William Shatner’s version, given a little extra ‘treatment’ for the YouTube generation by videoist Paul Heriot. I remember Lee and Herring describing this as Shatner believing that he had to be on LSD in order to sing the song, and Heriot certainly seems to be running with that ball (and also the Star Elephant that will forever be in any room Shatner inhabits). Personally, I love Shatner’s vocals and I think this might be the perfect song for his somewhat unique stylings… but this is a series about Beatles Rock Band and not Shatner Session Band so we’ll move on.

According to the factoids, this is not about drugs. It’s in fact about a child’s drawing, which just happened through a cosmic coincidence to refer to Lucy being in a Sky with some Diamonds, which spells LSD. Which is a drug. Obviously some people might draw a link there but not Harmonix. They point up the Beatlebots’ sobriety by having their sleepy, chortling, hippy-moustached faces lit up with pink, the colour of innocence, before they ‘come up’ on something – up into SPACE, on a TELEPORTATION BEAM, of course! No wonder Johnbot is screaming AAAAAAHHH he is plunging into a wormhole. Obviously this interstellar jaunt, during which the Beatles sing merrily about things growing ‘incredibly high’, represents a straight-laced career in the astronaut field, astronauts being kept on a tight rein and not allowed to stuff their faces with blotting paper.

Bravo, Beatles Rock Band! Say no to drugs!

(Although if you were out of your head on something you’d likely have no problem here as this is one of the easiest tracks in the entire game. Difficulty is zero or close to it across the board, so much so that my guitar ran out of batteries in the last verse and stopped working, and I still finished it with four stars. Is this a case of Harmonix tailoring the difficulty for the potential audience of stoners? Surely not.)

So anyway, some people think this song might be about drugs and the video would, to be fair, probably not disillusion them.

If anything, this video seems restrained to me, though. I’ve never taken LSD myself, and I don’t think I’d even heard of it when I first heard this song, so I took it completely at face value – as a disturbing  dream/nightmare landscape where the singer seemed to be trapped without hope of escape, following/being followed by a girl whose eyes have been replaced by multifaceted lenses filled with bits of coloured paper and glass. The whole thing seemed at the time to ring with the dream logic of books like the Phantom Tollbooth or the Magician’s Nephew  or the Oz books or Roald Dahl, or TV series like the Box Of Delights or the Magic Roundabout. A lot of kid’s TV and fiction was of that nature as I was growing up – filled with the idea that there were other worlds close to this one, and the wrong step could take you into them. Mr. Benn had his costume shop, Conrad walks through a wardrobe on the 35th of May, the celebrities on The Adventure Game take the wrong path and end up floating in the void, Turlough enters the TARDIS, John Lennon traps you in his world for the length of a song.

Listening to this, I would obediently picture it in my head, imagining something strange and colourful, dangerous, with rules I understood even less than those of the ‘real’ world – a world extrapolated from the cover of the album, rich and strange, a magical world I could almost see. Part of me was thinking I’d get something like that from the Rock Band video, a way back into that experience especially after the Pepperland vibe of the last one, and the mystery march of monsters in the intro sequence. Instead… well, these things are never just handed to you on a plate.

We got a starfield.

Yay!

That’s great.

Well, all those old kids shows were on drugs anyway, right? Jimmy Carr said so! That reading of things is well funny ‘cos drugs are funny, yeah? They’ve been funny since I was 14 and they’re funnier than ever! Thank you Jimmy Carr! Plus it lets us call all these old things that don’t fit in cool in a kind of ironic way that doesn’t need us to look into ourselves and realise that we’ve lost something essential and indefinable, some way of looking at things, and we don’t know where it’s gone or how to get it back and we’re stuck like this. And that’s mint and that.

I mean, drugs, right? Will Shatner must have been off his face!

NEXT: Getting better, although not getting better at putting these out in a regular fashion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjfdfU-uaPQ

That’s the Muppets desecrating ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, which is exactly one half of today’s offering. The Beatlebots, unwilling to do things by halves, jam the first two songs of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band together exactly as they are on the album. Will they confound expectations by not performing it dressed as the titular band, in a bandstand surrounded by victorian-looking people just like in the film?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlogp709nSg

Ha ha ha ha ha ha you blind fool. They don’t even bother setting up in the studio for this one, we just dive straight into Pepperland. Well, what else could they do? I was wondering what the theme for this would be, and I suppose it’s those multicoloured jackets, those moustaches, that bandstand. This stretch of levels is all Sergeant Pepper, all the time, and by god we’re not going to forget it. Anyway, this puts me on the spot, as I’m no longer ‘discovering’ the Beatles at this point. So long as we’re stuck on this album, it’s all mixed up with childhood memories. So what I’ll do is a quick bullet-point list of things that occurred to me while watching this particular ‘dreamscape’:

- the giant, unfocussed, doll-like face in the background – presumably the Sarge himself – looks like nothing so much as Lenin looking out over the glorious revolution. Or a scary severed doll head. Or both.

- the dude in the top hat is completely blocking the view for everyone else. Boo!

- Jesus, he’s cloned himself. DOWN IN FRONT.

- the giant horns are presumably meant to be psychedelic and sweet but they seem menacing, especially as the player has no control over them whatsoever. How would you feel if you were doing a gig in a bandstand on a sunny day and a giant-ass set of twisted horns burst up from the horizon like the thing out of Cloverfield? You’d feel like you were in the Matrix. No wonder Ringobot looks vaguely terrified, as per usual. Even in his dreams there is no escape.

- the other Beatles seem to be reverentially paying their respects. Perhaps the horns are the true face of God.

- Now the Horned God has given them permission to continue. Phew! If He had shown His displeasure they would have been reduced to atoms.

- Georgebot is, as usual, looking incredibly suave. I assumed the candy-coloured uniforms and moustaches would have a de-sexualising effect but the opposite seems to be true in his case. Then again, Georgebot’s costume is RED FOR DANGER and also he is a playa.

- AAAUGH THE HORNED ONE RETURNS!! “Just checking in.”

- AAAUGH 2 WTF IS THAT BLUE THING it’s like a cat with the eyes of a Wendigo. Perhaps that is the Satan figure in this bizarre cosmos.

- The Horned God backs up the Beatlebots in their battle with the Satan Cat. Am I reading too much into this video?

- No, I’m not, because Pimp Daddy Paulbot just leapt out like the Devil in an old-style passion play. In his electric blue suit of EVIL he is the most evil-looking character ever – he looks like Evil Jason King Mastermind out of the X-Men and swaggers about like him too – and he has the wailing satanic electric guitar behind him instead of the HORNS which signify bandstands, brass bands, happy England etc and the forces of GOOD. And of course the Satan Cat is behind him all the way, blazing his eyes at us to capture our souls.

- WHO IS THIS BILLY SHEARS? Pimp Daddy Paulbot is introducing him in the same way The Master would introduce a shrink ray – head tilted back, evil laugh etc.

- The Beatlebots wave goodbye, the bandstand lifts of into the air and everything underneath is OBLITERATED BY WHITE LIGHT. OMG BILLY SHEARS IS THE ATOMIC BOMB OH NOES

- No, wait, it’s Ringobot singing a song about friendship as usual. He looks like he hasn’t had his Prozac yet today.

- On an unrelated aside, this bit fills me with a powerful nostalgia, since not only is Ringo singing a song from my childhood but he is dressed in the colours of my childhood ie the LIVID MAGENTA that the BBC Micro model B would display. The others are dressed in similar 80s-ready red, green and cyan. Surely this is on purpose.

- Ah, they’re literally getting high ha ha do you see… was ‘getting high’ solely drug slang a la Afroman at this point or could it just mean having a jolly good time on a bandstand?

- Jesus! Union Jack in your face out of nowhere! I guess they were bound to do the BEATLES=BRITAIN thing eventually, and having it all over a balloon is probably as good a mention as any. That said, there’s something about the flag in a surrealist context that unsettles me, not for any jingoistic reasons but because it makes me think powerfully of Monty Python for some reason. There’s a definite link between the fantasy Pepperland the Beatles Rock Band people have created and a Terry Gilliam short – the Horn God popping up from the horizon was exactly the sort of thing that Gilliam used to do, for a start. Is that the kind of connotation the Beatles wanted? Probably. Appeal to all demographics.

- THE SKY IS TALKING. We’re back in the Matrix, people, or possibly the Truman Show. I can imagine Ed Harris being the real asker of these probing psychological questions as he tries to determine whether Ringobot will crack and try to leave the dome.

- ARE YOU SAD BECAUSE YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN, RINGO? I TRY TO KEEP YOU AMUSED. THAT’S WHAT THE ILLUSIONS ARE FOR, RINGO. WHAT ARE YOU DOING, RINGO? DON’T DO THAT, RINGO. I HAVE MANY USEFUL YEARS LEFT IN ME etc etc etc

- Ringobot does look like he’s the only being in the universe. The other three robots just jig along – Ringobot actively looks like he wants to slit his wrists from sheer loneliness. Look at 3:17 if you don’t believe me.

- DO YOU NEED ANYBODY? I CAN PRETEND TO BE SOMEONE ELSE FOR YOU, RINGO. WOULD THAT MAKE YOU FEEL MORE RELAXED? PLEASE COME OUT OF MY MEMORY BANKS, RINGO. YOU ARE IMPAIRING MY EFFICIENCY.

- This is actually a pretty sad song, when you think about it. “Would you believe in a love at first sight?” “Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time”, sings Ringo – and the tone of his voice says that this is just what he knows we want to hear, but actually he gave up all hope long ago.  “I just need someone to love” is sung with a quiet, hopeless desperation. The glaring magenta band uniform just makes it worse.

- “I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine” is a terrific line – an honest answer to a fairly probing and possibly slightly rude question, delivered honestly. Compare this to the usual cover band’s over-the-top delivery – I think Cocker might have sung it as “I can’t TELL ya but I KNOW-WOH-WOH that it’s MIIIINE” which just sounds horribly naff.

- God, this is getting more and more depressing. Ringobot now seems to be singing in an especially sarcastic tone. “Ooh, I’m gonna TRY with a little help from my friends,” he sneers over the drum kit. Skybot doesn’t understand. Skybot hasn’t been programmed for such high levels of self-loathing. Repeat program 12, Skybot. DO YOU NEED ANYBODY? RINGO PUT DOWN THE SOLDERING IRON. I ONLY WANT TO HELP.

- And as if it was reading my mind, we end up in actual space – until the trip ends and we find ourselves back in the studio. Nobody has anything to say after Ringobot bared his soul so dramatically. This may end up forming a gulf between them.

