The early notion of the Beatles as \u201cfour lads that shook the world\u201d has been subject to many shifts in emphasis over the decades. They have been valorised, vilified, mythologised, misunderstood and even ignored. The release this month of the new Beatles Anthology \u2013 an expansion of the original mid-1990s compilation with CD, vinyl reissues and the documentary series streaming on Disney+ \u2013 is testament not just to their enduring appeal but also to how the constant reframing of their story reveals as much about our changing tastes. The 2025 edition arrives as a full-scale revisitation of the original project, bringing with it a remastered, expanded documentary series and a substantial reissue campaign.<\/p>\n
What is more likely to reshape the way we see the band, though, is the addition of a brand-new ninth episode to the original TV series, built from recently excavated footage of Paul McCartney, George Harrison<\/a> and Ringo Starr working together in 1994\u201395. Far more intimate and informal than the original broadcast, this material captures the three surviving Beatles rehearsing, reflecting and simply spending time as old friends rather than cultural monuments, albeit still with the \u201ckid brother\u201d tensions between Harrison and McCartney. They work on Free As a Bird and Now and Then, jokingly speculate on a stadium reunion tour and generally talk about their history, loss and their unfinished musical ideas. It\u2019s a rare, humanising coda to the well-worn story. With new material like this, and with more than that axiomatic 50 years of distance since the Beatles dissolved in a blizzard of lawsuits and \u201cfunny paper\u201d, are we finally approaching a unified theory of everything fab?<\/p>\n Old friends rather than cultural monuments \u2026 Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in the 90s. Photograph: PR<\/p>\n Of the estimated 2,000-plus books about the Beatles \u2013 shelves groaning with both slavish hagiography and angry debunkings as well as whole volumes on their hair, their shoes and the Soviet mind-control programme they were allegedly involved in \u2013 Erin Torkelson Weber\u2019s 2016 book The Beatles and the Historians, academic historiography written by a tenured professor at Newman University in Kansas, may seem less sexy than, say, Turn Me On, Dead Man: the Complete Story of the Paul McCartney<\/a> Death Hoax; or Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles. Among Beatles maniacs however, her \u201cfour narratives\u201d theory has become much celebrated and discussed.<\/p>\n Pre-Fab \u2026 the Beatles in Hamburg in 1960. Photograph: PR<\/p>\n First came the \u201cFab Four\u201d narrative, prevailing during their lifetime. Breezy and celebratory, this foregrounded the positive, emphasising the joyous collective charm and energy of the early Beatles and glossing over drug use, sexual peccadilloes, Brian Epstein\u2019s homosexuality and even John Lennon\u2019s marriage to Cynthia. Hunter Davies\u2019 authorised biography of 1968 is key here. Davies has a seasoned Fleet Street denizen\u2019s enthusiasm for facts and detail \u2013 the \u00a332,000 Ringo paid for his house in Weybridge in Surrey, the \u00a317 a week Pete Best was earning in a bakery when Davies met him \u2013 rather than florid musings from the underground press.<\/p>\n The \u201cLennon Remembers\u201d narrative takes its name from a 21 January 1971 magazine interview and later book by Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner. With Lennon in a raw and corrosive frame of mind just three weeks after the dissolution of the Beatles, his bitter, self-pitying diatribe was either a planned purging of the suffocating Beatle myth or, as the comedian and Beatles fan Mitch Benn has tartly summarised it, John in full \u201cmessianic smackhead\u201d mode (though in the interview Lennon claims to be no longer \u201chooked\u201d). Here, he swipes at Harrison and McCartney and traduces loyal associates such as Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor and George Martin. When the latter plaintively asked him in 1980 \u201cWhat was all that shit about, John?\u201d Lennon sheepishly replied that he was \u201cout of me head\u201d.<\/p>\n Out of this grew what Torkelson Weber calls the \u201cShout!\u201d narrative, a viewpoint named for Philip Norman\u2019s 1981 biography wherein that author recasts the drama with Lennon as sainted rebel, McCartney a slick vaudevillian of industrious mediocrity and Harrison and Starr callously consigned to cameos as makeweights and tagalongs. It peddles the myth of genius versus craft, updated for the post-punk conscience and the sense of loss in the wake of Lennon\u2019s murder. McCartney referred to it, with some justification, as \u201cshite\u201d.