Beat Music; It Was Fifty years Ago Today: The Complete Story

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Hear Bob Harris's shout out on national radio here - 2 h and 45 m in

The Last Waltz of 'Beat Music. It Was 50 Years Ago Today' at SHARP (which has a shorter history, but a longer archaeology...)

'Best ever reprise' of our Cinderella 60s fairy tale Beat Music show, I am reliably told. About the (working) class of '63 'I won't be voting for Ted generation' which may just be due a reprise. Bright young diggers and diggers and others who remember the 60s - or not - made it a receptive audience. They got the jokes and the fairy tale and dug the music.

Very Beatley this - it's John's left hand guitar that does it

My other show half taking a photo of me doing this back to him

 

Not the hot summer night anticipated - jolly cold in that marquee after long days of rain, though sunny on the evening itself.

Goodnight night, 'Beat Music', sleep tight. 'Though I know I'll never lose affection for Beatles and things that went before - I know I'll often stop and think about them - in My Life, I love YOU more.' (YOU know who you are.)

Not only is it 50 years ago today that the Beatles film Help was released (July 29, 1965) it's also 20 years ago that SHARP (Sedgeford Archaeological and Historical Research Project) began.

 

Both events will be commemorated at Beat Music: It as 50 Years Ago Today at the Boneyard Field in Sedgeford tonight at 8 pm.

 

Gareth Calway (storytelling) and John William (guitar and vocals) will begin their Beatles show with a specially written version of an old Beatles' hit refashioned thus:

 

It was 20 years ago today

Sedgeford Diggers first came out to play.

Saxon ovens, bits of Ancient Rome;

The Iceni burned from house and home.

So may we introduce to you

The cutting edge of breaking ground:

Sedgeford Diggers bony parts club band!
 

There follows an excavation of 1963-1970 as the real life rags to riches fairy tale of the Beatles meets a magical realist tour of the real Sixties (from Kennedy's assassination to the moon landing.) This is told through the tale of Cindy a factory girl meeting her Beatle Prince at the final Beatle concert tour date on mainland Britain - the Capitol Cinema Cardiff in December 1965.

 

Every episode of the story is brought to vivid life by John's dazzling performances of Beatles songs from She Loves You through Norwegian Wood to Something.

 

The two Wannabeatles performance of Help is one of the highlights of the evening, which includes a Beatles-themed buffet. Tickets £8 from 01485 571828 or via jannineparry@yahoo.co.uk .

 

Fittingly for an archaeological venue, there are frequent references - musical and narrative - to the Beatles Neanderthal alter egos, the Rolling Stones! 

 

Hot rocks, as the Stones might say

 

This the farewell performance of this much-loved show which toured in 2013 - shades of that farewell stunt by the Fabs atop the Apple Building on January 30 1969.
 

After a "Once upon a time there was darkness..." ode to beat music, we plunge straight through the hole in an old 45 rpm single into the middle of the Sixties...

HELP!!!!

 

BBC Eastern Counties radio interview (90 minutes into the programme) -here

beatles revival- JULY 29. 7.30. 2015  sound promo - https://soundcloud.com/gaz29-1/hendrix-and-beatles-sound-bites

THE WHOLE EXPERIENCE REVIVED FOR THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF HELP IN A BONEYARD IN SEDGEFORD. DIGGING WITH THE DIGGERS

 as featured in The Lynn News

Picture the scene a Wednesday night on 29th July, an archeological research dig in it's 20th year, a field full of tents and archaeologists. Nestled within this a Marquee with a stage, with 2 men waiting to tell you a story.................. Welcome to a magical realist romp through the Sixties. Was there ever a more magical decade than this – a helter-skelter ride from black and white post-war austerity to kaleidoscopic flower-powered social revolution? This novel tells a Sixties fairytale charting the journey of Cindy Spectre from factory girl to hippie chick, kitchen sink drama to bedsit romance, Dusty Springfield to Janis Joplin. At the heart of this revolution is the music of the Beatles who undertake their own magical mystery tour from cheeky choirboy moptops of Love Me Do to the bearded sages of Let It Be.

