David Byrne explains why The Beatles “never made anything you could play in a stadium”
Recently, the multiple Grammy-award-winning producer, Steve Lillywhite, weighed in on the age-old debate: who is the greatest band of all time? During his postulating, he claimed that Queen are “more relevant today than The Beatles are”.
Despite Lillywhite’s work being studio-based, during his appearance on Warren Huart’s Produce Like A Pro podcast, he explained that what makes a band the best in the world is their ability to play in front of a live audience. Given that The Beatles stopped touring in 1966, Lillywhite asserts that this hamstrings them heavily in the debate surrounding the best band ever.
“Always it’s been The Beatles when you talk about the greatest bands ever,“ he explained. “But there’s an argument now that the Beatles never made anything you could play in a stadium. The Beatles never made anything you could play at a huge sporting event.”
“So Queen, when you talk about the greatest bands ever – I would never say anyone is greater than The Beatles – but there’s an argument right now that Queen, because of their ability to transcend stadiums, there’s an argument that they are more relevant today than the Beatles are,” he continued.
However, fans of the Fab Four would argue that from mid-1964 onward, the band almost exclusively played either stadiums or large auditoriums in an era whereby the sound quality of large-scale amplification made this a rarity. This huge leap allowed others to follow in their footsteps and changed the nature of music thereafter. In essence, The Beatles floundered in screaming stadia so that Queen could blast the proverbial roof off of Wembley.
In David Byrne’s book, How Music Works, the Talking Heads man makes the pertinent point that there is a symbiotic relationship between venues, technology and music, each adapting to a change in impetus from one prong of the triumvirate. If a band gets big enough to attract a stadium-size audience, but they have to stop because they literally can’t hear themselves over the crowd, then soon enough PA system technology will improve, and that, in turn, will lead to a change in musicology as bands experiment with bigger sounds.
As Byrne wrote: “In a sense, the space, the platform, and the software ‘makes’ the art, the music, or whatever. After something succeeds, more venues of a similar size and shape are built to accommodate more production of the same. After a while, the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted— of course, we mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.”
This has been true since time immemorial. The grandest buildings in any ancient city are often cathedrals. These hallowed spaces were also literally hollowed because this meant that when a choir began pelting out their hymns, the echoing boom would induce godly awe. However, in open spaces where music was largely played outdoors, such as West Africa, you’ll find that music was much more percussive because this was what carried over the terrain.
This was music and venues adapting to each other before technology even entered the picture. However, when it did, all three factors changed rapidly in response to one another. If traditional symphonies were heard in symphony halls, then it was also true that the Bob Dylan’s of this world would’ve been in lowly pubs where an acoustic guitar and loud vocal pipes were all you needed to be heard.
However, vinyl production and the promotion of television, radio and the printing press meant that suddenly small bands or folk stars were bursting out of pub walls. Beatlemania meant that the Fab Four simply couldn’t play The Cavern Club anymore for both commercial reasons and the fact you’d have a riot outside every night as thousands tried to flock in. So, they were ushered into stadiums before stadiums were ready and before their music had adapted to have the might to bellow above a huge screaming mass, too.
So, in some ways, Lillywhite is right – you’d expect that, though, as he is, after all, one of the most respected voices in music – but his argument is hindered by the fact that once The Beatles stopped playing stadiums, their music did, ironically, become more anthemic… as did most other rock bands.
The bombastic impact of pop culture meant that ‘Yesterday’ may well have no longer cut it in front of an audience of 80,000 people who all wanted to get loaded and forget about the looming Vietnam War draft. Enter booming bands like Led Zeppelin. Hell, even Bob Dylan went electric around the same time. However, just a few years earlier, can you imagine a mic’d up John Bonham playing drums in a tiny stonewalled pub; he’d have been sued for deafening the entire congregation of patrons.
So, it may be the case that the front half of The Beatles’ discography wasn’t fit for stadiums, but that’s just a matter of timing—and the quirk of fate is that they actually set the clock in motion to make stadium music a plausible reality, and once that gate was opened the likes of Queen took up the mantle.
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