I sometimes think that my teenage fascination with the Beatles is what drew me to becoming a professional historian. Piecing together what I could find out about them in the years before the internet was a sort of gateway to the history of Britain and the world in the decade in which I was born – Carnaby Street, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and counter-cultural figures like Timothy Leary.
The original Beatles Anthology released in 1995 in the form of three albums and a documentary series was undoubtedly a treat for Beatles fans. Recently an updated version of the Anthology arrived in the shops. The new release includes a fourth CD of unreleased tracks.
It is always thrilling to hear iconic tracks at an earlier stage of their gestation. And this is essentially what the recently released additional material offers. However, the true obsessives among us have heard much of the Anthology material from bootleg collections. What does remain as hard to come by as ever are some of the films.
