Radio Times mag offers some tidbits about the new, ninth episode of "The Beatles Anthology," which air Nov. 28 on Disney+.
The updated "Anthology" episodes begin streaming Nov. 26 with episodes 1-3.
From RT:
[The] additional part nine, made up of footage shot in and around the launch of that Anthology project and featuring the Fab Three, known at the time as “the Threetles”.
While it doesn’t offer much in the way of revelation, this film of their reunion provides even more of the one thing Beatles watchers most crave, which is to watch them in the room with each other, just behaving. This will never not be fascinating. Here are three middle-aged men, all at the time over 50, Englishly keen to demonstrate their ordinariness, drinking tea from workmen’s mugs and playing with any toy at hand, while also strongly hinting that decades before, they were bonded for all time by an experience the rest of us cannot possibly understand.
“I was 17 in Hamburg,” says George. “By the time I was 23 we had done Sgt Pepper.” Take that, pop stars of today. Like most gentlemen of their generation, born during the Second World War when lips were stiff, they are not natural practitioners of the newly voguish male hug, but they do it. You didn’t catch them collapsing into each other’s arms at the end of marathon performances the way bands do today.
...When they gather at George’s house in the summer of 1994, Paul and George play acoustic guitars, Ringo keeps the volume down by taking up his brushes and they sound like nothing so much as a skiffle group, which is where it all began. For repertoire they reach for the songs that come naturally: Ain’t She Sweet, a hit from the Roaring Twenties, Blue Moon of Kentucky, a bluegrass waltz from the 1940s, and Baby What You Want Me to Do, a Jimmy Reed song that was on the rhythm and blues chart long before they first released a record. That’s the kind of hinterland bands had in those days.
When they sit around and talk about the past, it’s the simple things they remember. Combing their hair forwards for the first time, getting their boots at Anello & Davide, getting £100 for John’s birthday, realising after a few hits that they were getting away with it. “It was all accidental really,” says George. “The funny haircuts and jackets and boots. We had something together even if it was just an attitude. You get certain people together and you get fire or dynamite.” Paul looks at a picture of them posing in Edwardian bathing suits on the beach at Weston-super-Mare in 1963 and laughs: “Here they are – the hippest group in history!”
When the three of them sit at the mixing desk while George Martin pulls back the faders to deconstruct the mix of Tomorrow Never Knows, they can’t help being amused by the Heath Robinson nature of many of those sounds. Not for them the reverent silence that attends that ceremony today. They know how this particular sausage was made. “Now it’s serious music,” says Paul, smirking as he recalls the days when they were doing the impossible because nobody had said they couldn’t and it was a bit of a laugh.
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