<\/p>\n Sainted rebel \u2026 John Lennon at a press conference in New York in 1968. Photograph: John Lindsay\/AP<\/p>\n More recently, we arrive at the \u201cLewisohn\u201d narrative. Mark Lewisohn is generally regarded as the world\u2019s pre-eminent Beatles authority and his approach is forensic, impartial, archival and driven by love of the music. He is deep into the research and writing of All These Years, his huge and magisterial three-volume Beatle biography, the second instalment of which is now in production, 12 years on from the first. Our knowledge of Shakespeare\u2019s life is sketchy, opaque and hugely unsatisfactory. Lewisohn, often at his desk in Kent from 6am till the small hours, is determined that the same does not happen to our other great cultural export.<\/p>\n \u201cMy interest is solely in getting the story right while there are still first-hand witnesses to what happened, to get at the truth if I can and let the rest fall away,\u201d he tells me. \u201cI have no agenda of any kind. I\u2019m attempting to tell the story as neutrally as possible and to put down anything that I consider is relevant and interesting and propels the story forward. I\u2019m taking my job seriously, but the Beatles were very funny people, so I want to be entertaining and reflect that. But I\u2019m approaching it seriously in the sense of trying my very best to get it as right as possible while it\u2019s still possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Long and winding story \u2026 Photograph: PR<\/p>\n His commitment is absolute; he has spent more than a year trying to have corrected one single sentence in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography\u2019s entry on a Beatles associate, a Trinidadian calypso musician called Lord Woodbine, which inaccurately states the fledgling Beatles were once dubbed \u201cWoodbine\u2019s Boys\u201d. (I\u2019ve just checked and, sadly, it\u2019s still there.)<\/p>\n Times change. The \u201cBeatle fatigue\u201d of the early 70s calcified into something more openly hostile with the advent of punk: the group were viewed as bulwarks of irrelevant and toothless pop-lite and queasy nostalgia. \u201cNo Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones\u201d snarled the Clash in 1977, while Glen Matlock was said to have been sacked from Sex Pistols for daring to like the scouse moptops.<\/p>\n Then, in the wake of Lennon\u2019s murder, he became lionised at the expense of his peers, particularly McCartney, and (wrongly) seen as the group\u2019s experimentalist and creative engine. This, as Lewisohn says, has now begun to swing the other way. \u201cPost-assassination, we lived in a Lennon world and I guess that lasted about 15 years or so, during which Paul was diminished unfairly. I think that\u2019s been corrected. If you stopped eight people in the street now and asked them to name a Beatle, they would say Paul first, I think \u2013 the result of him still being him around and engaging in any number of projects which keep his name at the forefront.\u201d<\/p>\n Times change again. Happily in recent years, many more women such as Torkelson Weber have entered the realm of Beatles scholarship, scrutinising gender roles and masculinity in the music. Questlove, Nelson George and Yaw Owusu have written about the Beatles in relation to Black artists and Liverpool\u2019s colonial history. In his brilliant documentary The Beatles<\/a> and India, Ajoy Bose examined how the culture of the Indian subcontinent changed \u2013 and was changed by \u2013 the band.<\/p>\n New wave band \u2026 (l to r) Harris Dickinson (John Lennon), Paul Mescal (Paul McCartney), Barry Keoghan (Ringo Starr), and Joseph Quinn (George Harrison) at a photocall for Sam Mendes\u2019 forthcoming Beatles films. Photograph: John Russo\/REX\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n The Beatles magical history tour shows no signs of slowing. On the ceaseless tide of Beatle worship, scrutiny and scholarship, new waves break every day, and we can only speculate how they will shift the Beatles historiographical landscape. Philip Norman\u2019s forthcoming biography of Epstein promises to refocus attention on the band\u2019s earliest professional years, potentially reassessing his role not only as manager but as the architect of their public persona and their development into global cultural icons.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Sam Mendes\u2019 ambitious plan for four interconnected biopics, each told from the perspective of a single Beatle, suggests a further decentralisation of that traditional \u201cfab four\u201d narrative. Early casting and production details indicate that the films may also give greater weight to the band members\u2019 partners and familial relationships, foregrounding the women whose influence has often been marginalised in previous retellings. Maybe this will reshape how audiences understand individual motivations, creative dynamics, and the fluxes and pressures that eventually sundered the group.<\/p>\n