I hate the Beatles and you couldn’t pay me to listen to their new song

Bland, gooey and grating on the soul… there is no way round it, admits John Rentoul, I don’t like anything by the so-called Fab Four, except possibly Ramsey Lewis’s jazz piano version of ‘Dear Prudence’. Let the battle commence!

‘Now and Then’, the new Beatles song, is bland and gooey (AP)

You know me. I’d rather bring sunshine and joy than the gloomy cloud of negativity. Generally, my view is that if you don’t like something, keep it to yourself. Whereas if you do like it, let the world know and share in your happiness.

However, the day has come when a smidgeon of grey has to streak the rainbow of all things being for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Today is the day that “Now and Then” – the “last Beatles song” – is released.

There is no way around this. I don’t like it. I don’t like The Beatles. I don’t like anything by The Beatles, except possibly Ramsey Lewis’s jazz piano version of “Dear Prudence”. I love Paul McCartney, one of the best human beings who has ever lived. In a reversal of the usual dilemma, of whether it is possible to like, say, Wagner’s music, I think it is possible to admire someone while being left cold by their art.

I couldn’t even listen to the whole of “Now and Then”. I find John Lennon’s voice irritating and whiny. The lyrics are vacuous mush. The tune is syrupy and the arrangement dull.

But I have never liked The Beatles’ music. As a child and a teenager, you were either The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, and I was with the jumpin’ jack flash. I was at school in Bristol at the time, and I was Rovers rather than City, and Stones rather than Beatles.

I didn’t dislike The Beatles’ music then. I was indifferent to it. I bought the double audio cassette of the greatest hits – the red from 1962 to 1966, and the blue from 1967 to 1970 – but hardly ever played it.

It was not until much later that I realised that what I thought was indifference concealed something deeper. I mean, obviously, “Imagine” is one of the worst songs ever made, and I loathed that. Even before I was a Blairite, I was a pragmatic Fabian gradualist, and the sentimentality and misplaced utopianism of that song grated on the soul. But that was Lennon after he went off the deep end, and nothing to do with The Beatles.

Then it struck me that I didn’t actually like any actual Beatles music either. I thought that there must be one or two tracks I liked, but when I tried any of the likely candidates, I came away with a firm “No”.

I came out as a Beatlesphobe a decade ago. I was compiling a feature called The Top 10 for The Independent on Sunday, when my friend Tom Doran said on Twitter that “All You Need Is Love” was the second-worst Beatles song. It did not take long to produce a Top 10 Worst Beatles Songs. The very worst, according to Tom, is “Across the Universe”, which he said is one whose “crushing banality and mediocrity are amplified by undeserved acclaim”.

The rest of the Top 10 was easy to put together: “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” (As Ian MacDonald wrote in his book Revolution in the Head, “if any single recording shows why The Beatles broke up…”) “Yellow Submarine.” “Octopus’s Garden.” “Revolution 9.” One contributor, Hegemony Jones, nominated “everything except ‘Hey Bulldog’”, which was a useful test. I listened to “Hey Bulldog” and didn’t like it. That was the entire Beatles oeuvre dismissed, then.

Another contributor, Mark Lott, nominated “Wonderwall” by Oasis, which was witty, but made my point in a different way, because I love “Wonderwall”, even if I would not have played it at my wedding as Samantha Cameron wanted to do at hers. (David refused, saying, “I am a Conservative, after all”, and they had Mozart instead.)

After that, I was liberated to express my unpopular opinion. The “no Beatles” rule became a running joke of the Top 10 feature, as I refused to accept nominations of anything to do with the Fab Four. For Top 10 Politicians in Songs, I excluded “Taxman”, which mentions Mr Wilson and Mr Heath. For Top 10 Last Lines of Songs, Ian Simcox‏ took my side, saying: “The last words of any Beatles song are a joy – because it means it’s ended.” For Top 10 Subjects on Which Otherwise Sane People Go a Bit Loopy, Colin Gumbrell tried to nominate “incomprehensible blind spots about The Beatles”.

To which I can only say that anyone’s tastes in music or anything else must, to some extent, be incomprehensible to people who don’t share them. I don’t know why I like some music and don’t like other arrangements of notes in a different order. I came of age when punk rock happened. That was exciting. I thought David Bowie was great, Pink Floyd were profound. I like a bit of Bach and Brahms. I currently enjoy a bunch of non-mainstream bands, such as Parquet Courts, The Decemberists, Little Barrie, The Charlatans and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

I could be positive and try to explain why I like them, but the reasons are hard to write about. I have always admired music critics who can say sensible things about why some music works and why other music does not. All I can say is that The Beatles seem bland and gooey to me, and this reconstructed offering, remixing an old tape of Lennon, with McCartney playing slide guitar “in the style of” George Harrison, is no exception. Sorry.