Backbeat
Sometimes “The Beatles” can overshadow The Beatles. Amid the recent ear-splitting hype that accompanied the reissue of their peerless back catalogue and their version of the popular Rock Band video game, it could be hard to see a living, breathing band beneath the slick marketing sheen and dancing pixels.
It is not a new paradox. John, Paul, George and Ringo knew it all too well. In 1966 they retreated from performing live, frustrated at teenage screams drowning out their music.
Timely, then, that Backbeat, the 1994 film about the young band’s amphetamine-laced early days in Hamburg, is to be revived for the stage and will receive its world premiere at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow in February. It is a story that both strips back the Beatles mythology and deepens it.
Backbeat is not about the band as world-conquering mop-tops, but a bunch of skinny kids from Liverpool playing rock’n’roll covers in sweaty German cellars. In fact, it’s not really about the Beatles: Stuart Sutcliffe, the “fifth Beatle”, original bass player and John Lennon’s best friend, takes centre stage.
Iain Softley wrote and directed the original film and will be at the helm for the stage play. He puts Backbeat’s longevity down to the tragic love triangle between Sutcliffe, Astrid Kirchherr, a German photographer, and Lennon.
“When I pitched the idea, I discovered that films about various stages of the Beatles’ lives regularly land on commissioners’ desks, but I think this was such a unique story,” says the 51-year-old.
Ultimately, Sutcliffe had to choose between staying with the Beatles or remaining in Hamburg with Kirchherr. He chose the latter, but died in 1962 of a brain haemorrhage.
“I felt the story of Backbeat hadn’t been told,” says Softley. “I was looking for a story about young people trying to break out and make their mark through music and art. I couldn’t believe, when I saw the pictures of Stuart and Astrid, that here was a story that communicated all these things.”
So, 16 years after the movie briefly made Stephen Dorff a pin-up for his portrayal of Sutcliffe – all James Dean quiff and brooding good looks – the story returns to remind the world of the Beatles’ human roots.
Softley is keen to distance himself from the current Beatles revival. Part of staging the premiere in Glasgow – as opposed to, say, Liverpool – was to move out from the shadow of Fab Four nostalgia. Glasgow is a city free from synonymous place names: no Penny Lanes or Strawberry Fields. Also, Scotland is the magnetic north for the story: Sutcliffe was born in Edinburgh.
The stage adaptation has been so long in the planning that Softley has seen several resurgences of interest in the Fab Four come and go. In the mean time he has directed mainstream Hollywood fare, such as K-PAX, starring Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges, and last year’s Inkheart, with Brendan Fraser. But Backbeat has been a constant hum.
“The play is something I’ve always intended to do, ever since I made the film,” says Softley. The idea first came to him during rehearsals on set in the Kaiserkeller club in Hamburg. After a day’s shooting, the actors who played the Beatles would take to the stage and belt out some of the songs that made up the soundtrack. Cast and crew would mingle, drinking and watching the band. By turning the cameras off, they accidentally stumbled across the club of the 1960s. “I realised that, in the film, you would just be watching an audience watching a performance,” says Softley. “But if we put this on stage, you would get a direct experience of the energy and excitement of the music. I was convinced of that, right from the first rehearsals of the film.”
After years of legal wrangling over who owned the script, Softley assembled the original cast for a read-through to see if his original instincts were correct. They were. He continued to tweak the script, found a producer (the west-end impresario Karl Sydow) and, in spring this year, began speaking to the Citizens’. He is now assembling his all-new cast, and rehearsals will soon begin.
One benefit of the current batch of reissues is the refocusing on the Beatles’ early albums. “Some reviews I read re-evaluated how great they sounded when they did covers of other people’s songs, which was the music we used in Backbeat,” says Softley. “And the energy, even from the early bad recordings from Hamburg – they were almost like a punk band. So I thought that would be accessible to people who have grown up with the Arctic Monkeys. There was a rawness and an energy that we will convey in the stage production.”