times of trouble

Anticipating delivery of my copy of Let it Be... Naked from Hong Kong some time soon, I've been listening to the original in the car this week.

There are many records that suffer from played-to-deathness, as far as I'm concerned, and playing things in the car can exacerbate the situation, because you can be too lazy sometimes to swap CDs and keep listening until you're ready to throw it out of the window. I've only relatively recently listened to the Beatles again, after many many years in which they were all used up.

I first got Let it Be in 1978, for my 16th birthday. At the time, it completed my Beatles collection. By then I had all the albums and all the singles (the latter in a box set). I also knew every word to every song on every record I had. I'd sing them all to myself, in order, when I was doing my enormous Friday night paper round. Obsessed much? On that Sunday in December 78, I'd never heard Let it Be, and every time I've heard it since, I'm reminded of the first time.

It was not the best listening experience. Had to put it on my dad's old radiogram*, at very low volume, and still attempt to do my household chores (to this day, I never understand people who take a day off "Because it's my birthday." I never had a day off, even when I was young enough to warrant one). So I remember working in the hallway with the vacuum cleaner blaring away and only being able to hear, oh so faintly, the warm sounds of the Beatles, almost below perception, in the front room. I may have looked into the hallway mirror a time or two and commiserated with myself.

Let it Be soon became one of my favourites, maybe just because some of it was a little less familiar, and even now I don't think any group has done anything cooler than that rooftop concert. I must have seen the film on TV not long after, and saw it at the cinema a few years after that, and I love the film too, in spite of all the misery. Because, in their misery, they were still brilliant. And Let it Be was a brilliant, raw, honest document. To release something like that, whatever the reason, seems so far from the fraudulent pomposity of current "serious" rock acts-who-think-they-are-Jesus.

I know many people object to the whole enterprise, and like to point the finger at Macca the control freak, but I'm behind him all the way, I don't care how ...Naked ends up sounding. It was as if, in 1969, the Beatles set out to make a black and white film, their Manhattan, and Phil Spector came along and colorised it. And I use the American Spelling advisedly. And I don't care if John Lennon thought it was all right, he was being a twat.

(*A Radiogram, for younger listeners, is something like a sideboard with a record player, radio, and a valve amplifier built into it. The valves got so hot that the plastic frontage of the radio tuner was always a bit melted in the corner. Sounded great though, "warm" in more ways than one. We never, ever, had anything resembling something modern or the fi that is hi in my house.

Until the advent of the Radiogram, which was twelfth hand when we got it, I'd only ever been able to listen in mono, on a record player that had been in the family as long as I had. It didn't have a cartridge that was "wired for stereo," so the first time I heard, say, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," I didn't even know it had an electric guitar on it. I thought George was being ironic.

Anyway, when people say that vinyl sounds better than CD, they're probably remembering the sound of valve amplifiers on radiograms. And, yes, I admit that my anti-stereo prejudice probably dates from the time when I felt cheated by stereo records sounding half-missing on my mono record player.)