IF you want to stage a speaking tour that looks back at the songwriting craft of the Beatles, who better to co-present it than Bob Harris OBE, one of this country’s pre-eminent music broadcasters?
Harris, now 77, became a DJ in the late Sixties before landing a coveted job on BBC national radio before becoming the presenter on the ground-breaking music show, The Old Grey Whistle Test. Today he is still an influential presenter on Radio 2.
He is taking to the road with The Songs The Beatles Gave Away, alongside the author and music journalist Colin Hall, whose own credentials are impeccable: not only is he the custodian of Mendips, John Lennon’s former home in Woolton, Liverpool, but he was also present at the Liverpool church fete on July 6, 1957, when Lennon first met Paul McCartney.
The show, which visits Braemar, Aberdeen and Cumbernauld in late April, has already proved highly popular with audiences across England. One in particular was notable for what Harris amusingly describes as being of ‘almost Bruce Springsteen set length’.
The Songs The Beatles Gave Away sees Harris and Hall discussing their lifelong love of the Beatles (not for nothing are the Fab Four the band that Harris has played most often throughout his distinguished 54-year-long BBC career) and presenting rare archive footage of the broadcaster’s landmark interviews with Lennon and McCartney. The encounter with Lennon, taped for the Old Grey Whistle Test in New York in April 1975, came about after Harris asked the New York-bound Elton John to tell Lennon how much the OGWT team wanted to talk to him.
The new show’s current run sees it visit towns and cities that aren’t often on the circuit: Hexham, Berwick Upon Tweed, Basingstoke, for example. Braemar and Cumbernauld fall into this category too. It’s something that the duo consciously set out to do.
“We played in Penzance recently and we had three sell-out shows in Devon and Cornwall,” Harris recounts, “and a lot of people came up to us and said, ‘We’re so happy that you came down here. Not a lot of people do’.
“The show is really enjoyable, and fun to do”, he continues. “It comprises a lot of archive material – interviews, demos, rarities. It really has a mind of its own.
“Every single show is different. We’ve got a basic spine, which includes a long interview I did some years ago with Paul, talking about the songs that he and John wrote for other people. That’s our guide through the evening, but we also hear from such people as Cilla Black, [Beatles producer] George Martin, George Harrison and Mary Hopkin. It’s a lovely listen. And Colin and I weave stories around all of that”.
The premise of the show is that by 1963 Lennon and McCartney were so prolific that not all of their songs could find a home on Beatles LPs. The rise of the Merseybeat sound of 1963 and 1964 allowed these songs to be sung by such notable acts as Cilla and Billy J Kramer. It’s often forgotten today that Cilla’s 1968 chart hit, Step Inside Love, was penned by McCartney.
Read more: Life on the road with Simple Minds: Derek Forbes tells his story
“Step Inside Love is in my opinion one of the highlights”, says Harris. “I’ve got the original demo that Cilla and Paul recorded with George Martin in a little studio in Bond Street. Paul had just finished the lyrics; he’d written them on a piece of paper and given them to Cilla, and she’s standing at the microphone, singing through the lyrics, just to get some idea of how the song might sound, with Paul accompanying her on guitar.
“It’s beautiful, it really is. The demo comes in midway through the second half of the show.
“We’ve also got a lovely demo that Olivia Harrison gave us of George demo’ing a song called Sour Milk Sea, for Jackie Lomax.”
As for the show that almost outlasted a Springsteen concert …. “We just got so lost in the stories and lost in the moment. We have a merch desk after each show and we meet audience members and talk to them. I apologised to the venue people for keeping them up so late, but they were fine about it.” The curfew was 10.30pm but the two presenters accidentally assumed that 10.30pm was more for the end of the show.
In his entertaining memoirs Harris writes of arriving in London in 1966, as a former police cadet from Northamptonshire. The capital was alive with music and cultural experimentation back then: nearly every weekend in 1967 found him at the happening Middle Earth club in Covent Garden, where bands such as Pink Floyd, The Byrds and (introduced by one John Peel) Captain Beefheart. The club sometimes relocated to the Roundhouse, at Chalk Farm, where he saw the Stones, the Floyd, The Doors and Jefferson Airplane. He even became one of the founders of Time Out magazine.
At length he won a regular slot on Radio One’s Sounds of the 70s slot. It made his name, and it led to him taking over, in September 1972, from Richard Williams as host of the Old Grey Whistle Test, which had been launched the previous year.
Music fans of a certain vintage have a remarkable sense of nostalgia for OGWT. Back in the Seventies it was utterly unmissable, introducing new groups to UK audiences via live performances in the studio.
DVD boxsets and YouTube videos today yield up everyone from Little Feat and the Eagles to the Dutch quartet, Focus, the New York Dolls, Springsteen, the Ramones, Dr Feelgood and Iggy Pop.
There were revealing interviews, too, with such luminaries as Elton John, Robert Plant, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And at the centre of it all, for many years, was ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, who quite simply had a job that music fans envied as he travelled the world to meet the biggest names in rock music and compered dazzlingly high-profile gigs in exotic locations.
Read more: Photographer Harry Benson on his landmark pictures of the Beatles in 1964
And now? Having worked for a succession of radio stations he now presents, with typically understated authority, the award-winning Country Show on BBC Radio 2 on Thursday evenings, widening our understanding of the country/Americana genre and, as ever, ushering new and established groups into the nation’s living-rooms and kitchens. “Country,” he observes, “has had a very strong influence over my musical tastes forever.”
He also presents, with his son Miles, a Fantasy Football podcast, A Game of No Halves, reflecting his decades-long interest in the fortunes of the imaginary but hugely successful team, North London FC.
Is there anyone he would love to have met and interviewed? Joni Mitchell, comes the immediate response. “I met her very briefly in 1971, when we passed each other in a room,” he says. “Joni, at that time, is someone I would like to have spent more time with.”
Bob Harris & Colin Hall present "The Songs The Beatles Gave Away”: St Margaret’s, Braemar, April 26; Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, April 27; Lanternhouse, Cumbernauld, April 28. Visit bobharris.org
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