BACKBEAT @ 30

John and Stu are fast friends, through partying and playing rock and roll and fending off the violence of the local yobs. Life's ok but about to get better. Stu sells a painting which is enough to buy an electric bass and, by coincidence, just in time to get off to a club residency overseas. Life in Hamburg, playing sets of classic rock and show tunes between strippers, can be gruelling but with sex and speed on tap, it's a pretty good gig for the young 'uns. Then the students start filtering into the shows and one, Astrid, catches Stu's eye and won't let go. Now, even if you have the most casual acquaintance with the story, here, you know it's about The Beatles.

The reason Backbeat was so impressive at the time was that it all but ignores this. It establishes that this is a story of the pre-fame days of the biggest band in history and then relaxes to tell the story of the kind of intense relationships we have when we're young adults. It might, of course, have been about a fictitious group but this story was already there in the timeline. Adding what the audience knows is to come brings a zest to it. This means, that when we start with a difficult shared experience with John and Stu we're happy to continue with them without gagging to see the whole band. When we do, it's a joy. They're wise cracking as they load their equipment on to the ship bound for Hamburg and later they do what made them famous. By then, all expectations catered to, we relax into the love story between Stu and Astrid which has two triangles attached to it from John's unquestioned love of Stu and Astrid's lifelong love Klaus. When we get Beatles content it's just part of the mix.

On that, an astute decision was made. The sets that the band plays don't need any Lennon MacCartney numbers. There were so few that their absence would not be missed in this context. So, it was the more easily cleared Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Frank Ifield etc. which is how the sets would have sounded. And then this was recorded by a group of current indy rock figures from the '90s, members of Nirvana, R.E.M. (well, they had been indy), Sonic Youth and so on. While the first number we see the band play sounds a little too slick and tight, later songs have a more realistic raggedness which feels a lot more live. 

The club scenes also feel credible with a mix of sailors and roughnecks there for the strippers (and some for the rock and roll) and students for the spectacle and scene. And there are some fine cinematic moments of world building showing the  seedy Reeperbahn, chief among which is the elongated entrance of Astrid in a taxi, shot from above the bonnet, reflecting the neon, as it courses through the night life like a shark. Montages of the band trading time on the stage with the strippers is narratively sound as well as diverting. Astrid's photography of the band in various locations for images that would enter history is also a montage with a thrilling feel.

If there are flies in the unguent here they are in the dialogue that presages phrases that came later. John describing the endless sets they had to do as a hard day's night, is very whiffy but there are also lines from that movie and Stu talks about feeling like he's working eight days a week. The earlier, starker, The Hours and Times, set at the start of Beatlemania, resisted this, though it might have credibly put them in. The later Nowhere Boy not only steered completely clear of this but never mentioned the band's name once. Their appearance in Backbeat is wince-inducing in a film otherwise so meticulous to show the rougher aspects of being in a band when that young. We get the micro-resentment, the rivalry for the leader's attention, the ridicule and ragging outside of the glory moments onstage where all the dreams are fulfilled (well, not even there). This feels authentic. Like a fair few people I know, I was in a few bands at this level (don't ask, you will not have heard of any of them) and never encountered an outfit that didn't have conflict evident with the slightest of surface scratches. It's the crowning achievement of Backbeat insofar as it is a Beatles film. The cute anachronisms in the dialogue leave an unpleasant taste.

Stephen Dorf gives us a cool but awestruck artist, ready to break out of the increasingly evident confines of band life. Sheryl Lee, who had signed on for Twin Peaks to play a corpse but ended up as its strongest cast member, is utterly solid as the young overconfident student, spouting aphorisms that would've sounded profound and exciting to a nineteen year old. She speaks them with a knowing curl, aware that they are largely the kind of descant to her cool nightlife. Outside of that context she delivers a genuineness that lets us warm to her. But this is Ian Hart's film as John Lennon, pained and witty, loving and destructive, driven and lazy. Unless I'm physically in front of this movie I recall the role actually played by a young John Lennon, so close is the look and my projected persona. This is the same as Hart's turn in The Hours and Times, even with an awkward Beatle wig, I recall the performance the same way.

