Because nothing with the Beatles is ever entirely over, 30 years after the three remaining members, Paul, George and Ringo, brought forth their long-threatened Beatles Anthology – an eight-part series of TV documentaries, accompanied by three double CDs of previously unreleased versions of some of their best-known tunes plus, if you were a completist, an enormous book – they are releasing a remastered version.
While it doesn’t offer much in the way of revelation, this film of their reunion provides even more of the one thing Beatles watchers most crave, which is to watch them in the room with each other, just behaving. This will never not be fascinating. Here are three middle-aged men, all at the time over 50, Englishly keen to demonstrate their ordinariness, drinking tea from workmen’s mugs and playing with any toy at hand, while also strongly hinting that decades before, they were bonded for all time by an experience the rest of us cannot possibly understand.
Like most gentlemen of their generation, born during the Second World War when lips were stiff, they are not natural practitioners of the newly voguish male hug, but they do it. You didn’t catch them collapsing into each other’s arms at the end of marathon performances the way bands do today. This was partly because they were rarely on for more than half an hour, and partly because Brian Epstein had instructed them in the importance of announcing the show’s end by forming up and executing a smart bow from the waist. A montage shows them performing this same signature move at the end of shows in front of everyone from stiff royals to demented teens.
As a three-piece they can never be entirely back in the groove. The cross-talk act, which they practised at press conferences back in the day, is missing John. Interviewed as a trio on two occasions, at Abbey Road and at George Harrison’s place in Henley, Paul appears guarded in the presence of George, who as the youngest member is always alive to perceived slights.
When they sit around and talk about the past, it’s the simple things they remember. Combing their hair forwards for the first time, getting their boots at Anello & Davide, getting £100 for John’s birthday, realising after a few hits that they were getting away with it. “It was all accidental really,” says George. “The funny haircuts and jackets and boots. We had something together even if it was just an attitude. You get certain people together and you get fire or dynamite.” Paul looks at a picture of them posing in Edwardian bathing suits on the beach at Weston-super-Mare in 1963 and laughs: “Here they are – the hippest group in history!”
They all have different memories. Ringo says that if he’d made Anthology it would have been different. Because bands talk about anything but the things that are bothering them, Paul is able to say, “I found out stuff about the other guys I never knew from the Anthology.”
The release of the Anthology in 1995 answered the question that had dogged the record business: can anyone be bigger than the Beatles? Apparently the Beatles could. In the year the CDs came out they made more money for EMI than anyone else. Which was going some for a bunch of out-takes that two years earlier George Martin had claimed were not worth releasing.
Within two years Downing Street was occupied by a prime minister who had grown up playing the guitar and was only too keen to promote the Beatles as being, along with Shakespeare and Dickens, examples of British genius. Anthology moved the Beatles up a gear. Following its release, they belonged to the ages.
Thirty years after Anthology, Paul and Ringo soldier on, in many ways even more famous than they were in the 60s. All they ever wanted to do, they both say, was play in a band. To watch Paul and George sitting opposite each other working out guitar lines during the recording of Real Love is to see that in their case, “bouncing off each other” was the basis of everything they did, and to further note that like most musicians they would rather play than do anything else at all.
Later he says, “When you find someone you can talk to, that’s a very special thing. When you find someone you can play music with, it’s really something. Most musicians spend their whole lives looking for the perfect drummer, the perfect bass player, the perfect guitarist. So I felt kind of privileged.”
It’s 30 years since George predicted: “The Beatles has become its own thing now. It will go on without us.” This has turned out to be true but may not be giving sufficient credit to the people at Apple Corps whose job it is to make sure the show remains on the road with an ever-rolling stream of films and other Beatle-related amusements.
“It’s the four in conjunction that makes that pot of soup. Take one of the ingredients out and it can be very similar but it doesn’t quite taste the same.”
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