It Won’t Be Long: The Beatles and MP3

I’m a big Beatles fan, and had a post cooked up all about those reports that, thanks to Norweigan Broadcasting (NRK), you could download Beatles MP3s for free, legally. NRK’s site said:

“Some weeks ago, NRK – Norwegian Braodcasting – signed a deal with music rights holder organisation TONO in Norway. The new deal gives NRK right to publish podcasts of all previously broadcasted radio- and tv-programs that contains less then 70% music.

One result of this deal, is that we now can publish “Vår daglige Beatles” – “Our Daily Beatles” in English – as a podcast.

In this series from 2001, journalists Finn Tokvam og Bård Ose tells the story of every single Beatles tracks ever made, chronologically. Each episode contains a 3 minute story about each track (sadly for our international visitors – in Norwegian) and the actual Beatles tune.”

The agreement only covered recent shows, and the Beatles ones were from 2007. So, the feed was pulled pretty quickly.

Part 1: The songs

with-the-beatlesNRK had put up 28 songs by this afternoon before the feed was taken down, sort of sorted in the order they appeared on the LP. They’d got through all of the Beatles’ first two albums, Please Please Me (1963) and With the Beatles (later in 1963). While skipping past some earnest Norwegian chat, humming and excited mutterings of “Ringo Starr!” to get to the songs was a little inconvenient, it was great to listen to the early songs again – I only have from Rubber Soul onwards on CD.

‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Twist n’ Shout’ (complete with great scouse accents, and a throat shredding vocal that meant George Martin got them to save recording it until the end of the session in case it wrecked Lennon’s voice) were obvious highlights, but I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed their covers of ‘Rollover Beethoven’ (Chuck Berry) and ‘Baby It’s You’ (Burt Bacharach).

You also get a sense of how eager they were to try things, so while ‘Please Please Me’ is relatively basic, just months later they opened With the Beatles with the terrific It Won’t Be Long, which is just as immediate, but adds the yeah-yeah-yeah harmonies, a desceding guitar bit that sounds like early R.E.M. and lyrices that conflate “be long” and “belong”, much like Smells Like Teen Spirit did1 years later with “Hello, Hello” and “How Low.” Even on the now largely forgotten Don’t Bother Me, George Harrison’s first Beatles song (one he later called crap), it’s amazing how many ideas they cram in; with 13, 14 seconds to go, the song finds the energy to drop its guitars and vocals and shake down into a shuffling, rhythm driven outro.2

Part 2: In which we get to the point

It all reminded me just how odd it is what they’ve done to The Beatles’ music in the last few years. In the mid-to-late nineties, the emergence of the Anthology project, the frequent praise of The Beatles in interviews by popular bands of the day combined with the launch of retro music magazines (Mojo etc) and Paul McCartney’s own increasing willingness to be a pop legend rather than going concern meant that the Beatles went from old to classic. They’d always been above the cheap compilations which recycled 60s hits (Best 60s Album in the World… Ever etc) but they became deified. Problem is, when Napster, iTunes, Guitar Hero etc opened up all the locks and the music started to go free – onto MP3, into remixes, inside videogames, onto podcasts and blogs – the Beatles stayed home, pipe and slippers.

And so now they’re missing. Everyone learns the truth that the Beatles are Important with a capital I. The Best. The Greatest. Whatever is left of the other Apple has done well to build them up. But the music just isn’t there. It’s absent from the places where the kids – the people who live and breathe music – are, and where everyone is increasingly going to be. iTunes is the biggest music retailer now, Guitar Hero is mainstream entertainment. The Beatles are abstract, venerated, protected. Their name is known, but I suspect knowledge – and love – of their songs is dipping lower and lower.  Sure, you can buy them on CD, but those releses are over 20 years old now and when it comes to packaging, presentation, convenience and most importantly sound, they’re just not good enough.3

The Beatles are admired, not loved, and that’s not right; one thing you get from their music – and that the fabulous Revolution in the Head gets absolutely dead right – is what made them great was that they were part of so many things. They weren’t about crystalline artistic genius, they were about connections between things – Delta blues and Blackpool music hall, LSD madness and genuine lovestruck giddyness, smutty jokes and conceptual high-art.

I’ve recently enjoyed watching the early 60s-set Mad Men; series 1 ended beautifully, with anti-hero Don Draper sitting lonely on the stairs as the caustic strains of Bob Dylan. Series 2 hurtled forward and all the time I keep wondering when we’ll hear the Beatles, despite knowing the restrictive licensing means we probably won’t. Kudos to the Norweigans; two guys talking about the Beatles on a podcast is just what we need. It’s off air now, but here’s hoping 2009 is the year they get the Beatles stuff online, in a decent way. There’s always the game, too.

