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Hi!  New to the forum, thank yo for having me, etc…

I’m from Nottingham, UK and am still alive.  I have been into the Beatles since I was to young to remember.  I’m an 80s child, so relied on my very tolerant parents pumping them for information about the 60s and feeding my habit by buying me the cassettes while I was growing up.  It was a great way to meet my parents as people, actually, talking about their earlier lives before I came along and ruined their fun.  Mum’s favourite album was Rubber Soul ; Dad’s was Abbey Road , though as a Hendrix/Clapton fan he liked the non-McCartney bits of the White Album too.

Loving the Beatles was deeply uncool when I got into them, it wasn’t really until 94 when Britpop came about and made them acceptable again.  (I’m also a Dr Who fan and was similarly mocked – I have a lifelong talent for choosing the least cool, hottest things to be fans of before they become cool and hot again.  Also, why do Cool and Hot mean the same thing in this context?)  The Beatles were seriously passe until the mid-90s, it was the kind of thing you didn’t talk about and kept at home which seems mad now but is true.  

I learned how to use my parent’s record player and put Let It Be on every day when I came home from school.  It was the only album they had, so it was the only one I listened to.  I loved it, and am probably the first person in the world who’s gateway album is LIB .  

The real moment I became a fan though is when I got Revolver one Christmas.  I put the cassette in my walkman and thought it was broken, with the warped “Ooone, Teo, Free, Faw” count in to Taxman .  And when I heard Tomorrow Never Knows I was completely electrified.  Nothing sounded like that as far as I was concerned (until the Chemical Brothers made Setting Sun a few years later, the best homage to the Beatles spirit Britpop ever produced).  I actually asked my Mum if the tape was faulty because of Taxman and Tomorrow Never Knows , and I bet that’s what a lot of people in the 60s thought about their records too.  I don’t think you need to have been alive in the 60s to have your perception altered by The Beatles, despite what Ian MacDonald might have you think.

I became a Beatles addict just in time for all the Anthology business.  I remember an embarassing car journey with my parents, my Dad taking the p*** out of Anthology 1 the whole way through (understandably, really, but I can’t hear ‘In Spite Of All The Danger without my toes curling.  To be fair, I bet the Beatles feel/felt the same.)  

I’m now married to a woman who likes to be controversial by saying ‘The Beatles are droney’, but admits to liking most of the songs when she actually listens to them.  I sing songs from With The Beatles to our baby to stop him from crying, and when that fails I just play the album on my phone and leave it in his basket.  He doesn’t seem to have a preference to mono or stereo but I’m still trying to figure that one out myself.

Anyway, that’s quite a long-winded way of saying hello, but if you’ve got this far – hello!

Ta for the welcomes!

@KaleidoscopeMusic , Ian MacDonald wrote a book on the Beatles called ‘Revolution In The Head’.  I was being a bit facetious – It’s actually very good and I’d heartily recommend, but one of the things he writes is “for those unfortunate enough not to be alive in the 60s it is impossible to explain blah blah blah”, which always rankles for a younger personage such as myself (32 is still young, yeah?). I think that’s because I believe that unlike most 60s bands the Beatles’ music by and large transcends its time and it is completely possible to understand without having have to have been there.  

It probably rankles a bit because I admit I would have loved to have been there at the time and don’t like to have my face rubbed in it!

From what I gather the Beatles were a bit of a kicking stool in Thatcherite/Regan era 80s, with ‘the 60s’ representing everything that market force capitalism doesn’t.  It was receding a bit in the 90s, but they were still deeply unfashionable, which is funny considering Acid House and the 2nd Summer of Love was kicking off at the time.  (I was 10-11 and didn’t attend many raves).  It wasn’t really until Britpop bands, especially Oasis came to the fore and cited The Beatles as a major influence (because that really needed spelling out). 

I’ll shut up in a moment, but my favourite anecdote about Oasis is that for a week (or maybe a whole month?) Liam Gallagher wore granny glasses and demanded to be called John.