I saw the Beatles live! Oh, yes I did! It was in 1963 in Croydon. I heard no music as the screams were so loud and they only used two relatively underpowered Vox speakers.
Having said all that, it was still a lifetime experience. (I also saw Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Pop Festival in 1970, just a couple of months before he sadly died. Another lifetime experience.)
But back to the Beatles. I had everything they ever recorded and after they broke up in 1970, we thought that was it. Yes, they all released solo albums but that was the end of Beatles music until … Christmas 1995 when Free As A Bird was released to great excitement.
Free as a Bird is a song originally composed and recorded in 1977 as a home demo by John Lennon. In 1995 a studio version of the recording, incorporating contributions from Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, was released as a single by the Beatles, 25 years after their breakup.
Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra, who had worked with Harrison on Harrison’s album Cloud Nine and as part of the Traveling Wilburys, was asked to co-produce the record.
The music video for Free as a Bird was from the point of view of a bird in flight and it depicts between 80 to 100 allusions to the Beatles’ story, music and lyrics.
Here are some in the correct order of viewing (though there are many repeats:
Childhood photographs of the Beatles, the sound of a Free Bird, She’s Leaving Home, Rain, A Hard Day’s Night, Wait, Get Back, Strawberry Fields Forever, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Yer Blues, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Penny Lane, I Am The Walrus, Hello Goodbye, Help!, Do You Want To Know a Secret?, Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?, Birthday, When I’m Sixty-Four, Doctor Robert, Run For Your Life, A Day in the Life, Helter Skelter, For the Benefit of Mr Kite, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Piggies, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, Paperback Writer, Apple Corp, Savoy Truffles, Her Majesty, Revolution, Fixing a Hole, Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey, I’m Happy Just To Dance With You, Ballad of John and Yoko, Yellow Submarine, Magical Mystery Tour, The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill, a sitar, Brian Epstein, Stu Sutcliffe, Sergeant Pepper, Here Comes The Sun, Let It Be, Eleanor Rigby, Martha My Dear, The Long and Winding Road, The Fool on the Hill, Lovely Rita, Abbey Road, Baby, You’re A Rich Man, The Inner Light and A Hard Day’s Night.
Numerous clocks are shown, but the times on them are out of sequence and the same time is not shown twice (Any Time At All) and where do the Beatles themselves appear in the video? (Here, There, and Everywhere) 😊
See if you can spot them all. Come on, you can do it. 🙂
The video was filmed in as many authentic locations as possible including Penny Lane (made to look like it was in the 1950s), The Liver Building, the Cavern, the famous Strawberry Field gates and Liverpool Docks (as a reference to Lennon’s seaman father Alfred Lennon).
So. how many references did you spot? Who noticed that two Blue Meanies made an appearance? Hands up if you know what Beatles film they feature in?
Now, let’s talk about the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO). As mentioned above, the main composer and lead singer, Jeff Lyne, has always loved the Beatles. Indeed, it has often been said that ELO is a continuation of the Beatles.
In 2015, he wrote a song called When I Was a Boy. This childhood reverie about wanting to be a musician was the first song that Jeff Lynne wrote for his Alone in the Universe album. He said about it “When I was a boy, I had a dream all about the things I’d like to be. Soon as I was in my bed, music played inside my head.”
Is it me or do you think this song and its video are so much like like Free As A Bird which, of course, he produced? 🙂
