Beatles film-maker tells how Interpol rescued vital tapes
When Sir Peter Jackson’s threepart documentary about the Beatles is screened in the northern autumn, an important note of thanks should be included in the credits: the final version of the film would not have been the same if it had not been for Interpol.
Jackson has used 55 hours of never-released footage of the band shot in 1969 by the British director Michael Lindsay-Hogg for the 1970 movie Let It Be to make a new film that casts fresh light on the legendary sessions.
His task might have been rendered significantly more difficult thanks to the theft of dozens of hours of audio recordings by an employee who used to work at the Beatles’ Apple studio in Savile Row.
The tapes ended up in the possession of two Dutch music traders in Amsterdam.
The result, according to Jackson, is that all that was left was a mono version of the audio track that was used for the final version of Lindsay-Hogg’s film. It would have posed a significant challenge for someone trying to make a three-part documentary.
Fortunately, however, the tapes were recovered.
‘‘They eventually got Interpol involved,’’ Jackson told Vanity Fair magazine. ‘‘In the late ’90s or early 2000s, they did a sting operation in Amsterdam and recovered all of the tapes, apart from 40. There was about 560 quarter-inch tapes. There are still 40 missing, but we managed to find some of that sound through other sources.’’
The police operation followed the discovery of documents at the Slough home of a former Apple employee, Nigel Oliver, which led investigators to raid a warehouse in the Netherlands in 2003, where the tapes were found. Police also found a key to a suitcase containing the 1960 passport of George Harrison.
In 2006 Oliver, who was found unfit to stand trial at Southwark Crown Court, was sentenced to a two-year supervision order for handling stolen goods. Another man, Colin Dillon, was given a suspended sentence for trying to sell the tapes. The late Neil Aspinall, the band’s first road manager who was then head of the Apple estate, told the court: ‘‘These tapes have huge commercial value. There’s lots of very unknown stuff and music on there that they wouldn’t have recorded in a normal session.’’
That, however, was not the end of the story. In 2015 the two Dutch traders, Stan Snelleman and Jos Remmerswaal, began a court action demanding hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages over the ‘‘unlawful’’ seizing of the tapes. The pair had also sued for the return of the tapes in 2013 and lost, but were appealing. Snelleman told the de Volkskrant newspaper in the Netherlands that they bought the tapes in 1992 from Oliver, paying 80,000 guilders (NZ$50,000). The tapes had been kept at the studio: when it closed down Oliver, a former tape library assistant, asked if he could take them home. No one objected, he said.
Snelleman said: ‘‘If Apple [Films] already believed that the tapes were missing in the nineties, why didn’t they report the theft then? Apple just wanted the tapes back. The theft has nothing to do with it. We have become the victims of all this and we want the tapes back. They are still ours.’’
Snelleman and Remmerswaal said they bought the tapes from Oliver when he approached them after they were outbid by Apple for other tapes at a memorabilia auction at the London auctioneer Phillips.
A decade later, according to the Daily Beatle website, Oliver got in touch again and claimed to have a serious buyer to take the tapes off their hands. It was, in fact, a police sting. In January 2003, Snelleman and Remmerswaal were arrested and charged with money laundering and fencing stolen property. The case against them was formally dropped in 2007.
In 2016 Snelleman and Remmerswaal lost their case in the Hague. Judges rejected their claim for compensation and said they had not proved they were the legitimate owners.