A Nostalgic Triumph: Beatles ’64

There are few names in twentieth-century culture that retain quite the magic of the Beatles. More than sixty years after four young men from Liverpool stepped off an aeroplane in New York and found an entire country apparently waiting for them, their music remains instantly recognisable, their faces familiar even to generations born long after the band ceased to exist.

One might reasonably wonder whether there is anything left to say about them.

Beatles ’64, David Tedeschi’s beautifully assembled documentary, produced by Martin Scorsese alongside Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison, Sean Ono Lennon and others, provides a rather wonderful answer: yes, because sometimes what matters is not discovering something entirely new, but seeing something familiar with new eyes.

The film returns us to February 1964 and to one of those rare moments when popular culture seems almost visibly to change direction.

On 7 February, Pan Am Flight 101 landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport carrying John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.

Thousands of young Americans were waiting.

The screams began almost immediately.

Within two days, more than 73 million Americans would watch the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was an audience of a magnitude almost impossible to imagine in today’s fragmented media landscape. For one extraordinary evening, a substantial part of America was watching the same four young Englishmen sing.

And America needed cheering up.

Only eleven weeks earlier, President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. The country was still living beneath the shadow of an event that had shattered much of the optimism associated with the beginning of the decade.

It would be simplistic to suggest that four musicians somehow healed America’s grief. History is rarely quite so neat. But there was unquestionably something extraordinary about the timing.

Into a country still mourning the violent death of its young President came four irreverent, energetic, absurdly charismatic young men from Liverpool, carrying guitars, jokes, peculiar haircuts and songs bursting with romantic optimism.

Suddenly, there was noise.

There was laughter.

There were screaming girls.

There was youth.

And there was joy.

That juxtaposition gives Beatles ’64 much of its emotional power.

This is not, as so many music documentaries are, principally a retrospective exercise in explaining greatness after everybody already knows the ending. Tedeschi attempts instead to place us inside the moment before the legend had completely hardened into history.

At the centre of the film is the extraordinary footage shot by the pioneering American documentarians Albert and David Maysles during the Beatles’ first visit to the United States. Restored beautifully in 4K, it possesses an immediacy that makes six decades momentarily disappear.

We see John, Paul, George and Ringo not as bronze figures in the pantheon of popular music, but as four astonishingly young men caught inside something none of them could possibly have fully understood.

This is where the documentary is at its best.

The Beatles are funny, irreverent, mischievous and occasionally bewildered. Their camaraderie is palpable. There is still an innocence about them because neither they nor anybody around them can yet know what the Beatles will become.

They are already famous.

They do not yet know that they are immortal.

The distinction is fascinating.

The Maysles brothers’ cameras catch moments that a more conventional documentary might have polished away: conversations in hotel rooms, journeys in cars and trains, fragments of humour and the peculiar mixture of boredom and exhilaration that accompanies sudden celebrity.

Outside, meanwhile, America appears to be losing its mind.

Girls scream and cry. Police struggle with crowds. Journalists search for explanations. Parents wonder what on earth has happened to their daughters.

Watching it today, the hysteria is almost touching.

There was something wonderfully uncomplicated about Beatlemania in those early months. The audience had not yet become interested in the Beatles’ politics, marriages, spirituality, drug use, internal tensions or eventual dissolution. The darker and more complicated chapters were still to come.

For the moment, America simply adored them.

Tedeschi wisely allows the archival material to breathe. The restoration of the Maysles footage is superb, but it has not been sanitised into something artificially contemporary. We remain conscious that we are looking through a window into 1964.

The performances are another revelation.

The Beatles’ first American concert at the Washington Coliseum and their Ed Sullivan appearances have been sonically restored and remixed, allowing one to appreciate something easily forgotten beneath the mythology: they were an extraordinarily exciting live band.

The screaming was so intense that contemporary audiences could barely hear them.

We can.

And what emerges is the extraordinary confidence of four musicians still young enough to appear almost boyish, playing without the elaborate technology that surrounds today’s stadium performers.

There is nowhere to hide.

They simply play.

