New Beatles documentary

In an unforeseen future, the background became the interesting part of the photo.

A new Beatles documentary premiered on Swedish television this weekend.”Becoming The Beatles”, produced by Formative Productions in 2012, focused on the early days of the group, ending with the breakthrough in USA on the Ed Sullivan show.

Among the talking heads were the two Tony B’s (Bramwell and Barrow), Phil Collins, Steve Harley, Norman Smith, Colin Hanton, Sam Leach, Ken Dodd, Freda Kelly, Sylvie Vartan and those true veterans of Beatles documentaries, Allan Williams and Gerry Marsden. By chance I happened to watch that old 1981 documentary “The Compleat Beatles” today, and it was fun to see those two guys there in their much younger incarnations.

Independently made, “Becoming The Beatles” doesn’t feature original Beatles studio recordings, although they snuck in some of that infamous Hamburg Star Club tape in the background. Leaning very much on old black and white still photos and some of Klaus Voorman’s Hamburg Days paintings, the film was augmented by some interesting colour footage of Liverpool in the sixties and a couple of gems in the form of that earliest “Valentines Day” colour film (Leach says he remembers the guy who asked to shoot the footage) and colour home movie footage from Paris Olympia Theatre, January 1964. John Lennon also popped in now and again, speaking from an interview with French TV in the mid-seventies.

The bulk of this material also appeared in a 2007 DVD from the same company, entitled “Rare and Unseen”, so I guess this new documentary is more or less just recycling footage and interviews they already had. It’s likely to be broadcast in your country too, just wait and see!

For your pleasure, here’s that Paris footage set to a soundtrack from those same concerts, something Formative Productions were unable to deliver.