WHAT WE DO IS WHAT WE DO [514]

There is a lot going on here...

Following a new thrill down the rabbit hole is energising, and I am not ready to climb back out of the DEVO cave since writing about the artistic group a few weeks ago, because I am not done with comprehending the extent of their creativity.

This has been understanding the DEVO did not start as a band, but more as an exploration of agit-prop art – music was also among its members’ capability, both Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh having played in bands, and proved to be such a fruitful avenue for expressing their ideas that it became the major way of disseminating it, causing most casual observers to believe they were a band first... one that had a strong visual identity and philosophical grounding.

This has been realising how easy it is, in our current connected times, to get your own work out – DEVO Inc. was founded in 1978 as the group planned to self-release everything, divisions including Booji Boy Records; DEVO Vision for releasing the “video albums” they anticipated will become the norm; and Recombo DNA Labs, presumably the artistic equivalent of Laboratoire Garnier. They would later acquire a manager and record deals, but continued to make art among those compromises to the music industry as it then stood. Their latest album, 2010’s “Something for Everybody”, turned the capitalism, focus groups and press releases into part of the performance, bringing attention to the accepted parts of the industry machine. 

This is being confronted by Mothersbaugh’s crescendo of yeah-yeah-yeahs in “Uncontrollable Urge”, a song ostensibly about masturbation, while deconstructing two Beatles songs, “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. The jerky movement of the alien choreography of live performances for this song continue to this day, including the final formation at its end, Mothersbaugh and Casale sharing the microphone on the final yeah-yeah-yeah, cementing their claim as the de-evolution of Lennon and McCartney.

This has been dealing not with earworms, but earwasps, with irritatingly catchy bass and synth lines, glued together by Bob Mothersbaugh’s lead guitar, topped with wonderfully observed lyrics. A particular favourite is “Modern Life”, which may have been a demo recorded in 1982, eventually finished in 1998 for use in a video game, but it has infectiously catchy call-and-response lyrics: “It’s a modern life, but it’s not what you’re looking for”, and “It’s a modern life, but it reads better on TV”, followed by “wah-oh, it’s a modern life” or “wah-oh, like it came from a zoo”, with the later refrain of “Time to pay up for the fuck up”, one you could not have made.

This has been trying to find if the B-side song “Mecha-Mania Boy” has ever been released on CD. This synth-heavy piece has been a favourite for years, the story of a delinquent being: “In a crowd or all alone / No one's laughing anymore / Now he wants to know your human's name”. This may be a case of trawling the many compilations and re-releases of DEVO songs and albums over the years, an endless mixing and recontextualising of their back catalogue, before I find when it was made, and how much money someone wants for it.

This has been learning that, through many interviews that Gerald Casale has given that mention the massacre at Kent State University on 4th May 1970, that he considers himself lucky that, having concluded that protest had become a dead end in his country, he found a creative outlet for dealing with that, one influence by the subversive practices of advertisers on Madison Avenue than in organisations like the Weathermen. This makes DEVO’s eventual 2009 cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio”, a song about the massacre finally performed by people that were there, all the more poignant and impactful.

This has been my thinking about what this means for the current moment. I began writing here in 2016, having recognised a febrile time of elections, the Brexit vote, and what felt like the death of a generation of pop culture – David Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Leonard Cohen, Sir George Martin, Sir Terry Wogan, Victoria Wood, Carrie Fisher, Muhammad Ali. That febrility has not subsided, instead exploited by opportunism: AI, far-right politics, clampdowns on free speech and civil liberties by all sides. The utopian view of the future didn’t arrive, so this must be de-evolution... but DEVO didn’t want to be right. I don’t think the group wanted to be interviewed in 2025 as sages of a world gone wrong, but here we are, and I am not done thinking about it.

Seriously, it's DEVO part 3 next time.

GOTTA MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND [458]

Especially in situations where I have given myself a deadline, I don’t normally think about how easy these articles are to read. I am more worried about the clarity of the points I am making – if I managed that, then legibility takes care of itself.

 

Apparently, the last paragraph scored 52.3 on the Flesch Reading Ease Test, producing a Flesch-Kincade reading grade level of 11.5, just below American college student level. It was “fairly difficult to read”.

 

Even more apparently, the paragraph just gone scored 31.9, placing it almost at college graduate level. It is “difficult to read”.

 

That last one went back down to 47.1 – still college level, but at the “easier” end of the scale.

 

Except for this sentence, this article scores 51.0 so far – we’re still going to college.

 

I only found out last week that Microsoft Word can calculate your document’s score on the Flesch Reading Ease Test, and I still don’t care for it now. Devised in the 1970s for use in evaluating technical, electronic and teaching documents in the United States Navy, it is an equation most often used by Government institutions to check the readability of their documents, weighing the number of words per sentence over a written work, and syllables per word. The higher the answer to the equation, the easier your document can be read: documents written in “plain English” will achieve a score over 60.

 

Of course, it doesn’t consider what those words say, only the numerical detail produced by the particular words used, a quick-and-dirty approach to checking your document, and one I won’t be using again because it doesn’t account for style, if I truly have a writing style.

 

The first article I published on this site in 2016, about the argument over how The Beatles got their name, had a readability score of 67.2, in the “plain English” bracket. For my previous piece about keeping the internet at bay  to reach the college-level score of 44.8 is, to be honest, where I expect writing by a college graduate, and my consistently reaching that level confirms I must be more confident at reproducing that level for public consumption.

 

Interestingly, the essay scripts made for video, like my first about the HP-12C calculator, and my personal best video, about Memphis furniture, achieve a “lower” score – 56.0 and 54.9 respectively – because they were deliberately written to be more conversational in tone, using shorter sentences but, then again, the test isn’t made for the spoken word.

 

In short, I’ll concentrate on clarity.

AND THEN YOU GOTTA SLOW IT DOWN [416]

Marshall McLuhan is a name that has come up here a few times already, but I somehow forgot that the founder of what we call media studies had recorded an album. Released in 1967, and an LP version of McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s book of the same name, “The Medium of the Massage” is an audio collage about the effects of media on its consumer, the title’s pun on “message” becoming intentional following a typing error in the original book. 

