A forlorn tweet this week from Paul McCartney lamented the death twenty years ago of fellow Beatle George Harrison. “I miss my friend so much” it said, touchingly, simply. Soon enough it will be the anniversary of John Lennon’s death in New York.
Over the way at the camp set up in artificial rivalry, the Rolling Stones are down a drummer, Charlie Watts having recently brought his lengthy set to an end. A symbol on the cymbals of the once youthful energy that powered a uniquely British cultural revolution, London swinging like a pendulum do, long before Tony Blair contrived Cool Britannia and Britpop was a thing.
Back with the Beatles, the epic documentary Let it Be and McCartney’s recent book The Lyrics have an elegiac quality to them. “I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have are my songs.” He wrote. There’s a sense now of a gathering together of the threads.
The Sixties and the people that made them an almost mythical part of British social history are passing. If you think that that’s the perils of a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, you’d only be half right. Great chunks of the 1966 World Cup football side have gone. Jack Charlton’s battling defeat by dementia the subject of the BBC’s superb Finding Jack Charlton documentary.
Sean Connery – the quintessential Sixties Bond – has proven that you only live once and Michael Caine – whose Alfie and The Italian Job were the rise of Sixties working class swinging London chirp made flesh – has given it up on the basis that acting is no country for old men. No parts in these parts.
Not just men either, Diana Rigg and Honor Blackman, Avenger and most infamously named Bond girl, karate chopped and judo thrown by the one opponent you never beat. Time.
And yet, still, they hold us in thrall these characters. Almost as though our noses are pressed to the loophole of a Camelot watching a time of magic of which we can only dream. Unless you were there. In which case, you apparently can’t remember.
They were youth and in that youth, they are trapped forever, from Lennon to Kennedy, it’s the smartest career move there is.
But, more than that, they were perhaps the last generation to rise without trace. Unconfined by the heads down pursuit of Russell Group success and City internship, they left behind them half-finished degrees and scarcely attended art colleges, grammar schools, mines and national service and last-chance acting courses and went to clubs in Hamburg, bars in Richmond and took jobs as extras. In blues parlance, “they paid their dues”. The great privilege of youth misspent and wisely invested.
Perhaps that’s what led Norman Tebbitt – you’ll remember him – to condemn “the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.” Of all people to condemn social mobility, the fact was, “they got on their bikes”.
Not that far from where I live is a former RAF station, now “an executive housing development”. It has two claims to fame. First, Guy Gibson, leader of the Dambuster raid, was stationed there while a night fighter pilot. But it was also the location for chunks of the Beatles film Magical Mystery Tour. A blue plaque on a kebab shop in the village of West Malling marks its start.
Their mark – big and small, huge and banal – is everywhere.
Not that long ago, on the train into London, I looked up at the sound of an instantly recognisable voice. It was Paul McCartney.
The oddity of it, as we stood facing each other waiting to get off, was that we nodded and winked at each other like old mates. Macca the Mucker to a bloke he’d never met.
The art of The Beatle being simultaneously close to the definition of living legend and yet so familiar that they seem like friends.
Macca on the commuter train from Tonbridge, smiling and winking without even the need for us to say anything.
Last week, my son played rugby against Dartford Grammar in the shadow of the Mick Jagger Sports Centre. Jagger and Richards, estuary boys at a railway station. Fifty years to get from Dartford to Greenwich, as Mick Jagger remarked at an O2 gig.
That, I suppose, was the essence of the Sixties star. From us, of us, like us. Everywhere. Art colleges, state schools and trains, the gods that walk among us, mortal immortals. Third rate indeed.