As a child I played DJ with our parent’s vinyls, amongst them Help! or one of the other, earlier tracks. We scratched those singles to high heaven.
My Grampa kept a Beatles Box in pristine condition, which was passed on to my Mother and more recently to me to look after. Last year I bought a new player and placed the vinyls (extremely carefully) on the deck for the first time. It’s amazing to listen to a vinyl, passed down and decades old, sounding like it’s coming from Spotify.
It was a similar feeling when I heard Now and Then a few weeks ago. An echo of the past heard anew. McCartney’s 80 year old tones adding weight to the lyrics. I think it’s a beautiful song.
There’s an insatiable demand to see them recording their songs, talking amongst each other, hearing their cheeky remarks. Always on show, we have had more access to The Beatles than perhaps any other band in history. Every new documentary seems to add to their mystery, rather than subtract from it.
I wanted to explore some of the films that shed a light on the life of the men from Liverpool, and what those films said about us at the time.
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A Hard Day’s Night - 1964
A Hard Day’s Night wasn’t made to be ahead of its time. United Artists wanted something to push the band’s fame further before they lost it. A marketing ploy to sell tickets to a new youth market and to push The Beatles brand.
What came out of it was a new era of cross-promotion. A soundtrack to accompany the film, filled with hit records, rather than instrumental soundtracks that had gone before. It came with huge success, not only because of The Beatles themselves, but it was, and still is, widely viewed as a classic. It is seen as “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals”, while being a fascinating time capsule of British culture in the mid 1960’s.
The film itself manages to portray the band as cheeky and popular with their young fans, while still upholding the cultural norms of the time so that they could appeal to an older generation. Each of them have their own distinct characters which we still think of them as today:
“John Lennon became forever known as an irreverent, sharp-tongued wit; Paul McCartney as an attractive, dashing romantic; George Harrison as a quiet curmudgeon; and Ringo Starr as a love-able sad sack”. -Ray Morton1
The writers knew that the band’s acting skills were limited and so they wrote the script to sound as natural as possible. Their fun nature does shine through and there’s a real sense that the backstage are as genuine as a staged film can be. It was a glimpse into their lives when Beatlemania was at its height.
Philip Jones Griffiths
The photographer, Philip Jones Griffiths was asked to capture the making A Hard Day’s Night. The film itself is about the band’s performances, fans, and their escape from them, but this was playing out in real life too, something that Griffiths was surrounded by.
“The train would stop, for various filmic shooting reasons, several times during the journey. Miraculously, thousands of fans would appear at every stop seemingly from nowhere – I spent a lot of time photographing action between bodyguards and police and those fans” - Philip Jones Griffiths
They are incredible images, and you can see more here. There is a feeling that the fame is happening around them but not necessarily to them; their working class sensibilities and humour keeping them grounded.
The film served to heighten and take advantage of The Beatles’ fame. What we are left with today is a time capsule and a perfect companion piece to what came after.
Let it Be & Get Back
“The gloominess of the picture plus the headlines of the breakup, I think, impose a narrative on Let It Be that was never really there”. - Peter Jackson
What was due to be a fun fly-on-the-wall documentary became known as a tell-all swan song of their break-up in 1970.
The reviews weren’t great either, “[A] fascinating study of the rot in the relationship among four musicians who made show-business history”. 2
It wasn’t until decades later that Peter Jackson looked at the footage anew, seeing that the band were actually as creative and fun as they always had been. When showing Paul and Ringo some of the unearthed footage, Jackson said he “started to ease them into the idea of the fact that the Let it Be experience is not what they remember.”
A two and a half hour film became an eight hour mini-series. The runtime, enough to put a casual fan off, is a gift for many. Watching the band create classic songs out of seemingly thin air, their boundless creativity and hearing the minutiae of their conversations is mesmerising.
“[W]hat Peter Jackson has done is not so much "correct" the narrative as provide a wider perspective, allowing those four weeks in January 1969 to breathe, and giving those men—two of whom can no longer speak for themselves—space to show themselves to us with all their nuance, complexity, humanity. - Sheila O’Malley
Watching A Hard Day’s Night and Get Back together is an opportunity to see just how far the band came in a short space of time. George Harrison was still only 25 when Let it Be was being filmed! Some things remained the same in both though; their camaraderie, their push for the ‘new’, and their incredible talent for timeless music.
Now and Then had its first play on BBC Radio 6. Craig Charles, another legendary Liverpudlian, had the honour of introducing the song, “It’s just so spine tingling to think that the journey isn’t over”, he said.
I stop and think about that Beatles box that was passed to me. One day it will be passed on again, letting someone else discover the Fab Four’s music, their films and recording sessions. The journey isn’t over.
For now, I’ll listen to those vinyls carefully, and put on those scratched singles. I’ll watch those films and documentaries. I will let all of those memories listening to The Beatles come back to me, now and then.
Gareth
Let me know your memories of The Beatles in the comments, I’d love to hear them :)
https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=58-V1IvsX8UC&oi=fnd&pg=PP2&dq=a+hard+day%27s+night&ots=Nfs1ZkfJd5&sig=SYNeRMdbRYbQcDtFbk2HqGHiUrE&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=a%20hard%20day's%20night&f=false
https://www.newspapers.com/image/808669877/?terms=%22let%20it%20be%22%20beatles&match=1
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509208.2016.1157056
This is a fantastic post. I am a generation after the Beetles really but I remember being stood by the side of the radio when the news of John Lennon’s death was announced. I also make the use of the digital world to listen to albums that I might never have listened to without it.
Wilfred Bramble as Paul's grandad made Hard Day's Night for me. I love the 'he's very clean' jokes, opposite of his dirty old man Steptoe role.