With McLuhan’s assured tone as a lynchpin, the effect of the album’s sound is not too dissimilar to the later experiments it influenced, like The Beatles’ “Revolution No. 9”. The intention of the album is to totally immerse the listener in a constantly changing landscape that utilises sound as an entirely separate medium of the printed work – this is no audiobook.

I found myself concentrating on the voices and sounds being sped up and slowed down. The collage is constructed of hundreds of pieces of spliced audio tape, played by reel-to-reel machines on top of each other, but the varying of their pace brings more attention to the physical existence of the tape, and how what you hear is essentially a result of friction, as magnetic tape is passed over a playback head. 

The speed of the pinch roller, feeding the tape past the head, can be varied to a desired effect, quite often comic, as anyone with a cassette player at home would find by pressing the “play” and “fast forward” buttons to make your favourite band sing even higher. The age and quality of the tape player, and the tape, also affects the output: you can tune your equipment to remove as much “wow” and “flutter” as you can, but there may still be imperfections in the tape, from its recording to their initial manufacture, to factors acting on the magnetism of the tape to affect its retention of a recording.

None of this is easily replicated digitally. Filtering audio could get close, like applying a “VHS effect” to video, but outright glitches need the original equipment, and both cassette players and “entry-level” Type I ferric tape are still readily and cheaply available. Best known for the vaporwave album “Floral Shoppe” under the name Macintosh Plus, Ramona Langley released “Big Danger” in 2017, under her usual moniker of Vektroid, which sounds like a found object: a sticky, muddy-sounding cassette tape in a damaged player that cannot play at the right speed, and that is the effect being sought – plying it back on a digital file is only the current method of delivering that particular sound.

I WAS TEALBY ABBEY THEN [406]

Sir Elton John has been a constant and welcome presence in popular culture for over fifty years because he is seen as honest, genuine and emotionally complex as the songs he and Bernie Taupin have written since 1967, and we have responded in kind: “Your Song” is everybody’s song, his speaking about his sexuality helped change public attitudes, and he’s now been in the public eye longer wearing a wig than not, and we still don’t care.

Having not engaged in the sort of alternate persona building or avantgarde soundscapes that became expected with each new David Bowie album, an Elton John album has sweeping ballads, or barnstorming rock standards, with chords influenced by gospel, all coming from the minds of two people who found their Georgia located north of Wembley. 

This is why I’m still bemused by “Regimental Sgt. Zippo”, having only just become aware of its existence. The first Elton John album was a psychedelic rock album inspired more by The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Procul Harum than Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, with heavy organ and harpsichord forming the album’s sound as much as piano. Recorded between November 1967 and May 1968, the album was ultimately shelved - some songs were released in a box set in 2018, with the full album not seeing the light of day until July 2021.

The title track is the sticking point. John started recording this album six months after the release of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, and the same month as their single of “Hello, Goodbye” and “I Am the Walrus”. “Regimental Sgt. Zippo” is evocative of that period, when that heavier, psychedelic sound was prevailing in pop music, and can subsequently be folded into any playlist of music from that period, its being an Elton John album making it a novelty. To that end, I latched on to the heavier sound of “Nina” as making it the best song on the album, followed by the title track, with the more frivolous sound of “When I Was Tealby Abbey” being welcome. For an album that would have been released in 1968, there had to be songs titled “Angel Tree” and “A Dandelion Dies in the Wind”.

For me, the weak points were “Turn to Me” and “Sitting Doing Nothing”, sounding more like standard pop songs, the former sounding like it could have been written by anyone. The curiosity of “Sitting Doing Nothing” is its rarity as a song with Elton John lyrics, with music by producer Caleb Quaye - a nice little poem about being told you are lazy by people who wished they were as free as you are, the melody makes it sound simpler still.

At the time of the album’s recording, John and Taupin were staff songwriters for Dick James Music, cranking out songs on demand for clients - Taupin was given an hour for lyrics, and John just thirty minutes for the music. These songs feel like they were written under these conditions, meeting the moment rather than making it. With John having a parallel career at the time as a session musician, backing vocalist and anonymous performer of cover versions on cheap compilation albums, having your own album is the inevitable next step, but not with these songs. 

The first released Elton John album is “Empty Sky”, released in June 1969, and while I previously put its sound down to having been released that year – more progressive rock than psychedelic, more harpsichord than organ, and John and Taupin directed to write more for themselves – it now sounds like a bridge between “Regimental Sgt. Zippo”, which has the same band, and the first “proper” Elton John album, the self-titled 1970 release that includes “Your Song”, “Border Song” and “Take Me to the Pilot”. This third album, and most people’s first encounter with Elton John, properly displayed John’s and Taupin’s own voice as songwriters, which belied its origin as a sampler for those songs more than a proper album, and John’s confidence as a singer that saw him break the United States before the UK. That’s what you get for being yourself. 

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL WORLD THIS WILL BE [362]

I distinctly remember the hope that, when the Covid-19 pandemic eventually drew to a close, the ensuing momentum that would follow such a seismic event could have been the beginning of a new “Roaring Twenties”, last seen following the First World War and the flu pandemic of 1918.

Of course, it does not feel like this has happened, replaced more by a need to return things to normal, just as the proposals to redraw the map of London following the Great Fire of 1666 was replaced by a need to rebuild as soon as possible.

This has left me feeling like the 2020s haven’t really started yet culturally, much like when the 1960s were said to have started with The Beatles in 1963, or when the 1990s were ushered in by Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991. The pandemic acted more like a stress test than a creative inspiration, before counting the threat it made to live music venues, in places like Liverpool and Seattle, that help foment the scenes that changed popular music.

The reason I have started thinking about this now was its having been prompted by reading many articles about the prospects of a “post-Elizabethan age” – following the death of the Queen, having been a symbol of stability and consensus for so long, what country is the UK going to become, and how will things progress under King Charles III and Prime Minister Liz Truss? 

It feels like fundamental changes are expected, but it is not known what they could be, or what for they should take, because elements of that expectation were themselves not expected. Who are we counting on to enact the change? Someone creative? A ground swell? 

I don’t think it is possible to expect a paradigm shift, unless this a result of anxiety. Beatlemania and Nirvana may have ushered in the “Sixties” and the “Nineties”, but the ironic detachment and post-Cold War relief that characterised the “Nineties” was definitively ended by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, just as the end of the “Elizabethan age” was not an event to prepare for. If the lockdown caused by Covid-19 is considered a paradigm shift, it is only in the sense that the standard procedure for progress to take was interrupted or stopped, while happening to coincide with the beginning of the decade.

