What's the key to a marketing hit: an original sound or the same old tune?
The Beatles weren’t that good when they first formed.
Don’t take my word for it, Paul McCartney said in a recent radio interview: “We obviously weren’t that good. We were formulating it all.”
Record producer George Martin agreed. “When I first met them, they really couldn’t write a decent song. ‘Love Me Do’ was the best they could give me, yet they blossomed as songwriters in a way that was breathtaking.”
They became great because they worked at it. I’m not talking about that 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell has written about, though there’s no question that all the time in Hamburg helped. But if it was just down to putting the hours in, then Gerry and the Pacemakers would have become global icons. They were from Liverpool, managed by Brian Epstein and they too toured the Hamburg club scene; in fact, they stayed longer than the Beatles. Gerry and the Pacemakers focused on what worked, they wrote some huge hits and had three number ones in a row. But to shake up the world, the Beatles knew they were going to need a little something extra. Originality.
When Paul, John, George and Ringo were told how something was supposed to be done, they would deliberately do it differently, as George Martin explains: “The Beatles were always looking for new sounds, always to a new horizon and it was a continual and happy strain to try and provide new things for them. They were always waiting to try new instruments, even when they didn’t know much about them.”
By: Sam Ball
Source: The Guardian
