The Beatles - All Made Up (1974)

In 2017, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a four-part series by the comedian Paul Merton, based around what would have happened if The Beatles had staged a reunion some years after they'd broken up. The year is 1974. Labour's Harold Wilson is Britain's Prime Minister, and Richard Nixon is in the White House. Abba win Eurovision, Germany win the World Cup and a new writer called Stephen King publishes his first novel. After 5 years of tension, ill feeling and fraught negotiation the four Beatles have buried their individual hatchets and are moving tentatively towards a full scale reunion, hopefully culminating in their first new album since 1969. As a warm up for the recording sessions, the Beatles - and some of their famous friends - have come together once more for a surprise concert, their first time live on stage since 1966 when they gave up live appearances after a show at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Join Paul Merton on the commentator's microphone as the Fab Four take to the boards once more....
Like all of us, Paul Merton is a huge Beatles fan and like all Beatle fans his mind often turns to the "What if's..." of their career. What if they'd never broken up? What if they were still playing live? What if they made another album? The series was Merton's attempt to answer those questions, and to put forward a fantastical version of Beatle history. Based on the known facts, and using the recordings available, he imagines the concert that the Beatles could have given, and follows it up with the album that they could have made. The result is a fascinating look into an alternative reality, but also a clear eyed examination of the strengths and of the forces that drove - and drove apart - the greatest band of all time. He followed up the radio series with an article in Radio Times, where he revealed the track listing of the Beatles re-union album that he hoped would have happened after the concert. 

Fifty years after the Beatles’ 'Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band' was released, Merton marks the anniversary with a radio series in which he imagines what would have happened if his favourite band had reunited, made another album, and played live one more time.

From Radio Times, May 2017

“It would have been 1974,” he says, firmly.

He’s worked on it painstakingly, plotting when these events could have actually happened as the Beatles’ solo careers were soaring and diverging, their personal lives rocking and rolling, and their finances still affected by the messy legal wrangles that plagued their final years.

He’s even done the set list for the “concert” and ordered the tracks for the “record” himself, stitching together lesser-known songs from the solo Beatles’ catalogues and live shows.

“To be honest, I’ve been doing this for years,” he says, “John Lennon said in the 70's that if you want to create a Beatles album, just take tracks off individual albums and put them together, and I always wondered, could you create something that feels right? Then work out when they could have played together, around solo records, having children, trying to get green cards? And then I developed a theory…”

Another reason Merton has enjoyed creating an alternative history is a personal one: he became a Beatles obsessive after his heroes split up. Born in 1957 in south London, he was five when they released their first album, 'Please Please Me', and 12 when they broke up, but he spent his childhood, amazingly, largely unaware of their music. “I was the least rock ‘n’ roll child ever. My parents listened to the Light Programme, and that was it, really. I was completely out of touch with what was happening in pop culture, projecting old 8mm silent films to myself and the wall. My only album was an Al Jolson album!” But as Merton’s teens whirred onwards, the Beatles’ music seeped in. He’d heard and loved 'Here Comes the Sun' from the last album they recorded together, 'Abbey Road', while wandering around Woolworths one Christmas, and borrowed the vinyl from his local library. “I remember the librarian going: ‘What, you really haven’t heard 'Rubber Soul' or 'Revolver'?’” He mimics a little boy lost. “And I was, ‘Er… no?’”. Soon he was back every other Saturday, borrowing every album in chronological order of release, like a mini-history project; he was agog at the extraordinary transitions the band had made in seven short years. “I basically did the Beatles in three months, in fortnight-long bursts, through headphones I got for my birthday, completely lost in their world.” He didn’t share the music with his friends, as he didn’t really go out to parties, he says; instead, he’d stay at home with his clunky tape recorder making compilations of tracks by the band together, and, prophetically enough, apart.

From day one, Merton loved 'Sgt Pepper'. “It’s not a rock ‘n’ roll record, really, is it? It does whimsy very well. It’s also got this strangeness, this hugeness, this going-upstairs-to-have-a-smoke-and-go-into-a-dream stuff. It’s a record that’s soaring above nature.” As a teenager, he even fantasised he might pay someone to put a photograph of him onto the 'Sgt Pepper' cover one day. Lennon is Merton’s favourite Beatle, who once said he’d rather have been a comedian than a pop star, although Merton himself gives this idea short shrift. “Rose-tinted glasses there, I think, John. I mean, when you’re in a band, you haven’t got another band heckling, trying to get you off the stage all the bloody time, have you?” 

We've all had a go at making up these 'what if......?' Beatles albums, and so here's another one to add to the long, long list, and it's actually a pretty good attempt.

Many thanks to Gumboil for providing the location of all four radio shows which inspired this post. Having now listened to them again I'd quite forgotten that Merton's imaginary album was a double disc set, and that I'd only compiled the first two sides, but I think this could have been because I wasn't that impressed that side three was mostly covers, and that side four included a track that wasn't recorded until 1998. I'm guessing that at the time I felt happy with just the first disc, but so that we can have the complete listening experience of the full 'All Made Up' album I've added sides three and four to the file, as well as all four radio shows.

Track listing

Side One

01 Be What You See

02 I Don't Wanna Face It

03 Cockamamie Business

04 Ram On

05 Step Lightly

06 Ain't That A Shame

07 No Other Baby

Side Two

08 Fading In Fading Out

09 Steel And Glass

10 Hi, Hi, Hi

11 Horse To The Water

12 #9 Dream

13 Morse Moose And The Grey Goose

14 Oh My Love 

Side Three

15 If You Believe

16 Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive

17 Have You Seen My Baby

18 Rip It Up / Ready Teddy 

19 20 Flight Rock

20 Peggy Sue

21 Love Is Strange

22 I'm Losing You

23 Devil Woman

24 Between The Devil & The Deep Blue Sea

Side Four

25 Soft Hearted Hana

26 Fluid

27 When We Was Fab 

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