The rock band movie sub genre is plagued by hokum. Even when it's a fictitious group and doesn't have to play up (or down) to history it can get dodgy. Eddie and The Cruisers is one of the worst bunglings of a decent idea I've seen to the point where just recalling it feels embarrassing. David Chase's Not Fade Away is so long and too realistic it just ends up being boring. It's worse when it's a real band, though. Oliver Stone's The Doors does even more damage through idolisation than the execrable Jerry Hopkins biography No One Here Gets Out Alive. Sid and Nancy is another exercise in how to render an interesting subject cringey through being too clearly a fan's view. It's always odd to me that something as invigorating as cinema can fail at capturing the excitement of rock music so very consistently.

Some get through. Expresso Bongo is bizarre enough to stand on its own as a kind of early rock fantasy. The Cliff Richard movies are acceptable cheese for admitting that they're showbiz first. If you want something with genuine drama and good performances, go back to Jailhouse Rock. It works. That'll be the Day is very good but it sequel Stardust is a messy failure. I like Control more than the eponymous documentary about Joy Division. On that, the best films about rock and roll have been straight up doccos rather than fictionalisation.

As to the films from the Beatles themselves, their first feature is a joy, the second a blithering mess with unresolved industrial racism, their own production only good for its music video moments, the big animation more than passable rainy afternoon entertainment and then there's the depressing Let it Be. It makes me grateful that the only movies that their rivals in chief made were a good concert/interview film (Charlie is My Darling) and a compelling and troubling one (Gimme Shelter) without a scripted line of dialogue for the running time.

Why I still like Backbeat so much is in its resistance to idolatry. Sweep the goofy future lines aside and you have a worthy love story in the foreground with a fraught one of creative life and fame chasing beneath. Those are the right stage placements and priorities, here, so that a well turned world can be built that keeps its gifts on display without the need to break anything. The coda sequence of the statements of what happened to the major players has been a feature plaguing retrospective cinema since American Graffiti. They appear over home movie style footage of a day at the beach and, really are completely unnecessary. Then again, Sam Taylor Johnson did the same thing in Nowhere Boy and it, too, might have escaped without them. The very last one in Backbeat is an unacknowledged pointer to the film's source. It's about Astrid and how the project was born from interviews with her about those times. I wonder if we might not just have had that one for poignancy. 

Review: THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK: THE TOURING YEARS

Teenaged Sigourney Weaver at a Beatles gig. Kewel!

The great acerbic music commentator Nik Cohn stopped at his chapter on the Beatles to point out the apparent futility of writing it as he wondered what else there was to say. That was in 1969. Decades and communications evolution later and the band is still being discussed, examined, prodded and tested. We just aren't finished with them yet. Not even the massive Anthology series put an end to that.

But then the one area that never quite got the attention was the world of the tours. John Lennon told Rolling Stone's Jan Wenner in 1970 that the Beatles on tour was like Fellini's movie Satyricon. Now after all this time mention of the secret world of all that youth and power still goes undocumented. It is still formless, wafting like a fog behind the masses of archival footage of sassy press conferences and scenes of teenage girls in screaming thrall.

Ron Howard's documentary doesn't go on the trail of the debauchery that Lennon hinted at with his image. The most we get is the story of cannabis which has long entered the realm of the mass public knowing giggle. Where are the stories of ethical dilemmas or spooking moments of revelation that the power of such deific adoration might engender? Not here. It's a beautifully constructed home movie night with the uncle who was there.

That said, it's a pretty bloody good home movie night. The polished film and audio blast and shine on the cinema screen and the sense of thrill the makers must have felt in piecing it together is communicated without effort. This is a beautiful hour and a half of memory.

Aside from the to-camera interviews with the surviving Beatles and the archival ones of the now deceased, we are given a series of recollections and comments from Larry Kane who joined them as a broadcaster on the first tour to now high-profile contemporary fans like Whoopi Goldberg or Sigourney Weaver. It's these last that really deliver the unknown here as they tell of life in the queues and the stalls, the tidal force of the screaming mass and its gleaming centre of gravity. Soon enough all care about the problems of saturated history fall away as this exhilarating film continues.

However, the reason to see it at the cinema is the post-credits feature, available, as the claim goes, only in cinemas. The entire Beatles set from the legendary Shea Stadium concert. This was shot in 35mm with a host of cameras trained on the stage and a small mass of them facing the other way, recording the audience, the great entranced public who filled this birthing ceremony of the stadium gig. Both are essential here and both compel.