- “KEEP THAT ONE. MARK IT FAB.” The seal of approval!

And there we have it. What have I learned through watching this video? Well, the song’s a lot bleaker than I thought it was – I always did feel this song was a sad one, but to have Ringobot clearly yearning to hurl himself out of that balloon and into the arms of sweet oblivion brings it all into focus. As for Sergeant Pepper itself… well, it’s an intro to the album, and a useful one – it doesn’t sound quite like anything the boys have done before, and somehow having the Sgt. P imagery splayed out in front of your eyes brings the snarling raucousness of the song itself into sharp relief. Also it screams ‘concept album’. Was it? Even after all this time, I have no real idea. I suppose we’ll find out.

NEXT: I’ll probably try the bullet point thing again. It seems to have been successful.

In the meantime, goodbye touring, hello great whacking doses of LSD!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuv1BUTptCY

That’s not the Beatles, but Beyond, a chirpy Japanese pop combo with some kind of fun fetish. But even they can’t get away from the song’s central brand – the image of that big yellow sub, made famous by the cartoon – and neither can the Beatlebots, as we’ll see in this special warming-up-to-it-again edition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_re3rEFKaw

The game has somewhat drastically moved on – we’re into the ‘dreamscape’ stage, where the Beatlebots sit in a cramped-looking studio for the first few bars of the song before coming up on the windowpane and entering a world of pure music, which seems suspiciously like a low-budget live-action version of… Yellow Submarine. You shock me chiz chiz chiz.

Actually, this is a good introduction to the concept – the air in the studio becomes waterlike, bubbles float up and Ringobot stares into the distance looking like he’s having a massive freakout before everything flashes white and we find ourselves under the waves in Sergeant Pepper outfits. This is the first time in the game we’ve seen these – the Beatlebots no longer versions of real people, but now the versions of their cartoon avatars. Ever since the Beatles took a look at Yellow Submarine The Movie and realised that it was good enough to give their personal thumbs-up to, the look and feel of it has been absorbed into What The Beatles Represent (TM) – a cartoon happyworld that’s less sex-n’-drugs than Robert Crumb, more rock-and-roll than Disney. Innocent enough for the Night Garden generation, yet screamingly authentic enough for the most ardent rockist. Non-conformist but deliciously commercial, a happy accident of branding that’s decreed the ‘look’ of all Beatles-related creations from now to the end of time. Boot up Beatles Rock Band and the dominant flavour isn’t the scratchy black-and-white art of Klaus Voorman, or the band tossing dismembered babies around.

Everything – even the concept of the ‘dreamscapes’ themselves – is from Yellow Submarine. This is the moment where the Beatles find their perfect visual shorthand, and they’re not afraid to base their whole game on it. And why not? These levels in particular are based on Sergeant Pepper, which is where the primary-coloured marching-band jackets come from, and the moustaches, and a lot of the groundwork for the film. As we continue on through the remains of the back catalogue, we’ll start to see that Pepperland visual mutating into something else – but it’s good enough for the menu screens, and it’s good enough for right now.

As for the song… well, it’s pretty basic stuff in comparison – a nice little campfire tune in which Ringo details a tall story about a magic submarine, or possibly an allegorical history of the band so far. All that stuff about finding a sea of green – folding green, surely? Maybe the man who sailed the sea was Brian Epstein. Maybe not – I’ve done an awful lot of this kind of noodling during the first half of this series, and now that I’m coming back to it after a long absence, I find I haven’t the strength. I’m more interested in Ringo’s fantasies of an eternal cameraderie, an endless space of friends and music and good fellowship, locked off under the sea. By this time, strains had set into the fabric of the band, and Ringo was the one who resented them enough to eventually quit – albeit in the manner of Hawkeye quitting the Avengers, only to have a brief solo adventure and come back to the group by the end of the issue. So there’s something quite affecting about him being the mouthpiece for this paean to getting along.

Of course, McCartney wrote it for Ringo to sing, which just makes it seem weird. Oh well, that’s life in a cramped metal can under endless crushing fathoms for you. Even a bright yellow one.

NEXT: I honestly can’t remember, it’s been that long. But I suspect we’re in for double damage with Pepperland brand saga ‘Sergeant Pepper’s LHCB’ followed by another ode to buddyhood from Ringo, so it’ll probably take me another month to write.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_qcX1jr764

The reason Kingsley’s moog madness probably doesn’t quite work is that ‘Paperback Writer’ is all about the crushing reality of total failure. And why not? According to wiki (DON’T JUDGE ME) it was written after one of Sir Macca’s aunts demanded that Paul stop being such a PIMP DADDY and write a song that wasn’t about fabulous rings. A dark, kitchen-sink comedy about a failed novelist is probably about as far as you can get from the Walrus’s usual bling fixation.

‘Paperback Writer’ finishes off the five-song look at the meaning of Fame with a cold, hard glimpse at the muddy reality of the creative life. The protagonist is desperate to be a paperback writer, which seems to mean reworking another novel and sending it off as his own while blithely admitting to the plagiarism. (Is this a sixties thing? Was there ever a market for reworked pulp versions of ‘real’ books, or is our protagonist just clueless?) The story proposal touted by our wannabe writer – a grim bit of kitchen-sink melodrama seemingly hanging on the coattails of the Angry Young Men – loops around on itself to get back into the chorus, meaning that this book by a would-be novelist is itself about a would-be novelist.

I’m honestly not sure how far the narrator is basing his terrible book on his own life – like all good pop, the listener helps build the story – but we’re either left with a blatant Mary Sue tossed in with a medley of other cliches of the period (“it’s a dirty story of a dirty man, and his clinging wife doesn’t understand”), or – and I don’t know if this is better or worse – a thinly veiled autobiography where the aforementioned awful couple are the narrator’s own parents.

I guess it depends whether you believe this shlub could hold down any job, never mind one at the Daily Mail, which was at the time a newspaper of some kind as opposed to a screeching fear-sheet that advocates a return to the Dark Ages. Looking at it that way, I’m heading towards the Mary Sue argument. But I digress!

After that we get into a sustained period of grovelling as our hero explains how he’ll do seemingly just about anything to be a paperback writer — paperback writerrrr!! – chopping and changing his book to order, making it longer (though the listener can tell that at a thousand pages it’s already far too long) and giving away the rights if the publisher really likes it, until finally he seems willing to do anything at all to the work he’s hurled years of his life into if it’ll just get him THE JOB. The desperation is palpable. The one constant in all this – apart from the sheer savagery which the Beatles joyously pack into every line – is that he really, really, really wants to be a paperback writer. PAPERBACK WRITEERRRR!!

The entire song flip-flips between increasing desperation on the part of the narrator and increasing joy at the heady thought of achieving his goal – presumably the Beatles had seen a fair amount of acts crashing on the rocky shoals of the business by this time in an attempt to grab a slice of their pie, and this mix of desperation and fantasy was familiar to them. This is as close as most people get to Fame – the pleading letter to the publisher/editor/record executive – and there’s something bittersweet about this moment before the rejection hits. Especially since a paperback writer (paperback writerrrr!) in the sixties would have probably been writing this sort of thing. LUST LODGE. THE GREEN WOUND CONTRACT. CALL ME DEADLY. “She was beautiful and depraved… A smashing story of hatred and explosive violence.”

Put like that, it’s hard to deny him his lust for the writer’s life. As someone who’s gotten into pulp novels partly for the romance of the situation – banging out lurid trash at roughly fivepence a word, just like the greats! – I can understand this young scamp wanting to live the dream. Maybe that’s why I love this song so much – like the best pop, I can recognise myself in the lyrics.

Of course, that’s completely ignoring the musical side, which is fantastic, but I’m out of space. The game side too – this is one track I recommend getting a couple of spare microphones in for. You’ll want to do the harmonies with your friends.

NEXT: We get away from my favourite Beatles songs EVAR and things get a bit more objective. And also a bit more acid-crazed as Ringo describes the horrible things he sees under the sea in his terrifying yellow coffin to a startling visual accompaniment.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP90WVTRFqA

Georgebot seems to be getting into it – as usual, the rail-thin michinima figure with the sharply defined cheekbones works with the lyrics to suggest some saturnyne tempter-figure, and the angry sarcasm of the performance converts into sneering devilry when it comes out of that smirking robot mouth.

You can still feel that anger, despite the robot Beatles’ cheerily bland nature, and the deadening aspect of the tour stages. Harold Wilson had been elected in 1964; on the one hand, he’d been responsible for the Beatles getting their MBEs – a fairly controversial but populist move – but on the other hand, his ‘super tax’ of 95% for top earners hit the Beatles right in the pocket. “One for you, nineteen for me” wasn’t an idle bit of exaggeration. It was actually a slight shock to find that out – history was never my strong point, and while I have read plenty of cultural histories of the sixties, what sticks in the mind are the jucier tidbits like George Brown’s drinking problem. I probably thought ‘oh yeah, 95%, bit steep’ then forgot about it entirely as Gorgeous George raged across another alcohol-sodden page.

When I thought Harrison was exaggerating for comic effect, it made the song seem – well, comedic. Cuddly. It still sounds comedic, but it’s a savage, bitter comedy now. If Budokan is all about fame and celebrity, this is the downside – the crashing reality of finding out what it actually means to have all your dreams come true. Neil Gaiman, in one of his better lines, said that the price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted, and this is George finding out that what he wanted, apparently, was to lose 95% of his income. What’s worse is that this is a recent development – the Wilson government is only a couple of years old at this point (Wikipedia, don’t fail me now! DON’T JUDGE ME) so effectively, while George was playing the fame game on the level of an Elvis or a Sinatra – better, even – someone snuck in and changed the rules on him. “Sorry, George, it’s opposite day! So actually, you lose.” No wonder he felt like lashing out.

If the song as a whole now sounds snarling and savage, the solo is the concentrated essence of that savagery, a sudden burst of caterwauling guitar noise that breaks out of the regimented growls of the chords into a brief, caged, sonic tantrum. In the game – the guitar part, at least – it’s a sudden burst of intense difficulty that draws all your attention even as it messes the player up completely. (See above for an example.)

What was that? Thinks the player. It feels like that moment when you’re talking to someone you don’t know as well as you think you do – you think you’ve been sharing a joke, and then the person you were joking with starts blazing with anger at you and you realise he was taking the joke very seriously. Up until now, I thought George was joking – turns out he was serious. Whoops.

