What the critics wrote about the Beatles in 1964

[Spider Jerusalem]

17. And meanwhile what at least one serious critic was saying about them in 1963:

Their noisy items are the ones that arouse teenagers' excitement. Glutinous crooning is generally out of fashion these days, and even a song about “Misery” sounds fundamentally quite cheerful; the slow, sad song about “That [sic] Boy”, which features prominently in Beatle programmes, is expressively unusual for its lugubrious music, but harmonically it is one of their most intriguing, with its chains of pandiatonic clusters, and the sentiment is acceptable because voiced cleanly and crisply. But harmonic interest is typical of their quicker songs, too, and one gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of “Not a second time” (the chord progression which ends Mahler's Song of the Earth).

Those submediant switches from C major into A flat major, and to a lesser extent mediant ones (e.g., the octave ascent in the famous “I want to hold your hand”) are a trademark of Lennon-McCartney songs - they do not figure much in other pop repertories, or in the Beatles' arrangements of borrowed material - and show signs of becoming a mannerism. The other trademark of their compositions is a firm and purposeful bass line with a musical life of its own; how Lennon and McCartney divide their creative responsibilities I have yet to discover, but it is perhaps significant that Paul is the bass guitarist of the group. It may also be significant that George Harrison's song “Don't bother me” is harmonically a good deal more primitive, though it is nicely enough presented.

I suppose it is the sheer loudness of the music that appeals to Beatle admirers (there is something to be heard even through the squeals) and many parents must have cursed the electric guitar's amplification this Christmas - how fresh and euphonious the ordinary guitars sound in the Beatles' version of “Till there was you” - but parents who are still managing to survive the decibels and, after copious repetition over several months, still deriving some musical pleasure from the overhearing, do so because there is a good deal of variety - oh, so welcome in pop music - about what they sing.

The autocratic but not by any means ungrammatical attitude to tonality (closer to, say, Peter Maxwell Davies's carols in O Magnum Mysterium than to Gershwin or Loewe or even Lionel Bart); the exhilarating and often quasi-instrumental vocal duetting, sometimes in scat or in falsetto, behind the melodic line; the melismas with altered vowels (“I saw her yesterday-ee-ay”) which have not quite become mannered, and the discreet, sometimes subtle, varieties of instrumentation - a suspicion of piano or organ, a few bars of mouth-organ obbligato, an excursion on the claves or maraccas; the translation of African Blues or American western idioms (in “Baby, it's you”, the Magyar 8/8 metre, too) into tough, sensitive Merseyside.

These are some of the qualities that make one wonder with interest what the Beatles, and particularly Lennon and McCartney, will do next, and if America will spoil them or hold on to them, and if their next record will wear as well as the others. They have brought a distinctive and exhilarating flavour into a genre of music that was in danger of ceasing to be music at all.

- The Times (London), 27 December 1963