What is the story of The Beatles really about?

The Beatles’ story has been told, retold, remixed and reimagined for every generation that came after them. Decades since their breakup, they remain a living presence in our cultural imagination, not just as nostalgia, but as something enduring and evolving. 

When the original eight-part Beatles Anthology began to be restored and remastered last year, I had the great privilege of being asked to add to this seminal work by directing a brand-new episode nine. The Beatles Anthology has become not only a record of The Beatles’ history but a cultural artefact in its own right, a snapshot of how they once chose to remember themselves 20-plus years after their breakup.

This new episode offered a chance for the Beatles story not just to be revisited, but reexamined for what it tells us about memory, legacy, loss, and the enduring human desire to connect through their music. 

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

The greatest freedom in creating episode nine was to step outside the familiar chronology, from Liverpool to Abbey Road to the rooftop, and instead turn inward. How do The Beatles themselves perceive the vast weight of their own legacy? How does subjective recollection, both personal and collective, soften or distort what truly happened? These are not questions about the past, but about what it means to live within one’s own extraordinary myth. 

At its heart, The Beatles’ story is one of transformation, not just theirs but also of the world. They began as a gang of childhood friends chasing a dream out of post-war Britain. By the time they parted, they had changed not only music but our engagement with youth culture, fame, creativity and our understanding of the way the world saw itself.

Amazingly the men behind the legend were still in their 20s when it all ended. It took a quarter of a century before they could return to their story with the distance and objectivity it required to tackle it. I was interested in seeing how they carry that weight, and grapple with the privilege and burden of being both authors and custodians of something larger than themselves.

Episode nine invites us to listen again, not just to the music, but to a level of reflection that comes with enough distance to see their own shadows. Their recollections are warm, funny, sometimes painful, and profoundly human. They remind us that history isn’t a monument, it’s a living conversation between who they were and who they’ve become. 

The fact that The Beatles remain such a potent force says as much about the way the world has turned and what contemporary culture has become, as it does about the history and creative output of the band itself. To revisit Anthology today is to ask not only what The Beatles mean to the world, but what the world now means to The Beatles. Perhaps that is the secret to their lasting power.

The Beatles didn’t just make music, they made meaning, constantly renewed by each new listener. Their songs have become a shared cultural language, passed down through families, films, playlists, and now pixels and streams, one of the last truly universal pop-cultural reference points.

Read more:

• The last 150 years of pop culture would’ve been dull without female fandom – just ask The Beatles
• Fab films: The best documentaries about The Beatles
• Now and Then: is it time for Beatles fanboys to finally let it be?

In a society increasingly divided by taste, politics and technology The Beatles represent a kind of timeless honesty. Their music is handmade, human and emotionally direct. Their belief in love, imagination and unity still resonates as an antidote to today’s cynicism and fragmentation. There will never be another band like The Beatles because the world that shaped them no longer exists. I find myself deeply moved as this story re-emerges now because we’re experiencing the end of an era.

The post-World War II generation that defined the cultural landscape we’re still so powerfully connected to are beginning to hang up their instruments, pens and cameras. The Beatles’ success belonged to a moment when music could unite millions in a single feeling. That power is vanishing into ‘the feed’ as algorithms splinter audiences into endless micro-genres, and it feels like watching the curtain fall on the generation that built modern culture. 

Episode nine may conclude the series, but it’s not an ending, more like a handover, a conversation between one generation and the next. It asks what it means for art to outlive its creators in the age of streaming, scrolling and everything happening everywhere all at once, revealing the bewildering but sometimes beautiful afterlife of culture itself. In a world obsessed with what’s next, The Beatles remind us that some things never stop beginning.

That, at its core, is the story of The Beatles Anthology, the enduring adventure of four young men who became a mirror for the world, and whose reflection still shines.

The Beatles Anthology is on Disney+ now.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Change a vendor’s life this Christmas.

Buy from your local Big Issue vendor every week – or support online with a vendor support kit or a subscription – and help people work their way out of poverty with dignity.