“Let them have their way with the songs’: how we recreated the Beatles for Backbeat.”
Iain Softley, Director:
In the 1980s, while working at Granada, I stumbled upon a photograph of Astrid Kirchherr and Stuart Sutcliffe while going through the station’s Beatles archive. They looked confident and intriguing, sparking my curiosity. Although I knew about the Beatles’ rise as a live band in Hamburg’s clubs, I wasn’t familiar with the story of Stuart, the group’s original bass player, and Astrid, a talented German photographer. Stuart passed away just before the Beatles hit it big, having left the band to pursue his art and be with Astrid. I was eager to break into feature films and, after considering a few ideas, I decided that this was the story I wanted to tell.
I eventually found Stuart’s mother, Millie, in Sevenoaks, Kent, after searching through several “M Sutcliffes” in the phone book. She and Stuart’s sister, Pauline, shared some of his artwork and connected me with Astrid, who was running a wine bar in Hamburg. Over the years, many people had reached out to her looking for Beatles gossip, but I made it clear that wasn’t my interest.
When we met, Astrid invited Klaus Voormann—her boyfriend at the time who had originally taken her to see the Beatles. Klaus later joined the Plastic Ono Band and played bass on the Imagine album. I spent 10 days with them, recording interviews that formed the foundation of the screenplay.
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