Rob Blackhurst

But though the music remains as vibrant as when it was recorded, the cultural influence of the Beatles has been vastly overstated.

January 2004

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Sir Paul McCartney's US tour is playing to some of the biggest audiences of his career. Though the boyish features are creased, the mop-top is dyed russet and he'll be 64 in less than eighteen months, the Beatles songs he wrote forty years ago more popular than they ever were in the sixties. Forty years on, Beatlemania has only got stronger. Their recent greatest hits album "1" sold hugely in America to a new generation of young fans born ten years after John Lennon's murder. Even Rolling Stone proclaimed them on their cover last year as the "world's hottest band".

It's now uncontroversial for Musicologists to mention the music of Lennon-McCartney in the same breath as Cole Porter, Irvine Berlin and even Schubert. Music that radio stations banned in the sixties because of its corrupting effect is now the soundtrack to the cultural establishment. In the ultimate sign of establishment respectability, Tony Blair reportedly wrote his speech to Parliament on the eve of war in Iraq while listening to a Beatles CD.

We may not think that they are, as Timothy Leary believed in the sixties, "the first harbingers of a new race of laughing god-men", but the claims perpetuated by the Beatles cultural industry are no less absurd. BBC Radio last year devoted several hours to dissecting their cultural significance – and managed to credit them with everything from creating the permissive society to breaking the iron grip of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

This is like giving Madonna credit for the eighties Wall Street boom or Noel Coward responsibility for the appeasement of Hitler. Pop music provides a memorable soundtrack to the times – and can distil its values in turn of phrase - but cannot be held responsible for deep-rooted political and social change. Rising living standards in the West, the youth bulge caused by the end of WW2 as soldiers returned to their wives and the invention of the contraceptive pill were responsible for the liberal values of the sixties – not the opening chords of Hard Day's Night.

Those editors and journalists – now in their fifties and sixties -who promote this Beatles mythology are from the generation that founded "cultural studies" in the Universities and grew up railing against the high art and culture of their parents. They took pop culture seriously – engaged in all those Is Keats as good as Dylan? debates – and were keen to ascribe all the changes around them to these magical new sounds. With a sentimental glance over the shoulder to their adolescence, they now propagandize about the "timeless" music of the Beatles.

But it's striking how dated the attitudes betrayed in Beatles lyrics now seem. John Lennon's Imagine is a Marxist manifesto that calls for the abolition of property, nationality and religion ("above us only sky") that is now only taken seriously inside North Korea. Its worldview is light years away from our age of popular capitalism, celebrity and alternative religions. Puppy-love anthems like "I want to hold your hand" have nothing in common the crotch-grabbing choreography of a Christine Agueliera or Britney Spears. And their later hippyish belief that "all you need is love" could not be further from the bling-culture of jewels and fast cars celebrated on MTV. The louche and libertarian Rolling Stones – also touring the US this autumn – wrote about this cocktail of sex, money and ambition far better than the Beatles.

If the Beatles embraced hippiedom - idealizing the natural, growing facial hair, and nurturing intense relationships, then Mick Jagger's combination of expensive tailoring and interest in the stock market were early harbingers of Thatcherism. Whereas the Beatles – in as much as they were political – flirted with the New Left (McCartney helped bankroll the International Times) and wrote nostalgically about their working class childhoods, Jagger went into music because " I looked around and this seemed like the only way I was going to get the kind of bread I wanted."

Even the blueprint for success that the Beatles pioneered has disappeared. In the mid-sixties, the whole of America tuned in to hear them on the Ed Sullivan show. Now, in our multi-channel age where music has broken down into hundreds of genres, it is not possible for one band to overwhelmingly dominate culture again. And with TV shows like Pop idol churning out forgettable singers singing torch songs, we're back to the pre-Beatles age where pop impresarios, rather than artists, run the music industry. So when a grizzled Sir Paul strains for the high notes of Hey Jude this autumn US babyboomers should enjoy it for what it is – a tuneful relic from a vanished age – whatever the critics try to tell us.