How The Beatles Amplified Phil Headway’s Musical Vision
It’s no news that The Beatles have been captivating generations for decades, and that the band’s cultural influence spread in such a titanic way that today it’s impossible to imagine a world where The Beatles never existed, as we can see in the film Yesterday (2019). The idolatry of the fans, the psychedelia, the Eastern spirituality, and even the mop-top haircut. But according to Phil Headway, there is a creative power in The Beatles that encompasses all of these things at once, and without them, his career wouldn’t be the same. “The meeting of those four was a true Big Bang, a concentrated energy that fermented for a long period in each member’s individual life and, through a series of coincidences, exploded intensely, causing a massive cultural impact,” he said. “What makes The Beatles a singular band for new artists is the ability they had to show us, in a simple way, how we’re capable of creating anything when we let our inner child sing. It’s not about chops or how much you’ve studied. It’s about what you do with it. A child can stamp their soul onto their art without any difficulty because there’s no filter of why — they simply are, and that’s enough because that is art: to be.”
Headway claims that not only listening to The Beatles, but also observing the band’s career through books and documentaries, made him realize that the Liverpool lads’ ease in songwriting revolves around non-judgment in the creative process. “They were open to making music regardless of genre. It wasn’t about pleasing people, it was about experimenting, and all four of them had that awareness. Actually, all five — George Martin is on that list too.”
Headway’s Beatle influences are clear throughout his career in several aspects, especially in songs from the album Philline. The song Soul Fluids, for example, has multiple references to the band, like the piano chords marking time, the voices that complete the chorus melody, and the fanfare-style trumpet solo that recalls Penny Lane. In Skiffle is My Name, the message is different: “nothing labels me, I play a bit of everything and I don’t care about musical genre,” something very characteristic of The Beatles — a singular dynamic with multiple layers, where Headway manages to build scenes in our heads through audio. The same happens with Your Fellas, a song that, according to him, he composed imagining lonely people gathering in an Irish pub to spend Christmas with strangers. The Christmas song references Irish tradition, but it’s impossible not to see The Beatles in it, since it carries a sense of camaraderie similar to Yellow Submarine.
Finally, looking at the albums Nerthus and The Answers, you can notice a common thread between Phil Headway and Paul McCartney: both making musical partnerships with their wives and recording their songs at home. And here’s the conclusion to all of this: truly, good music comes from our inner child who surrenders to the present moment body and soul. As Nietzsche would say in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness; a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred Yes-saying.”