You know you’re making it big in the world when you get an adjective named after you. The term “Beatlesque” was coined to refer to any piece of music that could be considered an homage, even if unconscious, to the Fab Four.
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Even in the 80s, songs that seemed to bear a strong Beatles influence did damage in the charts. These four stand out from the pack. (In case you’re wondering, we didn’t consider any Fab Four solo records.)
“Time” by The Alan Parsons Project
The Alan Parsons Project emerged out of the musical collaboration between Parsons and Eric Woolfson. They wrote all the songs. For the group’s first four albums, they doled out the songs that had lyrics to a series of rotating vocalists. But Woolfson had been badgering Parsons all along to allow him to sing a song or two. Finally, on the 1980 album The Turn Of A Friendly Card, Parsons relented. One of the songs fronted by Woolfson became the album’s big hit single. You could certainly hear the influence of Pink Floyd, with whom Parsons worked as an engineer, on the song. But Parsons also worked with The Beatles. Woolfson’s beautiful, sweeping ballad about ephemerality feels like a John Lennon number along the lines of “Across The Universe”.
“Raspberry Beret” by Prince And The Revolution
Prince refused to simply stay in an R&B lane throughout his career, even though he was brilliant in that genre. The guy’s talents just refused to be contained to one lane. You can certainly hear a Beatles’ influence in the Purple Rain song “Take Me With U”. On the album Around The World In A Day, Prince indulged his love of baroque psychedelia for an entire album. That confused a lot of people, and the album as a whole is underrated because of it. But everyone certainly seemed to love the lead single “Raspberry Beret”. What’s fascinating is how Prince ties the catchy string part and the buoyant melody to some of his more familiar lover-man sweet-talking. Even with the homage, his musical identity remained intact.
“Life In A Northern Town” by Dream Academy
Nick Laird-Clowes and Gilbert Gabriel were considering hanging it up, as The Dream Academy’s early musical efforts had been met with nothing but indifference. They decided to give it one more shot, centering an idea for a song around a wordless chant that you might hear in African music. From that foundation, they added touches that made the song sound wonderfully out of time for 1985, which is when the song was released. Kate St. John, who’d soon become a member of the band, added a part on the cor anglais, which was just the kind of out-of-left-field classical move The Beatles liked to make. To cement the association, Laird-Clowes name-dropped the group in one of the verses.
“No Myth” by Michael Penn
Circa 1989, it was difficult to find too many songs on the radio built around songwriting first. Most pop hits seemed to focus on the production. In the middle of that scene, Michael Penn sounded like a bolt from the blue when his debut single “No Myth” arrived. Penn’s family was known for acting, but he immediately established himself as a first-rate songwriter with the song, which hit the Top 40. What you’ll notice listening to “No Myth” is how Penn manages to fit his erudite lyrics so seamlessly into the song’s meter. That kind of thing was first perfected by The Beatles on albums like Rubber Soul. Penn’s subsequent career didn’t include any more Top 40 hits, but it certainly provided plenty of excellent examples of this technique.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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