They Don't Love You, Yeah Yeah Yeah

Musical geniuses, or 'crowned heads of anti-music'? Quotes from Beatles critics over the decades

By KARL SHAW
WSJ

Critics can pick a fight over anything, even artists who have received nearly universal acclaim, like Mozart, Shakespeare and…the Beatles. Herewith a list of sharply dissenting views on the Fab Four.

"Guitar groups are on the way out…the Beatles have no future in show business." — Dick Rowe, head of Decca Records, 1962

"Drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degrees" is "as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs." — James Bond, secret agent in "Goldfinger," 1964

"The noise was deafening throughout and I couldn't hear a word they sang or a note they played, just one long ear-splitting din." — Noel Coward, British composer and playwright, summarizing a Beatles concert in 1964

"The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music." — William F. Buckley, author and commentator, 1964

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