The music is woven into the narrative style and every stage of the plot. In the form of the composite character ‘Beatle’, the Beatles become the magical Prince who shows Cindy the way out of her workaday drudgery and onto a journey that ends in a question mark in India. The show ends with an emotional assessment of the Beatles’ enduring gift, that ‘Something’.

All this and a Beatles themed buffet
For the fantastic  price of £8 a person
Refreshments will be available
All profits going to the Minor John Bursery fund to help give people better access to Archaeology

Beat Music: It Was Fifty Years Ago Today by Gareth Calway

You don't have to be 50 to enjoy this show. My generation escaped O levels and CSEs with Sergeant Pepper. The next will study it!

Click here for the full show, Room at the Gin's finest hour and a half, as performed by Gareth and John to a packed house at Great Massingham Social Club, Norfolk, on 10 November 2013 and streamed live to the world on Folkspot Radio.

Welcome to a magical realist romp through the Sixties. Was there ever a more magical decade than this – a helter-skelter ride from black and white post-war austerity to kaleidoscopic flower-powered social revolution? This novel tells a Sixties fairytale charting the journey of Cindy Spectre from factory girl to hippie chick, kitchen sink drama to bedsit romance, Dusty Springfield to Janis Joplin. At the heart of this revolution is the music of the Beatles who undertake their own magical mystery tour from cheeky choirboy moptops of Love Me Do to the bearded sages of Let It Be.

The music is woven into the narrative style and every stage of the plot. In the form of the composite character ‘Beatle’, the Beatles become the magical Prince who shows Cindy the way out of her workaday drudgery and onto a journey that ends in a question mark in India. The show ends with an emotional assessment of the Beatles’ enduring gift, that ‘Something’.


17 May (Grosvenor Rooms, Prince of Wales Rd, Norwich), 30 June and 28 July (ABC Cinema, Great Yarmouth) : Beatles concert dates in Norfolk in 1963

1963...

23 August She Loves You is released.

12 September 1963, She Loves You tops the charts and Britain says Yeah Yeah Yeah.

Factory Girl Cindy meets her Prince at the Beatle ball.

2013...

Fifty years on, Gareth Calway (spoken word) and John William (guitar) conjure up a real-life fairytale.

sponsored by Fine City Sounds.

Sunday 30 June preview at Meet The Hedge, The Feathers Inn, Wymondham (the 50th anniversary of the night Beatlemania came to Norfolk for the second time in 1963 at the ABC Cinema, Great Yarmouth and the nearest I could get!)

YEAH YEAH YEAH! NEVER MIND ALAN PARTRIDGE, I'M ON RADIO NORFOLK ABOUT THE BEATLES' SHOW
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01df9rt/Stephen_Bumfrey_Thomas_McGuinness/ 2 hours and 10 minutes in

Thurs 22 August, The Wolf Folk Club, Wolferton, successful premiere of the William and Calway combo in two extracts (the 50 year anniversary of the release of She Loves You)

Sunday 25 August, Folkspot radio, part of a packed bill at Great Massingham (with Mike Prior standing in for John on guitar)

Tuesday 27 August, a preview at the Gin, Ringstead (with Alan Timms standing in for John on guitar)

Thurs 29 August, Fine City Sounds, Norwich, 8 pm.

A core audience of connoisseurs et dames, plus some street folk 'floating' at a door opened out on a City summer night - the entire first half done in 45 minutes at 45 rpm. She Loves You first charted 50 years ago. We celebrated in a Lennon's Cave of vinyl.

Thurs 12 September, The Gin Trap Inn, Ringstead, 8 pm

Preview in the LYNN NEWS! http://www.lynnnews.co.uk/what-s-on/lifestyle-and-leisure/it-s-back-to-the-fab-old-days-of-the-beatles-in-ringstead-1-5460482

Room at the Gin moved into its third and biggest room to date - le conservatoire! - and filled it for Beat Music. Photos by Zariah Wood-Davies. Audience drawn from the guests at the pub, Ringstead (including a guy who'd met the Beatles, been at Cambridge with the Pythons and wrote Spinal Tap) and surrounding villages as far as one the other side of Dereham. Also in attendance, via the Wolf Folk Club, Mr John (and Mrs Jill) McLennan. How about that? Just get the Harristarkeys in for the next one and that's a full set. Alan Timms and Dave Fisher (pictured in audience and Dave performing below)

gave A Little Help From My Friends (4 great Beatles songs from different periods) and Steve Knowles and I closed the show with my valediction over his moving Yesterday.

