There’s no doubt that the arrival of The Beatles Anthology in 1995 was a big deal. The TV series was broadcast at prime time on both sides of the Atlantic, and ABC in the US even changed its name to ABeatlesC in its honour. The three accompanying albums (the first time the Beatles had allowed outtakes from their recording sessions to be officially released) sold in their millions. Its success helped kickstart the latterday Beatles industry, a steady stream of officially sanctioned documentaries, reissues, remixes, compilations and expanded editions, predicated on two ideas: that the Beatles’ archive contains fathomless bounty; and that the band’s story is so rich there’s no limit to the number of times it can fruitfully be retold in fresh light.
For a while, those ideas seemed to hold true, but recently, it’s been hard not to think the Beatles’ Apple Corps might be trying to feed an insatiable appetite for content from an increasingly bare cupboard. You can marvel at the highlights of Peter Jackson’s TV series Get Back and still wonder whether the director wasn’t stretching his material a little thin; whether nearly eight hours of it – plus a separate Imax film of the Beatles’ final live performance on the roof of Apple’s London HQ, and a reissue of the original 1970 Let It Be documentary – might have been rather too much of a good thing.
Last year’s Martin Scorsese-produced Beatles ’64, meanwhile, just re-edited familiar footage – much of it from the Maysles Brothers’ 1964 documentary, What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA, reissued in 1991 as The First US Visit, then again by Apple in 2004 – and spliced it with new interviews that suggested everything that needed to be said about the events of 1964 had already been said, and the two surviving Beatles had run out of new angles on a subject they had been answering questions about for 60 years.
A similar sense of pointlessness attends the new version of Anthology. It arrives with a fourth album of outtakes, but 23 of its 36 tracks have been previously released, which means vinyl buyers are being asked to cough up nearly 70 quid for 50 minutes of “new” music, most of which is pretty inconsequential to all but the most banzai Fabs devotee. There’s no sign of Carnival of Light, the near-mythic Stockhausen-influenced experiment the band recorded during the Sgt Pepper sessions, nor the fabled 27-minute version of Helter Skelter. Instead, you have to make do with a wobbly first take of their cover of Carl Perkins’ Matchbox.
George Martin, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison in The Beatles Anthology.
Rock aristocracy … George Martin, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison in The Beatles Anthology. Photograph: PR
There’s also an “all-new” episode of the TV series, concentrating on the making of the original Anthology documentary and Free as a Bird and Real Love, the two John Lennon demos the surviving members worked up into songs in the mid-90s. These events are now as far in the past as Beatlemania was when the Anthology series was produced: bizarrely, the footage from 30 years ago – a riot of ponytails, mullets, leather waistcoats and stonewashed denim – looks more dated than that from the 60s, the clothes sported by 90s rock aristocrats having yet to pass into the realm of classic style.
The problem is, the new episode isn’t all-new at all. It’s essentially the bonus material from the 2003 DVD edition of Anthology padded out to 50 minutes: the three surviving Beatles being interviewed together at George Harrison’s home and at Abbey Road, loosely jamming old rock’n’roll songs – and an early McCartney effort, Thinking of Linking – on acoustic guitars and ukuleles; working on the new tracks at Paul McCartney’s home studio with producer Jeff Lynne; and sitting at a mixing desk while George Martin plays them multitrack recordings from the 60s.
Some of the footage is sweet – there’s a lovely moment where Ringo addresses his bandmates with a plaintive “I like hanging out with you guys” – and some of it is oddly telling: you could divine a lot from George Harrison’s visible exasperation as the sessions for Free as a Bird and Real Love drag on. (Off camera, he famously refused to work on a third Lennon demo, Now and Then, deeming it “fucking rubbish”. McCartney and Starr eventually finished the track in 2023, 22 years after Harrison’s death.)
McCartney has a funny story about getting Abbey Road’s recalcitrant engineers to keep working on Beatles sessions past their allotted hours by covertly dosing the studio’s tea urn with amphetamines. It’s nice to see them together and more or less happy, although you can’t miss a certain tension between Harrison and McCartney. When Martin plays the multitrack of the latter’s You Never Give Me Your Money, Harrison suggests it sounds “a bit cheesy”. McCartney is noticeably unamused.
None of it is essential or particularly insightful. Like the Anthology 4 album, it’s been flammed together to suggest added value, that there’s something new to say about a subject that may well have been exhausted.
The Beatles Anthology is on Disney+ now. The album Anthology 4 is out now on Apple Records
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/nov/26/the-beatles-anthology-new-tv-episode-feels-pointless
