Revisiting the restored nine-part documentary on Disney+, the music that changed everything, the damage fame did along the way, and the complicated business of looking back.
There is a scene in The Beatles Anthology that I could watch several times without getting bored. Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are gathered around a mixing desk with George Martin, listening to the separate parts of “Tomorrow Never Knows”. One minute they are legends with decades of history between them; the next they are musicians fascinated by something they made when the studio was still an enormous playground. You can almost forget how much has happened since.
I had just finished the restored nine-part Anthology on Disney+, and it was that kind of moment I kept returning to. Not another screaming airport arrival, another account of the Cavern, or another reminder that Sgt. Pepper changed the world. I know those stories, at least in outline. What interested me was watching these men discover that the past they had spent so long arguing about was also, in places, rather good fun.
The original documentary arrived in 1995, when Paul, George and Ringo were still around to tell the story together, and John’s recollections could be brought in through archival interviews. The expanded edition arrived on Disney+ in November 2025, with the first eight episodes restored and a new ninth instalment about the making of Anthology itself. It is an unusual second life for a documentary: the last chapter now shows the people who made the earlier chapters. Somewhere inside that loop is the point of the whole exercise.
Before they became a monument
The first episodes are useful because they return The Beatles to something resembling normal human dimensions. Liverpool, family homes, early bands, bad equipment and the long nights in Hamburg are less glamorous than the image that followed. Here are young men trying to become good enough to keep getting paid to play. They’re learning songs, pinching ideas, making each other laugh and finding out how much of the job consists of staying awake.
The Hamburg material matters. So do the photographs associated with Astrid Kirchherr and the friends who helped shape the band’s early image. Long before the carefully arranged record sleeves and immaculate publicity photographs, their identity was pieced together in clubs, boarding houses and dressing rooms. It reminds me that what we now call a recognisable visual brand often begins as a lot of guesses, some borrowed clothes and somebody saying that a haircut might work.
Anthology understands that a band isn’t simply four people who can play well. It is a set of habits, jokes and arguments that develop from spending an unreasonable amount of time together. Pete Best’s departure and Ringo’s arrival are treated as part of that formation, not a neat origin myth. In the telling, The Beatles become less inevitable and more interesting.
Beatlemania, and the loss of ordinary life
Then everything accelerates. Britain goes mad, America follows, and the four of them become news wherever they stand. The American television appearances and the films give the middle chapters their great rush of energy. For viewers who know the clips from a thousand compilation programmes, seeing them arranged within the band’s own recollections makes the absurdity clearer: they were young, they were astonishingly busy, and there was rarely a quiet moment in which to understand what had happened.
The screaming crowds are exciting until you realise how restrictive their lives had become. They couldn’t go out normally, could scarcely hear themselves on stage, and were expected to be endlessly witty in the middle of exhaustion. There is an odd contradiction at the heart of these episodes. The better the band got, and the bigger the audience became, the less the live shows could accommodate what The Beatles were actually turning into as musicians.
The documentary doesn’t have to insist that fame was terrible. It lets its own footage show the fun alongside the claustrophobia. You can see why they missed it, and why they eventually wanted to get away from it.
Manila: a story I can’t watch quite neutrally
As someone who grew up in the Philippines, the July 1966 Manila visit is harder to put at a comfortable historical distance. The Beatles played two concerts at Rizal Memorial Stadium on 4 July. What ought to have been a triumphant stop became an ugly dispute after they failed to attend a reception associated with First Lady Imelda Marcos at Malacañang Palace. Accounts differ about exactly how the invitation was communicated and declined, which is one reason I would rather not turn the episode into a simple story about a single missed appointment.
What is well documented is what followed. Hostile press coverage, difficulties at their hotel, a sudden tax demand and menacing scenes at Manila International Airport accompanied their departure on 5 July. Members of the travelling party were jostled or assaulted as they made their way out of the country. In Tony Barrow’s recollection, manager Brian Epstein and road manager Mal Evans were among those hurt. For The Beatles, the experience added to a growing sense that touring had become not merely tiring but unpredictable and, occasionally, frightening.
The incident took place under Ferdinand Marcos’s presidency, six years before he declared martial law in 1972. That distinction matters. The ugliness did not need the later formal machinery of martial law to exist. Nor does a Filipino viewer have to take responsibility for what happened. Still, I find it uncomfortable to watch a band who had come to play music leave Manila under those circumstances. The story belongs in the larger account of why they were ready to stop touring, not as a footnote that can be waved away.
When the studio became somewhere else to go
Once the touring stops, Anthology becomes a different sort of documentary. The crowds recede and the recording studio takes over. Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the records that followed are not just milestones lined up for inspection; they’re evidence of a group discovering that records could do things the stage no longer could.
This is where George Martin becomes indispensable to the story. The archive sessions and demonstrations explain some of the recording choices, but the best moments are more immediate than a technical lecture. Listening to a track broken into its separate components, I was reminded how odd some Beatles records still are. Those sounds became familiar because people have played them for sixty years, but the initial decisions weren’t always safe or obvious. Much of it was four restless minds, excellent studio collaborators and the willingness to try something before anyone could explain whether it would work.
The 2025 edition helps here. Apple Corps worked with Peter Jackson’s WingNut Films and Park Road Post teams on the restoration, while Giles Martin created new mixes for much of the featured music. It would be wrong to suggest that every piece of sixties material has magically become a pristine modern image, but the improved presentation makes it easier to attend to the conversations and performances rather than the age of the source.
There is a small pleasure in watching the images keep their historical character. Old television material doesn’t need to masquerade as something photographed yesterday. Grain, framing and the occasional awkward edit are part of the evidence.
