The Beatles & Me
Last week saw the launch of a new Beatles Website. Critique is easy and I could wax lryical all day about what I like, what I don’t like and what I would have done differently. Instead, I’ll offer something more credible and talk about my experience working on thebeatles.com.
Back when I was in art college in the mid 90’s, the Beatles were experiencing something of a renaissance, due in large part to the success of Oasis who credited the Beatles approximately four or five times every sentence. The Anthologies had been released and websites were starting spring up around Beatles albums and special releases. The whole package was a designers wet dream. The likes of Hi-Res (web design superheroes at the time) were doing things with flash that we’d never seen before and the editor of NME had openly admitted that if they wanted to double their sales they “…just have to stick a picture of John Lennon on the cover.” [citation needed]
So I doubt anyone would be surprised to learn that every student designer in the mid 90’s dreamed of working on a Beatles project when they left college. However, it came as a massive surprise to me when, after only two months on the job, my boss casually sat down at my desk and told me I’d be designing the first ever official Beatles website. Not a website for an album or a special project but the actual Beatles website.
After about two days of phone calls to tell everyone I knew (and all the people they knew) about what I was working on, I finally settled down to work sifting through super secret Beatles archive stuff to fashion a website which I’d be presenting at Apple Corps, offices to the legendary Neil Aspinall no less, a man often referred to as the fifth Beatle. This was a big deal to me. I’d never experienced the pressure of presenting to a client of this magnitude. thebeatles.com would no doubt be a major portfolio piece not just for me, but for my employer as well. From my point of view, our relationship with a major client hinged on the strength of my work, the clarity of my communication the professionalism of my presentation skills. Of course there was a lot more in the equation than that, but at the time that’s how I saw it. I’d like to say I sailed through the pitch, created the most awesome website ever and lived happily ever after with Natalie Portman…. but that would be a lie.
On presentaion day, my boss at the time, and Jeremy (Jez) Neecham, our liason from Apple Corp, did their best to calm a clearly nervous me by talking at length about what a nice guy Neil was, to absolutely no effect. As far as I was concerned, Neil Aspinal was the Beatles. As the head of Apple Corp, he held the keys to the kingdom and surely only a ruthless dictator with a super human ability to cut through the bullshit people like me are paid to throw at him, could rise to such a lofty position. He must surely be a buttoned down, cigar smoking, business psychopath who chewed out noobs like me for sport. So when he sauntered into the room wearing his reading glasses around his neck, a cardigan and slippers, clutching a box brimming over with playing cards and smoking a hand rolled cigarette, muttering something about Wurlitzers, I was taken a little off guard. He then proceeded to completely ignore me as I stood by the screen waiting to present and wasted about an hour talking about his prescriptions, Brazilian herbal remedies and how nice it must be to drive a taxi for a living. To be fair, he didn’t ignore me out of rudeness, he simply hadn’t thought to look over to my side of the room. But suddenly, he stopped talking, looked straight at me, pointed to the screen where my work was laid bare for all to see and with a completely straight face asked “What’s this crap then?”
Not the start I had hoped for, but I was certain I could overcome this initial upset. I had spent weeks going over and over my rational. Despite my nerves I was sure the strength of the concept and my articulation would be enough win over the harshest of critics with the keenest of eyes. Alas, I got no further than “This is our proposal for the Be-” when he piped up again with “I don’t like it” and promptly got back to talking about more interesting things with more interesting people.
I was devestated, but I wasn’t alone. My boss and Jez were also taken by surprise but after a few minutes of fractured explanations and pleas he once again turned his attention to me and agreed to consider whatever snake-oil I was pedaling. And to his credit, he did. He was attentive, interested and had plenty of thoughtful questions. After what felt like hours of hard selling, he changed his mind. He loved it now. The project was a go.
That was my first and only dealing with Mr Aspinall. Our paths never had cause to cross again. He died of Lung Cancer back in 2008, long after I’d left the UK. While I know absolutely nothing about him, I can say that in my experience he really was a nice guy. He seemed to enjoy talking to anyone about anything which made him an interesting person regardless of his affiliations and backstory. As we were leaving he reached into the box he had carried into the meeting gave us all a pack of Yellow Submarine playing cards. It felt to me like I was being rewarded for surviving my baptism of fire.
