Cliff’s pop at The Beatles
QUESTION Did Cliff Richard once accuse The Beatles of playing out-of-tune guitars? Sir CLiFF made some remarkable accusations in a 2008 interview with Q Magazine. After praising The Beatles for being an ‘incredible force’, he went on to criticise them because ‘even now, when i listen to them, some of the guitar is so out of tune it’s unbelievable.
‘i couldn’t believe that here they were in this high-tech age, with four-track recording machines, and they couldn’t go back and do it with a tuned guitar.’
Cliff didn’t reveal which Beatles songs offended him, but lead guitarist George Harrison came in for special criticism: ‘it’s mostly their guitar solos, which can be fairly horrific.’
Perhaps it was sour grapes. ‘ My only gripe is when critics writing the history of rock ’n’ roll leave me out altogether,’ he told the interviewer.
There is evidence of a few Beatles tracks being out of tune. in his book Here, There And Everywhere: My Life recording The Music Of The Beatles, engineer Geoff Emerick tells how, in the days of analogue recording, keeping a tape recording at concert pitch wasn’t always a certainty.
The engineers would use Varispeed technology to speed up or slow down the tapes for various technical reasons.
For instance, Paul McCartney requested that When i’m Sixty-Four be speeded up slightly to make his voice sound younger, with the result that this song in the key of C plays back on the album a half- step higher, in the key of D flat.
Other songs where the speed of the recording affects the pitch include i’m Only Sleeping, Yellow Submarine, Lovely rita, i’ll Get You and Across The Universe.
Karl Smith, Warwick. QUESTION A World War II documentary stated that during the Battle of the Bulge, 6,000 American soldiers were captured by the Germans. What happened to them? OnCE a member of the armed forces is taken prisoner, he comes under the protection of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, providing his captors have signed the convention. The prisoner is entitled to be protected from further harm.
They must be given food, clothing and accommodation and be treated humanely. PoWs can’t be forced to work for their captors, but they may undertake work on a voluntary basis to alleviate boredom or to improve their own circumstances, such as growing vegetables to supplement their diet.
in general, the American soldiers taken during the Battle of the Bulge were treated no differently from any other military captured by the Germans.
in the first instance, they would have been taken to a temporary camp out of artillery range, where they would be interrogated to see what military intelligence they might give up.
Prisoners were not, generally speaking, tortured for information.
The Geneva Convention requires a prisoner to give only his service number, name and rank, so the red Cross may be notified of his capture and can so notify the prisoner’s government.
After that, the PoWs would have been sent by road or rail to a camp in Germany, Austria or Poland.
The films The Wooden Horse, Albert rn and The Great Escape give a reasonably accurate depiction of life inside PoW camps, though conditions varied according to the temperament of the guards and the availability of supplies. During the Battle of the Bulge, 84 American prisoners were shot by their captors at Malmedy, under SS Sturmbannfuhrer Joachim Peiper. He was later tried as a war criminal, but served only ten years in prison.
There was also a massacre of 11 black soldiers of the U.S. 333rd Field Artillery Battalion at Wereth, a hamlet in Belgium. no one ever stood trial for that atrocity.
The Battle of the Bulge was not just an American battle. The British 2nd Army were also involved and suffered 1,400 casualties, of which more than 200 were killed and another 200 were listed as missing, presumably becoming PoWs.
Bob Dillon, Edinburgh. QUESTION Who invented the first electronic hearing aid? THE invention of the telephone, combined with the practical application of electricity in the 19th century, enabled the development of hearing aids.
People with hearing loss realised they could hear a conversation better through a telephone receiver held up to their ear than they could in person.
in 1870, Thomas Edison invented a carbon transmitter for the telephone which amplified the electrical signal and increased the decibel level by about 15 decibels (dB). However, a hard- ofhearing person needed at least 30 dB.
The first electronic hearing aid was the Akouphone, invented by Alabama engineer Miller reese Hutchison in 1898. it used a carbon transmitter to convert weak audio signals into stronger ones via electric signals.
The Press called the device a miracle, and Queen Alexandra was so fond of hers that she invited Hutchison to the coronation of her husband Edward Vii in 1902.
Beginning in the Twenties, hearing aids using vacuum tubes were able to increase the sound level by as much as 70 dB.
The first vacuum tube hearing aid was patented by naval engineer Earl Hanson in 1920. Called the Vactuphone, it used the telephone transmitter to turn speech into electrical signals.
The drawback was that it was 7lb — the weight of a newborn baby.
Karen Newman, Llangollen, Denbighshire.
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