Originally published in Uncut Take 346 [Review Of The Year 2025 issue]…
In the mid-1990s, THE BEATLES returned with Anthology, a new kind of documentary about the group, in which they told their astonishing story in their own words. A curious name, but then this was a diverse portfolio of releases gathered under one roof.
A TV series. A groundbreaking series of archival albums. book. And, most surprisingly, a new Beatles record! As the series and music is accorded a 30th-anniversary release, Uncut steps inside Anthology 2025 to hear about how it all came together, what passive-aggressive ukulele sounds like, and what’s still in the archive.
“It makes Revolution 9′ sound like ‘Penny Lane’,” Giles Martin tells John Robinson.
THESE days, the Penthouse is an all-digital mix suite, pitched on the Abbey Road studio prospectus as an inviting, multi-purpose creative space. Carefully remodelled and optimised for high-end music production and small-scale recordings, the studio is also fully accredited for Dolby Atmos mixing projects. It has recently hosted sessions by Michael Kiwanuka, The Rolling Stones, Mark Ronson and Wings.
As we settle in to watch the new, remastered documentary series Anthology 2025, extended from its original eight parts to nine with a new episode directed by Oliver Murray, we are effortlessly transported to the same studio space, but in spring 1995. At the mixing desk (a vintage model recently brought out of storage for him to use), we find producer George Martin, who is playing selections from the archive material he has recently been working on.
At his left hand, in a variety of ponytails, waistcoats and sunglasses, sit three-quarters of the musicians who made this music. At this moment in time they are former Wings frontman and solo artist Paul McCartney (53), touring drummer and voice actor Ringo Starr (54) and sometime Traveling Wilbury George Harrison (52). The recordings being played to them, however, have the power to turn back the clock three decades: to a time when George Martin was their recording manager and they were all members of The Beatles.
To begin with, they seem a little unsure of how they feel about being here. George Martin kicks off their session by cueing up the heavenly choirs of “Golden Slumbers” from Abbey Road. It’s the last album they all worked on together, “in the old way” – although that’s clearly news to George Harrison, who listens and asks which album the song is on. He’s equally uncertain about the arrangement, especially the brass section. “A bit cheesy, isn’t it?” he murmurs.
Not keen on that one?
George Martin has a few more surprises up his sleeve.
Reaching over to the desk again, he now seems to have the intention not so much to play music as to let a genie out of the bottle. We hear his younger self say “Stand by!” as a solemn and submerged drone floods from the tape. Duly stood by, we listen as Martin slides another fader and cues in a vocal that hovers above this churning rhythm. Not for the last time in this project, the room is inescapably filled with the enormous presence of John Lennon. Paul is singing along. Ringo is air drumming. George seems impressed.
We have been listening to an early take of Tomorrow Never Knows”, Lennon’s visionary composition on one chord, a song with aspirations to open the universe. With the help of a rotating Leslie speaker, his vocal hopes to achieve enlightenment and sound like a Buddhist on a mountain top. With the help of Paul McCartney, it will become stranger still.
At home, McCartney tells the camera, he made tape loops which were then cued up on various machines around the building and fed live into the mix, a spectacularly fortunate meeting of sound and circumstance. “It could never be done again,” says George Martin.
He might have been talking about the band themselves, of course.
But 25 years after they ended their career, the Anthology series didn’t only get the members of The Beatles back together. It went some way further -and helped them let The Beatles go.
“my technique is to make it sound more natural” – giles martin
“COME and have a look at this,” says Giles Martin, as he flicks through some screens on his impressive audio-visual setup, and cues up the pinnacle of Beatlemania.
We lean in as Giles dives into his Anthology 2025 work and pulls up what is probably the most empirically joyful sequence in the entire Beatles story. We are perhaps a minute and 20 seconds into “I’m Down” at Shea Stadium.
It’s a hot night in front of a wild crowd and we’re staring at the perspiring, grinning face of John Lennon as he attacks his Vox Continental keyboard, often with his elbows. His military-cut jacket hangs open as The Beatles deliver delirious rock’n’roll to a crowd already beside themselves with delight.
