Add The Beatles Anthology to your watchlist
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.
It comes with an additional part nine, made up of footage shot in and around the launch of that Anthology project and featuring the Fab Three, known at the time as “the Threetles”.
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.
“I was 17 in Hamburg,” says George. “By the time I was 23 we had done Sgt Pepper.” Take that, pop stars of today.
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.
They’re more comfortable when they have something to do with their hands. When they gather at George’s house in the summer of 1994, Paul and George play acoustic guitars, Ringo keeps the volume down by taking up his brushes and they sound like nothing so much as a skiffle group, which is where it all began. For repertoire they reach for the songs that come naturally: Ain’t She Sweet, a hit from the Roaring Twenties, Blue Moon of Kentucky, a bluegrass waltz from the 1940s, and Baby What You Want Me to Do, a Jimmy Reed song that was on the rhythm and blues chart long before they first released a record. That’s the kind of hinterland bands had in those days.
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!”
When the three of them sit at the mixing desk while George Martin pulls back the faders to deconstruct the mix of Tomorrow Never Knows, they can’t help being amused by the Heath Robinson nature of many of those sounds. Not for them the reverent silence that attends that ceremony today. They know how this particular sausage was made. “Now it’s serious music,” says Paul, smirking as he recalls the days when they were doing the impossible because nobody had said they couldn’t and it was a bit of a laugh.
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 variance in their individual recollections doesn’t just relate to things back in the mists of history. Paul says the idea to make Real Love came from a conversation he had with Yoko Ono in which she said she had an old demo cassette featuring John. George reckons it grew out of the Traveling Wilburys’ plan to “replace” the late Roy Orbison with the voice of Elvis Presley, an idea The King’s estate was apparently only too keen on. Jeff Lynne, the other Wilbury who was brought in to supervise the development of Lennon’s demo into a record fit for 1995, describes his thrilled reaction when he first heard Lennon’s voice with Harrison and McCartney’s harmonies. “They sit around bantering and they start singing and it’s the Beatles. That’s that sound.”
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.
However at the time they had a following wind: 1995 was also the year of Britpop. Oasis’s big song Wonderwall was inspired by a George Harrison record. Here was a new generation of British bands who all seemed to be agreed on one thing. They would never be as good as the Beatles.
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.
George Harrison died in 2001, just two years after being the victim of a terrible attack at his house in the early morning. It’s one of the more grisly ironies of the story of the band who gave us All You Need Is Love that their level of fame made two of them targets for murderous attacks.
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.
Teased by the other two for his work ethic, Paul says, “I liked the Beatles. I liked to work with the Beatles. I’m not ashamed of that. It’s what I love in life. All that making music.”
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.”
George says it’s a shame that John never had this experience. “The Beatles went through some turbulent times. When we split up, everybody was fed up with each other. Ringo, Paul and I have had the opportunity to get together in a new light and I feel sorry that John wasn’t able to do that. He would have really enjoyed the opportunity to be with us again.”
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.
All over the music business the past is the future. While Oasis perform Wonderwall for millions, Abba entertain in effigy and middle-aged boy bands pack stadiums, the Beatles remain the gold standard of the pop past that everybody wishes to share.
“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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