I HATE The Beatles – the t-shirt is back

So phoney Beatlemania really has bitten the dust.

It’s over a week now since September 9 2009 was declared “Beatles Day” as part of the media frenzy surrounding the release of new game The Beatles™: Rock Band™ and the remastered CDs of the Fab Four’s catalogue.

As noted widely elsewhere, the negative aspects of the overkill resulted in sales of the game flagging behind Guitar Hero 5, while Dame Vera Lynn out-sold the new CDs to become the oldest artist to top the UK charts.

THE LOOK ain’t saying nothing new when we express weariness at this grand spectacle of Beatle barrel-scraping; recent days have witnessed a great deal of vitriol aimed at the promulgators.

//Cook, Jones and Rotten, 1976. Photos: Bravo, Ray Stevenson// 

Now the mood has been captured by Burro’s reissue of it’s I HATE The Beatles shirt from 2001. This was inspired by John Lydon’s adapted Pink Floyd t-shirt from 1975, a statement against the dinosaur acts who ruled the musical landscape of the time.

  

The shirt (which was yellow but because of stage lighting appears to be green in some shots) aligned Lydon with the SEX shop crowd, and was worn by him and his cohorts in the Sex Pistols in the first year-and-a-half of their existence.

By the time Burro’s Olaf Parker came to reappraise Lydon’s tee at the turn of the new millennium, The Beatles had become a fertile symbol of a moribund pop culture; post-Britpop the group had attained an near-unassailable position, with their influence endlessly dissected as the Anthology series brought in the bucks.

Parker says that the “juvenile nihilism” of Lydon’s shirt had always struck a chord.  ”I’d only recently started to get to grips with Photoshop and was experimenting with the various possibilities it offered for manipulating images, pushing them until they were almost unrecognisable,” he says.

“The Beatles image was one which was used as an experiment. However far the picture was pushed it still retained it’s ‘Beatleness’.

“For us it became a symbol of how much our culture had been undermined and infused with blind adulation for a long-dead pop group.”

Parker made a single tee bearing the design for a 2001 catwalk show in Paris. “The response was such that we produced a small run mainly for our own shops. Things took off from there. Now the time seems right to bring it back.”

As Parker points out, the tee continues to polarise opinion, a capacity it shares not only with Lydon’s original but also the peerless designs produced from 430 King’s Road in the 70s – to this day some of those cannot be worn without causing discomfort and prompting comment.

//Dougie Millings laughs it up with The Beatles, son Gordon, daughter Angela and wife Lilian. Courtesy: Gordon Millings// 

During the publicity campaign for Rock Band and the remastered CDs, Paul McCartney has made the the surprise claim that it was he who was responsible for the besuited look which launched the band’s commercial career.

In a recent interview he told how, while on holiday with his family at a Butlin’s holiday camp in the mid 50s, he experienced an epiphany; four young men walked past the swimming pool dressed in exactly the same clothes. That night it became apparent they were a band, who appeared on stage in the ballroom wearing suits of the same smart cut.

When The Beatles signed to EMI Records in 1962, McCartney says he drew on that memory and persuaded his band-mates that this was the image that would help them on the road to stardom.

//The Beatles await delivery of their new suits, December 17, 1961. Pic: Albert Marrion// 

McCartney’s tale does not accord with any previous accounts, including that of their late tailor Dougie Millings in THE LOOK. In Brian Epstein’s 1964 autobiography A Cellarful Of Noise their manager describes in detail how he had to address their “scruffy” early leather-clad rocker look. Epstein’s assistant Alistair Taylor recalled in his own book that on December 14 1961 – the day after The Beatles signed their management contract – the foursome were marched to Birkenhead tailor Beno Dorn (a friend of Epstein’s) for fittings for matching made-to-measure dark blue suits. They also had their hair neatened at Liverpool’s top-notch barber Horne Brothers.

//In Millings’ round-collared suits 1964// 

According to the excellent website Savage Young Beatles the suits were first worn onstage at Manchester’s BBC Playhouse Theatre on March 7, 1962.Cut to the autumn of 1962 when Dougie Millings was commissioned by Epstein to make a suit for one of his charges, Gerry Marsden. Suitably impressed, Epstein made an appointment at Milling’s first-floor studio at 63 Old Compton Street, Soho.

“In late 62 Brian brought in four guys who all had this strange hairstyle,” Millings says in THE LOOK. “They said, ‘Make us something different. Don’t make us look like The Shadows!” so I dreamed up the round-neck collar. I make no claims I invented it, but we did add individual touches – the bell-shaped cuff with the link button; this strange collar with the four buttons.” 

//My obit for Dougie Millings, Mojo, 2001// 

That McCartney’s claim has come out of the clear blue sky after 50-odd years should not undermine it’s veracity. It would be a great shame, however, if it casts a shadow over the considerable stylistic achievements of Epstein and Millings, ones which were crucial in catapulting the band’s popularity into the stratosphere and underpin worldwide, multimedia promotional campaigns to this day.

Priced £25, Burro’s I HATE The Beatles tee is available here.