The first time I heard the Beatles on vinyl, I didn’t think – oh that’s a good job. I must get a job like that. I did’t plan a career, I felt euphoria. A total romance in my head filled with vivid imagery and sound.
The Beatles recorded that first album Please Please Me in a day and it shows how tight they were as a band. How those years of hammering out rock n roll in Hamburg and Liverpool for hours at a time, aided with speed and daydreams, must have trained them. So I guess that Hamburg period in the early 60s was their below minimum wage work experience before the proper career. Is that right?
Historically, the four future pop heroes had poor accommodation in Hamburg. Sharing bunks, or was it beds, in a sweaty room above a cinema. Skinny teenagers exchanging their talent for a laugh and hopes. It reminds me of the job I once did in a British Youth Hostel sleeping in a cold attic out on the hills. With my bed on the floor. Getting up for 6.30am kitchen shifts and cooking stinky raw bacon in huge metal trays. I thought the bacon was a fellow worker’s morning breath at first.
The Beatles must have met a tight fisted business owner in Hamburg happy to exploit the energy and enthusiasm of young musicians to amuse drunk punters in Germany. Like UK pubs do in 2025. Giving them a chance as musical interns.
My point is that listening to music, playing music, writing music and drifting on that plain of joy which transcends language, is different from sitting on a computer in a stuffy office. Looking at a computer in a stuffy office hurts my eyes and gives me headaches for one.
It’s not like a boring mundane job with set hours. At least I hoped, when I first picked up a guitar, that it never would become like that. Making a product that sells and promoting it with marketable content. Like a machine that can mimic soul but isn’t soul.
Personally I didn’t achieve international fame with my songs but I did gel with a good, tight band playing original music to a small numbers of fans in Manchester in crowded rooms. I can tell you it felt more emotionally liberating than cooking bacon or writing advertising features in an office.
I remember the first time I learnt a Beatles song with a band and how it transformed and deepened my respect for them. The moment we worked out Help and Ticket to Ride we were awestruck. The way the timing and the sounds created an effect on the human physiology. The instinctive crafted journey of a three minute pop tune as we followed along with the learning process.
I sang it with a female vocalist who had perfect pitch and working out harmonies was our thing. Tight harmonies. The whole thing came to life like a sabre toothed tiger genetically rejuvinated from a DNA sample. What a feeling!
We still preferred playing my songs. Beatles songs belonged to them. Our songs belonged to us.
Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, The Velvet Underground, the Everly Brothers, my first loves in music, along with 1980s British ska and reagge, convinced me that music was better than working in a shop. At least, listening to music was better than working in a shop or going to school and sitting in a maths lesson.
The whole sensation of music as free thinking, music as sex and rebellion, music as physical liberation for the stifled body and mind, arrived in the form of a film character Jimmy. Jimmy (played by Phil Daniels) was the main character in the film version of the Who’s Quadrophenia in 1979.
In one scene Jimmy decides he’s had enough of the bullying pompous middle aged managers at the office where he works. In one fabulous spluttering confrontation he lists of the office stationery he uses for his menial tasks and tells his boss where to stick it. Way to go Jimmy.
Music isn’t a job. Music isn’t work. Music is for dreaming.
The Music Workers Diary 