Beatles 2000: International Cross-disciplinary Conference, 15-18 June 2000, Jyvaskyla, Finland

Extract

There’s no doubt about it. A Conference with a single theme is amazingly comforting. If the theme is centred on a group as well known as the Beatles, then it is doubly so. ‘Journalistic texts on popular music are often disposed towards music which they themselves like and would listen to by choice (often thinly veiling race and gender prejudice). This is characterised by their attraction to a certain type of more subversive-seeming, more lyrically and structurally complex music.’ ‘You want a piece of music to encapsulate the period it was written in, and Sgt. Pepper does seem to do that.’ `It was a decisive moment in the history of Western Civilisation.’ Although these somewhat eulogistic reflections were written in the early 1970s, the attraction to the Beatles has continued unabated. Richard Lloyd Perry, writing in The Independent on Sunday, 21 February 1999, observed: ‘Ironically, given their reputation at the time as slurring Scousers, the Beatles are honoured as custodians of linguistic clarity - an observation echoed in many of the papers presented at the Conference.