The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years reviewed
When the statistics threaten to overwhelm – crowd attendance, cities played, records broken – it is important to remember the little details. Paul McCartney, for instance, will tell you how he and his bandmates used to arrive at venues during The Beatles’ earliest days wearing their ordinary clothes, each carrying a small suitcase containing a shirt, a pair of trousers and, finally, “the Beatle boots”. They would look at one another, identically dressed, and see reflected back a unified force. It is as this tightly defined unit that The Beatles tore up stages from Manchester to Melbourne via Tokyo’s Budokan and San Francisco’s Candlestick Park – a trajectory that is charted in Ron Howard’s excellent documentary.
It is hard to find something genuinely ‘new’ to say about The Beatles. But Howard – a diligent, journeyman filmmaker – sharpens the focus of his story, relying on assiduously researched footage of the Fabs – in concert, on planes, during interviews – to illustrate the ways in which the band adapted to their rigorous touring schedules and the changing world around them.
The LOLZ come thick and fast early doors – asked why they excite fans so much, John Lennon replies, “I don’t know, if we did we’d form another group and become managers.” Later, battle fatigue begins to set in. Among the talking heads, American broadcast journalist Larry Kane is superb as he details his experiences embedded with The Beatles during their August/September 1964 tour of America and Canada. In Vancouver, 7,000 people rushed the stage, “240 kids wound up in hospital,” Kane recalls. “No one was prepared for this.” The lead up to a show at Gator Bowl Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida threatens to turn ugly when the band make clear during interviews that they won’t play to a segregated audience.
By: Michael Bonner
Source: Uncut
