Back to where they once belonged: How Britpop helped make The Beatles cool again
The Beatles Anthology is currently on Disney+.
As the 1990s dawned, The Beatles were on a magical mystery tour to relative obscurity. Though indisputably still one of the biggest bands in the history of rock’n’ roll, it had been some time since they could be regarded as fashionable. If anything, they were within touching distance of naff.
The charge sheet against the former Fabs was considerable. In 1984, Paul McCartney took a truncheon to their reputation with the schmaltzy aka the tune where the rhythm section imitates burping frogs.
His surviving bandmates weren’t doing much better. Ringo Starr had chugged off into glorified semi-retirement as the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Even George Harrison – without question the coolest Beatle, following the 1980 death of John Lennon – seemed washed up. Through the 1980s, his output had been cheesier than a farmer’s market in West Cork. His 1988 hit, was, for instance, largely memorable for the video featuring various stuffed animals mugging for the camera. Collectively, their stock had never been lower.
But by the middle of the 1990s, the situation had changed entirely. One factor was Britpop and bands such as Oasis and Suede lavishly praising the songs of Lennon and McCartney in the press. The other was the release 30 years ago this month of Anthology – a six-part documentary and accompanying studio outtakes collection that allowed Macca, George and Ringo to present their version of the group’s rise and fall while sharing new music based on previously lost John Lennon demos – starting with the December 1995 single,
was a landmark – a project that reasserted The Beatles’ claim to be the defining band of the rock’n’roll era. Now, three decades later, it is back – in the form of a fresh assembly of rarities and an expanded documentary that includes a new episode, filmed in 1995, in which the surviving Beatles talk about the importance of honouring their legacy and telling their story from their perspective.
There’s not much new here – how could there be, given the industrial scale at which Beatles content is released every year (and that’s before the upcoming Sam Mendes quartet of Beatles biopics, featuring Paul Mescal as John and Barry Keoghan as Ringo). Still, the anticipation among fans for the new stands as a testament to the impact of the original – and the degree to which it put a shine back on the faded Beatles brand.
“There's no doubt that arrived at a very Beatles-friendly time at the end of 1995,” says Jason Carty, of the Irish-based Beatles podcast (and co-presenter of BBC podcast about their Irish roots). “It was fortuitous that the heady days of Britpop – 1994 [Blur] and [Oasis]; 1995’s [Blur] and [Oasis’s] – directly and indirectly echoed The Beatles and the 1960s. London was cool, bands were everywhere and it became okay to have hit singles.”
Beatles agnosticism had not just dropped out of the clear blue sky in the early 1990s. While today they are universally revered (more or less), that was not always the case. One prominent naysayer was Lou Reed, who in the 1970s had labelled John, Paul, Ringo and George “garbage”.
Those sentiments were echoed in 1994 by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. “I hate to think in a retro mindset. You know, ‘The Beatles were the best thing…’. F**k The Beatles, I hated people who were always going on about the f**kin’ Beatles,” he said. “They’re ugly now. Get them out of my sight.”
He wasn’t the only Gen Xer to feel that way. “The Beatles were elevator music in my lifetime,” REM’s Michael Stipe had said in 1992. had more impact on me.”
But, as Jason Carty notes, Britpop changed that – with some of the most fashionable acts of the time stating the obvious – as we might think today – by praising The Beatles to the skies. “The Beatles have to be the best band of all time. There’s no one to touch them,” Suede drummer Simon Gilbert told the London Independent in 1995.
“Revolver is the only album I’ve listened to at least once a week ever since I first heard it. Tomorrow Never Knows is my favourite song from it. It’s just way ahead of its time.”
Then, in the summer of 1995, came Blur v Oasis – a ding-dong chart battle where all involved sought self-consciously to recreate the rivalry between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
“Blur vs Oasis was The Beatles vs The Stones, etc,” recalls Jason Carty. “In September 1995, McCartney turned up at Abbey Road to record with Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher as The Smokin' Mojo Filters for the Help charity album - the most high-profile moment of an actual Beatle doing Britpop. When dropped in November, was number two - a song named after a 1968 George Harrison soundtrack.”
The remastered and expanded nine-part series on Disney is a trove for Beatles diehards. In that new instalment with which the story concludes, we see Paul, Ringo, and George tentatively reconvening at the HQ of their Apple Corps record label, having been encouraged to do so by their old-school friend and head of Apple, Neil Aspinall.
It had been Aspinall who, in the early 1970s, had first started work on what would become Anthology. Under the working title The Long and Winding Road, the idea was to combine archive footage with new interviews and tell the definitive story of The Beatles.
However, at that point, all four members had been worn down by the endless pressures of being the biggest band in the world. And then in 1980, John Lennon was shot – a tragedy that understandably took his bandmates years to process. Still, by 1995, they were prepared to set down their version of events. But if ready to reconvene, they still had to reckon with the absence of Lennon – that empty seat at the table.
“In some way, I feel sorry for John. The Beatles went through a lot of bad times and also some turbulent times, as everyone knows,” says George Harrison in the new episode.
“Everybody was a bit fed up with each other. Ringo, Paul, and I have had the opportunity for all that to go down the river and to get together again in a new light. I think John would have really enjoyed this opportunity to be with us again. We’d all had enough time to breathe – it’s much easier to look at it now from a distance.”
In the same interview, Harrison explains that Aspinall had wanted to make earlier - but that The Beatles felt time needed to pass so they had some perspective on their extraordinary journey from the clubs of Liverpool to the top of the global charts.
“Neil had brought together all the footage we owned of ourselves. He put it in a chronological order. That was tentatively titled, That was back in 1971 when we’d had enough of all that,” says Harrison.
“It’s been nice for us and the public to forget about The Beatles for a while. Let the dust settle, and now come back to it with a fresh point of view.”
Still, if was significant at the time, it was also a fleeting pleasure for Beatles fans. Since its initial broadcast, it hasn’t been easy to access. But that has changed as it returns to Disney, where it will function as a reminder of the glory days of The Beatles and also a time capsule from a period when their status as rock icons was not as assured as it is today.
“There is no doubt that, like the [Peter Jackson’s] documentary in 2021, was the introduction to The Beatles for people of a certain age,” says Jason Carty.
“I was already in too deep by that point. What was unforeseen in 1995 was that the timing was particularly beneficial because five years later, physical music sales would collapse. All the footage that appeared in having been locked up and unavailable for 25 plus years, is now just a click away.”
- is now on Disney+
