5 November 2009
The final tour song… ever! And it was actually the final tour song for the Beatles in real life, according to the in-game factoids. (Well, almost. But it was definitely the last song they played that was written by them.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtwqL4NB7yE
This was the only even faintly decent cover version of ‘Paperback Writer’ I could find – Gershon Kingsley, from his album ‘Music To Moog By’. That said, there’s something ill-fitting about ‘Paperback Writer’ devolving into a psychedelic wilderness over the course of the song.
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3 November 2009
Time to get political with ‘Taxman’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byjPd28KegM
That’s Junior Parker’s ultra-slow, ultra-mellow version, a chuckling drawl (“Aw, now this is awful…”) that makes it clear that Junior is having a whale of a time lounging in the shoes of the man to whom all monies flow. He’s recasting the callous bureaucrat as some kind of blaxploitational Kingpin Of Crime, divorcing the song completely from one cultural milieu – what does Junior Parker care about the Wilson government? – and plugging it into a completely different one, with frankly gorgeous results.
Great stuff! Not relevent, though. Let’s get back to the Beatlebots.
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31 October 2009
Well, after a week of hard conventioneering, I’m back in the saddle to talk about ‘Drive My Car’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GHY9nLrhU
Soothing stuff and fun to play, as I remember. I bashed this one out before I left, in the hope that I’d have time to write a column on it while I was away, but even after I got back on Wednesday I was still too dead to do more than gaze listlessly at it. Even now, I’m just going to cobble together some random thoughts and hope I can pull myself together enough to keep the momentum up until Budokan ends, the sessions start and things really get crazy. Anyway, a few spoilers:
SPOILER: There is no car.
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21 October 2009
There are still those, even in the dying days of the Noughties, who deride Rock Band and its ilk as ‘fake’. Well, here’s NES-rock group ‘I Fight Dragons’ doing their chiptune-heavy cover version of ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, played on a PC-friendly flash clone of Guitar Hero.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2H4aP62Gyk
So someone’s playing a let’s-pretend version of a let’s-pretend version of the guitar, pretending to play a cover version of a song by a band – probably a hipster band, ugh - who play with Nintendos instead of real instruments. We’re down the rabbit hole of inauthenticity here and I LOVE IT. Suck it, Grandad! Suck it in HELL!
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19 October 2009
Welcome to Budokan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d56_g38uURc
The boys are obviously exhausted, the microphones don’t work properly, Ringo looks ready to top himself right there and the haircuts have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Offstage, all sorts of trouble is brewing – the ‘bigger than Jesus’ comment, increasing tensions within the group, an album cover where the band smilingly cavort amidst bloody hunks of butchered meat and baby dolls – and history tells us that the Beatles are on the brink of Tourpocalypse.
As a result, that’s got to be the worst performance of ‘Day Tripper’ I’ve ever seen. Beatlebots to the rescue!
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17 October 2009
Whoops! The next song on the list isn’t ‘She Loves You’ after all, it’s the far less interesting ‘I Feel Fine’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCEB1qkhC9Y
Still, it’s a nice rocking groove, as the Ventures here prove.
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14 October 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHve4uTqvvY
That’s Nellie McKay’s version of ‘If I Needed Someone’, which by a strange coincidence is what the Beatlebots plough onto in their historic Shea Stadium gig.
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12 October 2009
Hello Beatles! It’s been a while.
So what happened there? Work happened, to put it bluntly – in the midst of a brutal cold that beat my immune system like a gong, I had to write some pretty serious comics (part of which involved creating an alien language from scratch). In the end, I took the week off the Beatles, and from now on I’ll be doing a more realistic production schedule of Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (or at least two out of three) as per Tom’s excellent and timely advice last week on keeping a long-running series going when the enthusiasm starts to run dry.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrjLvEKrnnM
And what could dry up a man’s enthusiasm faster than the sonic wallpaper that is ‘Eight Days A Week’, our unlucky 13th entry?
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6 October 2009
Back again, this time for reals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfNg484cRCQ
As the Shea Stadium section grinds on, McCartney gives in to the despair gripping his soul and sings ‘I’m Looking Through You’.
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2 October 2009
Special HARMONIC/HARMONIX CONVERGENCE Edition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDh-CxXHj5s
Normal service will be resumed etc.
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