No Rock And Roll Fun

LOOK, WE DO THE BEATLES TOO: Thanks to 6Music playing Let It Be - Naked, we've heard most of an album we really wanted to avoid at all costs; and my, isn't it rubbish? I suppose the one piece of soothing balm in its release is that it gives Phil Spector something to plea bargain with - having had to use every sinew to make silk purses out of the plinky-plonky Winifred Atwell goes pub rock that was apparently McCartney's vision, who'd be prepared to reject any claims of diminished responsibility? It's a miracle he wasn't at the top of a bell tower twenty years ago with a small calibre rifle.

The Guardian's Northerner mailout has a story about The Beatles this week:

Finally, a little sandwich-bite of popular culture now, and a heart-warming one for old veterans of the 1960s like myself. Browsing the Beatles' web pages of the Liverpool Echo is like having a warm, nostalgic bath. The electronic air is even redolent of all those very relaxed Debates about Everything we had in flower-power days. For example, the Echo's poll on the absorbing question: "Should the Eleanor Rigby statue to moved to a more prominent position in Liverpool?' is almost exactly, comfortingly divided: Yes 49.36%, No: 50.64%. There's a paradigm of a good rambling topic for debate after which nothing need be done. But we weren't entirely passive in those sunny days, as a different Echo, the one in Sunderland, reports.
Its columnist John Wearmouth is looking for Carol Dryden, a local girl who was 12 at the height of Beatlemania and posted herself to the group in a tea chest, snugly lined with blankets and equipped with a flask for the trip. Postal problems were not unknown then, as now, and she unfortunately ended up in a depot at Crewe where her taps - the flask being empty and the blankets manky - got her let out. Where is she now, asks John Wearmouth, an appeal which the Northerner happily amplifies. If she still has her tea chest, the Beatles museum in Liverpool will surely feature it in the coming European Capital of Culture festivities.