Founding Apple Corps was the worst thing The Beatles ever did for music
It is fine not to like The Beatles, but to be a music fan who ignores their contribution is like enjoying a stroll through a forest but saying you hate soil.
In less than a decade, the band went from young lads just trying to emulate their heroes to a pioneering force turning the world a little more avant-garde one masterpiece at a time. As the philosopher Mark Fisher once said, “The Beatles basically trained people to expect things to get more and more experimental the more popular they got.”
That mindset means that there’s a note of their inspiration in pretty much everything that has followed. Alas, in their final throes, they imparted one last message: nobody is perfect. The monumental shambles of Apple Corps and its damning legacy stand as testimony to that. Sadly, it’s dower influence is in pretty much everything bad about modern music, too.
Apple Corps was the band’s multimedia company, launched in 1968 with a view to becoming a utopian umbrella for the Fab Four’s creative and financial ambitions. Encompassing everything from Apple Records to film, electronics, and publishing, it was intended to function as a freewheeling, artist-first enterprise more so than a record label. But it was deeply troubled.
Firstly, its very inception held two portents. For starters, it ties into the nepotistic celebrity notion that because you’ve been successful in one area, you can simply apply that to another. You can’t just go from being in a pop band to writing wonderful children’s books just because you’re ‘creative’.
Secondly, and more egregiously, it was largely set up as a mere tax haven. The band could, essentially, funnel personal taxable income into a business venture that had a lower rate. As Lennon himself openly explained: “Our accountant came up and said ‘We got this amount of money. Do you want to give it to the government or do something with it?’ So we decided to play businessmen for a bit.”
Had they wanted to ‘be’ businessmen for a bit, then that would’ve been fine, to some extent, but the sentiment of ‘playing’ businessmen cheapened the venture from the get-go. Likewise, the notion of tax being equated to giving money to the government as opposed to contributing your dues to society is another troubling turn of phrase from the man who sang of no possessions only a few years later.
People often look back at the 1960s as the nation’s glory days, with the British Invasion progressively planting our flag as the foremost pioneers of first-rate culture, and collective buzz stretching from Soho to Scotland, and this is put down to some sort of mystery of the zeitgeist. The fact that Britain had a highly progressive tax system with top rates exceeding 90% for top earners – a model that enabled the Fab Four to go off and pursue making millions from art – is often suspiciously overlooked.
But once again, this is just a nebulous critique, and had The Beatles actually decided to contribute to the music world with a progressive new enterprise, then you could turn a blind eye even to the monetary motives. That didn’t happen.
The Fab Four’s biggest failure?
When they returned from India in 1968 and announced their own new liberated label for “creatives”, it seemed like the perfect way for them to foster talent and further their contribution to culture. Hopeful artists were now abuzz with a sense of possibility.
When he heard the news, David Bowie raced to the nearest telephone and immediately urged his then-manager Kenneth Pitt to submit an audition tape for the consideration of the newly yoga-fied Beatles. Sadly, Bowie was one of about a million artists who had this plan, and Apple Records was possibly the most ill-equipped label in the world to deal with such a predictable surge.
The endlessly bickering Beatles had to reach a four-way agreement on all signed acts. Which effectively meant that no act was signed unless they were friends or close enough to one of them to allow them to strong-arm the others into submission. As Nicholas Pegg writes in his memoir, “I know that Apple was a new, small label initially besieged by numerous musicians, managers, agents, artists, and hucksters, and that the individual members of the Beatles were directly involved with many acts signed to the label.”
He continues to list this nepotistic strategy. “As examples, McCartney with Mary Hopkins and Badfinger, and George Harrison with Jackie Lomax,” he writes, “but who in the Apple hierarchy actually listened to the submissions and presentations? Who rejected Bowie? Neil Aspinal, Alistair Taylor? Did one of the Beatles pass judgment on the youthful Bowie’s Decca recordings?” It would be a strong story if they had. But they almost certainly didn’t.
Bowie’s beleaguered Kenneth Pitt was just one of the many managers enraged by the slovenly new giant “creative” company he was met with. He later sharply proclaimed: “Had David not been keen on recording for Apple, I would not have tolerated the deplorable organisation, sheer amateurism and downright rudeness that confronted us during the next three months, the time it took Apple to give us a decision.”
This was a familiar tale that zapped many artist’s energy at a time when the fading dream of the 1960s needed fresh impetus. The label could’ve been a bohemian new business that wrestled the boardroom of the music industry away from the big suits and sparked a revolution of genuinely equitable creative freedom.
It turned out to be the opposite: a jobs for the boys enterprise that cared solely about the bottom line and barely had time to function beyond that. Hell, they even nabbed a few ideas from the odd audition that did make it through (see ‘Something’ from James Taylor’s audition).
And what culture it did bring to the world, it did so in a haze of financial chaos, management upheaval, and an air of litigation. It was purely a business and a shoddy one at that, which found many artists shafted in the cross-hairs. Proving one thing for certain: art and tax management are two separate spheres, and never the twain shall meet.
The Beatles were just young kids in turmoil, and they didn’t owe it to anyone to foster the business of the next generation. They had already done that creatively, but they took on that responsibility anyhow… they should’ve just settled the tab and paid their tax. Instead, they departed with a souring asterisk that sadly still lingers over the industry. There’s a lesson in that for society.
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