“They were so talented and funny and wonderful-looking, these beautiful young faces,” Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who directed this promo, remembers...
…“And they were so famous that they’d almost taken on personalities like comic-strip characters, beyond being human. They were as tight as four people could possibly be as no-one in the history of showbusiness – or of the world – had been through what they had experienced.”
The above is a pretty good place to start. It says it all really about four fab people from Liverpool who somehow came together to become the greatest band of all time and changed the world forever with their songs- very many songs that were about mainly love and peace and starring an always interesting cast of characters.
Maybe they were writing a screenplay without knowing it and which only they and their inner circle would have been able to produce?
Peter Sellers would have been in it playing at least three roles. Definitely. And all of Monty Python.
If they were up for it, Kenny Everett and Spike Milligan might have had parts.
It would have had to have been completely British made.
I could see Britain’s Rat Pack in it- Oliver Reed, below, Michael Caine, Peter O’Toole and Alan Bates.
Personally, I would have brought in legendary footballer George Best and F1 driver James Hunt. Maybe they would have, too.
Orson Welles or Dudley Moore could have played Allen Klein whereas Peter Cook would have been perfect as George Martin.
No one could have played the women in the lives of the Beatles except those wonderful ladies. So there’s that bit of casting taken care of.
“All you need is love?” You bet. Let it be? Yes. Here comes the sun? Hope so. Something in the way she moves? Most definitely.
How was this still ongoing magical mystery tour created in seven short years?
One doubts that even the Walrus knows whether he was Paul or Saul or Sherwin.
Maybe they didn’t overthink things as many of us tend to do today, because we might have so many new toys to play with, but actually getting even started to fill in that blank canvas has become so damn difficult.
Video might have killed the radio star, but technology has robbed music of its soul.
The Beatles had soul.
Their versions of their own songs were brilliant, but their songs became something else when performed by Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett, Aretha etc.
They were not necessarily better versions, but different and which gave these songs new layers. Like that Glass Onion.
The Beatles are that Glass Onion. Layers and layers to peel off and always, always, always, something new to discover.
Dig a pony.
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