Famously, The Beatles found touring musically limiting because they couldn’t hear themselves properly or play their more complex songs.
Never mind the screaming.
But what if there were no screaming? Giles clicks his mouse and the audience noise instantly ceases, while the music wildly continues. Orno keyboard? Click: it vanishes.
What, in fact, might the Shea Stadium concert sound like if it wasn’t The Beatles at all, but was just Ringo’s kick drum?
Giles clicks again.
Boof. Boof-boof. Boof.
Boof-boof.
Like that.
“Pretty good,” says Giles, leaning back in his chair, having stripped a moment of cultural history back to its heartbeat.
This, in a welcoming office/edit suite on the first floor of Abbey Road studios, is where technology has now brought us with the latest instalment in the Beatles story. We’re surrounded by familiar objects – guitars, a sofa, a high-end turntable cabinet with Beatles boxsets stored underneath it – but simultaneously in the middle of something very cutting edge indeed.
It’s a place where The Beatles want to be. Some people involved in the selling of The Beatles’ remixed and remastered music will tell you it’s done to put them on a level playing field with newer songs they might rub up against on a streaming playlist. Giles, however, disagrees.
“It’s not to make it sound like Taylor Swift,” he says, “that’s not the point. My technique, if I have one, is to make it more natural, more how it is on tape.”
After remixing Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (2017), the ‘White Album’ (2018) and Revolver (2022), most recently Giles has been working on remixing the remastered Anthology albums (which “sounded quite digital, despite being Geoff Emerick”) – and the music as it appears in the documentary itself. This is where Ringo’s kick drum comes in.
Essentially, the technology that enables Giles to isolate in high quality discrete elements of Beatle percussion from a full band performance through a tannoy system and the sound of 55,600 people screaming is the same MAL AI separation technology that enabled us to hear conversations more clearly in Peter Jackson’s Get Back series and experience a remix of Revolver. It’s Al, but not the “glues the Queen’s head onto a young rapper’s body” kind.
“It’s restorative AI,” Giles explains. “All I’m doing is digging through the soil looking for the bits I need to reveal. I’m not creating a John Lennon vocal.”
Assisting Giles on the dig is Emile de la Rey at Park Road Post Production, a composer and machine-learning expert who has helped music-related Al gradually sound more natural.
“This kind of technology has been in existence for quite a while,” Emile explains. “It’s just that we found good ways of training and extending it to yield results that were usable in a modern mix. You could hear a cellphone-like quality sometimes, the drums sounding watery – we were able to improve this.”
Back at Shea Stadium, it’s taken the music to a place that sounds natural, but which Giles acknowledges still has an air of unreality to it. “It’s better than they ever would have heard it,” he says, “even without the screaming.” At Park Road, Emile’s film-focused colleagues have been engaged in similarly detailed work on the images.
“The number of formats in Anthology is astonishing,” says Jon Newell, a creative supervisor who looks after restoration and colour. “That Super 8 footage is really quite unique. When you see those images of The Beatles playing around on the beach, or the intimate stuff of them on holiday, some of that material had been viewed extensively.
“So by the time we got it, it was pretty gnarly; you know, it was scratched, it was gouged. My goal was to make it look like it came out of the camera yesterday.”
“neil said yes and no to all the right things” – jonathan clyde
For Anthology 2025, Giles hasn’t only remixed and remastered the existing Anthology albums, and remixed the soundtrack of the show. He’s also put together a fourth volume to the original Anthology albums – an anthology to Anthology.
As he expands on his selection process – he wants something we can listen to, rather than tick off a kind of Beatles “to do” list – he calls up some particularly nice selections from his squadron of hard drives.
He plays an early take of “Every Little Thing” (de-mixed and separated by Emile and his team, then remixed by Giles, twice). As we hear, on this occasion only producer Norman Smith is present to hear this small but radiant 1964 composition.
