McCartney Times

TUNNEL VISION: Theatres have it, cinemas have it, arenas have it, but airports still adopt the same sound system that The Beatles faced when they first conquered America in the 1960s.

Have you waited for your flight to be announced above the cacophony of final calls from 20 other airlines alerting slobbering gin and tonic passengers they have two minutes left to board their aircraft?

That’s the sound The Beatles faced when performing at Shea Stadium in 1965. The noise, the screaming, the distortion was accurately captured in The Beatles – Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years, now screening on US television.

“John [Lennon] got agitated from 1965 onwards,” Paul McCartney recalled. “We were getting fed up.”

“We started to know what Elvis felt like,” George Harrison said.

But money’s a great incentive and a contract certainly helps. So for “eight days a week” they sang their numbers through the public address system and into a wall of noise. They left in a bulletproof vehicle, the sort FBI agents drove around in to protect President Kennedy.

My host in New York, Vince Sbano, remembers the concert there. He attended, saw The Beatles on stage, but all he heard was people screaming.  Adenoidal teenage girls by the thousand did their vocal folds untold damage and now talk in whispers.

I’m A Loser, sang the Fab Four. So were the girls and they lost their voice.

The Beatles’ impact was identified by composer Howard Goodall (Vicar Of Dibley), who said there was Schubert, Mozart and then The Beatles. He was talking about output only over a 10-year period.

Schubert and Mozart died in their 30s and it was said Beethoven didn’t pass away but de-composed instead. The Beatles however broke up and went their separate ways. The documentary vividly explains how it inevitably happened.

Source: Eight days a week, 57 weeks a year for Beatles | Stuff.co.nz