I recently read the book The Beatles BBC Archives (1962-1970) by Kevin Howlett, which I should have read 10 years ago when I first got the book. What stopped me from reading it all these years? The weight of the book -- it is one of those heavy, hardback Beatles books. I flipped through it many times, but never actually read it cover to cover. That is until now. I discovered that it was a book I could borrow with my "Kindle Unlimited" subscription, so I read the ebook version. (More on that to come).
I have always loved the Beatles' 1994 Live at the BBC album. (And for those of you who are old-school Beatlelegers, the Great Dane set!) There are so many great songs on that album that you can't find anywhere else: Solider of Love, I'll Be on My Way, So How Come No One (Love Me), Don't Ever Change, etc etc etc. What really amazed me after reading this book is realizing that the Beatles were on a time crunch to get these songs recorded for the BBC and many of them were done in one take. All of the performing in Hamburg allowed the Beatles to go into the BBC studio and sing a song they had sung live without any problems.
This book chronicles every BBC appearance of the Beatles from 1962 to 1970 and includes transcripts of many excellent, rare interviews with them. The photos in the book aren't rare, but they are gorgeous!
Kevin Howlett is the Beatles BBC expert. He has previously written books on the subject, and you can hear him on the Beatles Sirrus XM channel talking about the BBC sessions. He had access to the BBC files and vault and gave a great history of how the Beatles shows on BBC (Pop Go the Beatles, From Us To You) happened and about the relationship between the Fabs and host Brian Matthews. It is a super fun book and a must-read if you are a fan of the early Beatles (which I hope you all are!)
As I mentioned, I read the ebook on Kindle, which was nice as I traveled on an airplane. However --- be warned that if you read the Kindle version of the book, you will NOT be able to read the letters and documents on your e-device. They look very blurry and distorted. The photographs look great, but everything else is not legible. Thankfully, I bought the hard copy of the book a long time ago, and once I got home, I took it out and read those documents in the book.
This book was published before Live at the BBC 2 was released, so it could use an update on what songs are available, but that doesn't stop the book from being a must-read. Have you read this book? What did you think?
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