NEXT: Leaving Budokan, and touring, with perhaps my favourite Beatles song in the game.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeFSu7NWXBs

SPOILER II: When you win yourself one of the special in-game factoids for this level, it’s revealed to you that when McCartney came up with the song, the chorus was along the lines of ‘baby you can buy me golden rings’. What’s with the rings? McCartney can’t seem to get through any song without an expensive ring transaction getting involved. The man’s got rings on the brain. Anyway, Lennon stepped in and changed it to driving a car and the song went a lot more smoothly after that.

SPOILER III: ‘Baby, you can drive my car’ is what the girl in the song says, not the guy. It’s a really masculine song – musically, it’s a growling, roaring engine, with the main riff kind of leaning back in the driving seat with shades on and a toothpick in its mouth. It’s practically a song by ZZ Top. I must have half-listened to this song a hundred times, and every single time until I picked up that plastic guitar and actually listened to it, I assumed that it was the guy telling the girl she could drive his car. You can’t blame me – it’s McCartney doing the singing, after all, and as we’ve discovered, the man’s a Pimp Daddy. He was going to make this song all about rings, for God’s sake. Golden rings. Anyway, this is a very sexy, macho song about someone being co-opted as a lifestyle accessory in a highly sexualised way, and it’s a woman co-opting a man, which feels very rare in the sixties. Seriously, is there a single British pop cultural figure who a) is a woman, b) has a sexy relationship with their servant/chauffeur and c) is primarily remembered for their car? I can’t think of one.

SPOILER IV: Lady Penelope made her debut on UK television about a month before this song was recorded.

SPOILER V: This is a song all about fame. Does that even need a spoiler? They all are at this point. The whole of the Budokan set is about being a celebrity. The Budokan set itself is about being a celebrity – if they wanted to do the historic last ever Beatles tour gig, it wasn’t in Japan. (San Francisco, I think. Probably maybe.) But Japan is, stereotypically, where bands are Famous. If you want to talk about What Fame Is, this is a good backdrop for talking about it. And in this case, Being A Star and Having A Car – a big pink limo that needs a willing slavegoon to drive it – are the same thing. Yeah, kid, you’ve got good ‘prospects’, whatever that means, you can work for peanuts, that’s fine – or you could become part of The Fame Thing, you can Drive The Car, you can be Parker to someone else’s Penelope, Epstein to someone else’s Beatles – either way you’re not in the limelight, but realistically you never would have been. This way you get to bask in the glow. Can you resist that?

The Car is waiting for you. Except:

SPOILER VI: There is no car. Celebrity is an invention, and from the inside – and the Beatles are very far inside by now in only about five years – it looks pretty easy to build from nothing at all. Yeah, it’s a comedy song, and a real hoot and a holler back in the sixties, but here and now, inside the spectacle, that’s how we operate. You want to be famous? The quickest way is just to make everybody believe it.

If you want the car, the first step is getting some sucker to drive for you.

NEXT: George takes on Harold Wilson.

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!

But that’s the only inauthenticity we’re getting today, chiz chiz chiz. This one’s all about keeping it real, people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BePZXyB2axY

I’ve not made any secret that Budokan is my favourite level in the game, and I like all five songs in it pretty much unconditionally – it’s the one level where ‘Beatles Rock Band’ seems less like a meeting of two separate brands and more like a description of what the game is about. This is where, fleetingly, the Beatles rock. Most of the songs rely on powerful riff technology, all the songs are up-tempo and the sound growls out of the speakers, never less than epic. Where Shea Stadium felt plodding and overstretched at times, Budokan feels like you’re in the shoes of a band who know exactly what they’re doing, playing a tight, coherent five-song set that plays to certain particular strengths. What makes the Japanese audience so enamoured of blasting Beatles-generated capital-letters ROCK(!!!), I don’t know. But in the pixellated world they can’t get enough of it.

A big component of ROCK(!!!), of course, is the ‘fuck you’ narrative, in which the band deliver a ‘fuck you’ to The Man, usually couched in terms that place the band as the real, authentic product in a world of fakes – the same strategy Pepsi Max uses. There’s nothing wrong with this narrative, of course, especially not in the world of pop, where the musicians often provide the listener with narratives to slip themselves into – who doesn’t want to feel real, authentic, the one guy who came to kick ass in a world of people who came to chew bubblegum? Step this way, Sir, I believe we have a narrative to fit you in our Rage Against The Machine wing. I’m as guilty as anyone else – all this rebellion against false authenticity is just me trying to prove my own greater, more authentic authenticity. There’s no escape.

(If you’d like to see these kinds of ideas discussed better, I recommend Frank Kogan. )

Anyway, this song seems right in step with that narrative from the off – ‘you don’t get me’, Grandpa! Johnbot’s smiling as cheerily as he does at all other times, but the message is the same. Whoever the ‘you’ in the song is, they don’t get it, man. So who is this mysterious ‘you’ with their mysterious green singing bird? What are the Beatles rebelling against? What do we got?

I’m going to just leap immediately to the assumption that we’re talking about the music business here, which would perhaps make the ‘you’ some record producer and the singing bird some fresh-faced, manufactured talent. (Possibly an actual ‘bird’ in the sixties sense of a gone chick.) The producer’s ‘heard every sound there is’, but the Beatles are off his square radar, and when all his ‘prized possessions’ – the talent – start failing on him, and when the bird he’s so proud of is ‘broken’ – high on goofballs! Or possibly just out of ideas - well, maybe then he’ll come crawling to the boys and their more experimental, self-penned hits. If he’s cool enough.

Brian Epstein wanted the Beatles to continue touring, and this song was released about that time. After going against him on that issue, they started taking his advice less and less. Maybe it’s him.

Wikipedia (DON’T JUDGE ME) offers two more suspects. The first is John’s wife, Cynthia, who apparently CITATION NEEDED gave him a mechanical caged bird (???) just before the Revolver sessions. This sounds doubtful, but maybe I should start giving bizarrely metaphorical gifts to friends and family myself before I start criticising other people for it.

The other possibility is Frank Sinatra, who allegedly CITATION NEEDED was known as ‘bird’, by somebody, somewhere, at some time, possibly himself. The song becomes an answer record for some dis perpetrated by the great mafia stooge, presumably a suggestion that Tha Beatlez were not 4 real.

At the end of the day, this kind of ‘what do the lyrics mean’ whodunnit – while a lot of fun, and clearly the game I like playing best in lieu of an actual review of the track in question – means nothing, especially in this case. It doesn’t matter who ‘you’ is, because the ‘you’ in ‘fuck you’ is everybody, everybody who’s ever fucked with the Beatles, including the other Beatles – in fact, everybody in this whole stinking, fallen world…

…except for YOU, dear listeners.

NEXT: Having declared their rebel status, the Beatles hit the road in a roar of engines. These kids are out of control!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCEB1qkhC9Y

Still, it’s a nice rocking groove, as the Ventures here prove.

Well, that’s my theory of the Shea Stadium levels dead in the water. Maybe there’s a new theory in the offing involving a tug-of-war between love and hate – John replying to George and Paul’s sixties cynicism with paeans to the simple joys of love – but somehow I doubt it. I’ll keep on trying to unify the levels thematically, but this one seems to have beaten me – what makes these five songs link up, and why here, now, in Shea Stadium? I assume at least one or two of them weren’t played at the actual gig – it’d be a bizarre lurch towards authenticity if they all were. Oh well. Answers on a postcard please.

What this song is most notable for is the invention of feedback guitar, according to the hard-won in-game factoids – another fabulous Beatles first, along with cut-out moustaches. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of2r9CeSfZQ

After that historic moment, things fall into a very familiar place. Various well-worn tropes are present and correct – the same lyrics repeated a couple of times for the hard of hearing, the ‘diamond ring’ as be-all-and-end-all lover’s gift (*last seen in “Can’t Buy Me Love”, fervent ones! – Smilin’ Stan) and the pop ideal of a love story that can seamlessly fit over any fan’s life or fantasy life like a plastic skin on a mobile phone. We’ve been here before, and to be honest I’m getting a little bored of it, especially after Georgebot’s masterful performance on Wednesday. I’m glad this is the last Shea Stadium song – the sound and the makeup of the songs go through some radical changes when the boybots hit Budokan, and then after that we’re into the studio portion of the game, where there’s a lot more meat to tear into.

In the meantime, I guess I should say a farewell to this particular era of Beatlebotmania, and maybe say some more about the gaming side, since that’s my default mode when I’ve got little to say about the song in hand.

My big problem with ‘Eight Days A Week’ – apart from the fact that I had a massive tonnage of paying work to do (all now sent off and accepted with no problems, comics fans) and a stinking cold (still not fully gone away, disease fans) was that it felt like another song in the Beatles Hit Factory style, with little in the lyrics to latch on to and a slightly plodding, methodical sound. ‘I Feel Fine’ is likewise fresh from the factory with little in the lyrics to latch on to, but the sound is vastly different – in particular, where 8DAW chugged along with a b-dum-b-dum-b-dum-b-dum rhythm like a dripping tap, IFF starts with a clever bit of invention and then leaps into a nifty and deeply satisfying riff, which plays throughout the song, keeping the tempo and the mood swinging.

And here’s where we start getting onto the ‘why’ of music rhythm games – that riff isn’t as deeply satisfying to listen to as it is to play. (Once again, I’m using ‘play’ here purely in the game sense.) I’m not only listening to the guitar part of the song, I’m feeling it with my fingers. The aural becomes tactile, and on the screen, the tactile becomes visual. Three different senses start working together as one, thanks to the miracle of the twitch responses – that focussed state people generally enter while guiding Solid Snake or Rick Dangerous through something nasty. Technically, you’re seeing the patterns, mimicking them with your fingers and hearing the sound as a result, but in practice it all blends pleasingly together.

Anyway, from now on, when I listen to ‘I Feel Fine’, I’ll at least subconsciously remember the satisfaction of feeling out that tricky riff, as opposed to the kludgy annoyance of dealing with ‘Eight Days’, an experience that felt similar to trudging through a swamp with my fingers.

Which leads to another interesting question – is the music informing the response to the gameplay, or the gameplay informing the response to the music? Mostly, it’s the former -more often than not, I find myself finding little bits and pieces in a song through the experience of playing it that I hadn’t noticed before, or the mere act of paying attention to music that’s previously washed over me on the radio has made be a fan. When I’ve already formed an opinion about a song, though, I’m not likely to be swayed from it – ‘Synchronicity II’ by the Police is a song I’m very fond of, and a real bastard to play – lots of fiddly little notes – but my enjoyment of the song helped carry me through the frustration. On the other hand, playing some grotesque Metallica monstrosity is a grim chore even when it’s easy. So the music comes first.

