The Beatles Anthology New Episode: First Look Review

The Beatles Anthology – Episode 9

★★★★

Disney +

Absurd though it seems, the 1995 release of The Beatles’ “comeback” single Free As A Bird is as far away from today as that was from Yesterday or Day Tripper. It was fortuitous timing. Along with The Beatles Anthology, the TV series that inspired it, the single reinjected the music and the myth of The Beatles into the heart of popular culture at the height of Britpop, and there it has remained ever since. As Anthology makes its streaming debut on Disney+, a new finale, directed by Oliver Murray, covers the making of the project itself in 1994 and 1995, creating a little Russian doll of nostalgia.

Anthology was quite the saga. As soon as The Beatles imploded in 1970, Apple’s Neil Aspinall harvested all the footage he could and produced a 90-minute documentary called The Long And Winding Road, but it was far too early for the ex-bandmates to enjoy looking back and the film gathered dust until it was expanded into a six-part TV series in the 1990s: the epic tale of The Beatles “from the inside out rather than the outside in,” as Paul McCartney puts it. George Harrison muses Zennishly that their divergent memories make a “definitive” story of The Beatles impossible but that the story doesn’t belong to them alone anyway: “The Beatles exist without us.”

Paul, George and Ringo originally planned to write nothing more than incidental music for the series on the principle that it couldn’t be The Beatles without John, but somebody (accounts differ) asked Yoko Ono if she had any unreleased Lennon songs kicking around. She handed over some demo cassettes John had recorded on his piano at the Dakota Building in the late 1970s. Three songs sounded raw but promising: Free As A Bird, Real Love and Now And Then. Can-do producer Jeff Lynne took on the arduous slog of digitally cleaning the lo-fi, rhythmically shaggy mono demos so that the band could get to work finishing them at McCartney’s Hog Hill Mill studio. (They ran out of time for Now And Then but Paul correctly predicts, “It might not go away, that one.” It was finally finished and released in 2023.)

“It was a very heavy time for me,” Ringo admits. The prospect of making new Beatles songs was so emotionally daunting that McCartney suggested they all pretend that John had recorded half a song before going on holiday and had trusted them to finish it. When Paul was playing with John’s voice in his ears, he says, “It was like the old days.” And when Ringo heard the harmonies that had been added to Real Love, he exclaimed that it sounded “just like The Beatles,” which seems banal until you consider that he hadn’t heard that chemistry occur since the summer of 1969.

If Peter Jackson’s fan-thrilling Get Back allowed us to eavesdrop on The Beatles in their heyday, then the Anthology finale invites us to hang out with men in their fifties who no longer took their friendship for granted. We see the “Threetles” in acoustic mode, rattling through Bill Monroe’s Blue Moon of Kentucky and Thinking of Linking, which Paul wrote when he was just 15. They also appear cross-legged on a picnic blanket in the garden of Harrison’s Henley-on-Thames home, plucking the 1920s jazz standard Ain’t She Sweet on ukuleles. The nostalgia of reunion leads them back to the very start, before the name the Beatles meant anything.

In another poignant scene, the three are sat around a giant mixing desk as their former producer George Martin slides the faders to single out the separate tracks of Tomorrow Never Knows and they react as if they’re witnessing a delightful magic trick. When Martin isolates the exquisite harmonies from You Never Give Me Your Money, Paul seems sweetly amazed that this was his handiwork. Musicians who had spent 25 years refusing to wallow in their glorious past clearly enjoyed being given permission to do nothing else.

The individual interviews tell us nothing new about The Beatles’ mad canter of a career (“crazy times but great times,” Ringo says Ringoishly) but put the three together and the anecdotes fizz, from Abbey Road shenanigans to the origins of the classic early 60s Beatles look. Of the tensions that shattered their bonds, there is scant trace, although Paul does get a gentle ribbing for his workaholic intensity in the band’s final years. “I like The Beatles,” he retorts a little defensively. “I like to work with The Beatles. I’m not ashamed of that.”

When they joke about playing stadiums, but as mud-wrestlers rather than musicians, it occurs that had John still been around in 1995, a reunion tour would have been more than likely. What this episode does is highlight the lasting impact of that loss and the black hole in this reunion. At one point, Paul points to an empty chair and imagines that John has just popped out for lunch. Anthology, and the songs that came out of it, were the surviving trio’s opportunity to reconnect with their old friend and recreate, if only briefly, the four-cornered miracle that was The Beatles. “Even though John’s not here,” Paul says, “he’s here.”

WHAT WE LEARNED FROM THE NEW EPISODE OF THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY:

• Free As A Bird had an Elvis inspiration
  After Roy Orbison’s death in 1988, the Presley estate gave his Traveling Wilburys bandmates (including Harrison and Lynne) permission to fill the gap by using Elvis’s voice on a song. Fortunately, George says, they dropped the idea because it was “gimmicky” but a few years later it prompted the thought that a posthumous collaboration with John would be possible.

• Late-night Abbey Road sessions were fuelled by “special” tea
  The Beatles liked to work late into the night but George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick sometimes flagged after dinner. One night, the band came up with the morally dubious solution of dosing their tea with uppers, fostering a suitably energetic session. “George hasn’t come down yet,” Ringo quips.

The Beatles Anthology, featuring a brand-new episode streams exclusively on Disney+ from November 26.

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