“After what must have been an interminable amount of time, my parents just said: ‘Here, kid, listen to music.’ And there was no going back.” The 10-year-old borrowed Nicholas Schaffner’s The Boys from Liverpool from the library and spent the next few weeks reading (and re-reading) the book, “boring all of my friends and family” by peppering them with Beatles facts. “Being the dorky kid I was, rather than listening to the music, I decided it was going to be a research project,” she says. “It is in my mind a more expansive and inclusive version of the Beatles than the band that I grew up hearing on the TV as a kid.”ĭr Holly Tessler vividly recalls hearing news reports on John Lennon’s 1980 murder, although she didn’t know who the musician was at the time. “My version of the Beatles wrote short and snappy love songs, experimented with every genre possible and was clear about the cultures they were influenced by,” she says. Such sonic leeway shaped the music Phillips makes in the punk band Big Joanie – she references both the White Album’s “experimental song structures” and the taut songcraft of the Beatles’ “earlier, pop-centric albums” – and helped her cement a different perception of the band. View image in fullscreen Stephanie Phillips of punk band Big Joanie. Coming to the band’s music in her 20s via noisier covers by American bands such as Pixies and Throwing Muses “gave the Beatles this alternative sheen and almost made them sound like an obscure underground cult band,” she says. “As a young person who wanted to develop my own sense of self, it almost felt overwhelming,” she says. Growing up in the UK, musician and author Stephanie Phillips was struck by the Beatles’ cultural omnipresence. “It’s really been a portal into different interests.” As Geffen writes: “A girl could invest her desire in the band, but she could also discover herself there.”ĭecades later, the Beatles’ ability to spark curiosity persists across generations. The book grew out of Feldman-Barrett’s lifelong appreciation for a band that opened her eyes to other subjects, such as “British history, the interest in eastern spirituality in the 1960s”, she says. It delves into lesser-covered topics ripe for analysis (such as how the Beatles influenced female musicians) and takes a fresh look at Beatlemania, the women of the Beatles’ universe and fan relationships with the band. “The legacy of the ‘hysterical’ female Beatles fan is such that it has, I believe, made a good amount of women reluctant to write about the Beatles until more recently.”įeldman-Barrett’s book is a comprehensive corrective to outdated modes of thinking. “Female scholars who are also fans of the Beatles still run the risk of being perceived as more of a fan than as an authoritative voice,” says Dr Christine Feldman-Barrett, a senior lecturer in sociology at Griffith University and author of last year’s A Women’s History of the Beatles. Each group forged its identity in relation to the other.” Yet the narrow stereotype of a Beatles fan that crystallised during the 1960s – think a teenage girl screaming over the band because they’re so cute – lingers. As critic Sasha Geffen writes in Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary: “Without Beatles girls, there’s no Beatles. “Media coverage of the band’s evolution has depicted women as bystanders, rendering our stories of the music’s impact inferior or merely tied to fandom.”Īrdent Beatles fandom isn’t always viewed in a positive light, despite how vital it was to the band’s success. Yet in recent years more scholars, journalists, musicians and podcasters are challenging conventional Beatles narratives and expanding who gets to lead conversations around the band. “For a generation X woman coming up in the 1990s, the odds of placing a Beatles-related story or interview at a major publication felt like 100-1,” says music journalist Kristi York Wooten. The Beatles have profoundly shaped and enriched the lives of women, but the literature, journalism and critical scholarship – with a few notable exceptions – tends to focus disproportionately on how men experience and appreciate the band and its music. But Mitchell’s memoir is one of the few Beatles books written by a woman in the 60 years since they released their debut single. Most notably, Paul McCartney’s bestselling The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present arrived weeks after The Beatles: Get Back, a companion piece to Peter Jackson’s epic-length documentary. My Ticket to Ride is far from the only Beatles book released last year. View image in fullscreen The Beatles in February 1964.
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