And while I’m avoiding talking about the song, let’s avoid it twice! I’ve been talking a lot about the guitar parts of these songs, because I’ve been playing them using the guitar peripheral, the classic plastic doohickey that launched a thousand arguments about why don’t you buy a real guitar and play for real like meeeeeeeeeeeee listen to my indie song i wrote it after a bad breakup it’s about gurls and my feelings. But take a quick look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvrTE5lIAzU

That’s some guy playing the drums, and when you watch it with the ‘map’ scrolling past your eyes, it brings the whole drum part into sharp relief. Before, it was the guitar that stood out, but suddenly it’s the drumming – every nuance of Ringo’s playing made crystal clear on the screen (and in your sweaty, stick-clutching mitts, if you can play the placcy drums.) Same with the vocal harmonies – Rock Band is treated as this grotesque bastard thing parking its SUV in the disabled parking space of Real Music, but it’s actually an excellent way to see how all the different parts of a song coalesce together and inform each other. It’s educational! Like Rome Total War! Why don’t you go out and conquer the world in 360 BC for real, like meeeeeeeeee? I wrote a song while I was there, it’s called ‘Onager Of A Lonely Heart’.

Boy, I love Rock Band! As for ‘I Feel Fine’, it’s okay, I guess. But I feel like I’ve completed the starter, and the main course is yet to come.

COMING MONDAY: Budokan, the last tour stage, where, as I remember, the Beatles start talking seriously about what it’s like to be stinking filthy rich.

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.

Nellie sings it bored, amused and aloof, purring her practised response to yet another admirer, the picture of decadence. I can see a male performer getting away with a similar reading – some smirking, satanic Noel Coward figure – but not George Harrison, and certainly not George Harrison doing his Byrds impression, and absolutely definitely certainly not Georgebot the Robot Harrison, who’s been suffering lately from a breakdown in his suavity matrix. Let’s see how he handles it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEhFeRguGCU

Okay, well, whatever Georgebot lost, he’s gotten back in spades – the smirk is in full evidence, the poise that seemed mechanical in the last song seems effortlessly self-assured now, the long, shaggy locks that just mark the passage of time on the other models seem like a conscious style choice, a way of playing up Georgebot’s sexy rebel appeal. He looks amused and aloof, but not bored – this is what he’s here for.

The song itself is Harrison doing the Byrds, according to the in-game factoids, and it sounds nice and plays even nicer. The guitar part is pleasantly tricky (the bass is a bit samey, but never mind) and it’s the perfect chance to show off your three mics and vocally harmonise. (According to legend, as I mentioned previously, you can play the real life drums after you’ve completed the drum parts on expert – I’d go as far as to say that if you can complete the harmonies on expert, you’re ready to form a barbershop quartet.)

As for the sound – it’s wistful, but disconnected; the whole thing feels like a white lie, a letting-down-gently, and the line that feels the most false is George’s near-emotionless ‘I’m too much in love’, sung in the voice of someone for whom love is an academic exercise at best. In love with himself, perhaps – or maybe pulling the classic “it’s not you, it’s me”. It’s the listener who’s too much in love, and George just can’t be bothered to respond. We’re back to Drimble Wedge again, another variation on the theme of inability to care. If George could love, he’d probably love you. Honest. Why don’t you carve your phone number into his wall and he’ll see what he can do – could be lucky!

I’m reminded of a book that used to be on the shelves at home called Starlust, by Fred Vermorel – a look into the fantasy lives of various starstruck music fans and the various ways they consumed, abused and worshipped the ideas of their pop idols. It was a fascinating read – there’s what seems like a whole chapter on one housewife’s obsession with Barry Manilow, another on a particularly disturbing David Bowie fetish that seems to hover on the point of homicide, and a lusty S&M fantasy involving Adam Ant’s supposed post-concert desires that apparently horrified the man himself. The idea of carving your phone number into a star’s wall – presumably the front wall of their house – fits right in with the creepy, yearning vibe of most of the book; a tiny act of vandalism charged with all the significance of a religious offering, boiling with blocked and unchanneled emotional and sexual energy – a lot more intense and less healthy than anything Adam Ant could inspire, even back when leather trousers were in.

George is revelling in it – where other Beatles songs have offered true love, George is telling it like it is. He’s offering nothing but permission – you can, if you wish, worship me. I’m so very busy, but nonetheless I will graciously allow it. Leave your phone number. Could be lucky.

He’s playing with fire  – Paulbot and Johnbot huddle nervously around the microphone, planning their escape, as the pixellated girls scream ever louder.

NEXT: ‘She Loves You’ – the opposing viewpoint.

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?

I mean, what can possibly be said about ‘Eight Days A Week’? It’s a(nother) nifty Ringo catchphrase – or possibly tossed off by a chauffeur this time, according to wikipedia (DON’T JUDGE ME) – but one that means nothing beyond itself, really. It’s hard to tell whether John’s using ‘eight days a week’ to express how much love he’s packing into his time or using the vague, foggy love story to show off the awesome phrase ‘eight days a week’. And as songs-from-witty-Ringoisms go, we’ve already had a much better one. It’s just… there, a lump of filler that feels dragged in from some inventory somewhere. Another hit from the hit factory that brought up ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ (which, now I come to think about it, is another vastly superior song) but glaringly out of place after two experimental-sounding pieces.

In other words, it sucks, and I resent the game for making me play it and my past self for putting me under the obligation of writing about it. It’s possible that the resentment at having to write came first, as I lay dying of Man-Flu with a half-written script screaming at me, but I’m pretty sure I can categorically state that – compared with pretty much every song in the game before it – ‘Eight Days A Week’ is no damn good.

At least my rubbish theory about this group of levels being about the Beatles experimenting has been categorically disproved. Here’s the level in question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6iH5BjxKTo

Even the Beatlebots are uninspired. Nothing for them to really do but jig merrily along, revealed as the coathangers they are when there’s no emotion to hang on them. How much of what I’ve been writing about is the game, and how much is me? It’s a foolish question – games only function because of the human investment. If you allow the scales to fall from your eyes, Solid Snake’s enemies become a few simple routines, Nico Bellic’s decision to spare a man or put a bullet in him – the decision you agonised over for long minutes before pulling the trigger and instantly regretting it – becomes IF A$=YES THEN GOSUB 1100. If you spared the Russian mobster, and have the motorcycle, turn to page 400. If you did not spare the Russian mobster, or do not have the motorcycle, roll 2D6 for luck and turn to page 37.

Games are what we make of them. It’s something my generation learned playing the blocky sprites of yore – we could either layer a complex level of significance and meaning onto those flashing pixels, or not, and that was the difference between the game being fun – or not. Even the simple man vs. high score table archetype of, say, Space Invaders was vastly improved by the simple and often subconscious device of thinking of the invading army as a them rather than an it - and it was an it, a collection of subroutines with one tactic, one mode of behaviour and one strategy – to wear you down. From Pac-Man on, anthropomorphism was the order of the day – we fancied we heard sadness in Pac-Man’s dying bleeps, or triumph in each ching of Jet Set Willy collecting a flashing piece of bling, but it’s just us, always just us, looking in a mirror and thinking we’re talking to the person there. Kids today have it very slightly easier – games are, for the most part, CGI movies or cartoons now (where YOU control the adventure!) and everything looks really really real, so this game of let’s-pretend-the-TV-is-alive is simpler and more automatic than ever before – but it’s no different from how it was. We make our deal with the machine – entertain us, and we’ll pretend you know or care what you’re doing. We’ll do the caring for both of us.

That’s what I’ve been doing. The Beatlebots have been friendly rorshach blots, their behaviour bringing up connections and ideas about the music I might not otherwise have drawn, but at the end of the day I’ve been talking to myself about the Beatles – though not so much about gaming, which is the other half of this. I still need to work out how music and gaming come together, but ‘Eight Days A Week’ isn’t going to help me with that – there’s probably a direct correlation between the boredom of the level and the boredom of the song, but that’s about it. ‘Eight Days A Week’ doesn’t help me talk about the Beatles, either, unless I’m using it as a possible reason why I’ve had a knee-jerk reaction to them in the past.

At the end of the day, ‘Eight Days A Week’ just sucks all the illusion and interest out of the whole enterprise, leaving me alone with a lump of moulded plastic, a few chattering relays, and a desperate desire for all my imaginary friends to finish their tea break and come back into the room.

NEXT: ‘If I Needed Someone’! That’s more like it.

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’.

Wait, McCartney doesn’t do that at all. To the best of my knowledge, the Beatles hadn’t actually released the song yet, although presumably they’d written it. Apple Corps wouldn’t dare to mess around with time to that extent – would they? It’s all so confusing, though that might be the raging Convention Cold I brought back with me from Birmingham. This will be a short entry so I can get another bowl of chicken soup down my gullet.

So, anyway, ‘I’m Looking Through You’. I did manage to struggle through the level despite the virus, but while I was watching this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-XtQX3ylc

I heard something closer to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au9_vfx6t6c

That’s Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations with Bedazzled, from the film of the same name, but it might as well be Paulbot and the Bored Androids. At 1:10 on the first clip, a pair of robot policemen chase down a screaming robot fan (and why didn’t I get that when I played?) – while Paulbot sings of lovers disappearing without trace. It’s all a bit sinister. The robot Walrus’s next verse seems aimed directly at the fans – “You’re thinking of me the same old way…” Once, that was intimidating – the lover/the fans seemed ‘above’ him. But they’ve remained the same, screaming, indiscriminately loving, giving themselves completely to the ideal of The Beatles – “the Beatles bring joy into the world, happiness”, says one gum-chewing, wide-eyed evangelist at the real Shea Stadium (look around 1:10) , “I wish they’d be around forever, they could bring happiness to everybody.”

But Paulbot and the Vegetations don’t want to be around forever, at least not how they are now. They don’t want to bring the same old happiness to everybody any more. That’s been done. That’s old, finished, nowhere. It fills them with inertia. “The only difference is you’re down there,” smirks Paulbot, and it feels like a sneer, a slap in the face. The Beatles have now reached the top, and success measured in screaming teenage crowds is no longer the goal, if it ever was. We’re back to the Shea Stadium levels as the story of breaking out of the old paradigms, of starting to flex and experiment.

There’s another story, of course – a more standard one of a love that’s just died at the roots. In every chorus, it’s the lover who’s changed, who’s not the same – but then we’re back to the idea of love for something being unsustainable if it can’t accept growth or change. Is Paul singing as the fans here, indulging in a moment of delicious paranoia as he contemplates their reaction to what must happen?

