I'VE been trying to make sense all week of the extraordinary fuss which followed the death of George Harrison. I thought the misty-eyed Blair - "He was not only a great musician and artist; he did such wonderful work for charity" - was going to call for a national day of mourning. Paul McCartney wept into the lens: "He was my baby brother".

Suddenly, touchy-feely was back. In the face of maudlin sentimentality there's nothing for it but to wash your mouth out and gargle with salt. But I was just recovering from the Harrison wake when news came of the 21st anniversary of John Lennon's death and all those fans lighting candles in New York and saying how keen Lennon was on social justice.

Rubbish. The Beatles were not wholesome, fresh-faced national heroes. They were a malign influence on a whole generation of young people. In 1966, John Lennon said: "We're more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity".

Harrison never grew out of his adolescent sacrilegious phase. He backed financially The Life of Brian, the blasphemous satire on Jesus - the celebrity plutocratic version of the naughty schoolboy daubing F*** across the wayside pulpit. Worse, Lennon - a personality halfway between Walter Mitty and Charles Manson - gave us the nihilistic: "Imagine there's no heaven; it's easy if you try. No hell below us; above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today".

It is the language not of liberation but of despair. Perverted religious sensibility is a sign of deep wickedness. So The Beatles were the natural supporters of the mind-control and lust for power that was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation, Hare Krishna and Yogic Flying. Harrison left a lot of money to the perpetrators of this preposterous drivel.

The Beatles' album Sergeant Pepper promoted the satanic psychedelic drug culture - satanic because LSD makes its imbibers see reality other than it is; that is as a lie. When a pop band has pocketed its first ten million dollars, its members often succumb to ambitions to build heaven on earth and to bring about universal peace and brotherhood. The form of this utopianism in the career of The Beatles was to take the side of the communists in the Vietnam War. Harold, "all you need is spin" Wilson arranged for The Beatles to be awarded the MBE. Sulking about Vietnam, Harrison and the others threw back the medals.

But lay aside politics and paranoia, how good were The Beatles as a band? The mystery is how they ever came to generate a reputation for freshness and optimism when so many of their songs were full of dejection and a self-regarding despair. But the real misery is not so much in the words as in the music itself, in the relentlessly maudlin chord progressions: the sheer misery of Hey Jude makes you want to do away with yourself.

They were a rancid, destructive influence; above all negative. But don't take my word for it. In 1982 Harrison said: "Having played with other musicians, I don't even think The Beatles were that good".

All you need is hype.

Published: Tuesday, December 11, 2001