In late 2015, some anonymous maniac began uploading installments of an 18-part podcast titled The Beatles Anthology Revisited. It’s an impressively over-the-top achievement, even by the bonkers standards of Fab Four super-fandom. As the title indicates, Anthology Revisited is basically an extended audio-only remix of The Beatles Anthology, the multipart TV documentary that originally aired on Britain’s BBC and America’s ABC in November 1995. Anthology Revisited was released to coincide with that special’s 20th anniversary.
A year later, what remains remarkable about Anthology Revisited is how thoroughly it expands its source material—and how it could inspire fans of other sprawling musical topics to do the same. The extended DVD version of The Beatles Anthology plays for ten hours, and much of the material on the podcast is gleaned from it, with additions coming from the more interview-heavy rough cut of the same special completed in 1993. (Like all Beatles material, the rough cut has been widely bootlegged.) But Anthology Revisited only begins there; it lasts a full 28 hours, and unlike the series its remit extends well beyond the Beatles’ lifetime, with the last two episodes covering the post-breakup years: 1970 to 1976 in part 17, 1977 to 2015 in part 18.
But rather than merely glossing the already existing document, Anthology Revisited is a feast of secondary sourcing. It doesn’t contain a single line of overdubbed narration; everything on it, including news-hour headline summaries, comes from existing interviews, broadcasts, and recording sessions. There are tons of outtakes and studio chatter, from all Beatles in all eras—evidently, no potential source was spared. Amazingly, this unauthorized work made it onto a handful of podcast sites—namely, Podbean and Player.FM—before it got yanked from official channels as soon as word reached the Beatles’ offices. (Needless to say, the episodes can still be found and downloaded by the intrepid Googler.)
In fairness to the lawyers, and despite its maker's plea of fair use, many episodes contain entire songs and performances. Frankly, a lot of the time all that music is both unnecessary (you’ve likely heard it, if you’re delving into something this in-depth) and intrusive. The show’s real meat is hearing the band, their associates, and numerous commentators speaking at length about everything under the Beatle sun. And I mean everything.
Take episode 16, which opens with a 13-and-a-half-minute disquisition on the Paul-Is-Dead rumor that swept the more credulous corners of hippie nation in the fall of 1969. It begins starkly: hyperventilating radio DJs spell out the “clues” over the airwaves, suffused with the palpably fevered feel of a point in time when it seemed like American society was ready to crack. (Sound familiar?) We hear records played backward, such as John Lennon’s mumbled ending of “I’m So Tired” (which, it’s true, sort of sounds like he’s saying, “Paul’s dead, man, miss him, miss him”), interspersed with the band members’ incredulous responses (Lennon: “It’s ridiculous, you know—Paul isn’t dead, and if he was, we would have told you”). The segment finishes with the mournful cello coda of the White Album’s “Glass Onion”—you know, “The Walrus was Paul.” It’s a witty, audacious move, like an analogue to Steinski’s jittery Kennedy-assassination cut-up “The Motorcade Sped On.”
That kind of deep mining pays off throughout the series. The opening episode of Anthology Revisited, covering 1940 to 1960, features hefty and welcome pieces of the music and radio that shaped the young Beatles, from the cabaret swing beloved by McCartney to snippets of The Goon Show, the BBC Radio comedy that launched Peter Sellers’ career and spurred Lennon’s taste for the absurdist-surrealist, to (naturally) the ’50s rock‘n’roll that brought the band together. It takes a mere eight minutes of the DVD Anthology to get to the Cavern, the Liverpool club where manager Brian Epstein discovered the Beatles and launched their national, then global career. Instead the two-hour podcast gives the Beatles’ formative years the weight they deserve.
Just as deft is the 90-minute episode 14, which deals entirely with the January 1969 recording sessions for Get Back, the live-in-the-studio album the Beatles would abandon in favor of Abbey Road, before handing the unfinished tapes to Phil Spector, who made 1970’s Let It Be from them. The tension of those sessions—which were even more strained than those of the White Album—is brought to the fore via spiritless outtakes (a Paul-led run-through of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” a song the rest of the band despised) and later interview commentary (Lennon: “George had an argument with Paul, and in the papers it said that me and George had a fistfight”). It’s a things-fall-apart document far more fascinating than the Let It Be film itself.
So what, you might think: Haven’t we heard and seen and read this all before? It’s true, we have—but what’s most invigorating about Anthology Revisited isn’t merely that it’s so vividly and passionately rendered. It’s the way its very open-source format suggests any number of tantalizing possibilities—meaning that anything that follows in its footsteps would similarly have to sidestep copyright law. Think about it: No one has come out with a great music podcast that is strictly historical, let alone one that values the internet’s trove of source material over talking-head hosts.
Imagine similar extended, fan-made historical-megamix podcast series on Bob Dylan or James Brown or Led Zeppelin or David Bowie or Prince. Or go wider—just for starters, what about punk, early hip-hop, UK rave’s second Summer of Love, the ’90s alt-rock explosion, or Coachella? History, after all, is as endlessly remixable as music. Anthology Revisited hardly closes the door on the Beatles; let’s hope it opens another one for everything else.