Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 1 A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles

As the text below (lifted from my Facebook page) tells you, one of the challenges going the rounds while everyone and her/his dog is locked down is to list ten albums which were somehow significant in your life. This was my post, plus the song I mentioned. Over the following days I shall be posting the other nine . . .

I’ve been asked by my good mate Peter Bailey to nominate ten albums (called LPs when life was still in black and white) which — not exactly changed my life, but stood out. Here they are, in no particular order.

The first is A Hard Day’s Night from The Beatles. Every generation likes to think it’s the first in everything — trying sex and drugs and in music especially (and they’re not) — but ‘Beatlemania’ was nothing new, except that The Beatles were at the centre of it and there was a new young generation.

Ten years earlier Bill Hailey’s Rock Around The Clock had ‘shocked’ the world and caused minor mania, ten years before that it was bobbysoxers screaming for Frank Sinatra (when he still had hair), and just a few years before that it was swing music and the jitterbug. And 200 years ago it was Byron and lasses ‘swooning’, overcome by is poetry (never in private, by the way, and there was always some young chap on hand to revive and tend to them. They weren’t daft).

But I am not 90 or 80 but, - - and for me and millions the world over like me it was The Beatles, and as teen I loved them. Every song on A Hard Day’s Night hit and still hits the spot, but the one featured here, I’ll Be Back, is my favourite. It doesn’t seem to be as well-known as one or two others but there’s something wistful about it.

My love of The Beatles was so strong that I can even remember — no bullshit — my heart beating faster looking forward to the release of their then latest Revolver. But, I have to admit, after that they began to fade in my view: OK, we bought and listened to the LPs, but, for example, The White Album is testament to the illusion they now shared that everything they did was brilliant just because THEY had done it: they began to believe the bullshit. It should never have been a double album and would have been far stronger if half the songs had been cut out.

Having said that, nothing can diminish the glory (for me, at least) of With The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Help and Rubber Sole. Beatles For Sale has some classic songs, but also some also-rans, and it is obvious ‘the record company’ were working them hard, hard, hard, for money, money, money — just see how knackered they look on the album sleeve.

Of those four, though, A Hard Day’s Night comes out tops every time, and it is one of those albums which still somehow sounds fresh where others sound horribly dated.

Abbey Road? Magical Mystery Tour? Sergeant Pepper? Yes, I like them but I couldn’t love them. Maybe I was growing up, but they didn’t quite have that special zing of the early albums.