On stage the Beatles, by now blase about the constant screaming worship, are yet taken aback by the sheer scale of this audience. The sass and wit that coloured their banter is infused here with some of the dizziness before them as Lennon throws his arms out and quacks out strings of wordless garble. The set, of a brevity that no international touring band would ever get away with only years after this. Most of it is singles and covers of 50s rock and roll which would continue to make up their sets. By this concert the band had released eight US albums, mostly comprised of originals. It was either just easier to play hits and memories or the thought of slogging through the newer, more complex material only to have it dissolved in the jet engine scream of the fans was too much.

They are troupers, though, ploughing through a set as close to note and beat perfect as any band with so little notion of the sound they were making that they might as well have been guessing. There's a flub here and a miss there but take the screams away and this is a band that is playing like they love it. Put the screams back in and it's a spectacle of the effect of city-sized audience pushing a tsunami of love. All the band has to do is play well enough to start and end together and this will continue. That's what happens, they play and sing, screaming back the love that would carry them into unshakeable fame for evermore.

This isn't just because of their talent. As this half hour of footage demonstrates, the great win of a Beatles concert was only partly dependent on the fabs themselves. When we look in the opposite direction we see it all. Every few minutes a teenage girl is passed like roll of Persian carpet from cop to cop until her senseless limpness reaches the aisle and she is borne out of the heat and the din. I thought of the story each one would tell decades later, how she almost saw the Beatles even though she was there. Elsewhere there are tears and screaming and more screaming. Take any one of those girls out of that context and her paroxysms, the constant desperate scream distorting her soft features into hard masks of terror would suggest unimaginable trauma. And that's what this footage does. Every closeup of a girl in the crowd is startling as we see with such fresh clarity the screen fills with yet another fallen to deafening, twisting possession. Some middle aged dads frown behind their ray bans until it's over. But mostly it's the girls, each screaming, shaking one of them, girls, thousands and thousands and thousands of girls.

A shot of manager Brian Epstein appears. He's by the stage, absently rocking with the beat of the song, rolling his eyes to the sky as though this greatest moment his clients would ever know while playing live is just a bigger model than all the ones before. He knows no more than they do that this will end in a year's time as the band retreat to the studio to improve and intensify, leaving him little more to do than be nice to the press when the next album comes out. It's this moment, this one shot, that tells me that I am in a cinema watching a thirty minute document that has just been preceded by a ninety minute introduction.

Rock on Film Part 14: Nowhere Boy

Always a risk, this retelling of the early life of John Lennon does something refreshing: it keeps focus on the central issue of the young Lennon's torn emotional life, being raised by his aunt and only finding out his mother lived locally when in his teens.

Aaron Johnson in the lead plays a young, cocky, charming and hot tempered teenager rather than a nascent rock star. His aunt Mimi runs her lower middle class home strictly but not coldly. Kristen Scott-Thomas presents a woman containing a tide of heartache and disappointment by providing her ward with a clean home that is welcoming if not always warm.

Anne Marie Duff plays Julia, Lennon's mother whom he hasn't seen since a traumatic day of his childhood. She's wild and warm and constant fun offering all the freedom in the world to her newly returned son as long as she doesn't have to take too much responsibility for him. Duff shows the danger in the fun, allowing a teetering instability into every scene she's in. And mention ought to be afforded David Morrisey for playing Julia's second husband, tolerant of the upheaval his young family suffers at the entrance of the intruder to the point of formlessness. His anger is palpable but so is his concern for her sanity. He's not soft, he's just good at walking on eggshells. It's a strong and thankless performance.

Just as the scouse accents are not overdone for these people between the proletariat and bourgeoisie who are attempting to step above mucky commonality, the Beatles content is so understated that when asked for a reminder of the group's name toward the end, John simply answers: "would you care?" No B word there. Similarly, there isn't a single instance of a title of a Beatle song nor any line from one inserted into the dialogue. Showing the gates of Strawberry Field or the Penny Lane street sign are blissfully permissable.

Lennon's epiphany on seeing Elvis on screen is believable, he doesn't explode but you can see he's riveted and calculating at the same time. When he gathers a gang of boys to light up in the loo at school, calling them to be his group, he's not so inspired as starting somewhere. The scene rings with schoolboy excitement and derision and, as with some later moments in the story illustrates something very accurate about bands forming and managing their membership: people are chosen by personality and fit over ability.