Then, rescued from deep in the ‘White Album’ deluxe edition, Giles pulls up “Julia (Two Rehearsals)”, which documents the very first attempts John Lennon made to play this incredibly vulnerable song about his mother to George Martin. It’s a complicated song to pick and play, and Lennon wonders how to approach it.
“It’s very haaard, this,” he says in a thick Scouse accent.
By now, Martin knows when Lennon might be lightening the mood as a distraction from something more serious.
“Well it’s a very hard song, John,” he says, maintaining it.
It’s an intimate moment, and it seems to represent, in miniature, the guiding principle for the 1990s Anthology. It’s a story you thought you knew well, told in an entirely new way.
At a time when the minds of the former Beatles were all in very different places, it was as well there was someone around they deeply trusted, who was able to convince them that showing their more vulnerable sides might actually be a very good idea.
EVEN though we know The Beatles to have only had four members, history has been determined to find a fifth – if only to extend their storyline, or help carry their weight. Some alight on George Martin or Stuart Sutcliffe. The percussively minded favour unlucky Pete Best or even their locum drummer Jimmie Nicol, who subbed on an Australian tour when Ringo was in hospital with tonsillitis in 1964. Many opt for Brian Epstein, who discovered and moulded them – and they might have a point.
For Bob Smeaton, who was the writer and series director of the original Anthology show broadcast on ITV in 1995, however, there is no doubt who really holds that honour: Neil Aspinall. A contemporary of Harrison and McCartney at Liverpool Institute, Aspinall left school to become a trainee accountant but began his Beatle life when the band returned from Hamburg, driving the band to their bookings for a fee of a pound a gig.
Highlights from his extraordinary CV include: driving The Beatles to their ill-starred Decca audition; commiserating in the pub with Pete Best after he was sacked as Beatles drummer; assuming control of Apple and keeping it an entity in the 1970s and beyond.
Aspinall (1941-2008) never wrote a book, and never told his story. As Smeaton puts it: “He took those secrets to his grave.” He was packed in tight with The Beatles but never lost perspective.
He knew who The Beatles were, and had seen up close what they could do; and as such, he would never undervalue them.
“He knew when to say no,” says Jonathan Clyde, Apple’s head of production and a generational music business executive who began working with Aspinall at Apple in the late 1990s. “He was behind the scenes, and he liked being behind the scenes. He steered The Beatles through the decades and kept them separate from the other ‘catalogue artists’ at the time. He said no to lots of things, but yes – in consultation with them – to the right things.”
One of Aspinall’s key projects was a documentary, which he had begun to formulate as The Beatles broke up in 1970. Keen to preserve the integrity of The Beatles’ record, he developed Apple’s existing film archive beyond the band’s features and promos, eventually having a short, career-spanning film cut together. By the late 1970s, he envisioned it as a commercially available film, The Long And Winding Road, and knew what he didn’t want, should it go ahead. No David Frost-style big interviewer. No mid-Atlantic narration. A strong director, though. Perhaps Martin Scorsese.
For the time being, however, this was all hypothetical. The breakup of The Beatles had been more than simply the parting of ways of the world’s most important and creative group. It also required an epic and occasionally poisonous uncoupling of one business interest into four separate ones, a process that would take years to resolve.
Occasionally Paul McCartney or John Lennon would shoot the breeze with Melody Maker about the possibility of working together on a “loose basis” in the future, but if it was going to be as loose as the Lennon/McCartney “Toot and Snore” jam session with Stevie Wonder in LA in late March 1974, an observer might have wondered if it was going to be worth the wait.
At one point in the new, ninth Anthology episode, the three surviving Beatles are asked whether this kind of documentary interview project could have taken place in the 1970s.
There is some general head-shaking before George Harrison gives a decisive answer. “No,” he says. “We were at war.”
