Do betting companies still have extra-curricular singing groups? The Vernons Girls started out as a female choir formed out of women who worked for Vernons Football Pools. I had a friend who worked at a betting shop, and who has subsequently gone on to join a singing group in her local area, but I don’t remember her having the opportunity to get into singing through her work.
It was all very different in the late 1950s/early 1960s, and frankly, if Brexit is a mission to take the UK back to a perceived golden age, I hope that the chance for people to have a successful music career off the back of after-work activities becomes clear evidence of a Brexit benefit*
The Vernons Girls released an album in 1958 as a 16-piece ensemble but within a couple of years this had slimmed down to a trio of performers that released singles on a fairly regular basis up to late 1964 and nearly everyone associated with them went on to be a part of some fairly well known early 1960s girl singing group such as The Carefrees who released their own Beatle-centred novelty single and got into the US Top 40 with it, or The Ladybirds who provided backing vocals to many acts on Top of the Pops. Given that Vernons Pools were based in Liverpool, it was perhaps inevitable that the success of The Beatles would see The Vernons Girls chosen to sing a song eulogising them and the drawled Scouse accents as the girls compare the fanciable merits of the Fab Four sound like they could have been written down verbatim from overheard conversations at The Cavern Club.
The group’s connection to a football pools company was enough to get the track on to Bend It ‘92 and into Peel’s playlist for this show. Musically, the song presents a whistle stop tour through the sights and sounds of 1963 Beatledom as the Girls crowbar in the “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”s from She Loves You, which it took me until hearing this track to realise is a repackaging of the opening riff on Please Please Me, there’s also the brief “Ooh” refrain from From Me to You and the ascending “Aah”s from Twist and Shout. There are references to their haircuts and clothes, which inspired the boys and excited the girls of the time, but the standout to me are the closing lines which reflect the sense that Beatlemania wasn’t a passing fad but something which was upending perceived norms and the established order of things. It might have been only rock ‘n’ roll, but We Love the Beatles captures the force of the earthquake, as it was happening, and predicts the aftershocks to come:
We’ve never felt like this before, so let’s explain to ya/We’ve simply got Beatlemania!
On a personal note, 1993 was the year I finally started to “get” the Beatles and fully comprehend the journey they went on and their significance to pop music. It was a mixture of things that did it, there was a stunning essay in The Guinness Who’s Who of Sixties Music, that I used to crib whenever I went into WH Smith, but the thing that really opened my eyes was when I saw a girl on my BTEC course reading a book of their lyrics. I asked if I could have a look and was astonished to discover that tunes like Yesterday, Michelle and Drive My Car were Beatles songs. And just how the hell did Why Don’t We Do It In The Road go? By the end of the year, I had copies of A Collection of Beatles Oldies and The Blue Album in my possession, while I’d mentally cast myself as the bass player together with four of my friends as a 90s version of The Beatles called The Creed and spent time dividing up authorship of the songs among us. By the following year, I’d started to work through some of the albums themselves just at the point they were starting work on the Anthology project and with Britpop starting to gain traction and their influence being cited by many of the bands I liked, the timing could not have been better to really get into them.
*Which it won’t be because there are no benefits to Brexit. Maybe the hedge fund choirs will do good numbers on Spotify though.
Video courtesy of AnimalMySoul
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
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