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 commemorate January 15th, a day two British bands released classic records. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

A year after the Beatles stormed into American charts, British record companies continued to release disks that redefined how we hear pop music. Out of the seemingly endless stream of British performers flooding the international media emerged two performing songwriters with distinctly British voices. In one of the ironies of the era, on Friday 15 January 1965, two British bands released records that would become classics and both had the same American producer. Shel Talmy had relocated from Los Angeles to London with an introduction and faked credentials (he passed off the Beach Boys “Surfin’ Safari” as his own production) just before the Beatles and other bands lit the fuse of the “beat boom.” He had what few other British artist-and-repertoire managers had at the time: a great ear for hit songs, knowledge of how to elicit and to capture the excitement of performances, and an attitude big enough to push his ideas through to completion.

The Kinks premiered a song that Ray Davies had written as the follow-up to their breakout hit of the previous summer, “You Really Got Me.” Shel Talmy, although in favor of eventually releasing “Tired of Waiting for You,” wanted something that more clearly established a Kinks sonic identity. Consequently, for October release, Talmy, Davies, and the Kinks turned out “All Day and All of the Night” whose power chords and distorted guitar functioned the way the industry expected classic follow-up hits to sound. In January when the band appeared on ITV’s Ready, Steady, Go! to debut “Tired of Waiting” for Pye Records, the arpeggiated chords and nasal voice introduced listeners to a less aggressive and more melancholy Ray Davies. Instead of the hormonal lust of their previous two hits, “Tired of Waiting” spoke to an ambiguous ambivalence ambling about in that twenty-one-year-old heart. This would be the beginning of Davies finding his British voice. By the end of the year he would be skewering the well-respected men who rode trains into London’s City every morning.

Appearing on the same day, Brunswick Records unleashed the Who’s first single, “I Can’t Explain” for an expectant audience of London mods and to an unsuspecting world. Pete Townshend took the Rickenbacker electric twelve-string guitar that George Harrison had charmingly chimed on Beatles records over the previous year and turned it into a weapon. Shel Talmy allowed the band to play at club volume and compressed the sound so tightly that the guitar chords and drum hits project at the listener like spikes against a black background. Although Townshend would later complain about Talmy bringing in the Ivy League (John Carter, Ken Lewis, and Perry Ford) for backup vocals, the performances and the recording sound as crisp and cool as a mid-January night. Just as he had with “You Really Got Me” for the Kinks, Talmy