The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years(2016)
DocumentaryMusicRated NR, 106 min.
The Beatles stormed through Europe's music scene in 1963, and, in 1964, they conquered America. Their groundbreaking world tours changed global youth culture forever and, arguably, invented mass entertainment as we know it today. All the while, the group were composing and recording a series of extraordinarily successful singles and albums. However the relentless pressure of such unprecedented fame, that in 1966 became uncontrollable turmoil, led to the decision to stop touring. In the ensuing years The Beatles were then free to focus on a series of albums that changed the face of recorded music.
"The band you know. The story you don't."
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CinemaSerf
3/13/2024
7 / 10
It was often said that for people growing up in some of Britain's post-war industrial cities, the only way up/out was a career in music or boxing! Well these four men chose the former. What's astonishing with this documentary is just how much archive there still is, and at just how decent the quality of the audio is from concerts where the music was essentially just piped around increasingly large venues using the tannoy system. This film takes the band from their conquest of the USA in 1963 through their almost constant touring around the globe for the next four years. Peppered with some interviews from the the surviving members as well as a few super-fans that augment the footage nicely, we see quite a change from the haphazard nature of their image and their performance style - attributed to the vision of manager Brian Epstein, as well as following them through the trials and tribulations of dealing with a world facing some tough times and an USA still riddled with racial division that was about to start to come to an head. Veteran American reporter Larry Kane has some good context to add about his initial scepticism about following a band of Britons around his country before his realisation that they were the news - and big news at that. There are plenty of musical performances and some of the crowd footage is borderline fanatic as people are fainting, screaming and collapsing all over the place. The narrative also helps give us a little insight into why the band stopped playing live too. Diehard fans may have seen all of this before, but it's still an interesting and sometimes quite toxic story to watch unfold.
