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   CLUB SANDWICH 83

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THE BEATLES AT THE PROMS

Mark Lewisohn reflects on a remarkable event

            I sat at home the night of Thursday 31 July 1997. This time, you really didn't have to "be there". I listened to the radio.
            I listened to Radio 3, the BBC's highbrow music station, home to operas and the classics.
            I listened to The Proms, the annual series of classical music concerts that veritably defines the word highbrow. The Proms - the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, to give the full title - have been around for 102 years, since 1895.
            The King's Singers were performing a programme of four Beatles songs, numbers written by - as they kept announcing - "Lennon and McCartney". (In fact, they were all McCartney pieces.) They performed 'Penny Lane', 'Eleanor Rigby', 'I'll Follow The Sun' and 'Honey Pie'. The King's Singers don't always go for the obvious - they left out 'Yesterday' and 'Here, There And Everywhere'.
            The performances were delightful, not least because the King's Singers are an entertaining, witty bunch of sophisticates, and they know how to twist an arrangement to suit their specific style.
            The audience kept applauding wildly. The King's Singers were summoned back for three encores, 'Mother Nature's Son', 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' and 'Blackbird'. The audience were on their feet, cheering, clapping, whistling, stomping their feet. This was the Proms crowd was doing this.
            It really got me thinking. One of the songs was I'll Follow The Sun for goodness sake! Never a single, not on many people's Top 20 Beatles Songs Of All Time list. (I really must get around to seeing what mine looks like someday.) A song written by a teenage, schoolboy Paul McCartney in the front living-room of his father's house in Liverpool. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s - I remember well the condescending way that pop music, and the Beatles, were received and considered in those days. So I can appreciate that, had you been lunatic enough to suggest to Paul, this same day or night when he wrote 'I'll Follow The Sun', that his charming but straightforward and unassuming tune would one day be sung at the Proms, at the Royal Albert Hall, in London, he - and anybody else within earshot - would have thought this unbelievable, impossible, insane. It just could not have been predicted. Classical music was for nobs. Nobs who looked down their noses at the pops. London and the Proms was 200 miles away by road and a million miles away by class. (Or so it liked to think.)

            And here we are, in 1997.
            Paul McCartney has been knighted and is now Sir Paul McCartney.
            A song written by this 16 year old in his house in Liverpool, on a crummy little guitar, scratched down with a pencil in a school exercise book, is being performed at The Proms to a rapturous reception from The Suits.
            And that little terraced council house in Liverpool has been bought by the National Trust (this, perhaps, is even more remarkable than The Proms bit) as a monument of national importance.
            The future, they always say (whoever "they" are), is best left untold. The thing is, even if it were known, because it can throw up things like this, who would ever believe it anyway?

Club Sandwich 83