From there on in, things got progressively worse. Neil was effectively just the titular head of Apple Corp. Everything had to be run by other involved parties. Yoko Ono was responsible for John Lennons interests. Richard Starky (he doesn’t like being called Ringo anymore apparently) and George Harrison did their thing, and from what I could gather, Paul McCartney had little to no interest in any of it. It’s worth noting at this point that Yoko Ono released a book called “Memories of John Lennon” in 2005, and completely neglected to include Paul McCartney or Ringo Star, but thought to ask Bono and Nils Lofgren to give their input, a point which will hold more significance later on.
Besides the seperate estates of the former Beatles members, there was also EMI to deal with. I can’t shake the feeling that the relationship between EMI and the Beatles is very unhealthy, and I suspect Paul McCartney might feel the same. I remember someone telling me a story about getting into his limo after an awards ceremony and McCartney wouldn’t go home until he’d driven past EMI head offices and hurled some abuse at them at 2 in the morning. That could well be complete bollocks, but I’d like to think it happened.
Intially however, our major concern was Yoko. The concept of the site was based around the idea that the Beatles mean different things to different people. So it was decided that we wouldn’t create any new artwork and would only use original Beatles imagery taken from their long and diverse reign of rock from the Cavern to “Let It Be” and everything in between. In addition, we set about soliciting written pieces from famous folk who could talk about their relationship with the Beatles, or simply what the Beatles meant to them, which we would publish on the website monthly along with imagery and other supporting assets. I was pushing for an Interview with Donovan who I thought had a massive influence on their music and vice versa. But the biggest shock came from Jez, our Apple Corps liason who told me Yoko Ono was interested and ready to write a piece.
Perhaps Yoko gets a bad press and she doesn’t hate the Beatles, I can’t say for sure, but the news was even more surprising as she had allegedly put the breaks on this animation by the french agency Melon because it was a new interpretation of John Lennon. The animation found it’s way online anyway. Regardless of all that, she was on board with our project and everyone was over the moon, except the lovely people at EMI.
For reasons that have never been made clear to me, EMI objected to the idea of other people talking about The Beatles, on The Beatles website. Monthly updates no longer made sense since The Beatles weren’t in business any more, the Anthologies had been and gone and special projects were so sparse that we could realistically only depend on a handful of updates a year. I’ve no idea why EMI objected to it so strongly and to this day I firmly believe that someone inside that organization has an axe to grind either with the Beatles or with Apple Corp. My suspicions were supported with EMI’s next surprise move.
We had gone to great lengths to make samples of every single Beatles track available through the website. The entire discography, including rarities and with accompanying artwork had been compiled. Each and every album came with liner notes and other interesting tidbits form Beatles lore. But the key feature was the 30 second samples which we had intended to link to an inline store of EMI’s choosing in the future. So just to recap: 30 second samples, on the official Beatles website, to support sales of The Beatles music. Samples of tracks that were streamed in their entirety on other official Beatles websites.
Less than a week before we went live, Jez decided he had better run the site by EMI one more time. We were certain there was nothing they could object to, so it was just a formality. How wrong we were.
EMI instantly demanded we take all the samples off line. Bear in mind that these were 30 second samples, not full tracks, and that in the UK at the time it was perfectly legal for Apple Corp to have those samples online if they were promoting sales of the music. All of which fell on deaf ears. EMI didn’t care for Apple Corps legal rights top promote The Beatles, and they were ready to engage their most brilliant and militant legal team to do everything in their power to stop those samples hitting the web. Again, it was a bizarre decision with no reasonable explanation. I suspect that whoever threw the spanner in the works was the same person behind The Beatles mysterious absence on iTunes. The only believable explanation I can come up with is that EMI hates The Beatles, or Apple Corp, or both. Considering their precarious relationship with Apple Computers, it’s not unreasonable to think they just don’t like them Apples.
But in the end, after all that, thebeatles.com went live. It was a shambling parody of what we had set out to build. It sat online for almost 3 years, stagnating, doing nothing for no-one and to this day, the best place on the web to find out about the Beatles is still Wikipedia.
So, I take my hat off to SapientNitro and Apple Corp. No doubt EMI has come up with new and more interesting ways to screw over the fab four. Navigating those pitfalls and booby traps is no small achivement. I wish them the best of luck with whatever they have planned. They’ll need it.
