Boris Johnson © Wikipedia Creative Commons
A local author and Beatles expert has challenged London Mayor Boris Johnson over claims that the Fab Four have stronger links with the capital than Liverpool.
In the wake of Boris Johnson’s controversial claims made on Tuesday, David Bedford – who has spent many years researching the Beatles roots and has written two books about them – feels the Mayor of London is trying to take credit for the huge success of the band.
Mayor Johnson told an audience at the London School of Economics: “The greatest band in the world came from Liverpool, but in the end they recorded their stuff in London and it was London that helped propel them around the world.”
Walton MP Steve Rotheram even raised the issue during Prime Minister’s Questions at Westminster today, where David Cameron admitted he had enjoyed a visit to the Beatles museum here, as he credited Liverpool with the Fab Four’s success.
Speaking to JMU Journalism, David Bedford said of the Boris Johnson comment: “It’s a typical politician’s throwaway remark but it has big implications because again it is someone in London taking credit away from Liverpool.”
The Beatles recorded the majority of their music in London’s Abbey Road studios in the 1960s when Beatlemania first took off. However, Mr Bedford feels that this was merely a facility for them, not something that ‘made the band successful’.
The Beatles in Liverpool in 1964 © Trinity Mirror
“By the time they got to London in 1963, John, Paul and George had already been together since the end of 1957.
“By the time they had their first hit they’d been together five years … so the making of The Beatles was in Liverpool, it’s where they were born where they grew up, where they met where they played for hours and hours.”
He believes that if anywhere else contributed to the Beatles’ success, it is Hamburg and not London.
The band spent many nights performing for up to eight hours in Hamburg nightspots and studios.
“Boris Johnson is just trying to associate himself and London with somebody famous, when the credit really has to go to the musicians and the songwriters and the producer George Martin – the studio just happened to be in London.”
Mr Bedford grew up in Liverpool and has many connections with the Beatles, from early years in the Dingle where Ringo Starr grew up, to his daughters going to the same school as George Harrison and John Lennon.
He has devoted his life to researching the Beatles and has written two books about the band.
His first, ‘Liddypool’, which was published in 2009, was all about The Beatles’ roots and was the result of nine years research and writing.
Front cover of Liddypool © Liddypool.com
He is preparing to launch his second book ‘The Fab 104’, which will be published this Friday at Dovedale School.
The book looks deep into the Beatles’ past and at all of the musicians who have inspired them on the way to superstardom.
As well as provoking Mr Bedford, the speech also generated a big reaction on social media. Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson tweeted: “See Boris or the ‘Fool on the hill’ at it again claiming London made the Beatles nothing to do with the talent or songs of Lennon+McCartney.”
This isn’t the first time Mayor Johnson has said something to anger Liverpool, after having made comments about the Hillsborough disaster – a blunder for which he later apologised.
Bill Harry, the founder of the UKs first local music paper, Merseybeat, in the early 1960s wrote letters to the over-centralised UK media based in London. He requested they to go to Liverpool and report on the music scene there. He told them that what was happening in New Orleans in the early 1900s with jazz was happening in Liverpool with rock and roll. Of course they ignored him.
The London music scene at the time was appalling with Liverpudlians generally ignoring London looking to the inspirational USA. The massive USA generally ignored anything that came out of London. Being a massive port, and the port for America, thousands of Liverpool seamen would constantly stream back from the USA with the latest US records, clothes and styles. The small British music industry based in London had nothing to offer – only studio recording facilities. The Abbey Rd studios only bought an 8 track tape recorder in the final few years of The Beatles, way after US studios were using 8 track recordings. Imagine what Sgt Peppers would have been like using an 8 track. George Harrison was no big fan of London recording facilities, rarely using Abbey Rd studios after The Beatles split. George openly criticised EMI for being mean, even putting locks on refrigerator doors.
If cheap and plentiful airline travel had arrived 5 years earlier than it did, you may have found The Beatles and the many Liverpool bands may have chosen New York to record in, not London. The mixed cosmopolitan background Liverpudlians would have felt more culturally at home amongst New Yorkers than anyone from London or the Home counties.
London did nothing artistically to create the root of 1960s British music scene that took over the world, that was mainly down to the Liverpudlians. It is clear it would not have happened without the Liverpudlians. Even the biggest London based band that rolled along with the 1960s British music scene, a Kent band called The Rolling Stones had their first number one hit with a Lennon/McCartney song. Liverpudlians were directly responsible, artistically, for the subsequent expansion and dominance of the British music scene in the world – of which London greatly benefitted financially. London made a lot of money out of Liverpudlians for sure, a point not mentioned by mayor Johnson.
Only Paul McCartney had a house in London, amongst others. John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison lived outside not wanting to know the rigid class structured stuffy city too much, only using it for business reasons. They looked to the vibrant USA with the three of them spending a lot of time there.
I live yards from the Abbey Rd studios and see 365 days a year a procession of Beatles fans from all over the world make the pilgrimage – yet it is pushing 45 years since The Beatles last recorded there, the pull of these Liverpudlians is so strong. More visit The Beatles sites in Liverpool than go to Abbey Road. They would go anywhere the studios are, being in London is just incidental. The words The Beatles and Liverpool are synonymous, not The Beatles and London.
Liverpool has had a vibrant music and arts scene for decades attracting many from all over the UK and the world, complete with its own studios and no longer needs London. London was just a vehicle for the Liverpudlians at the time. No more than that.