Cities Made of Song, 1964

A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles

“But when I get home to you I find the things that you do / Will make me feel alright”

I’m not too proud to admit it. Long before I first saw a TARDIS on-screen, my British import of choice was the Beatles. I was quite the little fanatic, memorizing the discography and all, at least until embarrassment and teenagehood prevailed and sent me on my merry way, trying to forget I ever liked them at all. In adulthood I find that embarrassment is overrated, so pshaw to that. It turns out that I still like them after all.

I cheekily avoided mentioning the group at all for the first “Cities Made of Song” entry, even though they were all over the place in 1963. On 22 November of that year, the day Kennedy died and the day before Who premiered, they dropped their second major album, “With the Beatles”, whose popularity would at last make them a hit across the Atlantic. They landed at recently renamed JFK Airport in New York City on 7 February 1964, the day before The Edge of Destruction aired, to record crowds, and soon brought 73 million viewers (!) to the Ed Sullivan Show to see them perform live.

Needless to say, they were a hit, taking the world by storm in a way which no British pop band had before. Beatlemania and Dalekmania coincided, though the former involved a good deal more screaming fans than the latter. And in the midst of all this, the Beatles dropped their third LP, A Hard Day’s Night, which frankly blows the last out of the water. Recorded only a few months after their last studio album, A Hard Day’s Night immediately has a different sound to With the Beatles, a more slick pop-music tint to the tracks than the more straightforward rock and roll on the last. This rapid maturation of the Beatles’ music would continue; bear in mind that only 17 months after this release, they were recording Rubber Soul.

This LP is interesting in the fact that it’s actually a soundtrack for the movie of the same name, at least on its ‘A’ side. Filmed concurrently with the production of Marco Polo and The Keys of Marinus, and released during the broadcast of The Sensorites, the film quickly earned considerable critical praise as well as financial success, and for pretty good reason. Because it’s totally hilarious. One gets the sense that the screenplay writer spent a lot of time around the Beatles, because the jokes match their individual senses of humor very closely. John’s “snorting a bottle of Coke” gag had me in stitches. Wilfrid Brambell as Paul’s grandfather is a riot in pretty much every scene he’s in, too.

All throughout, too, there’s a wonderful sense of self-awareness not unlike the honesty with its limitations that Doctor Who seems to display during this period too, a simple self-effacing humor which makes the film a lot more than just a pop music money grab. All throughout the Beatles are portrayed faithfully as a quartet of young men who can’t quite understand how they got so big, and prefer having fun to the harrying adulation of fans and the harsh demands of their schedule. Small wonder that, within two years of this, they’d stopped touring altogether. When a contemporary critic calls A Hard Day’s Night the “Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals”, it’s only slightly hyperbolic. It comes with my recommendation. Try as I did, though, my straw-grasping didn’t identify anyone working on the film, whether cast or crew, as anyone who ended up working on Doctor Who. If anyone else can, I’ll happily resign and turn in my nerd card. As interesting asides, though, Patty Boyd, future wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton, who inspired “Something” and “Layla”, two of the greatest love songs ever written, appears as an extra. So does Phil Collins, whose career with Genesis will probably prompt me to revisit him a few “Cities Made of Song” installments down the line.

In turning to the music itself here (how I yammer on), I actually cheat a little in technically focusing on one song as is this segment’s remit, but at the same time covering the entirety of the album too. Because it’s hard to just love one song here; side ‘A’ of the LP is packed with instant classics, from the title track to “I Should Have Known Better”, “If I Fell”, “And I Love Her”, and “Can’t Buy Me Love”. I’m also quite partial to “Tell Me Why”, since I’m a sucker for anything in which all three of the Beatles’ best voices harmonize; sorry, Ringo. The obverse side, i.e. that which isn’t the soundtrack for the film, doesn’t really match the first. It has, erm, “Any Time at All”? I like “Things We Said Today” and “I’ll Be Back” well enough, but neither are classics, and a lot of side ‘B’ is just filler.

When the time came to pick just one to headline this installment, though, I settled on the namesake track, because A.) it’s in the title and B.) it’s flippin’ fantastic. The famous opening chord is a great stinger to open the song, which swift proves to be a real toe-tapper. There’s nothing quite like the bizarre, sped-up guitar solo backed by piano near its middle, either. In its lyrics, it’s about relief from weariness, an expression of simple joy and catharsis. And aside from that, it’s really not that deep. I can’t make a commentary on the Cold War politics of the day like I did with the last, because it’s not that type of song. It’s pop music at its simplest and most enjoyable, and listening to it still helps to take a load off, 54 years later.

Rock on.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 20 June 2018.)