The Beatles - The Unseen Beatles

Roll up, roll up, for the Beatles’ world tours

We know it all already: the ‘snubbing’ of the First Lady of the Philippines; the fears for their own safety; George, and then John’s, tiring of the tour routine in the States; manic, ‘unreachable’ crowds that made competent live performance impossible. So why bother retelling it?

Well, peppered throughout this 40-minute BBC Timewatch documentary is a little ‘unseen’ footage of the group on tour – except that, by the time this is released, it will have already been broadcast by BBC Two on Friday 12 January. Perhaps most exciting is the live footage of The Beatles’s final concert at Candlestick Park, filmed for posterity by 15-year-old Barry Hood on his own cinecamera. For the most part, however, the various bits of film are grainy, inessential and, with no sanctioned Beatles music, soundtracked by overly conspicuous Merseybeat backing. Roadie Ed Freeman, sound engineer Norman Smith and press officer Tony Barrow all tell the tale from their perspectives, but the story, and the theories on the story, are too well known to have any new meaning. Unseen? Not today. It’s not essential, either.

Liberation Entertainment | LIB 6048

Reviewed by Jason Draper
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