THE BEATLES
EXCLUSVE! NEW INTERVIEWS
ehind a set of beige double doors in a corner of the Las Vegas Mirage hotel, lie the Villas, a maze of deep-carpeted corridors leading to private rooms bedecked with fake old Masters and ersatz Louis XVi opulence. it’s a suitably surreal setting for MoJo’s audience with the two surviving beatles and director Ron howard, who has transformed the group’s life on the road from 1963 to 1966 into a dramatic hollywood documentar y, the beatles: eight days a Week – the touring Years. it’s a tale of grand voyage, deep crisis and triumphant return that bears a narrative similarity to howard’s 1995 double oscar winner, apollo 13. Ringo starr and Paul McCartney are rarely interviewed together these days so this is an unmissable opportunity to enjoy their stillbrotherly bond and occasional spikiness, their muttered code of old jokes linking back to the puckish armour the beatles wore for early clashes with the press, all those years ago. the trio take their places on a white leather couch opposite MoJo, howard in a dark baseball cap, jacket and shirt, starr and McCartney in dark blousons, slim dark jeans, trainers – asos to howard’s River island. assuming the humble swagger of a scouse job applicant, McCartney slips into an exaggerated version of his normally soft Liverpool accent. “Well what i think i could bring to this job…” he chirps… “is erm, loyalty, erm, i’m trying to think of my other skills…” in the centre, Ringo is engaged throughout, holding eye contact, while McCartney, perching on the couch’s arm, alternates between animated and distant, the first to indicate that, perhaps, he may have answered
MOJO: Ron, I’ve watched the rough-cut of Eight Days A Week and… (to Paul and Ringo) have you seen a version yet? RINGO (to Paul): Don’t tell him. PAUL: That’s classified.
MOJO: Well, it starts off with footage from the Manchester ABC, 1963. It’s an incredibly powerful sequence. I wanted to ask Ron, why that particular clip? RON: There’s something about that performance, the colour, it’s explosive, yet it’s not a huge venue so you immediately say, Oh, I get it! They’re fucking great. It’s not just the records, not some videos I’ve seen, it’s live and totally alive.
MOJO: It disproves the myth that, after the Cavern, The Beatles weren’t a great live band. PAUL: (whispers) Not true.
MOJO: The drumming is astonishing. Especially as Ringo appears to be playing what looks to modern eyes like a child’s drum-kit. RINGO: Yeah, yeah. What I love about it, is that it shows people that we were a band. That band ethic was always huge. It gets lost when people talk about, you know, your Shea Stadiums, and Candlestick Parks, but where we come from is clubs, and that never goes away. PAUL: That was the great thing. Whatever happened, you knew you could always go (launches into Long Tall Sally) “Gonna tell Aunt Mary ’bout Uncle John!” and nobody in the band would be like “Woah! What is he doing!?” They’d all be like, “Whoo baby!” Everybody always knew what everybody
else was doing. (To himself, almost) It was a great little band!
MOJO: The touring years almost broke The Beatles but, as you and John both say in the film, at first it was initially just four young men setting out to “have a laugh”. What were the main positives about touring America in ’64? PAUL: The thing is, every bit of music we loved came from America, whether it was blues, country & western, rock’n’roll, all of that, to us, it was from Valhalla. And so you go there, and you can see it, in all the early footage, just us, listening to ourselves on the radio – “Eh, eh, listen to this!” – we’re just thrilled by it all.
MOJO: The Larry Kane interviews in the film are fascinating, especially the point when he describes Beatlemania as “chilling”. That shift in the film is very important, isn’t it? RON: My pitch for The Touring Years was that this is an ensemble adventure survival story. I was really interested in the dynamics of The Beatles as a team, as a brotherhood. So, that Larry Kane stuff was really valuable because it demonstrated the level of intensity of Beatlemania, the growing intensity that’s coming out of the playfulness and the fun. MOJO: A real tension enters the group by 1965, where touring is how you make your money, but you’ve got voices in the band saying, “Hang on a minute, is this going to be what we do every year?” How conflicted were the group by 1965? PAUL: We got a bit conflicted, we got a bit fed up towards the end of it. RINGO: We mainly got fed up because, personally, I couldn’t hear anything. We used a house PA, with those huge amps (laughs) and I had to watch the back of the boys because I couldn’t hear nothing so if they went (wiggles shoulders) I’d know “Oh, we’re there ! That’s where we are now.” Also, and this is really my opinion, we really weren’t playing great. We were just filling in and… PAUL: (muttering) Going through the motions. RINGO: I could only hit the snare, to keep those three in time, because if I went to the toms no one heard them, above the screaming. So, it’s a lot of things. People always try and make like “Oh, well, it was the friction, or…” It was a lot of stuff involved. PAUL: At first, the screaming was exciting. It’s like doing autographs, having your photo taken, doing all that. Being in the media. “This is so exciting,” you know. Then, after a while, it got more and more boring. And the screaming, as Ringo said, got so as you were inaudible. And so you really were going through the motions and that’s why it was good to go “Whoooooh!” because something was going on, because otherwise it was just little matchstick men doing this stuff that you couldn’t hear.
