In Australia, my first recollection of hearing The Beatles was at the tender age of six. In primary school we danced incessantly to Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da and Yellow Submarine. It was a daily exercise ritual and I became increasingly disheartened and uninspired and nothing has really changed for me since about the Beatles. 36 years after the Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da drilling, I decided to watch the eight episode Anthology of the Beatles, to confirm if indeed I had missed something.
I enjoyed episodes 4 and 5 (the middle years) which had references to their influences including Dylan who two of them claimed was an idol. Easily the most thought-provoking episode is the final which deals with their inevitable divorce. I was completely bored in episodes 6 and 7 except for their Indian vacation about Transcendentalism.
The Anthology overall, like my primary school days had this incessant need to repeat songs, like She Loves You, as if repetition will sign and seal their enduring greatness. How many times do you have to hear Love Me Do or Help, or any of the other songs they repeated in their entirety in this series? I would have just preferred to hear the Beatles talk with song snippets in between, in similar vain to how Scorsese directed Dylan’s ‘No Direction Home’.
My favourite part of the whole Beatles Anthology is presented in the the transcript below from episode 5 which really sums up, how I have always felt about the Beatles and why I always enjoyed their solo works much more. Excuse the format, but I copied it from an English subtitle text:
Then they got interested
and got to really listen and like us
Then this screaming thing started
They used us as an excuse to go mad
The world did, then blamed it on us
We were just in the middle, in a car
or hotel room. We couldn’t do much
We couldn’t go out,
we couldn’t do anything
For us it was a drag –
we knew they wouldn’t hear anything
because it’s just like a riot,
not like a show
It felt dangerous because
everybody was out of hand
Even the cops were
just caught up in the mania
It was like they were this big movie
We felt trapped in the middle
while everybody else was going mad
We were actually the sanest people
in the whole thing
The realisation was kicking in
that nobody was listening
That was OK in the beginning
is that we were playing so bad
We were now a big band. When we
went ‘Whooahh’ and shook our heads
everyone went mad
I don’t really think it was that bad
I was playing just shit
all I could do was…
hold down the off-beat
I couldn’t come off that, really
because if you went to do anything
on the toms, it was just nothing
There was no noise
I just felt that we were
playing really bad
I’d joined the Beatles because
they were the best band in Liverpool
I wanted to play with good players
and that’s what it was all about
First and foremost,
we were musicians
George Martin
Record Producer
Their musical creativity
showed no signs of flagging
On the contrary, they were becoming
more and more productive
The work they were giving me
was much more interesting
They were finding new frontiers
all the time
Our whole attitude was changing
We’d grown up a little
I think grass was really influential
in a lot of our changes
Especially with the writers
Because they were writing different
stuff, we were playing differently
We were all expanding
in all areas of our life
opening up to a lot
of different attitudes
The direction was changing away
from the Thank You Girl poppy stuff
the early stuff –
From Me to You, She Loves You
All the early stuff was directly
relating to your fans
kind of saying,
please buy this record
Thank You Girl, PS I Love You,
it was all very that
There came a point where we’d done
enough of that and branched out
into songs that are a bit more surreal,
more entertaining
Other people were arriving on the scene
who were a little bit influential
I don’t really know whether
we’d been influenced
Dylan was starting to influence us
quite heavily at that point
When it got sort of contemporary
as it were, a contemporary influence
I think Rubber Soul was about
when it started happening
It was just around that period
when we were all getting into
different kinds of music
George’s became Indian
We were all listening to classical music
and various types of music
other than our own
and our rock’n’roll roots
and George moved into the Indian thing
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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
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