The Beatles

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: Yesterday: I saw a film today, oh boy

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 30th June 2019

    A common pub argument I have with a friend of mine is that the Beatles weren't as influential as everyone makes out. I tell him there weren't bands before the Beatles; just solo singers and backing groups. I tell him that artists didn't write their own songs before the Beatles. I tell him that the album wasn't an artistic endeavour before the Beatles; just a commercial ruse to package up a hit single or two with some filler and sell them again. He still won't have it. Obviously he is an idiot, but I hope to Christ he never sees Yesterday, because it'll only strengthen his wildly incorrect view. While it does have at its heart the idea that this was the most special collection of songs ever written, it overlooks that what the boys gave us all wasn't just the songs: it was far more than that.

  • It Was Fifty Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt Pepper & Beyond

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 29th May 2017

    Where Ron Howard's Eight Days a Week ends, as the teenage screams die down after the last chord struck at Candlestick Park, Alan G Parker's new documentary begins. Timed to coincide with Sgt Pepper's fiftieth anniversary and hoping to catch the wave of tributes and looks-back that will go along with it, it takes us from the end of Beatlemania into the start of the studio years and through the recording of their most significant album. And it doesn't come near to doing it justice.

  • The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 16th September 2016

    What a Beatles documentary has never quite captured is their cultural significance. You can't, not really: it is too tightly bound up in everything we hold as self-evident about popular culture and our relationship with celebrity. Ron Howard, having had the sense to focus his film on the touring years up until 1966 rather than compress The Beatles Anthology into two hours, allows us a window into just how mental those four years were, and gets closer to the truth of it than anyone else has managed.

  • Nowhere Boy

    Movie Review | Matt | 26th December 2009

    The iconic opening chord of A Hard Day's Night is one of the most recognisable introductions to any song ever recorded. It's a one-of-a-kind, messy clash that is an audacious start to an otherwise well-loved melody, and, fittingly, it's the first thing we hear in this portrayal of John Lennon's early troublesome youth.