My parents were big music fans, and my dad plays music, so I grew up with Madonna, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, Alice In Chains… it was all over the place. I had a Third Eye Blind record, but I also had Korn, Courtney Love, and Shania Twain.
My parents were always playing records: My mom was really into the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac, and my dad was more Billy Squire, Whitesnake, ’80s hair metal. But I think there’s that crucial point where you become an adolescent and you don’t want to listen to your parents’ music.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the Beatles can read music.
I think the ’60s was a great time for music, especially for rock and roll. It was the era of The Beatles, of The Stones, and then later on The Who and Zeppelin. But at one point in the ’70s, it just kind of became… mellow.
The artist that had the biggest impact on me was Michael Jackson. He was my Elvis and Beatles. When I was 15, I listened to a lot of Sinatra, but my jean jacket didn’t have, ‘I love Frank’ on it, it had, ‘I love AC/DC’, ‘Guns N Roses’, ‘Pearl Jam’. I thought Eddie Vedder was the second coming.
People listen to The Beatles, but while they were muscially influential, they weren’t culturally influential in quite the same way. You can go into the back of beyond in a little Indian village, and they will listen to Bob Marley. But they’re not going to be listening to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.
Personally speaking, I think the Beatles were our biggest influence.
Growing up in the Libya of the 1970s, I remember the prevalence of local bands who were as much influenced by Arabic musical traditions as by the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. But the project of ‘Arabisation’ soon got to them, too, and western musical instruments were declared forbidden as ‘instruments of imperialism.’
I was 19 or 20 when The Beatles were at their peak, and I was coming up to the peak of my career, too. I was also the first footballer to have long hair, and that’s how I got my nickname ‘the Fifth Beatle.’
I think the four men of the Beatles are an apt comparison for one Robin Lopez.
You know, I was such a big Beatles fan, and when I’d buy a new album I’d invariably hate it the first time I heard it ’cause it was a mixture of absolute joy and absolute frustration. I couldn’t grasp what they’d done, and I’d hate myself for that.
I grew up on a lot of early Beatles, DC5, Cream, Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix.
There was always a lot of American music in England until, obviously when the Beatles came around, then there was a shift towards English music, but before then American music was the main thing.
I heard the Beatles and the Stones, and Mom bought me an electric guitar. I played lead for four years and then switched to bass. One day someone suggested that I should sing, so I sheepishly stepped up to the microphone and the rest is rock history.
Lennon was right. And we are bigger than Jesus. We will be as big as the Beatles, if not bigger.
I never saw The Beatles live. I was very aware of them, though.
I really like the cute Beatles, the beginning. I don’t really like the moustached Beatles very much. And then the hippie Beatles I’m not super-thrilled with, although they had good songs.
From a very young age, music was very much in my house. I would sit with my mom, with the old LPs, listening to The Beatles and Carly Simon and Lionel Richie. The old LPs used to have the lyrics. From there, I would put on dance and music displays for my family, just to entertain them and make people laugh and smile.
The Beatles, the Small Faces and the Kinks were great bands, but that was in the ’60s.
I know when I started I would have been happy to sound like the Beatles or Joe Tex or whoever. You want to sound like most bands, you want to sound like their records and that’s how you learn your chops.
When the Beatles cut old rock n’ roll, they were recording music still in their performing repertoire, and besides, they never thought of the music as old.
I was in about in the 8th grade when I started recording R&B, so much of what was on was the Motown sound, and The Beatles had pretty much come over and taken America by storm.
In maybe 1963, we had ‘Collier’s Encyclopedia,’ and they sent us their yearly LP. I heard the Beatles talking on there. That was the first time I tried altering my voice, doing a Liverpudlian accent.
They are my friends. If they are the Beatles or the kings of China, it doesn’t matter lo me.
I love the Beatles.
It was my love for the guitar that first got me into music and singing. Growing up, I was inspired by The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Damian Rice was a huge influence for me musically.
