‘I’m cold, Teresa.’
‘Do your jacket up.’
‘Rain’s dripping down my neck.’
‘Stop moaning.’
‘When will we see the Beatles?’
‘We’re not going to see the Beatles, we’re going to see the Beatles’ film.’
‘Are we going to see it now?’
‘No, it’s sold out, we’re queuing to get tickets for it next week.’
The line of rain-strafed young people stretches round the corner from the cinema’s glamorous façade into this side passage, all unrendered brick and fire escapes, which is where we wait – uncomfortable, cold and (in my case) bored.
‘Can we come back another day?
‘John-John! This the Beatles!’
And then, next week, the heat rising from the hundreds of over-excited heads in the popcorn-scented dark, the fervour and anticipation amped up by days of waiting released in one galvanic, transfixing stab of sound.
A lot has been written about the chord that opens both the single, A Hard Day’s Night, and the film of the same name. According to George Harrison (the shy one) it is an Fadd9 – though he says you would have to ask Paul (the winsome one) what the bass note was and George Martin (the posh producer) might have added another note on his Steinway. John (the lairy one) plays the same chord as George but on a 12-string and Ringo (the drummer) hadn’t even started playing yet. But all this technical stuff is irrelevant. What the chord really is, is a caesura: an end and a beginning. The minute I hear it Cliff is dead to me. Hank, with his twangy old Burns licks, is dead to me.
I watch the film open-mouthed. The Beatles are being chased by fans and evade them wittily (wittily is how they do everything) by getting in one side of a taxi and then straight out the other. They catch a train and play a number in the guard’s van behind a wire partition, so it looks like they’re in a cage. The whole film, in fact, is about them being caged and trying to break free. They are caged by love. Everybody loves the Beatles, but the strange thing is that the people who love them most are the ones they run hardest and fastest away from.
Later after a rehearsal in the TV studio the Beatles get out by a fire escape and run around a field doing stupid stuff, just like kids would. That feeling, like the feeling of being out of school when it isn’t even lunch or break time, is one I instantly recognise. So strangely, although they are gods, the Beatles are in this very small way a tiny bit like me. (More so than Cliff, who I now see as a bit of a faker, having a fake American accent and not even using his real name).
That year I buy my first ever single, She’s a Woman backed with I Feel Fine.