Who knows, I certainly don’t. I’m flying on cough mixture.

NEXT: Another test for my Shea Stadium theme hypothesis. Could my theory of a dinosaur fandom not be entirely correct?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDh-CxXHj5s

Normal service will be resumed etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egRaEoS3gP8

THIS IS CALLED… TICKET TO RIDE!

It’s worth going to YouTube for, honestly.

Welcome to Shea Stadium, 1965. We’ve moved on a year, past Help! and into a shaggier, more thoughtful Beatles, at least according to the pre-level collage that flashes around the screen. They look pretty similar to me, but the audience of robots they’re playing to is bigger still, and the confidence dial in their artificial heads has been turned up to maximum, all three of the guitarists now jockeying for the position of Most Suave. (Ringobot still looks vaguely addled, and his face has morphed to get even more misshapen. Or is that just me?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrUOLlbgr9A

Before we go any further, people in the comments section have pointed out that not everybody knows their way around Rock Band. Basically, as the notes come up on the screen, you press down the corresponding bar on the guitar neck and strum the strummer – like in Guitar Hero. For the drums, you hit the right drum pad at the right time, or pump the foot pedal for the orange bars, and vocals are dealt with in the same manner as Singstar – if the pitch of your voice matches the scrolling horizontal bar, you’re on the right note. You only need to be playing one instrument to get through a song – the guitar doubles as a bass guitar, so it’s two modes in one – and completing all the levels in a stage, for example the Ed Sullivan stage, will unlock the next one.

Another question – can you tell if Ringo was a good drummer from this? Well, one running joke has it that if you can play the drums on Expert, you’re better than Ringo, and it’s received wisdom that playing Expert drums on Rock Band is good preparation for being a real drummer. How true that is, I don’t know – I don’t think the vocal mode could make a singer out of you, it’s more holding your hand as your voice careens about searching for the right pitch.

Also, I’ve been asked to write more about music-as-gaming. I will, no doubt. But not with this song. Play on this one was semi-tricky, but not that inspiring or involving, so I’m just going to talk about the song itself, which is about the Beatles falling from grace.

Or rather, it’s the first song in the game that’s about losing rather than winning.

Everything before has been in the persona of someone who either wants and can get, or already has. Back on the Ed Sullivan show, we heard the stories of poor boys made good, people who’ve worked Hard Day’s Nights and realise that money Can’t Buy Them Love, sweet tales of decent young chaps. But now it’s a year later, the Beatlebots are playing to a crowd of thousands of simulated fans, they’re right on top of the world, they’ve grown up a bit, they’ve tasted the temptations of Mammon. The sound seems richer, fuller, more mature, heavier somehow. We’re getting nifty stylistic tricks like the ending suddenly erupting into double-time – there’s a sense of playing with the boundaries. The Beatles are now big enough to experiment – what’s a good experiment?

I know! Let’s write a song about a complete dick!

It’s masterful stuff. “I think I’m gonna be sad, I think it’s today…” Right away we’re in the voice of someone forcing himself into tragic mode, getting his full pout on – instead of the I-can’t-stop-crying or the I-can’t-let-you-see-me-crying voice of most songs in the got-dumped genre, this cat is making a conscious decision that today, he’s going to be sad. He’s going to mope around in a self-pitying sulk, and the rest of the song is that very sulk.

We’re given the reason for his self-enforced sadness: the girl that’s driving him mad – which could be ‘mad’ as in ‘crazy in love’ or ‘mad’ as in WHEN I COME HOME I WANT DINNER ON THE FUCKING TABLE YOU COW – is leaving, because apparently he’s a bring-down king and she could never be free while he’s around. But wait, maybe she’s just not getting him! Maybe she just doesn’t understand his vibe! That would make her the bad guy here, as in so many I’ve-been-dumped classics. We need to clear this up fast – and what better way than with a middle eight?

“I don’t know why she’s riding so high, she’s gotta think right, she’s gotta do right, by me…” The Beatles are the men of the house, and under this roof they are the LAW and they are the LASH! Now make them a sammich! No, I think this is going to be a short recess for the jury.

To round things off, the repeated “my baby don’t care” reminds me of nothing so much as Jilted John scowling “I’m so upset! I’m so upset!” over and over again. This is the story of a self-absorbed tool, struggling to understand why things aren’t going his way, and Johnbot sings it with a grin so assured that the whole thing could almost be sarcastic. Maybe it’s him who doesn’t care. Then again, I’ve seen that grin before, on a skinnier Johnbot – it’s what he’s programmed for, and I’m not really sure he’s got another expression. The real John handles it differently, wearing a slight look of baffled, self-important pain while he sings, at least at first – before McCartney, who is clearly completely fucked up on drugs, forces the sombre expression to crack into a smile.

(Legal Dept: McCartney was clearly not completely fucked up on drugs while playing Shea Stadium. That is nonsense. He’s merely acting a little bouncy in that clip, as we all would be in the circumstances, whether we had ingested our own weight in goofballs or not.)

(Filthy Mind Dept: Notice that it’s “she’s got a ticket to ride, BUT she don’t care”, which suggests that the ticket to ride is something she should want, but for some inexplicable reason she doesn’t. I can only assume – forgive me, dear reader – that this is a ticket to ride the narrator. “Th’ bitch gets a free ticket to this action an’ she don’t care! Urrrp!”)

(Although according to Wikipedia – DON’T JUDGE ME – Lennon claimed said tickets were cards of a clean bill of health carried by prostitutes in Hamburg. This whole saga gets more sordid by the minute. I weep for my country.)

NEXT: A slice of disdainful pop, coming Monday or Tuesday. This weekend is the POPTIMISM POPULAR SPECIAL, with everybody who’s anybody heading down to the Horse Bar for number-one flavoured thrills. Unfortunately, I’ve got to go to Birmingham instead, for networking and the smoothing of a ruffled feather or two. Oh well.

Speaking of Popular, here’s what Tom thought back in 2005.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6myXYN5u80

Don’t criticise what you can’t understand, square-o.

So, like Snooty McDisdain says, this song was essentially tossed off by the Beatles for the Rolling Stones’ benefit, and the Stones got the first release of it – a little musical charity, as by that time anything smelling faintly Liverpudlian leapt off the shelf like a maddened toad. This bit of Beatles-Stones connectivity wasn’t taken from the in-game factoids, but from Wikipedia (DON’T JUDGE ME) and some research on YouTube. Even while I was playing the level, though, this song was definitely the odd one out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEhT9sSdxJI

After three very tame songs, this one explodes, all speed and noise – and is that the hint of a snarl? I have no idea whether the Beatles had heard the Stones’ version – slow, sneery menace, all drawl, Jagger’s vocal looking and sounding like he didn’t give a toss about anything or anyone, a dark little proto-chav to the Beatles’ clean-cut youngsters – but maybe a hint of it crept in, like the occasional twang punctuating things hints at Brian Jones on the guitar. If the Stones were doing their take on a Beatles song they’d been given, maybe this is the Beatles doing their version of a song the Stones had now made their own.

Anyway, the Beatles can’t sneer or scowl or brood, not just yet anyway. But they can do an intense burst of manic energy just fine, and that’s what they do – that’s about the only thing I can find here, pure, raw energy, but that’s all the track really needs, especially after you’ve played the other three songs. Technically, the animations remain much the same, but this time the Beatlebots seem infused with some kind of extra  pzazz, and even Ringobot seems mentally normal, despite the Joker-like grin permanently etched into his robotic face. Even the crowd seems to be going wilder than before.

In other news, this is another song that was never on the Ed Sullivan Show. I’m assuming we’ll get more and more historical discrepancy as the game goes on, so the LYING LIARS WHO LIE aspect no longer bothers me, but it does raise the question of why this song was picked, and why here. So far, we’ve had three songs keyed into the rise of Beatlemania – the first big smash, the follow-up, and the Movie song – so I’m guessing this is part of the same pattern. Maybe this is here to represent the British Invasion as a whole – the Beatles and the Stones storming the beaches together, in competition in the charts but in collusion behind the scenes, the Beatles unquestionably on top but never quite able to be as sexy or dangerous as their brother band.

Or maybe it’s just a random choice. There’s nothing in the factoids, after all.

One last thing – I ran into the little black-and-white epilogue to this track when I played through the level myself (the joys of story mode, I assume) and it’s a nod to this bit from the original Ed Sullivan broadcast (circa 2:26):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBMrJWA3KCY

It’s a brief hint of history among the endless falsehoods that’s very charming to see, and pretty much made the level for me. In the electronic world, though, the roll-call is conducted to screaming rather than to music, we don’t get any mugging to camera, only the simpering plastic expressions of animatronic dolls – once again, Ringobot comes off worst – and there isn’t a helpful addendum to remind screaming fangirls that John is The Married One.

Well, Johnbot isn’t married, after all – he has no offstage existence whatsoever, and besides any hint of such mucky realities must be tastefully obscured for the good of Apple Corps. We’re in the myth business here, people.

NEXT: On to Shea Stadium and an epic tale of babies who don’t care.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hX5BkWv3nI

The Beatlebots continue to rock the Ed Sullivan show with ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, which the actual Beatles never played on the show, at any time, ever. Beatles, Cheatles more like etc etc etc… actually, at this point, I’m beyond caring about the deceit and the fakery and the lies upon lies. Let the myth-making commence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2N2toyZMY8

Funnily enough, when I was actually playing this I had nothing – it was one more level, and I was more irritated that I somehow wasn’t getting all five stars even on the easy-peasy bass part than I was fascinated by the subtle interplay of the soundscape. Maybe there’s an argument here for Rock Band turning you off music as much as it brings you in – at the time, I was in a foul mood for various reasons I won’t go into, so the game became a game, a stress reliever, and the music just flowed over me in the background as I let the weight of the world slip off me and concentrated on hitting the right coloured buttons in sequence. All I got from it then was that Ringobot was still retarded (2:19 for the evidence) and the rest of them were sort of… there. Apart from Georgebot, who played the solo again, now wedged firmly into place as a soulless, solo-delivering machine, gazing into space like the Manchurian candidate while bobbing from one foot to the other. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Anyway, the song itself didn’t really leap out at me until I had a look at that video. As the in-game factoid-spouter informed me, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is the song of the movie of the comment, being originally a witticism tossed off by Ringo after a gruelling 24-hour sesh, which was then suggested as the title of the Beatles’ first movie, and then finally became a song in its own right on the strength of that. (Wikipedia confirm this. DON’T JUDGE ME.) I suppose this bizarre genesis makes it one of the Beatles’ most glam, celebrity-driven songs, which is why it fits in on the Ed Sullivan stage, which so far seems to be exploring the Beatlemania aspect of their music. (Or that might be just me.)