This personal entanglement was accompanied by a lengthy lawsuit between Apple and EMI over the ownership of Beatles material. It’s a measure of Aspinall’s laconic manner that he later described this as “getting back control of certain bits of Beatle business”. As Jonathan Clyde explains: “At the conclusion of that, The Beatles and Apple did get control of their catalogue the way they hadn’t been in control of it before – and that really paved the way for Anthology in the ’90s.”
It was in this more positive environment that Aspinall began to gradually introduce the topic of The Long And Winding Road. No narration, but something new: the story of The Beatles, in their own words. As the 198os became the 1990s, Aspinall also had a new inspiration and reference point to cite as an example: Ken Burns’ US TV series The Civil War. It was nine episodes long, and lasted 11 and a half hours.
As the project received a cautious assent, only one aspect of his original plan now troubled Neil Aspinall. The Beatles had risen from their working-class origins to be welcomed on their own terms by overseas nations, politicians, even royalty. He decided that if the video project went ahead, it would not be made by a venerated American director after all, but by a working-class team from the north of England.
Which is one of the reasons that in the run-up to Christmas 1991, the TV director Geoff Wonfor, veteran of Channel 4’s pop show The Tube (and recent director of Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio film), has summoned his good friend and protégé Bob Smeaton to meet him at Newcastle’s central station.
As befits the season, he carries with him good tidings of great joy. “He had no shoes or socks on,” Smeaton grins. “He said: I’ve got great news! We’re going to make a documentary about The Beatles!”
ALTHOUGH their film would track the evolution of The Beatles, Anthology‘s originators Geoff Wonfor, Bob Smeaton and Andy Matthews found that their own progress wasn’t anywhere near as swift.
On the creative front, everything was extremely positive; Smeaton remembers Aspinall and The Beatles to be dream clients.
Deadline? “There is no deadline. It’ll be finished when it’s done.” Budget? “The Beatles are financing it. It’ll cost what it costs.” How long do you want it to be? “As long as it needs to be.”
The assignment was to do justice to The Beatles’ legacy and, if at all possible, help to move it along. Such was the unique set of circumstances surrounding The Beatles, however, this offered unbelievably high pressure – and simultaneously no pressure at all. Says Smeaton: “It was a case of, ‘If it’s not great, it’ll never see the light of day.’ It would just sit on the shelf for decades.”
With John Lennon’s words sourced from 1970s interviews, the surviving Beatles each agreed to be interviewed about each year of their career.
Only when Wonfor and Smeaton had delivered a rough cut of 1963, though, did it become clear that the project (now “The Beatles Story”) was fully greenlit.
Behind the scenes, Aspinall had been fielding calls from the press and from American television, as his original idea for a set of retail video cassettes turned into a TV series. In the UK it would appear on ITV, the commercial network where the group had appeared to great jewellery-rattling effect in the 1960s.
With the television format confirmed and filming under way, at Abbey Road, George Martin began listening back to old Beatles sessions.
For Martin, a still ambitious and capable man in his late sixties, it wasn’t an uncomplicated experience.
“Growing up with my dad, The Beatles were almost like a dirty word,” Giles Martin remembers. “Like, ‘I’m working with America, Cheap Trick, Ultravox or whoever – don’t you realise who I really am?’ It was a bit like that. I think that was the beginning of his realising The Beatles were going to be his best thing – and that’s hard.”
Nor were the former Beatles themselves in an entirely Beatle-focused place. George Martin told the Anthology team that they seemed to find the experience of listening back to takes of their younger selves “traumatic”. While filming, Ringo was certainly a little taken aback to find that the sound recordist on the TV series was Howie Nicol, son of his sometime replacement, Jimmie. (“He said, ‘Great’,” Smeaton recalls).
As Giles remembers, Paul wasn’t playing quite as many Beatles songs in his sets as he is these days, while George Harrison privately made dark remarks about how the Anthology albums were “scraping the barrel”.
But Anthology wasn’t doing anything of the kind. The music, from the Fortlin Road bathroom demos and 78rpm acetates of “In Spite Of All The Danger” onwards, found new landmarks on a familiar map: how a young band determined to leave their mark became an ambitious, experimental group who wouldn’t easily be stopped.
