The Best 50 Beatles Songs Ever

Inspired by recent conversations on Twitter about bands you could build a steady 40 song playlist for, I decided to make a Beatles one. Anyway, I decided to listen to the Beatles and pretty much nothing else for a few hours just to see which ones I would pick.

During that, and doing some research, I found there's an awful lot of Top 50 Beatles songs out there lists. Being the saddo I am, I decided to enter all* these lists into a chart and work out what were the best 50 Beatles songs out there. Dead scientific, this. Anyway, here's the list. Can't believe You Know My Name (Look Up My Number) isn't in there....

I still haven't finished my own 40 song playlist either.

1. A Day in the Life
2. Strawberry Fields Forever
3. Something
4. Hey Jude
5. Let It Be
6. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
7. In My Life
8. Norwegian Wood
9. Eleanor Rigby
10. Tomorrow Never Knows
11. Yesterday
12. I Saw Her Standing There
13. Ticket to Ride
14. Here Comes The Sun
15. I Want To Hold Your Hand
16. Penny Lane
17. A Hard Day's Night
18. Help
19. Come Together
20. Paperback Writer
21. Blackbird
22. She Loves You
23. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
24. All You Need is Love
25. Cant Buy Me Love
26. Get Back
27. All My Loving
28. You've Got to Hide Your Love Away
29. Abbey Road Medley
30. Please Please Me
31. Revolution
32. I Am The Walrus
33. Dear Prudence
34. For No One
35. We Can Work It Out
36. Day Tripper
37. Nowhere Man
38. With A Little Help From My Friends
39. Drive My Car
40. Across the Universe
41. Here. There and Everywhere
42. Rain
43. And Your Bird Can Sing
44. Happiness Is A Warm Gun
45. Helter Skelter
46. Twist and Shout
47. She Said, She Said
48. Taxman
49. Got to Get You Into My Life
50. Eight Days A Week

* eight lists. That's enough data, I reckon.

In Praise of McFadden's Cold War

Picture this. President Reagan sat on Air Force One, reading a book. He appears engrossed. But wait, who’s that lying in a bed behind him? It’s Max Branning from East Enders. Hang on, what’s that book the late President is reading? It’s Pat Butcher’s autobiography.

Welcome to the world of McFadden’s Cold War, the funniest account on Twitter. A bricolage of modern global politics and British television – where Cilla Black is able to sit and have Christmas dinner with Kim Jong-un, where Khruschev and Eisenhower ride the streets of Washington with a young Sam Allardyce and a topless Cliff Richard. Present in most of these images, somewhere, often in a state of disarray is East Enders long suffering alcoholic wannabe gangster Phil Mitchell (as played by Steve McFadden).

McFadden’s Cold War should be Unit 101 in any Postmodernism Studies course.  Disparate images, times and cultural references are thrown together in order to both reflect the fragmented nature of society and the instant accessibility of all knowledge that the internet has afforded 21^st century man.

An image of Kim Il Jung and his generals watching a successful missile launch is subverted utterly by the replacement of the on screen warhead with an image of Nick Knowles mouth-turding his way through one of his songs. Reagan’s Cabinet pose for a photo, suddenly with Harold Shipman and distressed murder suspect Christopher Jeffries amongst their number, a juxtaposition jarring enough but given extra power by the realisation that they are posing beneath a large photo of a leering Dean Gaffney. This is Orwell via Wellard.

McFadden’s Cold War plays with ideas of cultureme, chronotopes and the like in a manner of a great sorcerer. In juxtaposing the worlds of pop culture and realpolitik, he anticipated the televisual celebrity cult of President Trump. Fictional drunks become players on the world stage, statesmen are reduced to mere citizens, drinkers at the Queen Vic, readers of TV Times.  It is this pricking of pomposity at all levels that makes the pleasingly anonymous MCW such a wonderful fountain of deep belly laughter.