Pete Best Band - Haymans Green
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CD Details
Artist: Pete Best BandEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
CD Release Date: 2008-09-16
Music Label: Lightyear Entertainment
Soundtracks:
- Come With Me
- Step Outside
- Round And Round
- Grey River
- Gone
- Dream Me Home
- Everything I Want
- Beat Street
- Broken
- Red Light
- Haymans Green
Music reviews of Haymans Green
Music Review: "Atom Beat" drummer's CD is a blast!
Rating: 5 Stars
Listening to this CD you have to wonder what would the Beatles have been like had they not tossed out their former drummer, Pete Best just weeks before they hit the big time in 1962. This collection of original songs, co-written by Best with his partners in the Pete Best Band (including younger brother and co-drummer Roag) sounds like the Beatles -- and yet not the Beatles. An autobiographical take on his two-year stint as the Beatles' drummer in Liverpool and Hamburg, Hayman's Green (named for the location of the Casbah Club, a coffee and dance club operated in the basement of Best's mother's home where the Beatles played in some of their earliest days)is by turns surprisingly lyrical, occasionally lush, wistful, hurt, melancholy and nostalgic, mixed with high-spirited straight-out thumping fun. The cover art itself is remarkable. Its a simple black background with a torn-off corner showing Pete's face -- part of a group photo of the early Beatles that also appeared on the cover of the legendary band's 1995 Anthology 1 album. In the Beatles album, however, Pete's image -- the image here -- had been torn off and replaced with a picture of Ringo Starr's face. And the designer behind that bit of cut-and-paste was Klaus Voorman, who had been a friend of Best's and the Beatles during their Hamburg days, and afterwards. Putting the torn corner on the cover of Hayman's Green is a abruptly-thrust middle finger at his fomer bandmates and at Voorman. There are times when the lyrics seem to make the same gesture, especially in the song "Broken", a sad -- yet defiant -- retelling of Best's shock and confusion when he was fired from the band. As former Beatle Paul McCartney is the only surviving participant of the event who knows the real reasons behind Best's dismissal (Best says he never got a real explanation, just "the boys want you out"), the lyrics seem directed at him: ("Tell the story that's never been told" and "How was I to know behind your smile was such an empty place?") Since there has been speculation by Beatles' historians that McCartney may have been jealous of Best's popularity and may have been the catalyst for his sacking, it's not unreasonable. But there are some real little gems too (and I mean little -- none of the songs are especially long). One in particular is a rousing little two and a half minute musical dance number called "Beat Street", in which I think Best gives us a sampling of the particular technique of drumming he used with the Beatles, which became known as the Atomic Beat, or Atom Beat and which was copied by most other drummers in Liverpool at the time. He starts in with snare and cymbal but then turns and gives the tom toms a ferocious sustained pummelling. Some of the other songs are slower and retrospective in tone, such as Gray River, a rumination of a young man far away from home for the first time and thinking back, while others go on about the hectic pace ("Round and Around" -- which has a self-reference "Pete keeps the rhythm till it's time to go") in Hamburg and even some of the "working girls" in the Reeperbahn district who took a shine to the boys ("Red Light").
Probably the best solo effort by an ex-Beatle since McCartney's "Tug of War" in the early 1980s, and personally I think a better effort than that.
Description of Haymans Green
Pete Best, original drummer for The Beatles, has delivered an incredible, surprising album.Rock'n'roll history tells us that The Beatles began at the Casbah Coffee House, in the Best family basement, and that Pete was an integral part of the group that did two tours of Germany and participated in early recordings for BBC, Polydor, Decca, and EMI. After his mysterious firing and loss of the opportunity of a lifetime, he withdrew from the music business for many years, but eventually formed The Pete Best Band and hit the road doing sold-out gigs, playing the songs that The Beatles performed in Hamburg.
But after a critically lauded PBS special and DVD release in 2006, Best of The Beatles, Pete and his band started to record an album that would show the world something new and different, all original songs which tantalizingly hint at the creativity that Pete could have brought to The Beatles had he remained in the group.
This is that album. Beyond all expectations.
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