MOJO: The recently unearthed footage from the Candlestick Park gig in 1966 is quite scary. It’s like you’ve crossed over into something else. It bears out what John said: The Beatles were no longer just the four of you. It’s this thing you can’t control. PAUL: Yeah.
MOJO: That clip of the four of you being ferried off in a Brinks armoured car, these scared or tired four faces in the back. RINGO: Tired. PAUL: But that was the moment, you know. Until then, it had been at least a group van in the early days, so you were together and at least it was a van. Then it got to be limos,which was quite cool. RINGO: Limo. PAUL: What? RINGO: Limo. It was only ever the one car. PAUL: But then that one gig, which was… by then we were totally fed up and getting actually put in the back of a stainless steel box. Now this is like some weird sci-fi thing from 2001 or something. It was a very weird place. What it reminded me of was… you know these rough rides that police do where they put you in the back of a van but you’re not strapped down? And they were accused of killing that guy. Well, that’s what it was like. We’re suddenly sliding around in the back of the van and it was like, Oh, fuck this! And finally. The guys, John and George, had been a little “Oh, murmurmurmur” about touring and, finally, all of us, were like “Fuck this!” So that was the moment. RON: As an observer, if there was one thing I took away from it, and it’s really hard to say in front of these guys, but there’s something inspiring about their creative integrity. Of course they left a lot of money on the table [when they gave up touring]. Of course they did. But when you talk to them now, it doesn’t seem to be the issue. The issue was, what are we doing with our music?
MOJO: Well, would Sgt. Pepper have been such a liberating, freeing experience if you hadn’t had that preceding misery? PAUL: No. No. I remember a definite conversation we had which all came, for me, from Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley had stopped touring and we heard, we read somewhere, that he sent his gold Cadillac out on tour instead. RINGO: We loved that idea. PAUL: So we was like, “Woah! Wait a minute! If it’s good enough for Elvis, we could do that.” So with us it was like, “We’ll make a record, and we’ll send that out on tour for us.” RINGO: Just like we’d done with the videos.
MOJO: So that idea that ‘The Beatles’ appears as a wreath on the Sgt. Pepper cover was your way of saying, “The Beatles are dead now”… RINGO: No. The Beatles were never gone. And they could have come back. PAUL: It’s more like, if you look at The Beatles songs, there’s never the same thing twice. That was the creative ethic. You’re getting Yesterday and Strawberry Fields, all completely different. So this is the idea. We were always trying to create something new. When we finished touring, we knew we’d have a lot of time in the studio, so I had this idea for a fictitious band and that gave us the platform to experiment and the idea was that if you stepped up to the mike, you weren’t Paul any more. Or you weren’t John or you weren’t George and you could actually tell yourself that and it would help. RINGO: I was the only one that got another name. Billy Shears.
MOJO: Ron ends on a clip from the Savile Row rooftop gig in 1969. What was it like hearing yourself live, in the open again, after three years of only hearing yourself in the studio? PAUL: Very cool. RINGO: We were live again. This was my point before. It wasn’t like we’d placed a wreath on the live Beatles. The rooftop gig showed that we could still do that stuff. And we could maybe have gone out live again. It didn’t happen. But it was never like, “The Beatles are dead.” It was always a possibility we would do it again. (To Paul) And you, in fact, tried one time to get us to go out again, didn’t you? PAUL: But you didn’t listen to me! RINGO: I listened. It was the others! PAUL: So we were basically OK.