How to use this Page

By Gordon Thompson

At the July 29, 1965 premiere of the Beatles’ second film, Help!, most viewers understood the farce as a send-up of British flicks that played on the exoticism of India, while at the same time spoofing the popularity of James Bond. Parallel with this cinematic escapism, a post-colonial discourse began that questioned how colonial powers justified their economic exploitation of the world. Eventually, Edward Said’s Orientalism would describe the purpose of this objectification as “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978: 3). In effect, Said and others argued that portrayals of the non-Western other—of which Help!, written by Marc Behm (who had also created Charade, 1963) would be an example—attempted (consciously or otherwise) to justify the myth of European racial superiority. Perhaps Behm, director Richard Lester, and the Beatles saw their film as in the satiric tradition of the Carry On film comedies popular in Britain and parts of the Commonwealth. But for Britain’s growing population of South Asian immigrants, the film would have been one more example of the dominant white culture twisting the identity of an economic underclass to serve the end of dominating it.

Most Westerners have never quite grasped the importance of the Hindu deity Kālī (presented in Help! as “Kāīlī”) and associated her with eighteenth and nineteenth century Indian organized-crime families (Thagīs, the root of the English word, “thug”), some of whom had worshiped her. As the goddess of time, Kālī also represents death, that great leveler of social classes and a figure both honored and feared. British governments fighting crime families profiled Thagī practices, such that for them mother goddess worship joined the list of criminal characteristics. Perhaps they also distrusted any religion that elevated a non-subservient feminine identity to the divine, and Kālī is anything but subservient. Subsequently, Kālī and Thagīs have presented irresistible conflated subjects for novels and films, even as recently as 1984 in the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

The culturally naïve world of the Beatles in 1965 experienced its own loss of identity control as others attempted to manipulate them, a growing disaster to which they contributed. Earlier that spring, a dentist had surreptitiously spiked Lennon and Harrison’s coffees with LSD at a dinner party in an attempt to ingratiate himself. And the Beatles’ extensive use of marijuana on the set of Help! had rendered them extras in their own film. However, early in the filming, the Indian instruments in one scene attracted George Harrison who would have already been aware of the interest in Indian music floating in the British air that spring and summer. A number of other musical compatriots had already been inspired by Indian music, from the Yardbirds (“Heart Full of Soul” in May) to The Kinks (“See My Friends” in July).

Over the next few years, Harrison would more deeply embrace Indian culture, especially music and Hinduism, and renounce the use of psychoactive drugs. Ironically, youthful Western audiences in the sixties created their own Orientalist vision of Indian culture by creating an association between Indian music and drugs and sex. Of course, their purpose was not to support British eco

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry.  In the post below he looks at the end of 60’s Brit-Pop.

Tucked into a tight lane off busy Wardour Street in London’s Soho district, the Beatles gathered on 31 July 1968 to begin something they had done only a few times previously: record outside the safe confines of EMI’s Recording Studios in Abbey Road. They had grown increasingly dissatisfied with EMI’s reluctance to invest in competitive equipment, while bands like the Rolling Stones and the Who had been recording in American studios for years. These bands flocked to Los Angeles both because of the recording culture and because of technology that EMI had postponed installing: eight-track recording decks instead of the four-track decks common in British studios. When the Beatles arrived at Soho’s Trident Studios for “Hey Jude,” they intended to add vocals to their EMI four-track recording of the musical backing. However, when they heard playback on the eight-track Ampex decks through Trident’s sound system, they immediately relegated the first tape as rehearsal and began working anew.

Trident had its problems. Principally, the owners, the Sheffield Brothers, had simply plugged American machines that ran on an alternating current of sixty-cycles into the British fifty-cycle system, resulting in slower playback at a lower pitch. Any pitched overdubs that the Beatles would have tried over their original EMI recording would have been hopelessly out-of-tune. But over the next few days, the Beatles would re-record the backing track to “Hey Jude,” add vocals, and play with musical possibilities that eight tracks allowed. The new environment may have expanded their musical options, but it also amplified personality quirks and irritated old wounds. In particular, Paul McCartney antagonized his old friends through his preoccupation with perfection and his predilection for prodding his colleagues to improve their product. The first casualty was Ringo Starr who quit the band on 22 August, returning only in early September after tempers had cooled.

The London recording and music industries were beginning to evolve under the combined influences of their relatively sudden international success and the growth of independent studios like Trident. In September of 1968, as “Hey Jude” rose to the top of British and American record charts, the infrastructure that had grown to produce hundreds of British pop recordings underwent a sudden revolution. The session musicians, music directors, producers, songwriters, and engineers who had generated the diverse array of British pop, rock, and blues recordings under the cover of touring bands like Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, Them, and the Yardbirds felt the system shudder.

“Hey Jude” describes the break-up of John Lennon’s marriage to Cynthia and its effects on their son Julian. Moreover, the inordinately long recording (over seven minutes) reflects McCartney’s interest in hymn-like musical structures (e.g., “Let It Be”) and serves as a requiem for the musical world that the Beatles had helped to define. Just as “Hey Jude” rose in international sales charts, a London trade paper, the New Musical Express, reported that two longstanding London session musicians had formed the “New Yardbirds.” Jimmy Page had established himself as a free-lance producer and John Paul Jones had demonstrated his skills as a music director. But, as technology and its availability transformed the industry, they saw their opportunity to leave the safety of session life. Thus, in the waning months of 1968, British recording engineers left for America, session musicians and music directors went on tours, and the old studios scrambled to stay competitive. The New Yardbirds, who soon renamed themselves Led Zeppelin, launched their mystical macho imperative into the seventies while the Beatles celebrated the end of sixties British pop by making a sad song sound better.

ShareThis