“The Beatles: Eight Days A Week-The Touring Years”, directed by Ron Howard (“A Beautiful Mind”, “Apollo 13”), is a thoroughly delightful, crisply edited film that takes viewers to Europe, Australia, the Far East and the US where, between June 1962 and August 1966, the Fab Four played in 90 cities in 15 countries.
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The documentary screening, which features the band’s behind-the-scenes footage, interviews and unheard music as it rose to superstardom fifty years ago, saw a star-studded premiere at London’s Leicester Square.
Alluding to the fact that the band famously quit touring partly because they couldn’t cope with the crushing crowd noise they generated at their peak, McCartney added, “In the cinema, we’re actually going to hear ourselves for the first time”.
As John Lennon says in one of his funniest rejoinders, if the band knew why people were so insane about them “we’d form another group and become managers”.
Madonna and a couple of her friends sang “A Hard Day’s Night” in the auto home after attending yesterday’s Beatles premiere in London.
“So to see us performing as a band is a great thing, because without that, we couldn’t have made the records”.
Howard has helmed Oscar-winning movies (“A Beautiful Mind”, “Apollo 13”, “Cocoon”) as well as box-office hits (“The Da Vinci Code”, “Parenthood”, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”) in a almost 40-year directing career. “After two years of working with it, I’m a little sad to let it go”.
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Bob Geldof attends the world premiere of “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years” in London September 15, 2016.