The TV show and the records had the same characters. The same innovation. Even the same career arc – just displayed in a different way. It made complete sense, but presenting it like this was ultimately more a decision of the heart than the head. “Expressions like ‘groundbreaking’ are wheeled out,” says Clyde, “but The Beatles did things because they instinctively felt to them to be right – there was an organic process that led to certain things.
“In current thinking, the audio element for Anthology would be ‘the soundtrack of the series’. People assume the albums relate but they don’t. It was unusual – but it paved the way for great artists to open up their archives and start revealing behind the scenes how the music was taken from a song into the finished master.” Fittingly, for someone whose favourite Beatles album was Sgt Pepper, George Martin explains the process in a metaphor that sounds both Edwardian and psychedelic.
“It was like watching a scrapbook coming to life,” he told Anthology.
THE Anthology series doesn’t upset received opinion about Beatle hierarchy, but it does recast George Harrison as someone who became more intriguing with each passing year. Paul and Ringo are both dependably upbeat interviewees, but George seems to have no interest in keeping up appearances.
Behind the scenes, he would reschedule interviews if he wasn’t in the mood and seemed to have little patience for a run through “Blue Moon Of Kentucky”. One thing you won’t see in the show, sadly, is George turning up to a meeting in a purple McLaren supercar tricked out with aircraft doors and secret mantra – as if we still can’t hack the idea of Hari Georgeson as a petrolhead. As the surviving Beatles chat in his studio kitchen at Friar Park, meanwhile, he plays his ukulele throughout the amiable reminiscences. (“How passive-aggressive is that?” says Oliver Murray).
On screen, George is a reliable source of information and gently punctures longstanding myths (they didn’t smoke pot in the toilet at Buckingham Palace). He also wears very lightly one of the big reveals of the new series: that it was Harrison who came up with the jawdropping idea of how to bring the different strands of the project together.
In the new episode, Paul, George and Ringo discuss how “Free As A Bird” – the new Beatles single of 1995- came to be. Originally, it had been suggested that the three surviving Beatles supply “incidental music”, but this now seemed weak and without John, simply not The Beatles – and inadmissible. Weirdly, George had recently confronted the problem ofan absent friend in another band. While playing with the Traveling Wilburys, the question arose of how to work around the recent death of sometime Wilbury Roy Orbison. The Wilburys and producer Jeff Lynne had an idea: how about Elvis Presley?
Specifically, to use technology pioneered by Lynne to isolate Presley’s voice and have the band harmonise around him on a chorus.
George mentioned this to Yoko. And, as he remembers it, she replied, with memorable understatement:
“Oh, I think I’ve got a tape of John.” With some help from Yoko and Jeff Lynne, it then seemed the three of them could accomplish what no 1970s promoter could – and get The Beatles back together.
“It was a huge move,” says Ringo in the new episode. “It was a very heavy time for me.” The recording of the new Beatles music, “Free As A Bird” and the follow-up “Real Love”, isn’t extensively covered in the Anthology series, but the rapprochement of the three living Beatles for the series is all the more touching for its warm but awkward nature. Perhaps what was missing is the urgent sense of purpose and direction that characterised The Beatles in life. To capture that, however, all of the members of the group would have needed to be there. “Three of us are still around, ” Ringo says, as ever decisively nailing the sweet spot between gravitas and sentiment.
“But the band’s not here any more.”
It’s Harrison, however, who grasps where they are, all these years later. Unlike John, the surviving Beatles have all had the privilege of “time to breathe” and process what their extraordinary experiences as young men truly meant. He’s also best placed to reframe The Beatles as they are in 1995. He does so not only for the contemporary TV audience, and for the fans, but also seemingly for himself. Speaking 30 years ago, he seems to be looking years into the future, fully surrendered to forces that he cannot control, and he is at peace with them.
“It’ll go on and on,” he says. “It’s become its own thing. The Beatles exist without us.”