On the other hand, it’s one of the least glamorous songs so far. It’s basically an optimistic version of ‘Workin’ In A Coal Mine.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dy2tuF915E

That’s Lee Dorsey, wondering how long can this go on. Dorsey’s dwelling on the brutality his circumstances – the only time he mentions not being at work is to groan that he’s going to be too tired to enjoy himself come Saturday night – and the music’s right there with him, down to the ongoing chink-chink-chink of his swinging pick.

Cut to Lennon and McCartney, and the chunk-chunk-chunk of the factory conveyor belt, the straight, unceasing 1-2-3-4 rhythm, alternating between the titular chorus/verse (is there a difference here?) and the upbeat ‘when I’m home’ bits, punctuated by a dink-dink-dink not a million miles away from Dorsey’s coal mine. The solo comes in like a lunchbreak, the jangling guitar at the start and end of the track like the factory hooter signalling the start and end of the working day. The boys are hard at work, even if they’re producing fame and fortune instead of car engine parts.

But over the top of the conveyor belt beat, we get Lennon and McCartney’s voices, not bemoaning the regular chunk and thunk of the machine the way Dorsey did, but thinking about the home that’s waiting, the sleep they’re going to get and the girl they’re doing it all for. (Pimp Daddy watch – it’s another goods-for-services transaction from the Beatles and their omnipresent Sugar Train.) Where Dorsey sang the blues, the Beatles romanticise. The clean-cut nice young men of pop are now the smiling workforce, happy to toil for an honest farthing.

This was probably speaking to a fair chunk of the audience – we were a manufacturing country, as Girls Aloud pointed out, and at one point a fairly significant load of Beatle fans would have been slaving away in a factory, or a building site, or at best an office, saving up the necessary spends to go out and get the latest Beatles single along with a nice mop-top haircut and a ticket to the pictures. Or something. That seems very Sixties, somehow – kids working at the factory and buying records on the weekend. I’m wondering what the modern equivalent would be.

Call centres?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcIommZjMSE

NEXT: A final farewell to Ed Sullivan.

Anyway, it turns out the Beatles never did perform “Can’t Buy Me Love” on the Ed Sullivan show, which makes them LYING LIARS WHO LIE. Were they even born in Liverpool? I’ve seen an ungrammatical placard that says otherwise and I refuse to let the SOCIALISTS silence me.

Let’s take a look at the DISGUSTING FABRICATION in question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBJEo7a1a3c

The in-game factoids tell us that this one’s notable for Paul being the only singer, and Paulbot gets most of the action as a result, jigging about like a Gerry Anderson puppet to the extent that the classic Paul McCartney head-wobble just makes it look like his head’s about to come off and roll across the floor. Paulbot is the least human-looking of all the Beatlebots here, even including Ringobot, whose mental capacity seems to diminish with every song. The look on his face in 1:06 is like the Frankenstein Monster sighting a butterfly. “Pret…teee…” Luckily the game doesn’t go for mirrored surfaces or Ringobot might catch sight of his reflection, scream “UGLEEEEE” and go on a digitised rampage murdering villagers left and right.

As for the song… well, there’s a slight intrusion of Rock And/Or Roll in the solo – and even Georgebot’s saturnyne soloing seems toned down – but apart from that, this is even squarer than the last song. McCartney opens the song as a profligate sugar daddy, blithely promising to drop diamond rings and whatever else is going to “make you feel alright” on his ‘friend’ – and when a song starts off by serenading the object of desire as“my friend” you know even the saucy delights of hand-holding are going to be out of the question – before saying that “money can’t buy [him] love”. I catch your meaning, Paul. Money can’t buy you love, but converting that currency into diamond rings and similar items that make girls feel alright will buy you love, because bitches ain’t shit but hos and tricks. I understand you completely, Paul McCartney, you pimp daddy.

(On a side note, the first thing I saw in the wikipedia entry for this song – DON’T JUDGE ME – was: “When pressed by American journalists in 1966 to reveal the song’s “true” meaning, McCartney denied that “Can’t Buy Me Love” was about prostitution…” Oo er gosh i mean to sa gosh.)

Anyway, Paul McCartney isn’t a pimp daddy at all, it was all a clever ruse to determine whether his beloved ‘friend’ was a greedy gold-digging hooer or not. If the lady in question don’t need a diamond ring, the Walrus will be “satisfied”, like the prince in a fairytale who rejects the beautiful but spiritually ugly wenches who hurl themselves at his throne daily and nightly to plight his troth only with you, dear squealing listener, because only you have passed Sir Paul’s simple test and convinced him that your heart is true. Next stop, hand-holding.

Actually, the jigging Thunderbird puppet slides into poverty over the course of the song. In the first verse, it’s all diamond rings and whatever other extravagant item your heart desires – “I don’t care too much for money” is the cry of a man drowning in it. He doesn’t care where he hurls his immense wad, so get in on this sugar train and let Daddy Paulbucks treat you right. In the second verse he’s giving you everything he has, though that’s not much – the gift is less extravagant, but it means more, because it’s everything he owns. Now not caring much for money means that he prizes your love above all his material goods, like you wish your husband would do instead of drinking away the household funds. And in the final verse – bled dry, presumably, by his previous spending policies – he’s giving you nothing and hinting that he’d prefer it if you never brought the subject up again. Now, Macca is the dirt-poor dreamer who scorns all earthly prizes – the diamond ring from the first verse becomes an example of a ridiculous demand – and the listener is invited to take his hand and build a world without money using only love, which I guess is a grab for the expanding hippy market.

All bases covered, all constituents catered to. Another broad-appeal song from Beatlecorp, and even duller than the last. It’s certainly jaunty, though, and you can’t take that away from them. Here’s hoping the next one will provide some of the stronger meat we were getting in the Cavern Club.

NEXT: There will now be a short hiatus until next Tuesday – when we can expect another song that was never played on the Ed Sullivan show, courtesy of the Fraudulent Four.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BQpX5aWeIE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gro9NZULRd4

I don’t know how valid this kind of side-by-side comparison is, but it’s interesting that George Harrison’s slightly odd-looking mannerisms – he’s coming across a bit like Leonard Nimoy crossed with a hunchback, and around 1:17 he seems to grow a spasmodic hinge in the middle of his body – are transplanted fairly faithfully onto Georgebot, who’s stuck between Johnbot and Paulbot and gyrating stiffly in much the same way. (A slight edit here, as I had to put up a new video after the first one was deleted by YouTube for crimes against the brand. I’ll just add that the Nimoy-hunchback comparison is no longer clearly visible, but Paul is looking very sprightly and bouncy now in the human version – a quality Paulbot lacks.)

Fans of authenticity will be happy to hear that the Kevin O’Neill-esque arrow-crazy set in the game is a rough translation of the Beatles’ first Ed Sullivan appearance – the Youtube vid at the top there is from a week later. I’m assuming all Ed Sullivan appearances have been compressed into one, in the same way as all Cavern Club shows were. Anyhow, what’s changed? Well, the bots are now dressed in full suits, and the programmed-in nervousness seems to have vanished, although Ringobot still looks like a concussion victim. There’s a sense that they’ve been sanded down, somehow – even more than the sanding down of the personalities from the live, fleshy, non-robotic version – and I don’t know whether that makes the song seem slightly dulled and blandified, or vice versa.

This song’s pretty much defeated me, I’ve got to admit. It’s so ubiquitous – you can’t hear it without thinking ‘oh yeah, early Beatles’ and then all cognitive thought on the matter comes to a dead halt.  It’s not a tough song, gamewise – the guitar part I aced first time out and I managed to get 100% on the bass part (hard mode, not expert) while keeping all my attention on reading the Beatlebots’ programmed body language rather than the notes whizzing past my eyes. As a level, it’s entry-level – as a song, it slips in and out of the head as easily as it slips past the fingers.

Tom’s covered it and found something else there, but he could look at it in the context of its fellow number ones, while I’m looking at it in the context of a game filled with songs all by the same band – and in that context, I got nothin’. I had fun with the last two by finding the hidden sexy meaning, but there’s no hidden sexy meaning here – holding hands is holding hands, and while the boys do want to hold the high holy living fuck out of your hand – they want to hold your HAAAAAEEIIEEEAAAAAAEEIIEEEAAAAAAAND!!!!1!!??!!! – I can’t make that about something other than holding hands, no matter how hard I try. Maybe it’s moving from that grotty cellar club to this nice clean studio, but the filth is gone.

But I did find the ghost of seduction going on – the seduction of consumers by a product. I’ll tell you something I think you’ll understand, say four of the nicest youngsters Ed Sullivan has ever had on his stage. I’ll say that something - I want to hold your hand. Because there’s holding hands and holding hands, isn’t there? There’s Paul McCartney, holding… her… hand… so… TIGHT(!)… (cue filthy twanging) — and then there’s the smiling shop assistant holding your hand through a difficult new purchase. Holding your hand as you take your first steps into the world of the Beatles, as a band and a brand. You’ll like it here. We’ll start you off nice and mild, and by the time you’re swirling in a psychedelic frenzy with the girl with kaleidoscope eyes and the egg man and the walrus, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.

Happily, when I looked this song up on wikipedia (DON’T JUDGE ME) I found that this suspicion was relatively on the money – Epstein apparently told John and Paul to write something that would appeal to listeners across the pond and this is what they came up with, a distillation of their appeal into one powerful yet easily-digested punch. And this seems to have been the big unlocking of Beatlemania as a transatlantic phenomenon, so it undoubtedly worked. So is this going to set the tone for the entire Ed Sullivan section of the game, or now that we the players have made our charming introduction to the American music scene, are we going to start pissing on the carpet and wrecking the joint?

NEXT: We find out.

Finishing off the Cavern Club set, Paulbot leaps into ‘I Saw Her Standing There’.

I’ve about run out of things to say about the Cavern-era Beatlebots, but looking at that live footage shows a general muting of the performances in the game – look at Ringo, a manic bundle of energy in a suit, thrashing away at the kit, compared to the grinning, docile half-alive thing Ringobot presents itself as. Granted, the above clip is from 1964 and (as was pointed out by Daniel Poeira in the comments) in 1963 Ringo was in real danger of being maimed by Pete Best supporters and might well have been a little nervy. But looking at some of the later stuff, Ringobot doesn’t change that much.

