I think this is my favourite clip in the whole of You Tube.
It's George Harrison watching a clip of the Beatles doing "This Boy", the B-side of "I Want To Hold Your Hand", on a regional TV show in 1963.
He's watching it in the year 1976. He's thirty-three. He's gone up to Granada in Manchester to plug his new album "Thirty Three and A Third".
Tony Wilson, who can be seen in the background, brings him into the edit suite and gets the editor to load the old reels into the Steenbeck editing machine so that George can look at this clip, which he has never seen. It's like he's looking back into the far-distant past. Thirteen years earlier.
Mark Cooper and I had lunch today. We were talking about the mid-70s, when the Beatles were all still around and only in their thirties. At the time nobody realised their reputation was only at the beginning of its ascent.
That's when this clip was shot.
Think about the things that would have been inconceivable to the people in that clip. The internet, You Tube and John Lennon's murder for a start.
Miming of course. I think it was "Scene At 6-30," a Granada show. The wider backdrop was some sort of collage, perhaps with a camera motif. I vaguely recall "Beatax" being part of it.
ReplyDeleteI also have the vaguest of recollections that Ken Dodd popped up at the beginning or the end.
The whole thing is probably somewhere on YouTube.
Other than that, as the jargonauts have it: Good Find!
You know what? I think it's just become mine too.
ReplyDeleteDavid I'm by no means arguing but is it really true that 'their reputation was only at the beginning of its ascent' in the mid 1970s? I mean their reputation, whatever that means, was really pretty big by 1964 and kept on going from there to be stratospheric by 1967 at the latest, no? Did you run that one by Mark Lewisohn? If so of course I humbly withdraw all the above, Keith
ReplyDeleteKeith, you're perfectly free to have your own opinion and you could well be right.
ReplyDeleteMark Cooper and I were simply talking about the fact that throughout the 70s it felt as though the stock of the Beatles didn't rise. For instance, were the Beatles on the cover of Rolling Stone or NME during the 70s? I'm sure they must have been but I can't believe it was anything like as often as they're on the cover of magazines nowadays. The four members were all getting on with their solo careers and music seemed far too preoccupied with disco, progressive, punk and the rest of it to refer back to them. The former Beatles weren't desperately keen to talk about it all because they felt they could put it behind them.
It was only when John Lennon died in 1980 that the Great Revision began. It was only then that people thought "hang on, that was something really special and now it's gone for ever."
Points taken, cap doffed
DeleteHere are a few numbers that corroborate your narrative David http://www.cnbc.com/2014/01/24/beatles-business-still-making-money-50-years-on.html
ReplyDelete