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I am not the Beatles

I Am Not The Beatles is a very funny and oddly poignant music website. It was made by a man who spent his 1980s childhood building up a vast collection of seven inch singles, all of which he bought from his local record shop for eight pence each. These were the failed records, the ones that nobody wanted (hence the website’s title). The shop stuffed them all into brown paper bags, 12 records per bag, and sold the bags for £1 each. You bought the bag not knowing what you’d get, which was part of the fun. It was a musical lucky dip.

There was a similar record shop where I grew up in the north of England - The Pink Panther in Carlisle, now long gone - and I occasionally bought a brown paper bag just like this. Unlike me, though, the creator of I Am Not The Beatles became slightly obsessed with the idea and collected vast numbers of these failed records. Years later, he has set up a website on which he picks those records out at random and then reviews them on his website without knowing anything about the people who made them - in other words, he listens to them now the way he listened to them then. The result is an affectionately written tribute to fleeting fame, failure and the ridiculousness of much 1980s pop music. I love it.

One day, I hope that Swimmer One end up being written about on a website like this. I’d prefer us to be hugely successful, obviously. Then again, all success is fleeting. What comes afterwards looks a lot like I Am Not The Beatles.

Andrew

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