The Beatles - Destination Hamburg

More drab than Fab

How to make a DVD documentary about The Beatles’ early years: Rewrite the opening chapters of the dullest biography you can find, scour the dusty shelves of a low-rent newsreel library for the blurriest fourth-generation copies of generic silent footage, slap it all together and hope for the best. Alternatively, don’t bother.

Blame Apple Corps for systematically buying up all the good stuff and blocking any requests for use of the group’s music, but the cold, hard truth is that any unofficial product of this kind can’t help but be a waste of the makers’ time and the punters’ cash. Destination Hamburg is an especially poor addition to the canon, its only exclusive component being talking-head inserts from a meandering Tony Sheridan who admits – on camera! – that his memory isn’t quite what it was.

The stilted narration attempts to draw geographical and cultural parallels between Liverpool and Hamburg with all the insight and authority of a numbskull sports master who’s been asked to fill in for a smarter teacher at the last minute. Honestly, there’s not a shred of information here that even the most casual fan wouldn’t already know. Destination remainder rack.

Wienerworld | WNRD 2439

Reviewed by Terry Staunton
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