AYE, the Fab Four were great in their day, true enough, but by God, it sure is time to move on.
Go on, admit it, dear reader. You must be as jaded as the rest of us by the sound of ‘Hey Jude’ repeated ad nauseum in the backstreet boozers of Merseyside.
I tell you, when people sing it in Hell’s Waiting Room, I step outside to avoid hearing it.
Same goes for ‘Imagine’ and its preposterously naïve lyric.
Over-familiarity has bred in me an abiding dislike for ‘Hey Jude’ and for quite a few of the other Beatles classics.
Nor would it have appealed to me to hear the foursome’s top tunes rattled out again in Derby Square, in the city centre, during the recent, not-so glittering Mathew Street Festival.
And how I wish boring old bozos from the 1960s Liverpool music scene would just SHUT UP about The Beatles and about the Merseybeat phenomenon.
Those old fogeys refuse to die… they just turn into oxygen-stealing local broadcasters.
And occasionally you will find them shuffling about in their kaftans at gigs inside Fort Perch Rock, New Brighton …along with other local dinosaurs.

Also, I do wish young men would stop trying to copy the fabled group, 40-odd years later.
A whole industry of Beatles tribute acts chugs on year after tedious year, with derivative events like the Mathew Street Festival encouraging them.
The Beatles were prodigiously talented, I don’t deny that, and they produced great popular culture with their music.
But let’s not forget that very quickly after they made it big, none of the Fab Four felt Liverpool was a place worth living in. Well, not for people as grand as them, at least.
They preferred London, the Home Counties, Los Angeles, the Mull of Kintyre, New York City … anywhere as long as it wasn’t Liverpool.
‘Let’s get away’ was the principal motivation for each of the supposedly lovable moptops from the mid-1960s onwards.
If they owed their fame to Liverpool, then they showed precious little gratitude to the city when they became global megastars.
Yet here we are, with Capital of Culture year nearly upon us and still Liverpool is trying to live in the past with tribute bands doing Beatles stuff in Derby Square while podgy, middle aged councillors strut around as Cultural Commissars. No wonder 2008 is in trouble.
Liverpool deserves better. And the city’s culture vultures would do well to remember that real culture and genuine talent rises from the streets.
It doesn’t need strategy meetings by PR suits or the launching of logos in the city centre's many fake-trendy bars. In fact those things militate against culture.
As for the very sad business of paying tribute bands to perform in public spaces, that should be left to hopeless provincial towns such as Stoke-on-Trent, where apparently there remains an insatiable appetite among local people for Smokie, Pilot, and Royston Vasey's finest, Crème Brulee.
Yes, and those Stokie types also have a taste for sideburns and mullet haircuts. Even the women.
A final word on music. And it isn’t about The Beatles.
It occurred to me the other day that I think I have discovered what must be the most irritating sound in the world … Sting singing ‘Fields of Gold’.
Sometimes incorrectly referred to as 'Fields of Barley'.
Mostly referred to as pretentious crap.

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