The cracks were there while the music was still good
The later episodes move through the death of Brian Epstein, the search for something beyond pop-star life, the trip to India, the White Album and the increasingly difficult business of being in The Beatles. By the time we reach Let It Be and Abbey Road, the emotional atmosphere has changed. There are disagreements about leadership, business and the direction of the group, as well as the simple problem of four adults no longer wanting quite the same life.
What I appreciate is that nobody can make the breakup neat. Paul could be relentless about getting things done. George had reason to be frustrated with his position inside the songwriting hierarchy. John was moving towards a different personal and artistic life. Ringo, who could often see the absurdity of things, had his own moments of feeling excluded. They all remember matters differently, and their disagreements make the documentary more trustworthy than a carefully polished farewell would have been.
It is tempting to tell the whole story as a mystery with a single culprit. The records themselves resist that. The same musicians who were finding it difficult to remain a group could still make extraordinary music. The end wasn’t one explosive scene. It was a series of decisions, moods, resentments and moments when other possibilities began to look more appealing.
The ninth episode changes the meaning of the first eight
The new episode, directed by Oliver Murray, is the reason this reissue feels like more than a restoration. Its previously unseen footage takes us back to 1994 and 1995, when Paul, George and Ringo gathered to work on the original Anthology. We get more of them in the same room, not merely giving separate interviews about the same years. They talk over one another, remember tiny details, joke, play and occasionally look as if they have surprised themselves by enjoying the company.
There is an important distinction here. I wouldn’t claim that Anthology repaired every friendship or settled every grievance. George could remain prickly, Paul could still sound like Paul, and not every old disagreement dissolves because somebody has produced a camera. But the film shows how much more complicated a relationship is than the last argument it contained. Having enough distance to laugh about the old days isn’t the same as declaring that everything was fine. It may be the more believable version of making peace.
The scenes at Friar Park, George’s home, are especially affecting for that reason. Three men who helped invent a large part of modern popular music are amusing themselves with tunes from before there was an international audience to impress. This isn’t a recreation of the old band; nobody is pretending John can walk through the door. It is a shared language they still understand, even after years of using it apart.
The sequences with George Martin and the mixing desk work similarly. They are not relics admiring their own brilliance. They sound like people listening carefully, wondering how they pulled something off, and sometimes finding it funny. For a moment the weight of being The Beatles doesn’t appear to be sitting on anyone’s shoulders.
Three men, four voices
Of course, Anthology also brought something genuinely new into the catalogue. Yoko Ono supplied recordings of unfinished Lennon songs, and the three surviving Beatles worked with producer Jeff Lynne to complete “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”. The results don’t pretend that this is the same as four men recording together in 1965. They are new collaborations made across an absence, and that changes how I hear them.
“Free as a Bird” has always struck me as slightly strange and slightly moving, which is probably appropriate. It is not a lost 1960s masterpiece. It sounds like people working patiently around the voice of someone they miss, bringing the best of what they can still offer without disguising the gap. “Real Love” has a different lightness, but it carries the same impossible arrangement: three musicians playing with a friend who is no longer there.
The abandoned attempt to complete “Now and Then” adds another layer. The song was finally released in 2023, after new audio-separation techniques enabled a cleaner use of Lennon’s original demo and work from the earlier sessions could be completed. That later release makes the footage from the 1990s feel less like a closed chapter. The last Beatles recording was not the result of the four simply deciding to reunite; it came together through time, memory, technology and the work of people who were no longer all alive to hear its final form.
The newly restored 2025 music videos for “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” make useful companions to the documentary. Both were remastered to accompany the new Anthology releases, and I find them more revealing than a random selection of Beatles clips scattered through an article.
A photo album, not an apology letter
The best way I can describe the whole experience is as a family looking at an old photo album, with the significant difference that this family’s photographs are also part of the world’s cultural memory. Someone remembers a journey differently. Someone complains about a haircut. Somebody laughs at what they used to wear. Then a song starts, and suddenly the room goes quiet.
I don’t buy the idea that watching Anthology means watching everybody achieve perfect closure. There is no reason they should. Even the simplest friendship collects a few grievances after years of working together, and few friendships have to survive stadium concerts, business litigation and the strange burden of being discussed by strangers for decades. What the 1990s footage gives us is something more modest: a chance to see Paul, George and Ringo occupy the same space again, and to remember that for much of their lives they had been friends before they were a story.
George died in 2001, and George Martin in 2016. Their presence in the new ninth episode gives these unguarded sessions a particular weight. It isn’t necessary to dress every smile up as a farewell. Knowing what came later is enough.
After the final photograph
I finished the ninth episode thinking less about whether The Beatles were the greatest band ever, and more about how little time they actually spent being one. From the first records to the end, their enormous recording legacy was made in a remarkably compressed period. The music has had decades to grow around them, until it sometimes feels less like the work of four people than a permanent part of the landscape.
The Beatles Anthology makes it human again. It shows the mistakes, the tiredness, the vanity, the remarkable curiosity and the peculiar sense of humour that tends to get lost once a band becomes an institution. The restoration is welcome, the rediscovered footage is valuable, and the new episode gives the whole series a more intimate ending. But what stayed with me was the sight of three older men returning to a piece of music, listening closely and enjoying themselves.
Not every photograph in an old album brings back an uncomplicated memory. Sometimes you keep the album anyway.
Viewing note: The Beatles Anthology (restored nine-part edition, 2025) is streaming on Disney+. The original eight-part series was released in 1995.
Sources and further viewing: Official Apple Corps series information: https://www.thebeatles.com/beatles-anthology-series-2025 · Disney UK publicity materials: https://press.disney.co.uk/press-kit/the-beatles-anthology-media-kit · Background on the Manila incident: https://www.beatlesbible.com/1966/07/05/the-beatles-leave-the-philippines/
Leave a Reply