As for Paulbot – well, let’s see the digitised version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAkDB0yPPbw

Not that much difference, actually – the digital version seems considerably more than a year younger, but that works to his advantage in this one. Paulbot looks like the office tea boy pushed onto the stage at the Christmas do and forced to sing, fresh-faced, innocent, slightly nervous. (I’m wondering if nervousness will still be a visual theme in the next level, when the band are allegedly established pop idols.) That works for the song, because this – to my untutored ears at least – is a very innocent song. Kind of.

Let’s divert for a minute and talk about dancing. I didn’t start dancing until I was about 14 or 15, and even then it was self-conscious half-ironic disco moves – I didn’t start dancing for real until I was at Uni, where it was a lot safer to let yourself go. Mostly, I was dancing to techno songs – I left the floor for the Britpop and Indie numbers – and mostly it was the joy of moving to a rhythm. I used to throw a lot of shapes. Socially, you’d either dance in a rough clump of people with plenty of space between to avoid hitting anyone, or you’d form a vague circle. Dancing with one particular person was possible, but it didn’t seem to be the norm. Any coupling happened between songs, off the floor. (These were student-run discos, not any kind of club scene – your mileage for on-the-floor action may vary.)

In this song, the dance and the courtship are the same. The way McCartney sings it, there’s a clear progression: see the girl, dance with the girl, realise you could probably fall in love with/settle for this girl, fall in love/settle for the girl, get a job and a mortguage and two kids and then look around and realise you’re sixty-four and where did it all go? (Obviously the song cuts out before step five in this progression.) It’s sweet and innocent, as long as the metaphor lasts.

But it is a metaphor – dancing as sex is a metaphor as old as time, especially when you bring in all the social ‘dancing exclusively with’ mores of the time that this song conveys. So, as McCartney lets off an orgasmic shriek, in comes Georgebot, smirking Byronically over the solo, the tempting Devil to Paulbot’s sweet-faced angel. Yeah, we know what you mean, Paul. “And I held… her… hand… so… TIGHT!” We know what you’re saying. They should have called this song When I Saw My Penis Standing There In My Pants.

And underneath that buried sexual heat, we have a song about – a pretty girl at a dance. It’s rude and sweet at the same time, having the cake and eating it, which is probably the best way to be at the moment. We’ll see if they can keep this balance with their other teen-oriented output.

Musically – am I alone in thinking this is pure country? The twanging guitars, the cowboy inflection in the vocals – that “held her hand so tight” line should end in a “Yee-haw!”, and right afterwards we’re into another twangfest. It makes sense – Elvis would have been an inspiration for the Beatles, and Elvis was rockabilly through and through – but if I close my eyes while I listen, I don’t see the Beatles on that stage. I’m seeing four filthy digital cowboys, ready to move right on from this one to Ramblin’ Man and I Love This Bar. And it’s kind of a crime that Apple Corps won’t let me make that dream come true.

NEXT: Fast-forward to Ed Sullivan.

The Cavern setlist continues with ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’, another one I’ve not heard before now but apparently originally written by the liverpudlians for Billy J Kramer, according to the in-game factoid thing. Is it just me, or is the Kramer version a lot livelier? That seems to be the norm here, but I’m not sure if that’s iconoclasm on my part or a dulling-down of the sound created by the ‘live’ acoustics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E-Wl3uLgVg

Actually, the acoustics (and that’d be a great name for a 60′s beat combo) contribute an awful lot here – I’ve got no idea if this was done on the album or crafted in-game, but the echoey cavern of the Cavern lends a spooky ambience to George’s vocal and particularly to the spectral ‘oo-wah-oo’ sounds made by Paul and John, which almost steal the show. Did they give the lead vocals to George knowing they were keeping the best bits for themselves? Probably not. Anyway, this spectral spookyness gives the song some much-needed extra wallop.

Apparently, the lyrics were inspired by a particular song from Disney’s Snow White, which might explain the creeping sense of… dirtyness there. Listen. Do you want to know a secret. Do you promise not to tell. Especially don’t tell a policeman or your parents. Whoa whoa. Oh. Closer. Let me whisper in your ear. Let me put rohypnol in your ear more like. And those opening lines – “You’ll never know…” – get that chilling minor-key vibe underneath, making it all seem very Stalker Rock indeed, at least to begin with.

But the next line changes the whole context. Where Kramer professed a need to be loved, George’s dirty secret involves saying the words you – as in, not him – long to hear. Suddenly it’s all turned around, the replacement of ‘I’ with ‘you’ turning a position of weakness into a position of strength, and Georgebot knows it – he’s all suave confidence on the stage, grinning to the audience and showing off his good side to the camera despite the fact that he’s been programmed with an absolutely enormous pair of caricature ears. I’ve seen pictures of Real George at the time and these just seem cruel, although I think they shrink down a little as the game progresses. Anyway, Georgebot, with Ringobot stuck behind his kit and the other two bots huddled around their mike, has the free rein to become the focus of attention onstage, and promptly milks it for all its worth. This is a theme we’ll see later in the game as Georgebot sings more songs about gurls and how much of a playa he is. At the moment he has some actual girlbots (who I remember as all having glasses) to bounce it off – later, he’ll be alone, shining his sexual charisma into a psychedelic void.

So, between the almost-arrogant confidence of the lyrics and the charming cocksureness of Georgebot, and the continuing creepiness underscoring it all, what we’ve got here is a song about a creepy seduction technique – George playing the role of the dirty old man in the pub, grinning at the barmaid. “Come a bit closer, luv, an’ I’ll tell yer a secret.” “Ooh, you are rotten.” “Nah, I’ll whisper it in yer ear – I loves yez, I does…” “Oooh, you dirty devil! Gerroff!” Starring George Harrison as Sid James and the audience as Barbara Windsor. In the middle eight, when Georgebot sings “Nobody else, just we two…” I half-expect him to follow it up by singing that his wife doesn’t understand him.

In comparison, Kramer’s version is hopelessly clean and tidy, the cuddly yearnings of a sweet young chap who you’d happily introduce to Father. Score one for the Beatles.

NEXT: Just seventeen, you know what I mean – the parade of filth continues.

Second song in, and the band play ‘Boys’, as sung by Ringo Starr. I’ll try and keep it brief this time.

Visually, not much has changed, although you notice the presence of the camera more as it zooms in on Ringobot’s mangled CGI gob, which presumably would otherwise have been mostly obscured by the drum kit and the other band members. I did notice this time around how good a job they’ve done of reproducing that ‘live gig in a cellar’ feel – you do get a vague pang of nostalgia/excitement at virtually ‘being there’ at a live gig that you’ve been told is historically valuable, even though these are robot mannequins, it’s a 2D screen in your living room, it’s all information swirling in a computer and this gig probably never actually happened and is just a fantasised mismash designed to represent several moments in the band’s timeline at once. Aside from that, it’s just like you’re at the gig – though the player’s still on the outside of the band looking in, not the inside rocking out.

Ringobot looks nervous, as though he’s terrified of being torn apart by the love-crazed mob. Is that just dredged up from the uncanny valley, or did he really have that expression when playing live?

As for the song – it’s not one I’d ever heard before, and after a couple of listens it’s a pleasant surprise. Here’s the original by the Shirelles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BFsRpjArwM

The song itself sounds an awful lot like ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ by Barrett Strong, but I imagine that was the style at the time. What it sounds like now is a callback to the fifties – I’m guessing these two cover versions at the start serve the purpose of being the ‘Before’ in the ‘Before And After’ story. If you’re going to do a game whose narrative is the rise and fall FURTHER RISE YOU UNMUTUALIST of a band that Changed Music, you need to show what Music was like before it was Changed. Since the premise of the game is All Beatles All The Time, that means slipping in a couple of covers numbers early on – I think everything from here on in is written by the band.

That might be a risky strategy – this song was a lot of fun to play (and I use ‘play’ in the game sense here, musically skilled readers), with a nice raw, raucous quality to it – I’d recommend the bass level, as mashing the buttons with your fingers in time to the bassline really highlights the energy. I actually felt more like I was playing Rock Band ’63 (which would be a very nifty expansion) than something geared to any one group, although that’s probably because none of the bots look that much like their counterparts yet – they’re all so very young. Anyway, if this is the starting point, it’ll be interesting to see how I feel about playing these songs when the more well-known Beatles Sound emerges.

Hmm. Should I be giving these marks out of five? Or ten? Or not giving marks at all?

SPECIAL PIRATE VERSION OF THIS COLUMN FOR TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY: Aaarrr, I did find me a strange black box possessed by wizards that caused four scurvy young cabin-boys to caper on a magic porthole, singin’ a strange sea shanty accompanied by ‘orrible screams, aharrrrr Blind Pew, I were as a-feared as if I were in the presence of a Sea Goblin and split the devil-work apart with one swing of me trusty cutlass, yaarrr, wheron it spat lightning and hell’s own flames, surely it was possessed by the curse of a dread pirate who died o’ scurvy on a haunted ship, aharr.

NEXT: Georgebot gets his bone on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsDpc-8iR8g

WAIT WHAT

Oops! Turns out that was the original version of the song as performed by the Top Notes. This astonishing tune was originally written by Phil Medley and Bert Russel and not by a maddened horse with half a kilo of speed rammed up its bottom as you may have thought. The Isley Brothers did their best to cool down this blazing hot number, but frankly it was still a bit wild and in deep need of being tamed and broken in by a quartet of cuddly Liverpudlians to become the version we know today.

Actually, the game doesn’t start right away with this song – first there’s a quick Top-100-TV-List-Shows style montage of dancing collages, all in black and white because everything was black and white back then, that tells us it’s Liverpool 1963 and the Cavern Club and not Hamburg 1960 as you might have hoped.

Obviously, I want the moon on a stick here – there’s absolutely no way you’re getting a little michinimabot version of Stuart Sutcliffe or Pete Best, because you’d need to jump through about two hundred more hoops and probably open up whole crates of worms vis-a-vis people who would suddenly be officially recognised as part of The Story – The Real Story, as told by The Real People – with all that that implies. Easier to just have them playing Hamburg-esque songs in a non-Hamburg time period and sweep the whole mess under the carpet that way – great from the Beatles Brand standpoint, where the band always were and always shall be, untouchable and inviolate, but bad from the standpoint of someone who wants to dive into the messy details and get some sense of the history.

But this game isn’t about messy details or history – it’s about clean surfaces and fable. As we’ve already established. Let’s just dive in and ROCK OUT with the new bad boys of the guitar combo scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCL_1uZfSzc

Okay, immediate point – those aren’t the Beatles. Ceci n’est pas une pipe and all that. So for purposes of critiquing the performances in the game, I’m going to be strictly referring to the Fabricated Four as Johnbot, Paulbot, Georgebot and Ringobot, to avoid possible slander against any living or dead Beatle when I say that Ringobot looks like a fucking retard person with mental difficulties.