1 Kurt was a huge Beatles fan – in particular John Lennon. Whenever Burch Vig talks about recording Nevermind he mentions how he’d convince Kurt to double-track his vocals because that’s what George Martin did with John Lennon’s. There’s also a good anecdote in Michael Azzerard’s ‘Come As You Are’ Nirvana bio that mentions Kurt wrote ‘About A Girl’ after spending a whole day repeatedly listening to Meet The Beatles, the US album featuring many of the songs from With The Beatles.

2 That said, modern pop songs are no less inventive – Rihanna’s Umbrella easily has enough detail to withstand nine spot-on points of Guardian music critique, for instance:

“[8th reason it’s great is because of] the way she pronounces Umbrella with four syllables, which makes it seem implausibly exotic. One of pop’s gifts is the ability to make humdrum words sound deliciously strange. Also, when she riffs on “ella” she sounds half like a playful kid and half like a malfunctioning robot.”

3 As Pitchfork noted, it’s almost worth buying the remixy Love for the fact the material on it is all remastered, and particularly through headphones, it sounds frighteningly fantastic. The opening harmonies of Because are worth the price of admission alone.

Previously on the Wired Jester:

* Barry Miles on counter-cultural London in the 60s
* Links to old soul covers of the Beatles
* Links to a 70s Lennon/McCartney/Stevie Wonder bootleg
* Beatles x Pac Man T-shirt

Can You Hear Me Calling? Vampire Weekend cover Fleetwood Mac

At some point, I will launch a blog entirely devoted to cover songs – they’re a great way to hear musicians taking on melodies and choruses they’d never normally write, and there’s great pleasure to be had in the way a cover puts the stresses in other places: different lyrics, different parts of the melody. (Biffy Clyro’s cover of Rihanna’s Umbrella is a fantastic example of this, turning her robo-sung version’s futuristic, chromed power-chords into something earnest, shivering and down-to-earth.) In these DRM-clad times, there’s also something powerful in the way a cover says no-one owns a song, only a version of it. Most of all, covers affirm that there are times when other people’s words and feelings do better – or are more accurate, more precise, more powerful and timely – than your own.

Hypeful put up a list of the best cover songs of 2008, and while there’s a fair amount of crap on there1, and a couple degraded by dubious bootleg quality2 there are two fantastic covers well worth a download. The first is the Last Shadow Puppets’ cover of Rihanna’s SOS, done in their own creepy Ennio Morricone/Mad Men style. Best of the list though, is actually its number one – Vampire Weekend covering Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere. Their vocals aren’t as smooth as the originals, but they’ve amped up the rhythm, stripped the sugary synths and it all fits beautifully.

The Vampire Weekend album was one of my favourites from last year, and is well worth picking up – plus, if you use this the link to get it from Amazon’s MP3 store I’ll get a couple of digital shekels.

1 Gnarls Barkley, who cover Radiohead’s ‘Reckoner’ using the medium of interpretive gurning.
2 Spoon, doing Panic! Should have been great, but the recording is very murky.

Lucky Symbols

Luckiest T-Shirt Ever - Threadless, Best T-shirts Ever

I’ve never been one to have any good luck totems myself – no lucky socks for my exams or charmed shirts for interviews2 – but I do like this Threadless t-shirt with its collection of lucky symbols. Should make it certain2 2009 gets off to a great start. From left to right: a rabbit’s foot, a wishbone, a ladybird, a horseshoe , a four leaf clover, a shooting star, a maneki neko and the number seven itself. The maneki neko (“welcoming cat”) is Japanese; most of the other symbols are European or North American, while the number seven and shooting star probably have Biblical roots.

lucky-symbols

Lucky symbols which are missing (that I can think of): a black cat and numerous other lucky numbers. While Wikipedia is surprisingly weak on most of the symbols – the lucky 7 page is just a disambiguation one – it does its best to be authoritative on lucky numbers and numerology (“Numerology, as it relates to luck, is closer to an art than to a science, yet numerologists, astrologists or psychics may disagree” sounds positively lawyerly).

1 Partly because it just strikes me as one more thing to remember. What if your lucky socks were in the wash when you needed them?

2 Unless of course, the effects of lucky symbols aren’t cumulative, but cancel each other out. In which case, the eight symbols on the shirt would leave you back at nul points.

A post in 2 parts: Mark Rothko and Camerabag

It's very black
It's very black

Took the shot above yesterday at Tate Modern, and it’s the first one I’ve got from the iPhone’s camera that I’ve been really happy with. It’s from Tate’s excellent Mark Rothko exhibition…

Part 1: Overheard at Mark Rothko
Well, I say it’s excellent, but that’s if you like Rothko. If you don’t, it’s fair to say it’s not going to change your mind about him. It’s not like there’s a secret room of photo-realistic portraits or delicate watercolours in the middle of it. Despite the fact Rothko is one of the few 20th century artists to be widely known, plenty of people there seemed annoyed, offended and upset by what they found. Best exchange I overheard was a father leading his 10 year old son through the rooms, at pace, saying:

“Right, so the last room was the purple and black series. This one is the grey and black series. You see the difference?”

