SWEET APPLE TRACKS

Considering that this film could never have been made, Chrome Dreams have done a bloody good job.

Why do I say ‘could never have been made’? Well the two most interesting Beatles are long dead, and I’m certain they didn’t have the budget for either Ringo or McCartney even if they would have consented to appear (which I doubt), word on the internet, that Mary Hopkin refused to appear, the two most important figures of Badfinger are dead, as is Derek Taylor whom Tony Bramwell slightly waspishly describes in the film as having been always drunk in the notorious Apple press office on the second floor. Neil Aspinall, for so many years the custodian of the Apple archives, and the keeper of the flame, is also no longer with us. As far as this documentary in concerned, this is a particular pity, because it was Aspinall that held together the rambling five-DVD Beatles anthology project nearly 20 years ago.

As the events described happened between 39 and 45 years ago and an awful lot of the people who are still alive were out of their gourd for much of the time, it is a miracle that the film got made in the first place. One suspects that Apple are going to be much more cagey, and frugal in allowing documentary makers access to their archives than was the Frank Zappa estate, which means that there is less archive footage in this DVD than in the one we reviewed last week about the recording company project Straight and Bizarre.

That being said, the film makers did a bloody good job putting together montages that looked as if they ought to have been promotional clips of the time. For example, I strongly suspect that the video for Mary Hopkin’s Lord of the Reedy River was cobbled together by a film director rather than being a bona fide artefact of the time. But this really doesn’t matter.

I have been a Beatles historian for many years. I am even responsible for a not very well written book on the subject of Beatles bootlegs which some people have been kind enough to say was a valuable addition to the burgeoning library of books on the subject. I own a large number of Beatles books and DVDs, and was very pleasantly surprised to find that there was information on this DVD that I had never heard, and footage that I had never seen.

While watching the DVD I was disappointed to see that the Brute Force single ‘King of Fuh’ was hardly mentioned. However, I then found it as a 10-minute interview under the ‘extras’. The man behind Brute Force is quite obviously as mad as a bagful of cheese, and whilst it is exceptionally welcome to hear his description of what happened, and how his notorious single ended up being released (albeit only in a limited edition of 3,000) on Apple, it is quite obvious why he was relegated to being an extra. The full 9-minute interview would have been impossible to slot into the narrative of the film in general, and – as a film director myself – I have absolutely no idea how I could have edited the interview to have included an appropriate sound bite.

Other artists of whom I am actually rather fond, but who were included only briefly, were The Radha Krishna Temple, White Trash, and Lon and Derek van Eaton. I can think of several reasons of why they probably weren’t included to any great extent.

1. They were so damn obscure that there is no footage available
2. The Beatles are unarguably the most famous pop group of all time. SO many people even slightly related to them charge obscene amounts of money for interviews
3. There just wasn’t time

I suspect it was probably the latter.

The documentary is over two and a half hours long not counting extras and there is no fat on it at all. There is nothing that could have been trimmed. The story of one of the most altruistic, and eventually one of the most abject failures, in late 60s/early 70s music is economically, stylishly, and informatively told. I just wish that it had been twice as long.

Well done to everyone involved.