I've never been in a band nor ever observed one that recruited someone just because they played well. Come on, you're between 16 and about 25, you're playing some version of rock music; you are not going to get anyone who's too old or nerdy or straight or socially or culturally wrong, regardless of how well they play. There is nothing reprehensible about this, it's the way of the genre and it says less about rock being a musically clueless music but one that can easily be built from little: to this day I'd rather hear Jonathon Richman than Genesis for that very reason. When the significantly younger Paul McCartney plays a word and riff perfect version of 20 Flight Rock it's impressive but he's encouraged more for his pluck. He fits. It's a good scene as it goes against the grain of the rock bio without a breath of spite.

Scenes of the Quarrymen playing on stage are far slicker than they would have been but the point of them is to show Lennon's commitment and showmanship. Depicting the cold and uncomfortable reality of a rock gig at that level runs contrary to purpose of the film. The ones in Backbeat are a lot truer to experience (if heightened for fiction) because it *is* about the young Beatles. This is a film about a teenager fighting his way out of a damagingly confusing situation. One way he finds to do this is through a door he has little trouble opening.

You could say that this didn't have to be about Lennon at all but that it is is important. It has a curious effect of deconstructing the pop god. Soberingly it might remind viewer's of the turbulent mind that pointed a pistol at him in 1980 and squeezed its trigger.

Reccomended.

SHADOWS AUTUMN PART 2 PROGRAM HERE.

Rock on film Pt 2: The Beatles

Didn't want to even start this. Too much to say. Too little. In the end I couldn't avoid it so I thought I'd get it out of the way. I'll try to offer only opinions rather than give backstory. Also, not much on the films as films. More on the depiction of rock bands on film.

FICTION

BACKBEAT

John and Stu share a joke

 I saw this new at the cinema. I was happy to sit through something tryhard and naff as long as it had ok music and made a fair stab at evoking the era. I didn't expect a well rounded drama, bursting with atmosphere and a seriousness that eclipsed its occasional false steps. What's good about this film is that it doesn't have to be about the Beatles.

By centring the story on the friendship between John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe the film starts out with a purpose beyond that of a plain biopic. Lennon's resistance to losing his best friend's attention to a woman is a poignant story knowable to just about everyone in the audience. There is an increased poignancy, given that they are the Beatles, in that it could be easily claimed of Lennon that he did the same towards the end of the group's initial life.

Also, the fact that these characters future is known by the audience and we really only see them in obscurity and five minutes past it adds a lot of weight to the tale. It still doesn't have to be about the Beatles, it's just richer that it is.

There are problems with this, though. There's a scene in the bar where the band are taking a break between the gruellingly long sets they were required to play in the Hamburg dives. Lennon is complaining about the hours and the exhaustion. He says something along these lines: "I'm talking about being on stage for four hours straight, I'm talking about dying for a piss..." and closes with, "I'm talking about a hard day's night." Now, I don't care if it was Ringo who came up with that or not. I do care that the audience already knows the phrase and probably also know it's being used here is way out of time and is being plonked in there for the sake of cuteness. It strikes me that it was probably just something that wasn't deleted from the screenplay after everyone had had a little old laugh about it at the first reading. Whatever, the line serves no purpose and pushes the viewer away for a moment. Why? Some Brecthian assault on the fourth wall? Nah. Someone just thought it was cute. The problem is that film not only doesn't need cuteness, it's considerably hampered by it. The scene ends with one of the regulars (probably a hooker) offers the lads some speed. Cut to close up of Lennon looking like he's about to explode while screaming Dizzy Miss Lizzy on stage. In another scene Paul complains to John that Stu can't play. John says: "we know you're a better bass player than Stu, we all know that." Scuse? There isn't a guitarist in any rock band in history that would campaign to give it up for bass. It shows an annoying gap in the understanding of the writer. That's not trainspotting, by the way. Ask any rock bass player what they started on and see what they say. (Exception: John Entwistle) Sigh. Imagine a parent videoing his toddler's first steps. Now imagine dad puts an elf hat on the kid.

