Ready Steady Go! The Beatles Live

Great document of the early Beatles appearances on the cult British music programme “Ready Steady Go”, although the version I watched was a 48 minute extended version. This of course was before the band themselves helped usher in the promo – video age with their own song-films – from about “Help” onwards, in fact.

Here they lip-synch their way (John less successfully than the others!) through their early smashes and also some great B-sides (remember them?) too – like “I’ll Get You”, “She’s a Woman” and “You Can’t Do That”. The boys seem to enjoy themselves throughout, – check Ringo doing the frug with Cathy McGowan, answering the usually between-songs inane questions (some delivered by celebrity guest-hostess Dusty Springfield) with wit and panache, Lennon wasting no opportunity to shamelessly plug his first book “In His Own Write”.

The camera work is pretty all over the place – during George’s classic solo for “Can’t Buy Me Love”, we get a close-up of Ringo beating the skins, for some reason – but just sit back, take in the great songs and relive the initial success of the world’s greatest ever band, just like I did.