I think this is one of those times where I don’t know what to expect. The UK has seen uncertainty in one form or another caused by Brexit, Covid, and by changes in Prime Minister and Monarch, unless this proves to be the character of the 2020s – we are already nearly three years in, so it might be time to either call it now, or start preparing to make the 2030s as great as possible.

EVERYBODY’S A DREAMER AND EVERYBODY’S A STAR [343]

We open outside the Abbey Road recording studio in St. John’s Wood, London. Traffic is held up as people attempt to recreate the cover of The Beatles’ album named after its recording location. We cut to inside the building, looking through a window into Studio Two, used by the greatest rock bands of all times. We cut to inside the studio, looking up towards the ceiling, taking in both the scale of the space and the weight of its history. 

 

The camera pans across the studio, and fades to the door outside The Front Room, another Abbey Road studio that is far smaller, and far more affordable. Cut to inside, and an engineer, wearing headphones, sits at a large mixing desk, changing the levels on several tracks. An insert shot shows a call sheet on a clipboard, listing that the album being recorded is titled “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers”. 

 

The camera moves toward the door where, cutting to the other side of it, are three session musicians, two on keyboards and one on drums, and myself, singing “all they have are words” repeatedly into a microphone.

 

This is the dream that led to my original name for this website when it launched in 2016. What is more, this is pretty much how that dream presented itself to me, in a manner that is simple enough for anyone to understand: establishing shots, “camera” positions, cutting and fading between shots, building a narrative, and even the “camera” acting as a third-person narrator, as “I” look at “myself” in the dream. The Front Room did not open at Abbey Road until 2017, but the hypothetical small studio I thought they had in 2016 can now be substituted with a real location.

 

“Continuity editing”, or “Classical Hollywood editing”, is the name given to seamless film editing that is used to create narrative continuity, which became the dominant film style because of where and when it was developed. Continuity editing is so ingrained in our cultural memory, by way of Classical Hollywood films, and in moving pictures in general, that the language of film is a language everyone can read without needing to know how it is written – learning to "write" it is like learning French when everyone on Earth already lives in France.

 

With the notion of montage causing you to create meaning between different pictures, and persistence of vision making those pictures move, you do not need to know the process of establishing shots, close-up and insert shots, or how fading from one shot to another indicates the passage of time, or the sixty- or 180-degree rules are used to keep continuity of viewpoint between people in a space, but you have seen these used so often you have stopped seeing the joins.

 

When I was a small child, I did wonder why I could only look through my own eyes, and if that led me to a love of cinema, and my studying of film for my degree, then I may have only just recognised that while writing this sentence. But if dreams are meant to be cryptic notes from your unconscious mind, the meaning of mine couldn’t be clearer: my ambition is to record an album, but even in my own dream, I couldn’t afford to rent Studio Two.

WHAT AM I TO DO [311]

It takes inspiration and vision to turn an error into a moment of serendipity, but instances of an error supplanting that which didn’t need replacing are rarer still. It was harder than I expected to compile a list of cases where a fix occurred where there wasn’t a problem, but I found more examples than I expected.

 

The following is a list of items, and people, that received their names by accident. In all cases, they were already known under a different name when the accident occurred. A decision will have been made to keep the mistake made, or no subsequent attempt was made to correct the mistake.

 

1) Cilla Black: Best known as presenter of ITV entertainment shows “Blind Date” and “Surprise Surprise,” and for her initial career as a singer – the best-selling song by a female artist in the 1960s in the UK was her version of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” – Cilla Black was born Priscilla White, first performing under the name “Swinging Cilla” at the Zodiac Club in Liverpool, following a few unplanned performances at the Cavern Club, where she worked in the cloakroom. Her surname was flipped into negative in 1961 by the local music newspaper “Mersey Beat,” a name that turned a scene into a genre. Its publisher, Bill Harry, made the mistake. Cilla Black signed with manager Brian Epstein in 1963, having seen her perform with The Beatles, and then on her own.

 

2) Ovaltine: To my knowledge, I have never drunk Ovaltine, but only because it sounds like I would still prefer hot chocolate. A flavouring product made of malt extract, whey and sugar, with cocoa for taste, Ovaltine is added to milk to make what is traditionally a bedtime drink in the UK, alongside the similar Horlicks. The drink originally also contained eggs, and is still known in its birthplace of Switzerland and elsewhere under the name Ovomaltine. However, the name change for the UK was made long before eggs were removed from the recipe – it was a spelling mistake on the trademark application, contracting the name down.

 

3) Lew Grade: A talent agent and TV executive whose companies, ATV and ITC, were associated with everything from “Crossroads” and “Thunderbirds” to “The Muppet Show” and “Jesus of Nazareth”, Lew, Baron Grade of Elstree entered showbusiness as a professional dancer. Born in Russia as Lev Winogradsky in 1906, moving with his family to the UK at the age of five, “Louis Grad” was the name he danced under, until a typing error in a Paris newspaper report added a vowel. The name “Grade” was also used by his brother Leslie, also a talent agent, and passed to his nephew Michael, who later ran BBC One and Channel 4. However, Lew’s other brother, Bernard Delfont, originally also a dancer, continued to use his own stage name to distinguish himself from his brothers.

 

4) “Ye Olde…”: This is a case of a term being used for effect, when everyone knows it is wrong. The English language as written in the years until the post-Tudor period continued to use the letter “thorn” where we would use the two letters “th”, making “the” into “þe”.  The first printing presses often substituted the thorn for “y”, which more closely resembled how most people wrote it, especially when Gothic type made it resemble a closed þ. Now, the y sound of “ye” is deliberately, and incorrectly, used and pronounced retroactively to evoke an old-time period where it was never used.

 

5) The Hindu-Arabic Number System: The Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī wrote a treatise in around 825 AD titled, in modern English, “On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals”. Three centuries later, it was translated into Latin as “Algoritmi de numero Indorum” – “Algorismus on the Indian Numbers” – giving the author a Latinised name. Alongside the work of the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, the treatise served as the introduction of “Arabic numerals” to the West, e.g. 0 and 1-9, but it became known as “algorism” or “algorithm”, using the “originator’s” name to describe a type of arithmetic, instead of just using a word like “arithmetic.” As this number system became dominant, to the point of no longer needing a distinguishing name, the word “algorithm” would later be applied to definitions relating to computer instructions.

