‘The Long and Winding Road’: A gift from my family
Do you ever feel like there are artists who are integral to the very genesis of your life itself? For me, The Beatles are just that.
To all intents and purposes, they were a band who probably shouldn’t have filtered into my formative psyche as much as they did. I was born in 2002, after all – that was over three decades after they’d last released any music, and nearly 40 years since Beatlemania exploded onto the scene. Hell, half the band were already dead before I was even alive.
And yet John, Paul, George, and Ringo – yes, I was on first-name terms with them all – were such integral characters in my early years that I think I almost believed them to be fictional friends, a bit like the Teletubbies, albeit with a bit more LSD involved than they had in the land of Tubby Custard.
A family trek down to Liverpool, which I barely remember, became embroiled in infamy where, after a day paying homage to The Fabs at all their various local sights, we were soaked by a supposed tidal wave from an incoming boat at the Albert Dock. Near enough every time the words ‘Beatles’ and ‘Liverpool’ have been mentioned in any proximity in the two decades since, the story of that fateful day is brought up. It’s like the family bible.
All of this is to say that The Beatles have existed in my life from the very first second, and are likely to remain so right up until the very last. They are the foundation of everything I’ve ever loved musically, even when the results differ greatly from the muse. Just play any one of the classics, and I’m straight back to being a child again.
By the same token, it would also be inaccurate for me to say that my love of the Fab Four has something I’ve been acutely aware of through every moment of my life – indeed, all of these reflections outlined are only really things I’ve come to realise in the space of the last few years. But I suppose it’s like the family heirloom: it’s always been in your world, so it takes something special for you to understand just how precious it is.
For me, ‘The Long and Winding Road’ is a real manifestation of that. It’s an emotionally-charged song at the best of times, written by Paul McCartney as he realised the band was coming to an end, lamenting their tensions with one another and generally looking back at the tumultuous journey they had been on as a whole.
Of course, no one except those four can know exactly what that felt like, but when you start applying those kinds of feelings to situations in your own personal life, the song now always has the effect of stirring something within me that I would have never known to exist when I was younger. It’s a nostalgia, it’s an ache, but it’s also a sense of peace.
I was unlucky enough to have lost all my grandparents before the age of 16 – of course, it’s not like grief is unfamiliar to anybody, but compared to other people around my age, it was quite an isolating thing to feel like that aspect of warmth was so gapingly missing in my life, when everyone else still seemed to have it deeply embedded and present in theirs.
One way I’ve learned to deal with that, as well as the various other tragedies that life inevitably throws at you over the years, is through the power of music. With The Beatles being such an important presence in my family’s memories, they restored a sense of connection and purpose for me when I otherwise feared it could have been lost.
In many ways, ‘The Long and Winding Road’ summed up two different sides of the coin, in my own view of the world. On one hand, the “pool of tears” and the question of “Why leave me standing here?” is the sense of injustice at it all; the feeling of being robbed of something you know you should have had.
But on the other hand, the “long and winding road, that leads to your door” is also evocative of a comforting notion. No matter how much time goes on, it’s the idea that these memories I have, whether from 20 years ago or from yesterday, will never leave. So long as songs like those exist, it’s always going to remind me of certain people and times.
I know now that this was definitely the key to unlocking the realisation that The Beatles are one of the most important musical forces in my life. It’s not like I was anywhere near alive during the time of the Summer of Love, or peak psychedelia, or even when they said goodbye. But through their sheer legacy, they have managed to create a new story all of its own, with how their songs apply to me and so many others.
It’s brought me a massive sense of peace by realising that I don’t have to hold all the memories, or indeed all the answers to the past, to still feel these types of deep-rooted connections and synergies. That’s something I’ll take with me for the rest of my life, and most definitely makes John, Paul, George, and Ringo part of the family.
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