Episode 50 is out tomorrow (15 July 2023) and it’s our longest yet. It has a close focus on A Hard Day’s Night as an album and the film. As usual, you can expect it to venture into some strange territory. For example, I probably spend longer talking about It’s Trad Dad than anyone else in the history of anything.
However, there are a couple of things that we forgot.
Firstly, there’s a missing episode. As a result, what should be episode 50 will actually be episode 49.
We recorded an episode for Hold Me Tight from With The Beatles. But for highly technical reasons*, it never got released. It’s still sitting in the Stuffology vaults, waiting for Peter Jackson to make us an offer.
*The technical reasons are that our producer extraordinaire, JG, forgot and posted the subsequent episode and neither of us noticed until a few weeks later. I’m not in a position to criticise as I leave all the hard work to him.**
**By all, I mean, all. I just turn up and talk.***
***Ok, I do some research.
Secondly, there are always things that we forget to say in each episode. And in this one, we forgot to cover the actual album cover. This is important because it is such an important part of The Beatles’ story. The album artwork is a significant part of their releases, it was clearly something that mattered. A Hard Day’s Night is also a much parodied piece of artwork. This Simpsons version, for example, works well as it also plays on the title.
There are some album covers that are supposedly parodies, for example:
However, we’d need to get into a conversation about post modernism, intention and other things that can easily make the small number of readers I have here turn off. It’s better to suggest that it’s inspired by Robert Freeman’s masterful work and leave it at that.
My favourite version of it comes from @Jaythechou on Twitter and his ongoing mission to “Photoshop Paddington into a movie, game, or TV show until I forget”. He’s on day 856. This was day 717:
My only quibble is why it took him so long. Other than that, it’s perfect.
This cover is a reminder that The Beatles were hitting many cultural areas at the same time. Their understanding of photography as an art form and as a selling point was ahead of its time. I’d be interested in knowing what were the other great album covers of 1964. The first Rolling Stones album has a photograph that seems to owe something to With The Beatles and 1963’s Out of the Shadows. Cliff Richard’s album covers were fairly generic. Elvis’ most famous album cover is his first but you could argue that that owes more to The Clash than to Elvis himself.
Perhaps the clearer link is to 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which, more than any other cover of the period, seems to be selling a narrative.
A few artists had this field completely to themselves and, it seems, were prepared to see what they could do. After all, only four albums occupied the top of the charts in the UK in 1964 and three of them were by The Beatles. If we’d remembered to talk about it on the podcast, we might have said that this made it yet another area of popular culture they’d heavily influenced.
But then who wants to listen to a podcast where people talk about still images?
The new episode will be here on Saturday morning:
Stuffology 
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