7 August 1964
Sgt Pepper is Temple Bar ’60s. Revolver is cold and chippy. Rubber Soul has ‘Run For Your Life’. Abbey Road is ’70s soft rock. The White Album is bloated. My favourite Beatles album is A Hard Day’s Night.
Handily, its title track is a perfect overture for the album. ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ starts with a starburst statement chord, then bottles the lightning of Beatlemania, and ends with a jangling arpeggio that invents The Byrds. (Could they have made better use of that inventing-folk-rock pulse of creativity by instead writing a better second verse than rhyming “things” with “everything”? It’s easy for us to be wise after the event.) Side one of the album, for those of you gone back to vinyl or even tape, similarly buzzes with US-conquering excitement before side two captures their evolutionary process: the jaded ‘Things We Said Today’ and wistful ‘I’ll Be Back’ are sumptuous 1964 tasters of their mature, thoughtful ’65-66 songwriting.
If you know your Beatles, you’ll recall that the phrase “a hard day’s night” is a Ringo-ism, the best part of the exceedingly likeable movie is when Ringo goes off on his own for an extended sequence of sight gags and pathos, and the title track is jet-propelled by Ringo’s barrelling rhythm and splashy cymbals. The coolest Beatle is Ringo: fact.
