Director Tony Palmer brings rare Beatles footage to Harrogate

His pet hate, he says, is TV presenters who describe what viewers can see for themselves – but Tony Palmer is breaking the habit of a lifetime in Harrogate next week.
Film director Tony Palmer. Picture: Getty ImagesFilm director Tony Palmer. Picture: Getty Images
Film director Tony Palmer. Picture: Getty Images

The revered filmmaker, arguably the inventor of the music documentary, will emerge from behind the camera to take questions from an audience on some of his rare early interviews with The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein.

He made All You Need Is Love, his seminal ITV series on the history of 20th century music, with neither presenter nor narrator, instead letting his contributors – John Lennon and Bing Crosby among them – tell their own stories. Both sent him fan letters.

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The series was among more than 100 music projects he oversaw from the mid-1960s. The 1968 farewell concert of the rock band Cream – part of which will also be screened in Harrogate – was another.

The Beatles at a rehearsal for their global TV performance with an expected audience of 700 million. 'All You Need is Love'. Picture: Getty ImagesThe Beatles at a rehearsal for their global TV performance with an expected audience of 700 million. 'All You Need is Love'. Picture: Getty Images
The Beatles at a rehearsal for their global TV performance with an expected audience of 700 million. 'All You Need is Love'. Picture: Getty Images

“I filmed Brian Epstein in 1966 and even then, you just knew how important the Beatles were,” he said, “By the time I filmed them for All You Need Is Love in the 1970s there was no doubt.”

It had not always been thus. When Palmer wrote in a Sunday newspaper that the Beatles were the most important songwriters since Franz Schubert, people wrote to the editor to cancel their subscriptions.

“They thought it was outrageous that I had mentioned The Beatles and Schubert in the same sentence. Now, it’s a perfectly reasonable comparison,” he said.

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Palmer’s interview with Epstein’s mother, Queenie, after her son’s death, is the only one she ever gave, and is included in the footage he is taking to Harrogate.

“It was the first film about The Beatles which they allowed to be made by anyone other than themselves,” said Palmer, who is now 78 and the only person outside the band’s inner circle to have written the sleeve notes for one of their albums.

“As a result, Paul and John gave me all kinds of material, which they didn’t include even when they produced their ginormous anthology series,”

Lennon also gave him the series title – which he later discovered The Beatles had neglected to trademark. “Two other people had registered it instead – a brothel in Amsterdam, and a maker of lingerie in Hong Kong,” he said.

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The footage of Cream, shot at the Royal Albert Hall with early colour equipment – “on video tape no-one knew how to edit” – was not only a musical but a diplomatic triumph. “The last rock-and-roll act there had been Bill Haley and the Comets, and the fans tore up the seats,” Palmer said. “I had to put on a tie and talk them into letting another rock band inside.”

He is still working on new films but deplores the present fashion to explain everything to viewers.

“The audience is not stupid – they’re perfectly able to watch quite a complicated film about something,” he said.

Graham Chalmers, who arranged Palmer’s appearance as part of the week-long Harrogate Film Festival, said: “Tony isn’t the sort of person to blow his own trumpet very often – his track record speaks for itself. He’s long been a personal hero of mine and it’s amazing he’s heading to Harrogate just for this event.”

The festival begins on Saturday and Palmer’s screening is next Thursday at the Cold Bath Brewing Company on King’s Road.