MakemineVanilla

In the age of the rock virtuoso they certainly gave hope to the rest of us who couldn't play.

He's already in as far as I'm concerned.

Some voices get better as they get older and some don't.

There is a huge amount of pathos in Dancing Queen and I can only wonder which is the sadder experience; fat people dancing to Dancing Queen or fat people dancing to I Will Survive? I would probably vote for the latter, as long as there was at least one handbag involved.

I agree but they were by the same token, never for me. Had better tunes than the Beatles though and they did of course give rise to this KLF album being withdrawn from the shelves Didn't Elvis nick the piano from Dancing Queen for Oliver's Army? And come to think of it I would probably have put Dancing Queen on my songs that make you cry list. There is definitely an undercurrent of Scandinavian melancholy in most of what they did.

When it comes to perfect records Abba made quite a few. When I consider the combination of great songs, superb production, chilling harmonies and the fact that they were never quite hip, I would be waiting for the cock to crow if I was to disavow the pleasure they gave me. Kitsch and never cool but everything a pop group should be.

Cahill really struggled. Blowing hard. Another bad mistake. Lacked pace.

As a man who loves a riff I have to admit that Day Tripper never fails to give me the white man's overbite. Perfect example of John and Paul's sweet and sour vocals complimenting each other perfectly. But I think Back In The USSR and Paperback Writer are nearer to perfection.

Waterloo Sunset is a strange one ... by which I mean , it's a fantastic song ..and yet possibly it's become a victim of it's own success and through familiarity I sorta no longer like it ... Kinks wise nothing beats that you really got me machine gun like guitar riff , I'll never tire of that Beatles wise ... All you need is love probably , even if it was "borrowed" from Chanson D'Amour and three blind mice !! again for me the singles probably suffer through over play but Paperback Writer still sounds fairly fresh even after all those years .... I can't disagree with the problem of stuff getting played to death. I can't argue with your choices.

I quite agree. I think their reputation arises from the sheer volume of quality work but it is still an interesting question - subjective or not.

The next question. Did the Beatles ever produce a perfect single? Personally I would rate things like the Kinks' Waterloo Sunset as perfect and Ike and Tina Turner's River Deep Mountain High. Which Beatles' single do you think reached that level of perfection?

Here we go again more utter nonsense. Did the Beatles invent time travel too? Poet Philip Larkin even suggests that they might even have invented sexual intercourse but he is definitely ambiguous about it. Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) - Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP.

I like to watch TV quizzes and I've lost a lot and won a few down the pub (I was on a good team) but the question which always remains at the end of the night is: How the f*** did they know that? Or when I am answering myself: How the f*** am I supposed to know that? This is even more relevant these days when a guy called Mark Goodliffe has won the Times crossword championship six years in a row. This clever bugger has the ability to solve 3 difficult (read - impossible) Times crosswords in 30 minutes. Now the question is: how does he train? I've asked loads of people, even an actual champion, but never got a straight answer - they do three crosswords a day and have been doing it for thirty years etc. But this doesn't do it for me because I can't see how it is possible for actual random crosswords to bring up enough of the rarer words, where the difficulties lie. So how do they train? Mooney tells us that he watches four quizzes on Monday and usually wins free beer by winning the quiz down the pub but what else does he do? Any tips, anyone? For those interested, my last frustrating crossword moment was provided by the answer - Boccaccio. HTFWISTKT?

The one thing I can never understand is why there is so much hostility towards McCartney. I can understand the disappointment at some of his early post-Beatles output but the obsession with trying to devalue his contribution to the Beatles is beyond me because he really knew how to write a song and he was probably the most talented musician of the four (he even played drums). I assume that it can only be about the politics of pop appreciation and that Lennon's aggressive teddy-boy image is mistaken for authenticity, that chimerical beast which is often confused with other things.

Popular music evolves in increments of the acceptable. Artists who manage to make a new form acceptable to mainstream culture move the evolution of popular music forward. So artists like Lonnie Donegan and Elvis enjoy their place in the pantheon for doing so. Artists like Jerry Lee Lewis were just too far ahead of that curve and were barred from entering the country: their acceptance had to wait. Elvis was a white man who sang like a black man and his acceptability enabled black music to enter mainstream public taste and imagination. Black rock'n roll artists were just not quite acceptable to the British or American public, even into the 1960's. Look at the charts of the time and see all those brilliant records by black artists which were rejected and the abysmal covers by white artists which topped the charts. The Beatles were the perfect combination of acceptability and progressiveness which totally revolutionised the popular music industry, both here and in America. Their adoration in America (the land of rock 'n roll) and the commercial success led to a revolution in the music industry, which was that the artist suddenly became the creative auteur and which put them at the centre of creativity. This is the biggest thing which the Beatles contributed to popular music and which every band now owes a debt to. Up until then the big artists were mostly singing other people's songs with a few mainstream exceptions like Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry (CB never had a British top-ten hit until 1964). So in my view people have to forget how the Beatles sound (good, bad or indifferent) and follow the arc of the evolution of pop music from the early 1960s to the progressive rock of the 1970s and beyond, and acknowledge that without that shift from Brill building hits to artists having their own creative vision, the cornucopia of diversity which is the modern popular music scene would almost certainly not exist.

Yeah, right!

Sounds like the new theme song for Villa to me. Although something by Lerner and Loewe, which for those who know German provides a double pun, might be better.

Me too. Playing computer chess I found that my pleasure in the game increased with chances of me winning. But as it was pointed out in a certain episode of Frasier, chess is a bit too Oedipal for my liking.

Some time ago we had an outbreak of chess interest at work and people played in their breaks. It was surprising to find out who turned out to be good and who not. It tended to be the guys who were very competitive in other games and sports who were the best.

If that was a response to my "I'm shit at chess" post, you have failed to understand my problem. I can't hold more than one move in my brain at once - in fact I can't even see all the possibilities that that one move will open. I can sit and ponder the board for ten minutes, make my move - and then immediately see my queen taken, because I hadn't spotted that that would happen. So that the very concept of 'controlling the centre of the board' or coming up with any sort of strategy is meaningless. It must be some sort of left brain/right brain thing - I mean I think I'm reasonably intelligent in other ways, but chess (and similar games) is a real blind spot. And it really isn't worth the effort to work on it, TBH. It is probably because you are not gifted with the sort of Asperger's which enables you to think in patterns.

This looks like the start of a promising rant. Could you supply the whole thing? Oh no..... Mike's saying he's heard it all before from me many times on VT so you'll forgive me if I just tell you that the Beatles and Queen are two bands that make my blood boil Out of compassion for Mooney's sensibilities we won't carry it on here but could you direct me to the thread you might have delivered your thesis, and then I can do a search. Thanks!

This year's Reith lectures by Grayson Perry were superb. Best bit of stand-up I've heard for a while. He starts off by quoting Alan Bennett - You haven't got to like everything! http://tinyurl.com/ozqnjca Still available on iPlayer

The dilemma with buying classical music is whether to be buy the best performance or the best recording. Always a tough call. Love the Kogan - thanks! Although I definitely find Tchaikovsky a bit too sweet for me in the morning.

For some reason I think Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto is at its best when a woman plays it: maybe because Peter had a strong feminine side, or because they look so sexy doing it. http://youtu.be/GAkw_Wi4yIo

I love that song because the defiance of the prisoners in the audience always lifts my spirits.