Here comes the next piece of Beatlemania... why can't we just let it be?

I like the Beatles, and I'm almost definitely sure that you do too. But I'm afraid their 21st-century omnipresence – impressive for a band that split up 56 years ago – is starting to bring me slightly down.

It has been revealed that there is to be a ginormous new Beatles museum in Liverpool, opening in 2028. Its 9,290 sq m will be packed with props and costumes from the four – yes, four – biopics of the band to be released the same year under the auspices of Sam Mendes. All this will come on top of the opening to the public of the band's former Apple Records headquarters in Savile Row, repurposed as another sanctum. This one promises seven floors of memorabilia.

Oh, and the dodgy Richard Curtis film Yesterday is being transformed into a stage musical, featuring the songs of Showaddywaddy – no, not really, it's The Beatles again.

One can't help feeling a little bit over-Beatled. Growing up in the Seventies, I naturally found the Sixties a bit naff, and the lingering overhang of The Beatles a bit tedious. Were people ever going to stop boring on about them?

After all, when you grow up after a big sensation has flared and died, you take it for granted. It will never be a surprise to you, just part of the furniture. Like everybody else I was reared on Beatles tunes, but I inevitably developed the usual teenage disdain for the kind of music that everybody likes.

Like the moon landings, it was only years later, in adulthood, that I appreciated the momentous quality of The Beatles, the almost uncanny combination of genius-level talents, their constant innovation, where every record surpassed and expanded on the one before.

In fact, I realised that their ubiquity concealed their strangeness. There is the oddly pristine, unsexy, clean-as-a-whistle quality of their sound, which unwittingly future-proofed them in a way that no other band or artist could quite match. Their songs are both very Sixties and so tuneful and memorable that they seem to exist outside time. Even their weirder excursions are strangely, hypnotically beguiling. Their records tower over you, which is something pop music never normally does.

Source: yahoo.com/Gareth Roberts

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