But John and I did the main business of the evening with our musical fairy tale of Factory Girl meeting Beatle Prince and a splendid time was had. 'He can make the guitar talk and I can make the words sing' as someone said after the show. Nice.

Sunday 10 November, Great Massingham Social Club and Live Folkspot Radio Broadcast, 8 pm

WOW Lynn News cover story of the show  and a great pic of the Fabs here

Saturday EDP story and pic rushed out like a Stones single after we got the Friday Lynn News cover here

WHO AND WHAT HAPPENED

ONLINE AT http://www.folkspot.co.uk/ AND ON EARTH IN GREAT MASSINGHAM - LIVE.

This was my debut as a radio presenter and it went like a song - and I mean one of the longer ones from the later 60s because it went on for four hours. You can always tell when a party is going well when the landlord extends the evening for an extra hour.

A great end of tour performance from John 'Jimi' William and myself (I was told) in good voice and with a rapt audience - a big one - hanging on the story, applauding the songs and joining in the choruses. There was also a short introduction from me on the Beatles' place in history, some historic reviews of the Peterborough concerts of Dec 1962 and 1963 (one of the more perceptive reviewers present in the audience 50 years on) a fairytale-ending not heard before and a streaming waterfall of Beatle-only floorspots from Martin Hopp, Dave Fisher, The Fried Pirates, Cary Outis and Charley, Rich Pickins, Lynn Wykes and Terry Smith, Tim Chipping, Beatle spots from resident folk-spot performers Dave and Mike Prior and Beatle CDs from Jane.

A combined arts performance of story, poetry, theatre and beat music conceived last year, announced last epiphany on Folkspot and brought to fruition in the time it took the Beatles to launch a legend. (the best part of a year but with a lot of prep)

AS FEATURED ON RADIO 2 SOUND OF THE SIXTIES!

50 MINUTES IN http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/radio/bbc_radio_two/listenlive

ALSO FEATURED ON ABSOLUTE RADIO, (BBC) FOUR COUNTIES RADIO, BBC RADIO NORFOLK, IN THE EDP AND THE LYNN NEWS

Me and Jane, the presenters, both once teachers - a profession I gave up to devote more time to education. 'Anyone who doesn't think there is a connection between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.'

PRESS RELEASE

When the Beatles made their final LP Abbey Road in 1969, they referred to the then unnamed medley on Side 2 as The Big One.
Well, here’s our Big One: a 3 hour gala of non-stop Beatles music on Folkspot Radio. www.folkspot.co.uk performed free and broadcast live to a studio audience by Norfolk-based musicians at Great Massingham Social Club, Station Road, Massingham on Sunday November 10, beginning at 7 pm.
About 40 of the Beatles 186 songs will feature during the three hour live performance, half of them in a special live broadcast performance of Gareth Calway’s touring Beatles show: Beat Music; It Was 50 Years Ago Today, the centre piece of the evening, which combines Gareth’s magical-realist storytelling with John William’s excellent guitar. This begins at 7.45 and runs until 9.15.

Includes:
In My Life
Norwegian Wood
She Loves You
I Feel Fine
Rain
Girl
Drive My Car
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
Eight Days A Week ...



The rest of the evening features guest musicians performing their favourite Beatles songs. A list of these and the performers is available on Folkspot’s Facebook web page.

Includes

Strawberry Fields, Get Back, Hey You’ve Got To Hide your Love Away, I’m So Tired, Ask Me Why, Here There and Everywhere, Yesterday, Blackbird, We Can Work It Out, With A Little Help From My Friends, Revolution.

