The band John Lennon thought were “just The Beatles redone”
When The Beatles first emerged, they were seen as a phenomenon unlike anything else seen before in the world of popular music. The amount of hype, praise, publicity and screaming fans they had following their every move, whether in scrutinising fashion or in complete awe of their existence, was a sight to behold, and many people were unable to explain just how four ordinary boys from Liverpool had managed to take the world by storm.
Except, it had all been seen before. During the 1950s, Elvis Presley had just as much of a stranglehold on the public with his suave style of rock and roll, and had people fawning over him constantly. At the same time, Frank Sinatra, while more in line with swing, big band and jazz, had a similar amount of attention coming his way. By these metrics, everything that The Beatles achieved in the sense of popularity had been seen before, and it should have been far more expected than it was.
Musically, The Beatles changed the world, though, right? Their style of pop rock reshaped music as we know it, and nothing before had ever quite sounded the same, with the vocal harmonies being more sumptuous than anything that any other group had offered up, and they played all of their instruments with such panache and wrote the majority of their songs, unlike many of their contemporaries. The Beatles couldn’t be stopped or beaten in this regard, surely?
Well, that’s true if you’re looking at the band’s work from 1966 onwards, where they began incorporating elements of psychedelic rock into their work in a way that felt revolutionary. Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band felt like groundbreaking works at the time of their release, but their first four records were sprinkled with covers of rock and roll songs, and they were still forming an identity that was heavily based upon the works of their contemporaries in the Merseybeat scene.
So, was there actually anything truly original about The Beatles, or had everything they supposedly pioneered been done before? The moptop haircuts might have been something that they popularised, but there’s probably a very good reason as to why nobody had done that before. In terms of their artistry and popularity, were they simply just recycled goods that the world had already been subjected to countless times, just being lapped up by a different audience?
As far as John Lennon was concerned, all music was simply going over the same repeated ideas over and over, and that there was no such thing as being original. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, he went as far as to accuse one particular band who had enjoyed similar levels of commercial success to The Beatles during the 1970s as having copied everything they’d done.
“All music is rehash,” Lennon claimed. “There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme. Try to tell the kids in the ‘Seventies’70s who were screaming to the Bee Gees that their music was just the Beatles redone. There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees.”
While The Bee Gees may have had a huge amount of success in the ‘70s when they began to release a fusion of pop and disco music, it was more in the 1960s where their work was most derivative of The Beatles. However, if you were to tell a fan of the Bee Gees in the ‘70s exactly what Lennon said, they’d either shrug it off and not care, or simply laugh at his remarks. There may not be such a thing as originality, but that doesn’t mean that things can’t be good.
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