Remembering… The Beatles Anthology

Paul Sinclair recalls 1995 and his ‘Compressed Anthology’ promo video!

It’s hard to convey just how exciting The Beatles Anthology was back in 1995. The Beatles had split up in early 1970 and we’d endured a quarter of a century with no outtakes or unheard recordings being made officially available from the archive. Even in 1987-88, when the studio albums were reissued on CD there were no bonus tracks at all, just the albums. Perhaps surprising, when you consider how common extra tracks are in the modern era and how record labels were using bonus tracks (normally 12-inch remixes or B-sides) as a carrot for fans on early CDs.

That’s not to say Capitol and EMI didn’t do their best to exploit the catalogue with compilations such as Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (1976), Love Songs (1977), Rarities (1978/80), 20 Greatest Hits (1982) and oddities such as the Reel Music compilation and ‘The Beatles’ Movie Medley’ single, which feels as tacky now as it did back then (both 1982). The problem was, while occasionally a mono or stereo rarity might slip out, EMI did not have permission to use any unreleased recordings and it wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that lawsuits and other legal matters were resolved in a way that encouraged the band to open up the vaults for what became The Beatles Anthology.

In 1995 I was living in Bayswater in London and my friend and flatmate Aubrey (RIP) had just started working the “the media” and somehow managed to blag a preview VHS of episode 1 of Anthology about a week before the programme was broadcast. This added to our excitement, even if much the narrative was very familiar indeed, if you were any kind of Beatles fan and had read any of the books, with the predictable growing-up-in-Liverpool stories and much time devoted to Hamburg (whilst a spoof, ‘The Rutles’ did all this just as well 17 years earlier!).

I was much more excited about the release of the three planned volumes of albums than the actual documentary, if truth be told, but of course while Anthology 1 was issued at the same time as the TV programmes, we had to wait until March 1996 for Anthology 2 and the best part of a whole year for Anthology 3 (October 1996). So any bits of unheard audio used in the documentary from later periods (such as the ‘laughing’ take of Revolver’s ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’) was quite a big deal at the time of broadcast.

It’s also easy to forget just how rare some of the footage was. In a post Peter Jackson, The Beatles Get Back era, the rooftop footage from the Let It Be film is ever present, familiar, and easily accessible, but there was no way to view this in 1995 unless you owned a dodgy bootleg VHS of Let It Be that was invariably awful quality. The film had been commercially unavailable since Betamax versions floated around in the marketplace in the early 1980s. So at the beginning of episode one of The Beatles Anthology series, when we get a mini-history of the band set to ‘In My Life’, seeing even the briefest of sneak peeks from Let It Be was very exciting.

I videotaped all six episodes when they were shown in the UK on ITV. It was annoying that we had to endure adverts during the original broadcast in Britain, but The Beatles have always known their own commercial value and while the BBC always felt like the best fit, presumably it all came down to pounds, shillings and pence and the commercial network got the gig.

I was working in a post-production facility (called Sunrise Post Productions) in the West End of London in 1995 (in Sackville Street, coincidentally just around the corner from Savile Row) and this was a time when non-linear video tape editing was just starting to happen in the broadcast and film industry. Where I worked was equipped with what was at the time state-of-the-art Avid Media Composers and Avid Film Composers (the latter supported 24 frames per second). My job was to take care of bookings for the facility, but my lovely boss (Ray Nunney) gave me the keys to the place and let me come in at the weekend and use all the equipment! This was amazing because, as I say, it was long before non-linear editing had hit home computers and there would be simply no other way to do this.

So I carted in my VHS player from Bayswater on the No 23 Routemaster bus (I think it was an S-VHS model) and using all of my VHS tapes from the telly and some CDs and decided I’d teach myself how to using the machines and start to learn about video/film editing. The idea was to create a kind of mini-promo film of the series using the footage and the band’s music. Just for fun.

I can’t remember how long this took me. Probably quite a few weekends – it likely dragged into early 1996 –  but it felt fantastically creative and I still have the original Betacam tape and VHS onto which I outputted the finished edit almost 30 years ago. They’ve sat in a box in the loft all that time. It only ever got one ‘public’ airing, when my friend Aubrey sneakily played it in a VHS rental shop where he had a short-lived job for a few months in early 1996! Needless to say no one noticed.

However, I had completely forgotten that in 2011 I put what I had called ‘Compressed Anthology’ up on YouTube. Never promoted and never mentioned, but it has been there. With all the Anthology anniversary chatter it occurred to me very recently that I had vague memories of uploading it. I was sure it must have been blocked, but no, it is still there, although seemingly only visible in some territories.

Anyway, below is the video created by 25 year old me. Sorry if you can’t view this, due to YouTube restrictions, but I’m hoping most of you can. Here we are 30 years later (further away from Anthology than Anthology originally was from 1970) and it’s rewarding that I have a platform where I can share it amongst fans who might enjoy the video. Watch it below (stay to the very end).

Share your memories of The Beatles Anthology by leaving a comment below.