The Beatles Revisited
When I was young and so much younger than today…
I spent hours with the Beatles during these holidays. It was great nostalgia, fun, thought provoking, opening for sweet memories from when I was a lad and joined Ove from the other side of the street listening to Paul, John, George and Ringo, when their first songs came out early 1960’es. Me and Ove, who is precisely one year younger than me, met after school, had a cola and pastry from the bakery, listened and learned the lyrics, which were not that complicated… Ove played the guitar, he is still in a band; still, we meet a couple of times per year, with wives, no cola and pastry…
Thanks to a one month subscription to the streaming platform Disney+ I watched “The Beatles: Get Back”, 8 hours (!), documentary series made by Peter Jackson, that “draws largely from unused footage and audio material originally captured for and recycled original footage from the 1970 documentary of the album by Michael Lindsay-Hogg.” (Wikipedia). (“Let it Be” now also available on Disney+) Of course there are boring moments but my overall appreciation as a documentary addict (I started at the Danish Film Board in 1975, 50 years ago) is one of joy as they, the four of them and the wonderful Billy Preston on piano, rehearse, you feel the tension between them, but when they end up performing on the rooftop in Saville Road in London, it’s just an amazing show, with 10 cameras in action, a couple of policemen entering the building to stop the noise, people getting together in the street making comments, most of them positive… of course it is a positive film that Jackson has put together for Disney, premiered in the 2020’es. Yoko Ono is there, Linda Maccartney is there, Glynne who is recording, the road manager Mal Evans, George Martin… and many many others, not to forget Lindsay-Hogg, the director of the documentary-to-be (“Let it Be”), always with a cigar in is mouth, oh yes the taste, also for me when I was much younger than today.
On top of that – also on Disney+ – the new documentary “Beatles64” (in America) by David Tedeschi with Martin Scorcese as producer. In short scenes we see him interviewing Ringo Starr, others are also interviewed, Paul McCartney of course, archive clips with John and George, but most impressive is the footage from Maysles Brothers, legendary documentarians, who show their ability to be there making the audience “be present”, as their colleague Richard Leacock once put it. It was in February 1964, four months later Beatles were in Copenhagen to give concerts, June 4 – I was there! This film is full of joy and freshness and – to quote Peter Bradshaw in Guardian (November 24), “… and what is still amazing is how brief an instant it was; in just a few years, the Beatles and their music would evolve into something completely different. A few years after that, they would break up, while still only in their 20s. An amazing split-second of cultural history.”
Photo from Central Park, “Imagine”, you know the lyrics, still to be remembered today: …Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for…
