Blog: My Records Are Better Than The Beatles'

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At the moment i'm reading Mark Lewisohn's INCREDIBLE Beatle Biography "Tune In" which is part ONE of a proposed three book series called "All Those Years". It is TOTALLY BLOWING MY MIND. As anyone who has ever spoken to me in a pub for more than 0.3 seconds will know i am a bit of a Beatles Nut and have read a LOT of books about them (i.e. I mean REALLY a lot), yet this book keeps coming up with ASTOUNDING new facts. I don't want to give any spoilers away (or indeed HEAR any - I'm only on page 267 out of 840) but I will give this as an example: they had a whole OTHER NAME for MONTHS that I'd never heard before! A whole other NAME!!!

It's all TERRIBLY exciting and also IMPRESSIVE. This volume only goes up to 1962 (I'm a third of the way through and they've not even all MET each other yet) so almost everything Mark Lewisohn is talking about is based on the things they and their friends did as TEENAGERS, and young teenagers at that. He's looked through old newspapers and asked people for their memories but, CRIKEY, how many of us remember ANYTHING we did as teenagers in any depth? And how many of us kept NOTES as we were going along? There's huge chunks of time where Mr Lewisohn says "nobody knows what happened at this point" because why would they? But there's also AMAZING pieces where rather than rely on what everybody "knows" about The Beatles he's actually gone and LOOKED and found out from old newspapers, adverts and interviews with the people who were THERE. It is ACE!

Anyway, so the other day I happened to look back at the page for gigs in 1993 on the webpage (I was Bored At Work and thought "I wonder what I was up to 20 years ago?") and noted that there was quite a bit of DETAIL missing. As it happens I also had a bit of an old SORT OUT at home last week, part of which had involve putting all the mementoes of my time in VOON into one FOLDER. "I could totally sort that out!" I thought, so on Monday night spent a couple of hours trying to do just THAT.

Now, obviously, two hours of rifling through an old folder of magazines, posters and diaries isn't QUITE the same level of effort put in by Mr Lewisohn, but it did yield some pretty good results. I've kept quite a few old diaries, lists of BOOKINGS, and some other bits and bobs which allowed me to work out EXACTLY when some gigs happened, who we played with, and sometimes what SONGS we played too. A really good example of this is the page for gigs in 1992, where I found out all SORTS of bits and bobs. All right, maybe there aren't a HUGE amount of people who care who else was on the bill for the Princess Charlotte All-Dayer on September 19th 1992, but it was quite good fun having aged brain cells gently PINGED by the memory.

I'm thinking about maybe taking this a bit further and digitising some of the many many TAPES I have of those gigs. I've thought about this BEFORE and have always given up BORED before very long, but I could at least use them to hear what SONGS we played. I've also got PILES of photographs which it'd be nice to put online, rather than just have them taking up space in my drawers.

We'll see how it goes - goodness knows there's plenty of other stuff in my LIFE at the moment that I need to get on with - but whatever happens I can take one thing from all of this: I do have some pretty good records of what happened in my early years of ROCK, and looking at all the evidence I can say with all due FACT and ACCURACY that MY records are MUCH better than The Beatles'.

If I can get independent verification I might start putting that on posters!

posted 30/10/2013 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

I remember that time you were playing in http://tchaiovna.com/events.php/ and I phoned Sandy Blair to find out where he was....and his poor wife Angela answered saying it was 4am and they were on holiday in Malaysia....weak excuse for missing a gig!!
posted 30/10/2013 by Gary Urquhart

My playing is also better than Paul McCartney's. I'm sure he's rubbish at GTA5!
posted 30/10/2013 by Chris Abbott

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