Never needing any second invitation to write about The Beatles, at the weekend I watched ‘EIGHT DAYS A WEEK – THE TOURING YEARS‘ (director Ron Howard, 115 minutes).
This 2016 documentary covers the four year period between 1962 and 1966 when The Beatles made a series of wonderful records peaking with the albums ‘Rubber Soul‘ (1965) and ‘Revolver‘ (1966) that have become landmark recordings in popular music.
They also made countless live and television appearances, starred in two films, changed the course of contemporary culture – and oh yeah, at the time when they were reaching such dizzying levels of fame and creativity, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr also became the four most famous men in the world.
Through grainy black and white footage filmed from the audience in tiny clubs such as The Cavern, their original Liverpool base, to professionally recorded colour footage shot before audiences of fifty thousand or more in enormous American stadiums, ‘Eight Days Week‘ – interspersed with latter day interviews with McCartney and Starr and the archive reflections of Lennon and Harrison – tells the story of The Beatles meteoric rise from Merseyside dance hall act to worldwide phenomenon.
In terms of concert performance they undergo the incredible transformation from tight, intuitive live band in relatively small venues to four isolated musicians unable to hear what each other are playing due to hordes of screaming fans in cavernous arenas – this a key factor in their decision to stop touring altogether in the late summer of 1966.
Even for the unaware or unconverted ‘Eight Days A Week‘ should prove a fascinating watch. Even if the music is not to taste or The Beatles’ engaging exuberance comes across if not quaint then dated, the documentary is still a worthy attempt at showing how in a time long before 24-hour news channels and the advent of social media, a group conquered the world on the basis of firstly their records and secondly their repartee.
For the initiated the film is a poignant, affirming reminder of just how endearing and magnificent The Beatles were, the overriding sense of togetherness between John, Paul, George and Ringo as the world fell at their feet an enjoyable counterpoint to the squabbling individuals they had become by the end of the 60s – the group visibly falling apart before the cameras at the ‘Let It Be‘ sessions of 1969.
The observations of Beatles aficionados such as Whoppi Goldberg, Sigouney Weaver, Eddie Izzard and Elvis Costello are welcome enough, but the crux of the story lies with the Fab Four themselves. In one of his first remarks to camera Paul McCartney makes the revealing comment, ‘In the end playing live and touring became quite complicated, but at the beginning it was very simple,’ a statement that perfectly encapsulates the ensuing story.
In the early days The Beatles simply piled out of a van or bus to play before excited audiences – but when the ‘Beatlemania‘ that swept Britain in late 1963 took hold in America they entered a previously uncharted stratosphere of fame.
Their performance on the Ed Sullivan Television Show on February 9 1964 was seen by countless millions across the US, catapulting them to an incredible level of popularity which brought levels of scrutiny that no act before – and probably since – has ever had to contend with.
Referencing the one possible exception, George Harrison says: ‘That’s why I always felt sorry for Elvis Presley – I know he had people around him, but the fame thing he was going through on his own. We had each other and no matter what would always stick together.’
As ‘Eight Days A Week‘ goes on to show, the next two years (64-66) brought an unrelenting schedule of recording sessions, film and television work – how Lennon and McCartney ever found time to write songs is a mystery, the fact they were developed into such prolific, imaginative songwriters a miracle.
But live performances involving a mad dash to the stage, half an hour in front of audience who screamed so loud the group could no longer hear each other, followed by another life-threatening run through surging crowds to the sanctuary of a hotel room, had become nothing but a chore.
Remarks made by Lennon about Christianity in a March 1966 interview with the Evening Standard newspaper went largely unnoticed in England, but were then taken out of context in parts of the world beyond (as the documentary goes to great lengths to emphasise) the summer US tour of that year becoming fraught with difficulty.
Venues frequently received bomb scares while The Beatles themselves became subject to death threats. Indeed, Harrison reflects on an incident when he mistook the sound of firecrackers for gun fire and thought one of them had been shot – a sadly resonate comment when remembering what happened to Lennon fourteen years later.
At the end of another show when they had done little more than listen to screaming teenage girls, the tour came to an end with an effectively pointless performance in San Francisco on August 29 1966, at which point The Beatles decided to cease touring – the four of them reaching the decision in a windowless meat van with no seats, while being driven away from Candlestick Park.
Freed from the rigours and demands of being on the road, The Beatles returned to the studio and now with absolutely no constraints on how to reproduce the material in the setting of a live show, came up with their most compelling, intricate work yet – ‘Revolver‘ being a worthy successor to the mesmeric ‘Rubber Soul.’
As scars from the latter-era of the touring years showed no signs of healing, their ground-breaking studio work continued to push back the boundaries of what the LP could say and how it can sound – the innovation reaching a whole new plateau in 1967 with ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club‘, a work of breathtaking complexity, depth and imagination.
On parts of the 1968 double ‘The White Album‘ they edge back closer to their roots in sounding more hard-edged – at times they rock as gloriously as say The Who, one of a number of groups (Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience) who had began to develop huge sound systems.
Embraced by The Beatles, such amplification would have allowed them to be heard in concert no matter how loud the audience would have screamed in 1969 (had they still wanted to scream by then) – the group, their audience, popular music and the world at large changing significantly since the last time The Beatles had played to a paying audience.
But by the time of ‘The White Album‘ the group had begun to disintegrate and in a career that came to an acrimonious end in early 1970, touring had long since stopped being a consideration – live shows one more tribulation they could happily do without.
Overall Ron Howard produced an excellent film – strange no mention is made of Lennon, Harrison and Starr all becoming husbands during the 1962-66 time-span – and while the documentary is tailored distinctly to an American audience, it does not shy away from The Beatles commendable refusal to play in front of segregated audiences in some US states, McCartney describing their standpoint with great eloquence in a 1966 interview.
Toward the end of the film, over a montage of photographs and footage from The Beatles touring years, where their facial expressions range from delight to dispirited, Lennon can be heard saying:
‘There was no enjoyment in touring anymore. Most of the time we couldn’t be heard, it had become a freak show. The Beatles were the show – the music had nothing to do with it. We were musicians who wanted to make music, not be part of a circus.’
Far be it for me to contradict the man at the very epicentre of that circus – but from where I was sat last weekend ‘Eight Days A Week‘ looked and sounded the greatest show on earth.
This article was first published on 23/7/2018.
NEIL SAMBROOK is the author of MONTY’S DOUBLE – an acclaimed thriller now available as an Amazon Kindle Book.