I don’t know any Beatles songs. My dad never listened to Elvis or Sting or Bowie. Any band name that’s on a t-shirt, I probably won’t know their music, like AC/DC or whatever. I don’t know what that is. As a kid, I would sing along to artists like Tania Maria.
The Beatles production is often so ‘perfect’ that it sounds computerized. ‘Sgt. Pepper’ really does sound like it took four months to make.
Musicians of any era – whether it be The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Rage Against the Machine, or, of course, Madonna – will inspire fashion. And we, in turn, will inspire them.
I used to love the Beatles and the Stones and I’d always want to hang out with them, even though they were about seven years older.
Cole Archer’s Chillout Mix. That’s my son’s mix. He’s ten weeks old, and this is what he listens to: ‘Valerie’ by Amy Winehouse, ‘Everyday People’ by Arrested Development, The Beatles’ ‘Rocky Raccoon,’ and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Atlantic City.’
Don’t get me wrong, The Beatles are one of our all-time favourite bands, but there’s a lot more we were influenced by.
I don’t have an iPod. I don’t get the whole iPod thing. Who has time to listen to that much music? If I had one, it would probably have Sinatra, Beatles, some ’70s music, some ’80s music, and that’s it.
All the best British groups were inspired by black American music. With The Beatles, it was Motown and the blues. With me, it was a mixture of British styles and the more sophisticated Seventies soul of Barry White and Marvin Gaye.
I feel enormously privileged to be part of the generation that witnessed the magic of the Beatles first hand, and I think ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ connected with my four-year-old self because it was the whole package: an album and a movie.
I always liked that about bands like the Beatles. They could be so touching at one moment and then ‘Helter Skelter’ the next.
Just coming from a musical family, I was always surrounded by it. On the car rides to school, my mom loved playing A Tribe Called Quest and the Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ and then my dad was listening to a lot of Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder.
Even the Beatles lived their lives as a soap opera.
The Beatles were something everyone had in common; this was thirty years ago, there was Dr. Who and everybody knew who the Daleks were and there was The Beatles and everybody knew who George Harrison was.
I think all of The Beatles were from an era when certainly playing was important to them, and they were cutting edge. But for all time, they’re master composers.
A lost of people recognize me and maybe will ask for an autograph, but it’s nothing like if Elvis would’ve done something like that, ’cause he’s so popular, or maybe The Beatles ’cause they stirred up a lot of action.
The music I listened to as a kid – the Stones, the Beatles – that was so rebellious at the time, it became mainstream.
I was about twenty and the Beatles were meditating and I heard about it and they had a center in New York and I came to the center and I learned about it.
I stream this radio station, Radio Nova, that’s based in Paris. They curate a beautiful set that’s really all over the place – they’ll play blues or some West African music, then A Tribe Called Quest, then funk from Ethiopia, then James Brown, and then the Beatles. It’s an amazing mix.
I really like The Beatles.
One day when I was like 9, I heard the Beatles on the radio, and I asked my dad who they were. He told me they were the best band in the world, and I became obsessed. He started giving me their albums in sequential order, and I listened to them – and only them – until I was probably in high school.
Between 1963 and 1975, I worked very little. The Beatles had come to New York and changed music – all the solo singers were out of work.
Your band members? Your band members don’t want to be tied to a machine. They want to be playing. That’s what the Beatles did. And the Beatles’ stuff is timeless. That’s what I would suggest. Just get back to sweating, playing hard, hammering, and having a blast.
People have made a living deconstructing Lennon and The Beatles songs because of their compositional sophistication. But what’s so exciting about John is that he never had any of that training on musical theory; something just spoke to him, and he just knew what sounded right.
I grew up listening to pop; I grew up listening to ’60s pop music, the Beatles, the Monkees, Herman’s Hermits and all that stuff. So I had a very strong background of listening to great pop music.
If the Beatles made England swing for the young, then Bond was a travel-poster boy for the earmuff brigade. The Bond films even put a few theme songs, such as Paul McCartney’s ‘Live and Let Die,’ on the pop charts.