Apart from such lapses (and there are a few), Backbeat delivers a strong story of fractured friendship, youthful loyalty (such as it is), the sheer energy of people who are determined to succeed (especially as a rock band, a cultural unit typically riddled by grossly unrepresentative self-fervour) and the inevitable stretches of discomfort and boredom that starting at the bottom can offer the keen. It's not "this is how the Beatles started" but "hey, even the Beatles started like this." That's what's really good about Backbeat, it gets the age right.

Ian Hart and Stephen Dorf are superb as Lennon and Sutcliffe respectively.


THE HOURS AND TIMES

John and Brian share a joke

Not an attempt to explain or in any way prove the Beatles, this cinematised play rises above its frequent awkward moments to achieve something quite fine. The story is based on the holiday Brian Epstein shared with John Lennon in Spain in 1963. The characters could almost be anybody but it is important that the younger man be beholden to the elder and that the swelling celebrity offscreen has made the younger man brattish and demanding. If you will, it's about a client managing his manager. Epstein's frustrated love for Lennon is centre screen and Lennon's various toying with it is largely the plot.

There are major events suggested without full disclosure which serves the quiet power of the piece. Much of the dialogue is on the one hand too theatrical for the screen but on the other might well serve to illustrate a kind of formal common ground for the two players where they could speak without ambiguity or with candour.

The best sequence is not between these two but involves the reappearence of an air hostess from the opening scene. She shows up unexpectedly at their hotel and Lennon claims the suite to enjoy her while his manager sulks in the lobby, filling up on sangria. The dialogue between the stewardess and Lennon shows him one unit shy of command over any woman he meets and develops into an interesting compromise. This is the best acting in the film.

On the performances, David Angus as Epstein is frequently stilted and theatrical, apparently informed by film interviews with the original (what else would there have been?). Ian Hart as Lennon owns the film, though, as he would soon after in Backbeat.

At around an hour of screentime, this won't break your attention budget and holds rewards for the open minded viewer (fabs fan or not).


I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND

A big canvas movie in the same neighbourhood as American Graffiti, this comedy of chaos is set during the Beatles first momentous US tour and their performance on the Ed Sullivan show. It's not about the Beatles, though, it's about the fans and their attempts to get in to see the show. Ultimately it's a feelgood piece which ends in a lot of resolution you can predict as soon as you get the initial character keynotes. Still there are one or two moments that have the kind of tang that American moves were allowed in the 70s. See it if on tv.

 





THE BIRTH OF THE BEATLES

The early Beatles share a joke

Of its time which means that it couches a cute scousey laddism in some late 70s grimness. The actor playing Lennon does pretty well but looks about 30 when he should be 21 or so. Brian Epstein is a little too insubstantial for someone who would have used his class status and commercial clout locally to rope the Beatles into his corrall. American filmmaking in the 70s is a mixed bag where depictions of homosexuality are concerned. It can be as frightened as it was in Papillion or as celebratory as Rocky Horror. Here it is expressed by personal timidity that "makes sense" in a later scene of gay bashing. From memory, that incident is handled pretty well without being cloying but its appearence as a major part of the narrative seems to have commanded a particular performance style from the actor playing Epstein at odds with what he needed to be in the light of history. Just sayin'...

The Beatles themselves wanted this film prevented (The Abortion of the Beatles?) and you might wonder why, on seeing it, but if you read the credits you might get a clue when you see that Pete Best was the chief consultant. Well he was there, wasn't he? Yes he was and famously he was rejected by them at the point of their lift off into the celestium. He wasn't invited. Ringo was. So we get Pete Best as the great misunderstood genius who brought them all together and drove them to stardom. I'm exaggerating here but you won't find another account that suggests that George Martin liked Best's drumming.

Some of the hijinks are Cliff and The Shadows ish but the 70s grey carpet underneath allows a little control to provide a serious attempt at telling the well worn story plausibly. Ends on the eve of the US tour with a brief portentous exchange between Lennon and Epstein.

JOHN AND YOKO: A LOVE STORY

Paul McGann (I in Withnail and I) plays Lennon. The non-John fabs are all money grubbing grumblers driving the sole godlike genius from the garden. Goes up to the murder of one of the title characters. Does what it says on the tin.


 










DOCUMENTARY

THE COMPLEAT BEATLES

The Fabs in the 80s

By today's post Anthology standards this is slim pickings but, coming as it did pre-MTV and Rage, it offered a well-rounded history which included song clips not seen for decades (eg Strawberry Fields Forever), incompletely but they were there. Rendered invisible by Anthology.












TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY

School photo

On the Twentieth anniversary of Sgt Pepper, this celebratory outing included the surviving Beatles and George Martin along with a crew of ... anyone else they could find who had been alive and not comatose at the time. First hearing for me of the unmixed recordings. Also, eclipsed by Anthology (cds as well as documentary), this was a very welcome addition at the time.






THE BEATLES 1ST US VISIT

One of the finest records of a band at the door of worldwide fame. From this point on, the Beatles were the most recognisable musicmakers on the planet. How many other bands' bass players can you name (it won't be none but it won't be many: few people would nominate Brian Wilson, for example)? Anyway, here they were, having legitimately broken and entered American culture. We follow them through interviews, photoshoots, being bored in hotel rooms, playing to huge venues and on tv and most memorably, being funny for the camera on an interstate train (watch it with Hard Day's Night). The publicity machine was of course old and grizzled by this stage but you get the distinct feeling here that it's about to change, that its objects were going to start taking more than their share.

This is joyous documentary making. It was made by the Maysles brothers, a team whose documentary career remains exemplary for its candour, depth and power. Whether its Grey Gardens about a pair of old New England aristocrats decaying as certainly as the old mansion they live in, or Salesman an account of the life of a door to door bible salesman which is as funny as it is depressing, a Maysles film will reward your attention long after you've spent it. There are always approaches and ideas that lift their films above the generic grind and in The Beatles 1st US Visit it's a doozy. They were not allowed to film in the studio during the momentous Ed Sullivan Show performance so they arranged to visit some friends with teenage daughters who would be watching it (ie teenage daughters). So instead of turning the cameras in the direction all the other ones were they showed that the reaction however muted by distance was still intense and portentous. The DVD release "corrects" this with inserted footage from the show so the effect is muted.  This also detracts from the stolen feel to the live concert footage later in the piece. As for the fabs themselves, the Maysles picked up pretty soon that they needed to do little more than point and shoot. Tellingly, during the spontaneous-feeling hijinks on the train, the lens lights on an unsmiling Paul who says to it: "I'm not even in a laughing mood." Probably the last time that was allowed to happen.

Having introduced the flavour of 1960s rock to the world, the Maysles showed its demise with Gimme Shelter (which deserves its own entry), a post Woodstock journey into the hell on the other side of hippiedom.

Utterly recommended even to non fans (see also, Let it Be)


OFFICIAL BEATLES FILMS
A HARD DAY'S NIGHT

Playwright Alun Owen followed them around for weeks, wrote the kind of things he heard into a plot more or less about the real band going for fast paced comedy. The fabs take the train to London and appear on a tv show. Plot generator is provided by the character of Paul's grandfather who mucks up continually. It's fun. John Lennon at one point is handed a small bottle of Coke. During the dialogue between the others he quietly puts the nozzle to each nostril and sniffs it deeply. It's one of a host of jokes for the adept that pepper this movie and keep it from being a Cliff and the Shadows show of sexless mania. Seeing the Maysles Bros. film of the 1st US Visit, particularly the train sequences, I can't believe Owen and Lester didn't also see it before this went into production. Watch one then the other, either order. The tight similarity is testament to the quality of both films, as far as I can see.

Final point that I haven't seen anyone else make: I recall all the other Beatle films apart from Let it Be as a series of clips joined by dialogue. I remember A Hard Day's Night as a film and THEN recall that it has songs in it.

HELP

The story with this one is that from the top of Mount Fame the Beatles couldn't be bothered but were still contractually bound. This meant that Dick Lester had no co operation of the level he'd enjoyed on the previous one that had allowed it such energy and fun. The end result has a kind of accelerating hollowness as though it's being eaten from within. That's before you get to the cringey Brit Character actors in blackface doing Goon show Indian stereotypes. This is countered a little (a very little) by the local villans who are just as bumbling. Victor Spinetti, in one of the few genuninely funny bits, keeps cursing his ever failing equipment for being British.

I first saw this film when I was about thirteen and loved it. I also loved Benny Hill and Dick Emery. The side of me that revered Monty Python might well have been sleeping that day as, if awake, it would have slapped me around the head until I left the cinema. When I saw it much later on tv I cringed.

What's good? The songs and their clips, particularly You've Got to Hide Your Love Away.