FIVE YEARS, STUCK ON MY EYES [300]

First logo (May-December 2016)

Hello there. There is a question you often hear in interviews where the answer is always going to be “no.” “Did you think that when you started Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers on 30^th May 2016, that you would still be doing it five years later?” “Yes, yes I did, I always knew that I could write articles about various aspects of popular culture, philosophy and the news, then deliver them weekly for that that entire time without a break. That outcome was baked in from the start.”

Of course, I never planned it, but I’m glad it happened. I began this site to keep my mind working, learn more about different subjects, and build confidence in putting my name out there. I was inspired by the Three Minute Thesis competition, begun by the University of Queensland, which challenges PhD students to present their research in only three minutes, to an audience with no specialty in their subject. Trying to explain a complex subject in an engaging manner is a brilliant way to develop your communication skills, so I deliberately put myself in a position to make myself do this over and over again, refining my approach and style as I go. I originally set myself a five-hundred-word limit, which would take about three minutes to read, and if anyone else happened to read what I wrote, then that was good – and if they found it entertaining, better still.

 

I certainly did not expect to arrive here, at my three hundredth article, having reached over 196,000 views so far, with another sixteen thousand for the “Gatekeepers” videos posted to YouTube. I can only assume that my plan must be working, especially as that word limit was abandoned a long time ago! To anyone that has read or watched my work over the last five years, thank you for your time.

 

The question is, what have I learned in that time? What lessons from five years of nostalgia culture crisis will I take into the next five, provided I get that far?

 

Second logo (January 2017 to May 2017)

 

1. STAY CURIOUS

I am happy I have never restricted my choice of subjects. I may like to find out new things, especially about how ideas, machines and personalities are constructed, but there is a difference between a hobby, and your natural state of being. I cannot imagine a version of me that is simply contented with things being as they are – I would want to know why that was the case.

 

Therefore, my top ten most read and viewed works here, combining views on my website and YouTube, is as varied a list as I could have hoped for, and I am happy with what has appeared. Some weeks may feel like I’m throwing spaghetti against a wall to find a subject, but it is amazing to see what sticks.

 

1. Why BBC Radio had no news to broadcast on Good Friday 1930 (#88 I’m Just Second Hand News, written version posted 29/12/2017, video 24/02/2020)

 

2. My January 2020 walk around the doomed Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre (#217 An Elephant Never Forgets, video posted 15/01/2020)

 

3. The shipwrecked ocean liner SS American Star, formerly America and Australis (#76 Just a Dream and the Wind to Carry Me, written version posted 06/10/2017, video 26/12/2019)

 

4. Looking around The Bridge Shopping Centre, Portsmouth in 2019 (I’m Giving Up on Trying to Sell You Things That You Ain’t Buying, video posted 13/10/2019) 

 

5. How “CheapShow” is the “Goon Show” of podcasts (#234 Welcome to the Cheap Seats, posted 03/05/2020)

 

6. A list of interesting facts about Jeremy Beadle, who built a library onto his house (#26 Watch Out, Beadle’s About, posted 11/11/2016)

 

7. The HP-12C financial calculator, which no-one has stopped buying since 1981 (#200, I Am Adding and Subtracting, I’m Controlling and Composing, video posted 29/09/2019)

 

8. the battle to grow blue roses (#78 I’ll Pick a Rose for My Rose, written article posted 20/10/2017, video 25/05/2020)

 

9. The ornate pleasure dome that is The Trafford Centre, Manchester (#192, Plastic Palace People Sing Silent Songs, written version posted 11/08/2019, video 22/03/2020)

 

10. The ridiculous Sports Direct Giant Calculator (#208 Everyone Seems to Know the Score, video posted 24/11/2019)

 

Is there anything I wish was on the list? Not really, as writing about a particular subject never means I am then done with it. However, if you read what I am calling “The Myra Breckinridge Trilogy” - #149 Come Outside (Shove It) (03/02/2019), #150 I Wouldn’t Tell You Where to Go (10/02/2019), #204 Mama I’m Sure Hard to Handle (27/10/2019) – suggests I am not done with that film yet.

 

Third logo (May 2017 to April 2018)

2. ALL THEY HAVE ARE WORDS

In hindsight, I find it funny that I started this series by picking apart why The Beatles are called “The Beatles,” but it set the tone I wanted. The intention was to point out that, while the true inspiration came from Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and the name of Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang in the 1953 film “The Wild One,” the “official” origin is instead a man coming to John Lennon in a dream, riding a flaming pie, declaring the name of his band will be “The Beatles” with an “a.” It turned out that Yoko Ono pushed for this version, a flippant answer once given by Lennon to a journalist, to be the origin of the band’s name as given in “The Beatles Anthology,” with Sir Paul McCartney admitting, “There are still a lot of things we have to fudge because of compromise. If we don't all agree on a story, somebody has to give in.”

 

Well, I dreamt that I had recorded an album titled “Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers,” and one song on this album will feature me repeatedly singing “all we have are words” – I’m guessing I was incandescent, either in the dream or earlier that day, about being told what to think, by someone who claimed they had all the answers. I will write that song eventually, but after having to reject any comparison I could have made with The Beatles’ flaming pie, I concluded that “Gatekeepers,” as a series, will “be more about me trying to make sense of an issue, why I think the way I do, or why I am expected to think something, rather than coming to a decision. Ultimately, I want this to be a fun exploration of the stories we tell ourselves.” Keeping this in mind would, hopefully, prevent me from being seen as a “gatekeeper” myself.

 

So, the angle and tone for my writing was set by The Beatles. It was at this point I decided to use song lyrics as titles for my work, as a kind of primitive search engine optimisation, although that first title came from David Bowie’s “Word on a Wing”: “Ready to Shape the Scheme of Things.”

 

I did talk again about The Beatles, except to explore how multi-track recording meant John Lennon didn’t have to play his harmonica anymore.

