The world ended in the nineteen-sixties. Or rather, one world ended in the nineteen-sixties and gave way to another, a transition personified by no human beings more clearly than the Beatles. “They are lightning rods for so much that makes the sixties a revolutionary decade,” says The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland in the video above. “In all kinds of ways, in the twenty-first century, we’re living in the aftermath of what happened in the sixties, rather like people in the sixteenth century were living in the aftermath of what happened in the fifteen-twenties.” Many of the show’s regular listeners will grasp that analogy immediately, though perhaps fewer of those who’ve tuned in to this especially popular episode, in which Holland recounts the complete history of the Beatles with Conan O’Brien.
O’Brien has never made a secret of his Beatles obsession, but here he demonstrates it definitively by supplying most of the details of the band’s story himself. (That goes even for relatively obscure ones: he mentions, for example, the score Paul McCartney composed for the film The Family Way, featured earlier this year on Open Culture.) He also manages to win the trivia contest against Holland at Abbey Road Studios in the video just above, but then, he’d been studying in one sense or another for quite some time. A decade ago, he held his own in conversation with Mark Lewisohn, the first volume of whose painstaking three-part Beatles biography comes to nearly a thousand pages in the abridged edition. That was on his YouTube interview series Serious Jibber-Jabber, the predecessor to his current podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.
Holland and his co-host Dominic Sandbrook appeared on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend last fall. They may have seemed an odd choice in a guest roster consisting mostly of comedians, actors, and musicians, but O’Brien himself has declared The Rest Is History “the best podcast in the world,” and their shows’ fan bases turn out not to be mutually exclusive. That wide-ranging conversation went stimulatingly enough to inspire a completion of the crossover just a few months thereafter, when Holland brought O’Brien to Abbey Road for an hour and a half of nothing but talk about the historical significance of the Beatles, whom O’Brien declares “a complete break from what happened before.” (Sandbrook, the rare non-appreciator of the Fab Four, absented himself from the discussion.)
O’Brien praises books like Lewisohn’s, as well as Ian Leslie’s more recent John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, but his understanding of the group as a historical phenomenon suggests that he’s also read the work of critic Ian MacDonald. After Revolver, “it seemed to Western youth that The Beatles knew — that they had the key to current events and were somehow orchestrating them through their records.” So MacDonald writes in his book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, whose title refers to “the true revolution of the Sixties”: an unconscious mental adaptation to the passage from a local reality of “consensus, hierarchy, and fixed values” to a global one of individualism, sensationalism, and “jealously leveled standards.” The Beatles didn’t cause those changes, as they themselves well understood. But they accepted the roles of its avatars, and more than 60 years after the rise of Beatlemania, we still live in the world they represented.
Related content:
How the Beatles Made their Most Acclaimed Album, Revolver, Released 60 Years Ago This Month
How the Beatles Wrote Their Songs: From Early Demos to Final Recordings
Conan O’Brien Writes Chicago Blues Songs With School Kids
Conan O’Brien Plays Charlie Rose, Talks Presidential History with Edmund Morris
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