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

George finds friends to play with

You know the story. Brian dies and Paul takes over. At his insistence they make another film ... by themselves. It is shown in black and white on Boxing Day when its audience is dozing off on yesterday's plum pudding and has little tolerance for anything more difficult than the St Trinian's movie rerun. Result, universal ridicule and the fabs take their first real punch on the jaw. No wonder they fled to India.

So what's it like. It's gibberish with a few good video clips of some fine pyschedlic era songs. It's the result of people being dragged out of bed at six in the morning and told to be whacky so it's about as funny as a joke prefaced with "this'll make you laugh" and as surreal as an op shop copy of a Dali painting. But then what wasn't from that era? Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, The Knack, Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came Magical Mystery Tour were all try hard cringeworthy rubbish that attempted to encapsulate something of their time but could only stay encased in it for all time. is no worse than that but it is also a little better as it includes a number of what would otherwise be video clips for some great Beatle songs like Fool on the Hill and (best of all) I Am the Walrus. Compare either of these to the Strawberry Fields Forever clip and they'll stand proudly beside it.

YELLOW SUBMARINE

The mid 70s was a strange time in the Beatleverse as, being the period immediately following the band's demise, far more attention was given to the individual's careers (at the somewhat unsurprising insistance of the individuals themselves) and it would have seemed like old news anyway. So in the Christmas holidays of 1975 when I stumbled on a broadcast of Yellow Submarine I had no idea that it was an official product of the Beatles machine. I thought it was just a feature length Japanese cartoon. I sat back and enjoyed it.

The year to come brought the rumour of the reunion and stories of insane sums of money being offered to them for one final concert. There was another story doing the rounds that they all happened to find themselves together in New York when a Saturday Night Live skit put the request out. Supposedly, they all thought why not but couldn't get through due to traffic. Yeah right. Anyway, that kind of thing was in the air. A few compilations were released which spread the Beatle meme like superpollen throughout the teenage world and the second generation of Beatle fans arose from the fertile ground. From then on the brand settled into its cushions at the top of Merch Mountain where it remains unassailed to this day.

So what's it like?

First up, the fabs themselves had almost no involvement with the film, no writing or acting beyond the final sequence when they appear in a live action coda which includes a mimed performance of Paul's Althogether Now. Second, there is a lot of psychedelic imagery in this film but it's only drug related if you are making the association yourself. If you look at it as a fantasy film it suits an under ten audience pretty well. I was only a little over ten when I saw it and I loved the whimsy and Christmas cracker jokes and the sheer colour assault along with the Sgt Pepper era songs that fill it to the brim. There's nothing remotely as risque as the coke bottle bit in Hard Day's Night. It declares its hand early and keeps it on the helm. If Magical Mystery Tour had this kind of discipline this film wouldn't have been made. As such, it's rendered essential, if only as a thing to put in front of Magical Mystery Tour and Help when you have visitors.


LET IT BE

Well, like it or not, this is at least an authentic document of a working band at the end of its life as a unit. As such it works perfectly, offering a dreariness to the rehearsals which now and then breaks into conflict (the infamous Paul vs George argument) and then rising to a kind of joy as the momentum builds for the rooftop concert. I can't say what non fans would make of most of it. Even as one who doesn't like the songs on the resulting album very much I still find the tension of the strained friendships on screen compelling. Would I watch the same thing if it were a band like ... Hootie and the Blowfish? Maybe, if the drama was there ... once. If you want to see what the most successful rock band of all time was like just before it jumped off the roof here it is, yawns and all. Intriguing but trying. I love it.


ANTHOLOGY

The closest thing you're going to get to the real story with the involement of its principal players. Masses of archival images, film and video footage and interviews with people surrounding a given passage of the history. Lennon is represented through archival interviews. The DVD box set of this television documentary includes the extensions of the home video version as well as an extras disc. For the anorak fan there is much left unaired in the interviews but the good thing about this is that we are presented with what the people who were there could recall when asked. But what was left on the cutting room floor, hmmmm? Couldn't care less. What I have is a thoroughly enjoyable history of a thoroughly enjoyable band in a thoroughly enjoyable package. Any shortfalls can be bridged with the various accounts that have appeared since the mid 70s boom-that-never-ended. Beyond that, there are a number of fine albums to enjoy while planning urban renewal schemes or doing the dishes.