There will also be some rare treats, like hearing the reviews of the Beatles 1962 and 1963 Peterborough concerts written by a then cub Wisbech Advertiser reporter who 50 years on will be in our audience. And learned disquisitions about the Beatles’ place in musical history written by a Radio 3 scholar.
The performance/broadcast marks the 50th anniversary of the day the Fab Force learned they had sold 1 million advance copies of I Want To Hold Your Hand, the record that made them in America.

There’s plenty of room at this warm and welcoming club – so come and join in the 3 hours of Beatle fun. Or if you can’t get there, tune in from 7 pm.
Press release enquiries 01485 571828

All other enquiries janeknights008@btinternet.com or see www.folkspot.co.uk


The show is an extract from a novel called It was Fifty years Ago Today - whose blurb and synopsis are copied below.

Welcome to a magical realist romp through the Sixties. Was there ever a more magical decade than this – a helter-skelter ride from black and white post-war austerity to kaleidoscopic flower-powered social revolution? This novel tells a Sixties fairytale charting the journey of Cindy Spectre from factory girl to hippie chick, kitchen sink drama to bedsit romance, Dusty Springfield to Janis Joplin. At the heart of this revolution is the music of the Beatles who undertake their own magical mystery tour from cheeky choirboy moptops of Love Me Do to the bearded sages of Let It Be.

The music is woven into the narrative style and every stage of the plot: each of the fourteen chapter titles is the name of a track on the Rubber Soul album. In the form of the composite character ‘Beatle’, the Beatles become the magical Prince who shows Cindy the way out of her workaday drudgery and onto a journey that ends in a question mark in India. Her younger brother follows her there twenty years later, too young to have experienced the Sixties himself, the Spectre of a feast he hippy-trails to the end. What does he find – the Answer or a Question? The meaning of his empty life or the elusive butterfly of a dream?

Fifty years on, as ‘When I’m 64’ comes back to haunt the love generation , the issues remain: is love all you need? Is revolution in the road or in your head? Mystery and magical realist fairy tale combine to provide a rich and funny commentary on the sixties.

It Was Fifty Years Ago Today Synopsis of the novel

The novel is based opens in on the day Kennedy is shot and 16 year old Cindy Spectre is at Wally Pratt’s biscuit factory in Somertown, stacking biscuit tins and longing as usual for the weekend. When the assassination is announced over the wireless, a month after Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech, Cindy is devastated by the death of this symbol of young hope. Her older generation working class parents attempt to repress her but the Beatles prove a growing magical and liberating influence. ‘Beatle’ – the Fab Four in one - is the weekend fairy tale Prince of her council estate week. Her moody boyfriend, Johnny, performs this role less effectively. After a motorbike ride to Wales, she actually meets ‘Beatle’ before the Beatles’ farewell concert at the Capitol Cinema Cardiff on December 12 1965. This encounter feeds her dissatisfaction with her humdrum life. Through politics (perhaps the most liberalising government in history), education and pill-fuelled sexual liberation she emerges from her ‘Factory Girl’ chrysalis towards the ‘butterfly’ fantasy flower child of the later Sixties, her intelligence revealed in a radical hippy edge.
Johnny loses Cindy after a crisis in Cardiff on the day of the Beatles concert, where the ‘doll’ love-object of the early songs comes to life as a real woman with aspirations of her own, the Girl of Rubber Soul. Heartbroken, he begins to pursue her instead of the other way round. They are reconciled. Inspired by the Beatles’ musical progress through artistic and spiritual revolutions, Cindy now leads Johnny through mind-expansion, the anti -Vietnam student demos of Grosvenor Square and finally the hippy trail to India. The Sixties reach midnight, the princes revert to frogs and Cindy flees the ball.
The story is told by Cindy’s younger brother haunted by the mystery of her disappearance and damaged by the well meaning but dysfunctional Spectre family, in which Christmas angel/Fifties Fairygodmother Mary is mostly Stepmother and Dad is mostly Absent. As he tries to make sense of it all the tale hurtles to an explosive end.

Read the whole novel here