The film is enriched by new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the two surviving Beatles, alongside archival interviews and recollections from fans whose lives were transformed by those extraordinary weeks.

These testimonies are important because Beatles ’64 is ultimately as much about the audience as it is about the Beatles.

That is one of Tedeschi’s cleverest decisions.

We already know that the Beatles became famous. What is more interesting is trying to understand what they meant to the people who encountered them at precisely that moment.

For a generation of young Americans, they represented something new and tantalisingly foreign. They were British without being conventionally British, rebellious without yet appearing dangerous, sexually exciting without being threatening, and funny in a manner quite unlike the carefully manufactured American pop stars of the period.

Even their accents were part of the revolution.

There is also something rather poignant about watching all this from the distance of sixty years.

We know what the people on the screen do not.

We know that within a few years the immaculate suits will disappear, the hair will grow longer, the music will become astonishingly more complex and the cheerful unanimity of the Fab Four will eventually fracture.

We know about Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, the Maharishi, Yoko Ono, Apple, the rooftop concert and the final bitterness.

We know that John Lennon will never grow old.

They know none of it.

And because we do, their innocence acquires an almost unbearable sweetness.

Perhaps that is why the documentary feels so nostalgic without becoming sentimental.

It captures the Beatles at the precise point between ambition and destiny.

They had already conquered Britain. America was supposed to be the impossible prize. British performers had generally struggled to achieve comparable success across the Atlantic. Yet within days of arriving, the Beatles had not merely succeeded in America; they appeared to have overwhelmed it.

The cultural consequences were immense.

Their success opened American ears to a generation of British musicians and helped ignite what became known as the British Invasion. More importantly, the Beatles themselves would spend the remainder of the decade refusing to remain the band America had first fallen in love with.

That may be their most extraordinary achievement.

The four charming young men singing I Want to Hold Your Hand in February 1964 would, in barely three years, create Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Popular music was moving at breathtaking speed, and the Beatles were very often the ones doing the pushing.

There are lovely cultural details throughout the film. Smokey Robinson appears, reminding us of the enormous debt the Beatles owed to American rhythm and blues. Ronnie Spector appears in archive footage. Photographer Harry Benson contributes his memories. There are fans who were there and can still summon the excitement six decades later.

These voices prevent the documentary from becoming merely another exercise in celebrity archaeology.

And then there is the music.

It remains the irresistible argument at the centre of everything.

One can analyse the phenomenon endlessly: post-war prosperity, television, youth culture, fashion, changing sexual attitudes, Britain’s new cultural confidence and America’s psychological condition after Kennedy.

All of these things mattered.

But none of them would have produced Beatlemania without those songs.

I Want to Hold Your Hand. She Loves You. All My Loving. Please Please Me. Can’t Buy Me Love.

They remain astonishingly fresh.

That is perhaps the greatest pleasure of Beatles ’64. For an hour and forty-six minutes, it strips away some of the accumulated historical importance and allows us simply to enjoy them again.

Not the Beatles who changed recording technology.

Not the Beatles who became symbols of the counterculture.

Not the Beatles whose break-up has generated half a century of books and arguments.

Just John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Four young men in suits.

Four fringes.

Three guitars and a drum kit.

And an aeroplane door opening at Kennedy Airport.

There are moments in history whose importance is apparent only afterwards. This was not quite one of them. Something extraordinary was visibly happening almost from the instant they arrived.

The policemen knew it.

The journalists knew it.

Ed Sullivan certainly knew it.

And the thousands of teenage girls pressed against barriers, screaming themselves hoarse, knew it before almost anybody else.

Beatles ’64 succeeds because it does not try to explain away their excitement. Instead, it invites us to share it.

More than sixty years later, with two Beatles gone and an entire cultural age vanished with them, that invitation carries an unexpected emotional weight.

For those who remember 1964, the film offers the delicious shock of recognition.

For those who do not, it provides something perhaps even more valuable: a glimpse of what it must have felt like when the Beatles were not yet history, when every song was new, when everything still lay ahead of them and when four young men from Liverpool landed in a grieving America and, almost impossibly, made it smile again.

Nostalgia? Certainly.

But what glorious things to be nostalgic about.