 

Fourth logo (April 2018 to May 2021)

 

3. ALL THEY HAVE ARE WORDS

 

When I began “Gatekeepers,” Barack Obama was still President of the United States, David Cameron was still Prime Minister, the Brexit vote was a few weeks away, and Donald Trump was an also-ran… and then, 51.9% of 72.2% of the British electorate voted to leave the European Union. I don’t give the figures like that to question the legitimacy of the vote, more to point out that the single issue that has dominated British politics, and social life, ever since, was decided in a process where over a quarter of people who were entitled to have their say said nothing at all. I personally believe voting in elections and referendums should be mandatory, so the winner knows they have to answer to their entire electorate.

 

I consider my political position to be slightly left of the middle – many would consider me to the “right” of them, and many more would consider me to be the “left” of them. As a result, I have never found talking about the “Right” and the “Left” to be overly helpful. The last five years pushed politics and people to extremes of opinion and thought, whether that be Labour and Conservative, or Democrat and Republican, and I am left in the middle thinking, “what happened?” 

 

I never feel I need to talk about my own politics, but I feel I have become more informed about what mine is. I just wished that politics could become the background to general life again, instead of carrying the tune.

 

4. ALL THEY HAVE ARE WORDS

I began 2021 by writing several articles about how postmodernism, a branch of arts and philosophy deeply rooted in the 1980s and 1990s, still influences public discourse today. Most notably, the route normally taken is to think that, just because Jacques Derrida deconstructed texts to look at meaning and motive, reality itself must therefore be relative, and you can do and say anything you want. Even worse, deciding you can say what you want, because you know it ultimately doesn’t matter, is dangerous. 

 

No wonder I spent four out of the last five years excoriating Donald Trump. Originally just someone who needed people to explain what he is trying to say, the alternate reality Trump’s words created became so dangerous to the security of his own country that he had to be banned from Twitter. Now a relic of his own era, Trump had to start a website to continue issuing his own statements – anyone can do that (I said, living in a country where a right-wing newspaper columnist became Prime Minister). 

 

Imagine putting ideology over life. Imagine being so strident with your language that it killed people.

 

Fifth logo (from May 2021)
 

5. ALL I HAVE IS WORDS

 

Words can only take you so far. That is why I started making videos as well. 

 

When making a trailer for my YouTube channel I ended it by saying, as a joke, “That’s Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers, the longest name in culture.” The truth is, if I knew this would turn into an ongoing project, I would have chosen a shorter name, no matter how evocative “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” is – I once had to tell someone, “It’s not an affirmation, it’s a website.”

 

Therefore, I am changing things a bit. The new name for this series is “Leigh Spence,” subtitled “dancing with the gatekeepers since 2016” – there will still be “nostalgia culture crisis” in the mix, but that can be taken as read by. The new address for all my work will be www.leighspence.net.

 

I also have a degree in film studies, but YouTube opened the year after I graduated - I wish I had been in on the ground floor of that in 2005, but streaming video never mixed well with dial-up internet. Now that I can fit a video camera approaching TV broadcast quality into my pocket, allowing me to use it like I would a pen, there is simply no excuse to take the leap I need… said someone who made a video questioning if videos need pictures, and presented my thoughts on Ikea plastic plants in 2.39:1 Cinemascope.

 

From now, video will be my focus. I will still post my scripts to read, but they will have been made as videos first. Separate written articles will still appear on occasion.

 

What has cemented this decision is that top ten list. Three of the “articles” were made as videos first, and my walk around the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre, a fifteen-minute video with no voiceover, constructed entirely through editing pictures and captions, is exactly what I should pursue more. That this video is also the second most-viewed “article” of the series makes that decision extremely easy.

 

For this reason, I may not post something new every week – you tend not to be in pre- or post-production on a written article. I also need to work around a full-time job until something causes that to change, like a lottery win. However, more time will produce, I hope, even better work.

 

In short, I owe the confidence I have to the work I have done, and I am the person I am due to that confidence.

 

After five years, and three hundred articles… I think I’ll give myself the week off.

RISE, GO OUTSIDE BITCH [262]

My choice for the song that defines the year 2020 was decided very early on, by the end of March. Furthermore, it was was actually released on 20th December 2019, but reviews raved about it into the new year. “Sick & Panic” is the first release by the electronic music artist Ramona Xavier to use the pseudonym Macintosh Plus since the seminal 2011 album “Floral Shoppe,” a cornerstone of the vaporwave genre. Xavier usually releases under the name Vektroid, so the use of Macintosh Plus this time caused immense anticipation.

For the uninitiated, “Floral Shoppe” is a cut-up of mostly Eighties tracks already drenched in keyboard and saxophone, that are sped up, slowed down, looped and distorted, giving the impression that you have unearthed a cassette tape with no known history, and the tape itself is worn and ragged. The standout track is “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー" (“Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing”) – Japanese text is a big feature in vaporwave song titles and album design – which spins out the first ninety seconds of the Diana Ross album track “It’s Your Move” into a seven minute meditation on the idea that time is running out, with the line “I'm giving up on trying to sell you things that you ain't buying” rendered iconic. Vaporwave is a genre defined by hauntology, a longing for a future that never came, and wherever that future went, “Floral Shoppe” is what it left.

In comparison, “Sick & Panic,” released as the precursor to a new Macintosh Plus album later in 2020, is like playing the cassette found stuck inside an old Sony Walkman that was itself found in the back room of an abandoned branch of Currys, after they moved out of the town centre. It gets stuck, it stutters, it has snatches of lyrics, and some melody comes up that may sound familiar, but it is then distorted and enveloped back into itself. Classical vaporwave has to smash through modern EDM noise first. It could be dismissed as noise – twelve and a half minutes of noise, in the same way that The Beatles’ “Revolution No. 9” is eight and a half minutes of noise.

You may start to pick out patterns, because that is how the mind works, but that is only so you can find a hook, an anchor, something to hold. The choppy lyrics, like “Face, face, don't, face” and “Goes, goes get you,” will suddenly make a whole sentence: “I don’t need my body anymore” and “go outside bitch.” The song’s cover art, which sends flying the Apollonian bust from the original “Floral Shoppe” cover, reads, “Rise From Your Grave.” When the drum machine and MIDI sampled keyboard kick in at the half-way mark, it is almost comforting, but the cosy nostalgia that vaporwave hopes to evoke is quickly snatched away again, but this is not the time for that.

