Close to the Beatles, subject of our latest 172-page Ultimate Music Guide but never so close as to lose objectivity, the late British rock ‘n’ roller Tony Sheridan had a succinct take on the band’s formative two years in Hamburg. “It wasn’t sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” he told me some years ago. “It was music, music, music.”
We have become accustomed to the idea that the German language has an accurate way of describing every situation, and so it proves here. What Sheridan recalled about his encounters with the band between 1960 and 1962 he described as an extension of wohngemeinschaft – a kind of shared living.
As Tony explained it, this extended beyond the generally horrible accommodation the Hamburg bands lived in, but also a more philosophical sharing of resources. So enthused were the bands about their pursuit – in a time when musicians were considered a kind of reviled social underclass – that they shared resources, knowledge, even group members, all in the name of their wider mission.
Could this be the first flowering of the musical questing, the inclusiveness and open-mindedness that we think of when we think of the Beatles? If it’s not an idea to rule on, it’s a warm feeling that you’ll be able to trace throughout this new definitive edition of our Ultimate Music Guide to the Beatles.
Access all areas doesn’t really have the same sort of meaning today as it did when NME’s news editor Chris Hutchins spent the afternoon on a boat listening to the new Bob Dylan album with the Rolling Stones, before joining the Beatles backstage at Shea stadium. That’s just a flavour of the refreshing openness which underpins the band’s dealings with the press, which you’ll find in the archive features included here.
Even when the band are in dispute with each other, John Lennon is still receiving callers from the world’s reporters to explain his position on peace, Yoko, and of course the Beatles. Of Paul’s many innovations, his retreat from the spotlight and subsequent ownership of the narrative to announce his first solo record seems particularly striking – it’s one of the few times a Beatle broke new ground in the press without a journalist being present. He did something similar in 2023, busting his own record company embargo by announcing the imminent arrival of “Now And Then”, the “last Beatles song”.
Alongside these archival pieces, Uncut’s writers have made their own insightful trips inside the Beatles’ music, to chart the band’s recorded course from “1-2-3-4!” “…the love you make”. We bring things right up to date with a deep look at the new Giles Martin remixes of Revolver, Sgt Pepper, The White Album, Abbey Road and Let It Be. There’s a review of the Get Back series, in which Peter Jackson has given a deeper insight into the band’s legendary studio sessions of January 1969 beyond that in the Let It Be film.
Very much as they were in their lifetime, over 60 years on from Beatlemania the band are much as they were: finding new ways to help us look afresh at things we thought we already knew very well indeed. Enjoy the magazine, you can get yours here. Fancy a hardback edition? It’s here.
