: The “knockout” band Paul McCartney felt took up The Beatles mantle
When Ozzy Osbourne was talking about the Beatles, he gave them what might be some of the highest praise ever received in music. During a recording of one of his family’s podcasts, Sharon prompted him to talk about the Fab Four, to which he said, “[It’s] like going to bed in a black and white world and waking up and it had turned to colour. That’s exactly what it felt like.”
In justifying his comment, the Black Sabbath frontman spoke about how mundane life was at the time. “Don’t forget, we’d come out of World War 2, and the whole thing, we had strict rules to live by, and they broke the fucking doors down for so many people,” he said, “And they gave freedom to the world.”
If you imagine music as a game of Jenga, pivotal artists are the blocks that make up the tower. If you remove certain blocks from certain parts of the tower, music as we know it will remain unchanged. Some other blocks change things; they bring down a couple more parts of the tower, essentially meaning that if one band didn’t exist, several other bands might not. Then, you have the bottom two rows of blocks; if you remove them, the whole tower comes crashing down. Those blocks are The Beatles.
It’s the most repeated phrase in music, but it will never be exhausted: The Beatles are the most important band to ever take to the stage. Without them, music looks incredibly different. Many people who now play music would have never played if it were not for The Beatles, and the way we use rhythm, melody, and everything in between would look completely alien.
When a band has had that big an impact on music, who else could ever step up to them? Realistically, no one has come close, but many bands took what they did and expanded upon it, showing the true potential of a specific type of sound, attitude or recording technique. Paul McCartney picked up on one of these bands early on in their career, as the first time he saw Pink Floyd perform, he knew they were something special.
When McCartney first watched Pink Floyd in Abbey Road Studios, he saw something in the band which was tough to ignore. He could hear what they were doing and was excited about it, telling his friend Barry Miles that they represented a “Synthesis of electronic music and studio techniques and rock ‘n’ roll.”
Miles remembers the conversation well and said that he felt McCartney’s meeting the band wasn’t just an established musician saying hello to some up-and-comers. Instead, it was an acknowledgement “of the existence of a new generation of music.” McCartney would go on to describe Pink Floyd as a “knockout.”
He certainly wasn’t wrong in his assessment. No band has made a stamp on music like The Beatles have, but Pink Floyd was groundbreaking in the way that they recorded music and made engaging landscapes as a result. Another block in the Jenga tower, sure, but one that brings down half of the structure if removed.