In close second:

(Man, looking at a massive canvas that’s absolutely covered in paint) “Well, it’s not really painting, is it?”

Part 2: The Camerabag iPhone app
You do get some interesting people at exhibitions. Families with babies that literally look like they’ve just come out of the hospital, perplexed French tourists and people who appear to have dressed solely to look like cliched art fans. It all makes for great photos, but unfortunately you have to contend with the gallery guards and the no photography rule. This meant the SLR was out, and the iPhone was in. I’ve written about the iPhone’s camera before, and as it’s not brilliant, I’ve tried out a few apps to see if they could improve it. By far the best has been one called Camerabag; it’s cheap, regularly updated (most of the bugs have now gone) and allows you to apply a series of filters to pictures you take with the camera. The idea is that the filters mimic certain camera styles – Lomo, Polaroid, monochrome etc – and it’s easy to use, and as you can see from the picture I took at Tate, allows you to get a bit more out of your phone pics. Well worth the £1.79 cost. For more, check out the Camerabag Flickr group.

Previously on the Wired Jester:
Art: Visiting Tate Britain’s Holbein exhibition.

How to delete podcasts you’ve downloaded to an iPhone with 2.2

The new 2.2 system software for the iPhone allows you to download podcast episodes straight to the phone (previously it just copied episodes downloaded via iTunes if and when you synced with your home computer). This is great, but there are some problems with the process – namely that podcasts downloaded directly to the iPhone don’t show up in iTunes, so you need to delete them on the phone.

It isn’t immediately obvious (i.e. It’s completely hidden) how to do this – but it’s quite simple when you figure it out. In the iPod program, go to the list of episodes of podcasts, swipe your finger (as derisively as possible, of course) over the episode you want to get rid of – and the delete button will magically appear 🙂

The Custom PC book: Ultimate Guide to PC Gaming

CPC UGTPCG

I’m pleased to announce the first ever Custom PC book, the Ultimate Guide To PC Gaming, out just in time for Christmas on the 4th of December. It’s everything you need to know about PC gaming in one 174-page book.

It went to press yesterday, so we’ll get copies in the office at the end of next week hopefully. A lot of work went into the book – and I’m really pleased with the design and writing in it. The internal design was inspired by the design of Factory Records sleeves, as I was recently given a book called FAC461 – Factory Records, The Complete Graphic Album, which features lots of the famous Manchester record label’s beautiful designs. We used a font very similar to the one found on the front of Joy Division’s Substance, and the bright colours and grids were developed from the look of some of New Order’s singles.

The writing’s aimed at a more mainstream audience than CPC is,the idea being that there’s a very strong line-up of PC games at the moment (WoW, Warhammer, Left 4 Dead, Crysis, Fallout 3 etc etc) but that people might be put off playing them because the PC is typically thought of as a difficult machine to use, especially in contrast to games consoles. Hopefully the book will succeed in demystifying PC gaming and showing what a rich, varied and involving experience it can be. It’s going to cost £7.99 and is available from WH Smiths and Borders. You can also buy it from Amazon.

Updated: The book’s official site is up now at www.custompcbooks.co.uk.

Talking about Windows 7

Warning! Awkward geekery ahead. Here’s me on the BBC website, talking about Windows 7. In short: it looks a lot like Vista, especially at this early stage – much of the stuff previewed by MS (and covered on the PC Pro blog) doesn’t appear to be in the version we had to play with. But it’s fast to install, quick to load and seems a lot less annoying, a lot snappier. So far, so good. Issue 64 went to press yesterday, maybe next week I’ll have some time to run some proper benchmarks, see how it is for gaming…

43 was a pillock, 44 looks like he’ll be a lot better

Omaba OMG
Omaba OMG

I was with an American friend last night, and even at 11pm she didn’t dare believe it was going to happen.

It did though, it really did.

Writers with a firmer grasp on the issues, the times and the rhetoric you need for them have delivered the goods. And of course Obama himself did. His speech wasn’t as exuberant as it could have been, and it didn’t luxuriate in the achievement itself as an isolated moment of incredible success. Instead it was thoughtful and powerful. Touchingly, the language emphasises that this is bigger than one man. Bigger that one campaign, more important than one election and one choice. It echoes with repetition, it’s rich with patterns and has a solid structure which gives a sense that a chain of voices made this happen; that this moment is linked to many more and that what you do now matters to the future and that everything is connected:

“This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing – Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons – because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America – the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves – if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call.”

And then there’s what George W. Bush had to say to Obama:

“What an awesome night for you, your family and your supporters. You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life. Congratulations and go enjoy yourself.”

Sounds more like what a parent says to someone who’s finished their A-Levels and is about to go on a gap year.

Picture via Waxy.