Why “Sick & Panic” sounds the way it does may not truly make perfect sense until the rest of the album is released, but it sounds like something unknown is about to burst, and you are being implored to fight its effects. The two-word description of the track on Xavier’s Bandcamp page (https://vektroid.bandcamp.com) is “NO WAR” – from your perspective, you have either not seen the war coming, or you have to start picking which battle to fight. This is vaporwave designed to agitate.

It would have been easy enough to choose “Sick & Panic” as my song of 2020 based solely on the title, but when 2020 is finally talked about in the past tense, it will be as a difficult year to have lived through, the world itself having changed, and with the future having finally arrived. Making sense of the noise is like brushing your teeth these days.

WHO DO YOU LOVE? IS IT ME BABE? IS IT HIM NOW? [259]

With my tastes in music saturated with synthesisers, Eric Clapton rarely makes my playlist, but I always make an exception for “Behind the Mask,” released in 1987. It is a rare Clapton song where the main drive is the synth chords and powerful drums, his own guitar playing used for extra flourish here, but the production is tight, and the call-and-response chorus, with the backing singers seemingly the ones in charge, is immensely effective.

I had never questioned where “Behind the Mask” came from, letting it stand by itself, but having stumbled across its origin, I am not only far more informed, I have a new favourite version of it too.

Two weeks ago, the YouTube algorithm suggested I listen to “Rydeen,” by the Japanese electronic group Yellow Magic Orchestra, itself sounding like a splinter group of the Electric Light Orchestra. I was already listening to music from a different Japanese group, the jazz fusion band Casiopea –in particular the tracks “Space Road,” “Midnight Rendezvous” and “Swallow,” all from their 1979 debut album, practically inspiring computer game music for the following decade – but “Rydeen” came up after its use in a different video I had watched. Yellow Magic Orchestra were influenced by Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, but their use of synthesisers, sequencers and drum machines as a mainstream pop group at this still-early stage predated the development of synth pop and techno music in the 1980s.

Their eponymous first album, from 1978, sold well in the United States, but their second, 1979’s “Solid State Survivor,” on which “Rydeen” is found, sold two million copies worldwide. In Japan, “YMO” were as popular as when Beatlemania hit the US in the 1960s, even though they initially started as a joke band satirising Western ideas of “exotic,” “Oriental” Japanese music – a sarcastic cover of Martin Denny’s “Firecracker” ironically became a major hit in its own right, reaching number 60 in the US Billboard singles chart, and number 17 in the UK chart, before sampled by everyone from Afrika Bambaataa and 808 State to De La Soul and Jennifer Lopez (for the song “I’m Real”).

Naturally, I ordered a copy of “Solid State Survivor,” and have been obsessed with “Technopolis” and “Absolute Ego Dance,” but noticed it also had a track titled “Behind the Mask.” It could be a different song – Fleetwood Mac released a song and album named “Behind the Mask” in 1990 – but when I heard it begin, it sounded like a simpler, electronic version, with only one side of the chorus sung, using a vocoder. Like the version of The Beatles’ “Day Tripper” on the album, until I realised the dates didn’t match up.

The basic structure and melody of “Behind the Mask” was written in 1978 by YMO member Ryuichi Sakamoto for a TV commercial, advertising Seiko watches. (I was unable to find the original ad for myself, as searching “1978 Japan Seiko watch commercial” only brings up a separate ad starring Kate Bush, the watches intercut with her dancing and singing of “Them Heavy People”.) This was developed into a full song after YMO was formed, with the British lyricist Chris Mosdell adding verses inspired by Japanese Noh masks, and by the W.B. Yeats poem “The Mask”. Mosdell has talked about the lyrics representing a society that is very impersonal and controlled, with the immobile mask presenting a cold, unemotional state, but Japanese Noh theatre itself relies on codified gesture and expression, the traditional masks presenting different moods depending on how they are tilted.

(I must mention at this point that the Ryuichi Sakamoto I mentioned above is the same one that, as an actor, appeared alongside David Bowie and Tom Conti in the film “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” in addition to writing its score – he also wrote the music for “The Revenant” and “The Last Emperor,” for which he won an Academy Award.)

The YMO version of “Behind the Mask” was released as a single in the UK in 1980, and was included on the US and European version of “×∞Multiplies,” released there as the second YMO album instead of “Solid State Survivor.” Record producer Quincy Jones heard it, and shared it with the singer whose next album he was producing. In an alternate world, “Behind the Mask” would have been a song on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the biggest-selling album of all time, and one of the most culturally-significant albums ever made, but a failure to agree over royalties, prompted by the extra lyrics and melody written by Jackson meant it was not included.

The Jackson lyrics turn what was a meditation on emotion – “Is it me, is it you / Behind this mask, I ask / Is it me, is it you / Who wears another face” – into a storyline about someone spurned by a duplicitous lover, hiding behind a mask, with lines like, “sit behind the mask where you control your world,” and “camouflage the truth, indulge your fantasy.” The second verse of Mosdell’s lyrics are adapted into a chorus that makes clear how the meaning has been changed:

Mosdell version: “There is nothing in your eyes / That marks where you cried / All is blank, all is blind / Dead inside, the inner mind”

Jackson version: “There is nothing in your eyes, that's the way you cry, girl / All is grand, all is bright, you're just studying my mind”

It is clear that the disagreement over the Jackson version was purely contractual: Ryuichi Sakamoto released his own version in 1987, with Jackson’s lyrics sung by Bernard Fowler, in an arrangement ironically rockier sounding than Eric Clapton’s version. Jackson had recorded his lyrics, remaining unreleased until 2010’s posthumous album “Michael,” where a new arrangement of the music, mixing in YMO’s original version, was overlaid with the original 1982 track.

The nearest we have to what the original Jackson version could have sounded like is found on the 1984 album “Pulse” by Greg Phillinganes, a musician that has performed with Stevie Wonder, Laura Brannigan, Bruno Mars, George Benson, Kenny Loggins, and Michael Jackson and The Jacksons, working with them on every album from 1978 onwards, the highlight of which was creating every keyboard part on the song “Thriller,” from the opening chords, the base lines, and the pipe organ accompanying Vincent Price. Phillinganes affects a couple of Jackson’s signature sounds, but his playing skills is reflected in what is still an entirely electronic score, singing against a vocoder in the chorus.