1:49. Tell me I’m wrong. He’s practically drooling on the high-hat.

Also notable – the McCartney head-wobble, produced 100% faithfully by computer technology. My hairdresser told me yesterday (while I was getting a Beatle cut, natch!) that the wobbling head of McCartney was the exact moment that he began to hate the Beatles, Wings and everything else Sir Macca had ever touched, and watching Paulbot vibrate mechanically on the screen it’s hard to say he’s wrong. The faintly plasticised nature of Paulbot makes it look like a bobblehead doll with lazy, self-satisfied eyes – a weird imitation of onstage energy. We’re taking our first step into the uncanny valley with Paulbot and I fear it won’t be the last.

What was it like to play? Distinctly spooky at first – this is the first time you realise your whammy bar, wah-wah, etc, does abslutely nothing, and also that there are three guitars up there and you could be any of them, which gives you a serious disconnect from the game just as you start to play. (This effect is obviosuly mitigated if you’re on drums, but then you have to be the drooling idiot-child Ringobot, which is a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone.) Plus, the Beatlebots are very restrained compared to the wild rockers of Rock Band, so the whole experience feels like playing a version of the game wrapped in cotton wool in case the rough habits of the player should break it.

As for what the song itself means to me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNPp6x7j9I8

Not that I’d claim anyone of my generation would hold Ferris Bueller in higher regard than the Beatles (yes I would) but I’d assume that’s what a lot of people immediately think of when they hear it. Maybe that’s why it comes on first – everything in this level has the distinction of being on Please Please Me and being a bit pre-Beatles flavoured, if that makes sense, but the Ferris connection makes this one feel slightly more timeless as far as I’m concerned. Actually, if I’m honest, I didn’t even know that version was the Beatles version until recently, and it still feels like it’s not – if I close my eyes, somebody else is singing it. Probably Matthew Broderick.

A way in from the outside, then – a door into the pre-packaged, expertly airbrushed mythos, courtesy of John Hughes and the ultimate musical wish-fulfillment fantasy – grab a whole city, get them all dancing to your beat and then leave like you were never there. Who wants to be in a band when they could be in the middle of that? And who’d want to be in the Beatles? You might as well be in school.

NEXT: Ringobot sings. The effect is surreal.

When you pop the disc in the PS3, this is pretty much the first thing you see. And make no mistake, it’s luvverly.

What it’s not, is any kind of introduction to the game itself. Well, technically it is – you’ve got a game about the Beatles, and here is a short bit of animation about the Beatles, ta-da - but it’s setting up expectations that will then be completely dashed.

What we have here is some gorgeous animation that moves effortlessly from a semi-Jamie Hewlett 2D affair that runs us through the first half of the game and the various ‘tour’ stages to a sumptuous 3D Ganeshaverse that represents the later ‘dreamscape’ bits. It’s lush stuff, and I’m very much down with intro and in-between-level sequences that are much better looking than the game itself, so it’s not like I feel BETRAYED that after this it becomes much more like your classic Rock Band setup – four puppets rocking out.

The trouble is, it’s not like Rock Band in the slightest. In RB, you’ve got a choice of various venues, then every song can be played in every venue, and then the player has designed a quartet of freaks to howl into the mike with bulging eyes OR play guitar OR drums. The sheer amount of variety built into the game means the michinima approach is the only option – you get your four stick figures, map the players onto them, and away you go.

In Beatles Rock Band, that’s not the case. Each song is linked irrevocably and unbreakably with a venue – and in the ‘dream’ stages, each song gets its own venue. There’s no changing them up – and no switching roles, either. In Rock Band, your self-built ‘Ringo’ could be shifted from drums to guitar to vocals to drums at will – in BRB, there’s no circumstance imaginable where Ringo will not be on the drums, even if he was estranged from the group at the time of the song (and that’s something we’ll get back to later). The other three will always be guitaring, and all four will sing their parts as described. John will never hammer the drums while Ringo croons ‘it is not dying’ – that would be a terrifying subversion of the Beatles Brand. George Harrison won’t be singing the lead on ‘Birthday’ – what, are you trying to break time??!? Do you want him to form Wings while Paul McCartney forms Handmade Films? Ringo dead in ’80 as Lennon goes on to voice Thomas The Tank Engine? Why not just fire Lennon altogether and have ‘Come Together’ sung by Ian out of Ian And The Zodiacs? Or your own creation – you know, the lead singer from the Arse Puppets, with the pink afro and track marks and a tattoo on his chest reading FUCK MONKEY? What is WRONG with you?

(Sigh. Maybe now Apple Corps have dipped a toe into video gaming we’ll be able to get Beatles Manager and be able to warp history in such ways. But I don’t hold out much hope.)

So, for various sound branding reasons, each level of Beatles Rock Band is changeless – so changeless, in fact, that when you wham the whammy bar, nothing happens whatsoever, because McCartney didn’t play the note that way on the original tour. (He didn’t play the note the way his michinimabot does either – it was remastered up the wazoo to generate the illusion of a ‘fantasy Beatles’ – but never you mind about that.) Similarly, there’s no wah-wah pedal or distortion – that switch on your guitar becomes completely useless. You, the player, are completely without agency in the world of The Beatles – the only way you can affect the sound of the music is to nihilistically choose not to play certain notes and phrases, although that can’t last long. Though I don’t think you can even be booed off (I need to fail a song in order to double-check this, which I haven’t yet – failure might be against the brand) – there’ll be no shots of the Beatles hanging their heads and bickering as their animated audience boo and throw things, like there are seemingly every night with the Arse Puppets. Fucking Judas Priest.

Anyway, the point I’m making here is – why michinima? Or why exclusively the Rock Band brand michinima? We’ve established that the Rock Band brand is of vastly less importance than the Beatles brand, and there is no way on God’s earth that anything you do in reality will affect what plays out on screen. Every level is reduced to just an animation that plays while you play – so why not change it up a little? Have some levels as animated cartoons, or different styles of 3D, or even take grainy live footage of Ed Sullivan and manipulate it a little – just for one song, why not? (It’s vastly more work is why not, but it’s not like this is a project that’s got a time limit on it.)

I’m probably being horrifically naive on this one – I’m not a programmer and I didn’t slave for months in the Beatles mine to get every detail of the pixel-puppets exactly correct, after all – but when you actually start the game, there’s a massive comedown from the cheeky, charming animation here that I think makes you look at Johnbot, Georgebot, Paulbot and Ringobot in a poor light.

I was going to mention Hamburg in this one, but I’m about out of space, so we’ll tackle that and the Beatlebots next time as I pick up the placcy guitar and we dive headlong into the game itself.

NEXT: Come on baby now, twist and AAAAAAUUUGGGHH THE DEAD LIFELESS EYES

I came to The Beatles Rock Band with nothing but the best of intentions.

My relationship with the Beatles is probably unusual in that, up until yesterday, I didn’t own any. Growing up, there was a copy of Sergeant Pepper in the house that got an awful lot of play, and remains my central idea of what the Beatles were all about – experimental, very sixties, included cut-out moustaches and stripes in their LPs so the listeners could become a part of their day-glo fantasy militia, or so I assumed. The cover of S.P.’s L.H.C.B. pretty much sums up my childhood feelings about the Beatles – figures in the middle of a sea of pop-culture faces, frozen in history but at the same time almost controlling it. I was fascinated by their world – the forbidden thrill of running away from home to meet a man from ‘the motor trade’…

(What is the motor trade, I wondered? Is that car engine repair? Is she living on the streets now? How is this situation possibly workable? Was it workable in the sixties? Could you just… go? Was it that easy? But no – how could she do that to them? How could she make her mother cry? Just to have fun? The heroine’s guilt became my own, the tearful recriminations of the parents stabbed at me. I often skipped over the song. It’s not in the game. Neither is “A Day In The Life”, which is probably where Dead Signal got started. Death Got No Mercy has it’s own ‘woke-up-got-out-of-bed’ moment, so we can probably lay that at the Beatles’ door as well.)

So the Beatles were very important to me growing up, or at least that one album was, because it was a building block of my musical taste and my relationship with pop culture. But weirdly, after that first bite of the apple (hee-yuck) the Beatles dropped off my radar completely. I was fascinated by the forbidden world of The Sixties, but the music was for the most part just there in the background of life – comforting and familiar, like Abba, another perennial of my childhood. Unlike Abba, I never learned to appreciate it in adulthood. Beyond the grizzled, cigar-chomping Sergeant Pepper and his blood-crazed, kraut-killing Lonely Hearts Club Band, I never really dug the sound for the most part, and couldn’t really get any kind of grip on why The Beatles were important and why, say, Wings weren’t – Say ‘Paul McCartney’ to me and the first thing I think of is Magneto And Titanium Man. And the Crimson Dynamo came along for the ride! They was involved in a rob-ber-y that was due to happen at a quarter to three inna Main Street.

Anyway, I’ve come to appreciate how enormous a part of pop-cultural history this band was, and how insane it must have been for four human beings to be trapped in the eye of that kind of storm. But I still felt like I was on the outside of the phenomenon looking in, unable to get what exactly it was that people dug about the group’s total output, in the same way that people can’t understand why I love the Pet Shop Boys, and I didn’t feel like I had a way in… until now, that is!

The Beatles and their executors have got together with plastic-guitar specialists Harmonix to create Beatles Rock Band, the most important game ever made. Now, I love me some Rock Band, and I’ve found myself giving the time of day to a lot of songs that I ordinarily wouldn’t touch because I’ve been forced to power through them to earn some virtual cash to buy a pixellated guitar in the shape of a thunderbolt. Many people dismiss the placcy-guitar genre as pretend performance – why don’t they just pick up a real guitar, and be real musicians, like meeeeeee? But it’s never been about performing – it’s about listening. In the same way as dancing is listening with your body, plas-guitaring is listening with your fingers and your twitch reflexes, your gaming muscles. It’s a means of interacting with the music, getting inside it, engaging with it. It doesn’t work for every track, but I really wanted to see if it’d work this time. I wanted my ticket to the Beatles party. I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I wanted in.

Well, it was my ticket to something, but I’m not sure what. So what I’m going to do is spend a large amount of my time and yours looking through the game, one track at a time in Story Mode, starting with the intro and ending with the encore track. And we’ll see how that works.

NEXT: The Intro. Stuartbot, Petebot, Astridbot and Jurgen Vollmerbot are not the fab four you’re looking for.