Greg Phillinganes also plays keyboards on Eric Clapton’s version of “Behind the Mask,” having introduced the song to him, although you can hear more “real” sounds – the vocoder has been replaced with backing singers, one of which is the song’s producer Phil Collins, whose tight drumming is essentially replicating a programmed machine. As mentioned, this version remains led by synthesisers, whereas the Ryuichi Sakamoto / Bernard Fowler version relegates them to playing background chords behind a fuzzy guitar lead. Sakamoto would make a further version with Yellow Magic Orchestra, again using Jackson’s lyrics, this time sung by a UK electro-pop group, and released on a 1993 EP titled “YMO Versus The Human League”. This time around, it sounds like a standard UK dance song from 1993, and even though YMO were involved, there is nothing in the recording to distinguish it from a Human League song of the time, especially when you compare it to their later hit “Tell Me When”.

Of the seven versions of “Behind the Mask” I have now heard, picking a favourite involves splitting it two ways: the original Yellow Magic Orchestra version from “Solid State Survivor,” is the best of all, and Greg Phillinganes’ version is the best that uses Michael Jackson’s additional lyrics, because it is closer musically to the YMO original. Even better, Yellow Magic Orchestra has emerged as a favourite band with me, although their version of Archie Bell & The Drells’ “Tighten Up,” retitled “Tighten Up (Japanese Gentlemen Stand Up Please!)” is a bit of an acquired taste.

THE FEELING IS GROWING, SO LET’S KEEP IT GOING [238]

There exists a song, released in 1968, where the chorus is all about bringing everyone together, and pushing the country forward, but the verses talk of working half an hour longer each day without extra pay, buying British cars and going on holiday in Blackpool. Sung by the all-round entertainer Bruce Forsyth, and written by Petula Clark’s usual songwriters Tony Hatch & Jackie Trent, it is titled “I’m Backing Britain.”

With that title, the song could have been the relic of a Government campaign fronted by Forsyth. It sounds like the essence of Matt Monro’s “We’re Gonna Change the World” has been synthesised and condensed, with the satire removed, and I can’t imagine the British public went along with what was being asked of them. It turns out the campaign that mounted behind the slogan disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared, in a matter of weeks.

“I’m Backing Britain” snowballed from the efforts of five company secretaries working for a heating and ventilation company in Surbiton: the Colt Group, whose headquarters are now based alongside their main factory in Waterlooville, were instrumental in the post-war rebuilding effort, designing and constructing ventilation systems for prefabricated houses that removed the need to build fireplaces. The secretaries - Christine French, Carol Ann Fry, Brenda Mumford, Joan Southwell and Valerie White – received a memo from the company’s marketing director, Fred Price, that gave them the idea of starting work half an hour early each day, to boost productivity. The Surbiton head office voted to begin on 29^th December 1967, two days after the memo was written. The Waterlooville factory later decided to work their extra half hour at the end of the day. As other companies took up the idea after hearing about it over the following weekend, the five Colt secretaries, along with Alan O’Hea, the company’s managing director, created a slogan, “I’m Backing Britain,” and placed an order for a hundred thousand badges to hand out to other businesses. At this point, it had only just reached New Year’s Day 1968.

The single was pressed in different places, and Bruce 

Forsyth's surname was spelt incorrectly on all of them.

If the Government weren’t planning a campaign to increase productivity, they needed one, and approved of the one served up for them. Fred Price’s 27^th December memo, mainly a company progress report, also paraphrased a letter published in “The Times” two weeks earlier, in which the MP John Boyd-Carpenter suggested how the United Kingdom could reduce the massive deficit created by the gap between imports and exports, which had led to the devaluation of the Pound. Boyd-Carpenter’s solution was to suggest the first Saturday morning of the month could be used to set an example, using the equipment that would have remained idle over the weekend. Price modified this to suggest an extra half-day is added to the working week, before the Colt secretaries chose to make their existing work days longer instead. In response to the growing sentiment, a press conference attended by Britain’s three main political parties backed “I’m Backing Britain” on 5^th January 1968, one week after Colt’s longer days began.


The campaign was a gift to the media, which spread it further. The “Daily Express” ran a story on the Colt secretaries on 30^thDecember, while the “Daily Mirror” ran editorials welcoming the campaign from 3^rdJanuary, the same day an advertisement in “The Times” was run by an ad agency offering their spare time to create ads for the campaign. This was when Pye Records stepped in: the promotional record made by Tony Hatch, Jackie Trent and Bruce Forsyth, who reduced their usual fees to participate, was released on 8^thJanuary, costing two thirds of the usual cost of a seven-inch single. However, “I’m Backing Britain” never charted, selling fewer than eight thousand copies. The record was made so quickly the singer’s surname was misspelt as “Forsythe” on the label. 

The campaign looked bizarre, as people suddenly began waving their flag for their country, often literally with flags supplied by the campaign’s office, but it became uncomfortable for some. It insinuated that people were not being as productive as they could be, and should work longer, without compensation, to make up for that fault. Unions were upset by this, but the fervour generated by the campaign meant they could be seen as obstructing patriotism. The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had already criticised people who complained that others were not pulling their weight in a speech on 8^thJanuary, only three days after the Government became involved.


The campaign began to unravel during February. On 12^thFebruary, workers at Colt voted to return to their standard work schedule – the unions present there had been strained, and the Colt secretaries ironically had their work interrupted by their running the campaign. Only three days earlier, the Post Office had started using an “I’m Backing Britain” postmark on millions of letters, stopping on 29^th February. Colt had passed on the running of the campaign to the Industrial Group (now the Work Foundation) during January, but when it was wound up, at the end of September, they were only sending out promotional material. The MP and book publisher Robert Maxwell attempted a concurrent “Buy Britain” campaign from the outset, later amended to “Sell British, Help Britain, Help Yourself,” but the protectionist campaign unravelled when it was discovered his promotional T-shirts were made in Portugal.


By 1969, “I’m Backing Britain” was forgotten as a campaign, leaving relics strewn about the place, especially the badges and the Bruce Forsyth song, which can be found on eBay. The Beatles song “Back in the USSR” originally began as a satire of the campaign, before being refocussed following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czecholslovakia. However, for a campaign later derided as an over-patriotic aberration, it has an ironic link to “Dad’s Army”: the first episode, filmed on 15^th April 1968, and broadcast on 31^stJuly, begins in “the present day,” with Captain Mainwaring as chairman of Walmington-on-Sea’s “I’m Backing Britain” campaign, reminding viewers of a time when everyone backed Britain. The studio audience then laughed loudly as the Nazi arrows in the opening titles moved Britain back home, puncturing the hubris.

"Made in New Zealand"

AND ALL I HAVE TO DO IS ACT NATURALLY [194]

For the life of me, I cannot remember how I tripped up on this cartoon, but here it is, it exists, and I must now deal with that fact: the Beatles had their own Saturday morning cartoon series in the United States, made from 1965 to 1967, and it looks bloody awful.

The idea for “The Beatles” came from Al Brodax, a TV producer with a track record of developing new programme formats who, in 1960, joined King Features Syndicate, a company which syndicates content to newspapers like columns, puzzles and games, and comic strips. “Popeye” was the first of their strips to get a new series on television, with Brodax overseeing 220 new shorts between 1960 and 1962 – these are the ones where Bluto was renamed “Brutus,” when they thought they didn’t own the character, but actually did. These were followed with a revival of “Krazy Kat,” “Beetle Bailey” and “Snuffy Smith,” but seeing The Beatles perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show” defined the rest of Brodax’s career.

Unfortunately, the animation style of “The Beatles” is mired in the funk of limited animation that affected the reputation of Brodax’s productions of “Popeye” and “Krazy Kat.” The head of animation for the series, George Dunning, had experience in using limited animation to great stylistic effect when working for the famed animation company UPA - they of “Gerald McBoing-Boing” and “Mr. Magoo” - but their modernist ambitions were traded here for a more realist style that, in the face of the glut of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, looks cheap, jerky, and arguably unfinished.

The storylines themselves are, well, not really there: each half-hour show is built out of a number of 5-6 minutes shorts, again much like “Popeye” and “Krazy Kat,” and are animated around a song. The Beatles arrive somewhere, and things happen – John fights a bullfighter to “When I Saw Her Standing There,” while the band are shown where leprechauns keep their gold to “Do You Want to Know a Secret.” Characterisation was also kept simple: John was the squared-jawed leader, Paul his pretty deputy, George is dry and witty (with a slightly Irish accent), and Ringo is as dopey as hell. Brian Epstein even made an appearance in one episode, but he was drawn to look like Al Brodax. 

The Beatles did not provide their voices: Paul Frees, of “Rocky & Bullwinkle,” voiced John and Paul, while the British comedy actor Lance Percival took George and Ringo. The band themselves originally disliked the series, but it appeared to grow on them later. What didn’t help was how the series froze them in time as lovable mop-tops in navy blue suits, especially as their music and style developed incredibly quickly: once reruns of the series had ended in 1969, “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “The White Album” and “Abbey Road” had been released, and their early work is almost that of a different band. What is more, the network showing the cartoon, ABC, now had their own legally distinguishable version, named “The Monkees.” 

Giving Al Brodax and George Dunning the last film of The Beatles’ contract with United Artists would have been an admission that they simply did not care what was produced – good thing that, without the confines of TV animation, they delivered “Yellow Submarine” instead.

MAN, THEY WERE BLOWING LIKE A HURRICANE [152]

These days, if a harmonica is ever heard in a new pop song, it is mainly because Stevie Wonder is involved, but with the way he plays it, you always know it’s him. However, as synonymous with them as he is, no Wonder-branded harmonica has been offered for sale by Hohner, the leading maker of the instrument, which have produced harmonicas using the names of Bob Dylan, Toots Thielemans (who performed the title songs of both “Midnight Cowboy” and “Sesame Street”) and Larry Adler (who did the same for the film “Genevieve”). That covers the harmonica players most people can name, apart from one.

When I found out that Hohner make John Lennon harmonicas, I was surprised. Wasn’t this the same John Lennon who stopped using one in The Beatles because he said it became too much of a gimmick? The ability to add an extra layer to your band’s sound without employing an extra member, unlike with a keyboard or saxophone, must have been a significant benefit from the start - Lennon’s uncle had taught him to play the harmonica as a child, and producer George Martin was partial to the sound of the instrument. However, no Beatles song after 1964 featured one prominently, and only sixteen of their songs use one at all, but it didn’t stop Hohner licensing the band’s image to package their harmonicas at the time – no reference to the band was mentioned on the instrument themselves, just on what they came in.

The inclusion of a harmonica in “Love Me Do,” influenced by the pop charts while the song was being recorded in 1962 - particularly “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel, and Frank Ifield’s “I Remember You” – led to a total of four songs on the “Please Please Me” album featuring one, the others being the title track, “Chains,” and “There’s a Place.” Harmonicas also featured on “Little Child” from the “With the Beatles” album, the single-only release “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and B-sides “I’ll Get You” and “Thank You Girl.” The Beatles will also use one when performing the songs “Clarabella” and “Got to Find My Baby” on BBC radio.

In all these cases, The Beatles are essentially recording their songs as if they were playing them live – this would have been especially true on the BBC performances, and on the “Please Please Me” album, most of which was famously recorded in a single day. With only twin-track tape recording available, enough to make a stereo version of your performance, any augmentation of the band’s sound will have to be made at the same time. However, from 1963’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and from “A Hard Day’s Night” onwards, four-track recording allowed the band to build their sound in different ways, overdubbing voices and guitars, instead of using other instruments.

Only two songs recorded in 1964 will use harmonica: “I Should Have Known Better,” from “A Hard Day’s Night,” and “I’m a Loser” from “Beatles for Sale,” the “gimmick” having run its course. It is interesting that Bob Dylan is cited as an influence in the writing of “I Should Have Known Better,” but this was for how Dylan’s lyrics inspired a more meaningful and thoughtful direction, but the increasing use of harmonica in what was still being termed as folk music probably also caused the band to drop it themselves – the fact that John Lennon broke into laughter while recording Take 2 of the song couldn’t have helped either.

The last four Beatles songs that use harmonica would not come until 1967, by which point the band had stopped touring, and their main instrument became the studio. With their palette of overdubbing sounds, eventually increasing from four to eight tracks at a time, led to the arrangements for “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” “Rocky Raccoon, “All Together Now,” and the up-down-up-down bass of “Fool on the Hill” being supported by a very familiar hum amongst the sitars, piccolo trumpets and strings.

The Hohner signature harmonica collection also includes Steven Tyler and Ozzy Osbourne – I must have missed all their songs that used one.