The Untold Story of Their Reunion (Exclusive)

The original version of The Beatles Anthology — the groundbreaking 1995 documentary series that detailed the band’s career in their own words — concludes with a freeze-frame of the hirsute Fabs assembled for a photoshoot at John Lennon’s Ascot estate on Aug. 22, 1969. It’s believed to be the last time the foursome would ever gather together in the same place, seven years to the day after the first photo of them was taken together. 

It was a fitting ending for the eight-part, 11-hour saga, diplomatically lowering the curtain just before the bitter business squabbles and public mudslinging that would fracture the group legally and spiritually at the dawn of the ’70s. But the decision to cap it there left a compelling story — how we got the closest thing to a Beatles reunion — untold. 

Now, that final act is being explored in a new, expanded version of Anthology, available to stream for the first time on Disney+. Three decades after its original release — and long difficult to find outside of rare DVD and VHS copies — the entire series has been rebuilt from the ground up by Peter Jackson’s WingNut Films team, using the same state-of-the-art restoration techniques that made the multi-part Get Back docuseries such a phenomenon in 2021. Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer Sir George Martin and longtime steward of the band’s recorded legacy, oversaw an equally exhaustive overhaul of the audio, bringing new clarity to the archival interviews and a surprising vibrancy to the vintage live footage.

Martin also oversaw a new double-disc soundtrack of rarities, Anthology 4, designed as a companion to the original three volumes released in 1995 and 1996. Completing the ultra-ambitious multimedia rollout is a newly reissued edition of the lavish, photo-heavy Anthology coffee-table book, first published in 2000. Together, these restorations form the most comprehensive revisit of the Beatles’ story since the project first appeared 30 years ago. “ We’re now further from Anthology’s debut than the Beatles were from their own breakup when it first aired,” Martin observes.

A major part of that expansion is an entirely new hour-long episode of the Anthology documentary, which follows the three surviving Beatles as they reunite in the early ’90s to revisit their past together and complete a pair of unfinished Lennon demos.

For director Oliver Murray, the installment had a very specific purpose. “It needed to offer a whole layer of new self-reflection that episodes 1 to 8 simply didn’t have time for,” he explains. “Episode 9 is untethered from the chronology of the band’s story, which means it can be about how they felt to be a Beatle and what it cost. Being a Beatle is a heavy thing to carry, and they all had different ways of dealing with it.”

The distance, he says, allows for a rare kind of emotional candor. “This was a case of saying, ‘Okay, enough valuable time has passed. You can now see your legacy without being in its shadow. How do you feel?’ We get this privilege of being able to see it as an observer, so to hear from them, decades later, still trying to unpack it is fascinating.”

The seeds of Anthology were sown while the band was still (officially) an active entity. Roadie-turned-Apple Records chief Neil Aspinall began assembling footage back in 1970 for a documentary tentatively titled The Long and Winding Road. A rough cut was assembled, but as the Beatles began to splinter, the four lost interest in all things Fab. (“We couldn’t deal with it,” Starr says in episode 9.)

Work progressed intermittently throughout the decade, but the wounds of the breakup were far too fresh for any of the band to want to take an active role. “We were at war then,” Paul McCartney admits in episode 9, to which George Harrison agrees. “We weren’t talking much.” Lennon’s death in 1980, coupled with the resolution of some business issues, helped relations thaw. 

Indeed, the new installment features far more interaction between the so-called “Threetles” (as the press dubbed them) than any previous episode. Alongside footage of the trio seated around a table at Harrison’s Friar Park estate — reminiscing about rooming arrangements on the road and the origin of their famous moptops, a moment hardcore fans may remember from the DVD bonus features — the episode also includes genuinely charming home-movie clips Starr shot during an early phase of their reunion. With their wives in tow, the scene plays like an intimate family gathering, loose and full of laughter. Harrison teases a tardy McCartney, a staunch animal rights activist, for his “vegetarian leather jacket.” 

What’s striking is how effortlessly they snap into their familiar dynamic. “The interactions between them are the same as in the early days,” Murray notes. “Paul is leading the charge with his energy and enthusiasm. George is slightly sitting back being like, ‘Oh, I’m not so sure about that…’ And then Ringo says nothing, but then when he does, it’s super funny and on point.”

Their trademark humor — that mix of cheeky absurdism and brotherly ribbing — is fully intact, recalling their ‘60s press conferences that won the hearts of a suspicious media. “Paul and I are going to do some stadiums next year together,” a sardonic Harrison jokes to the camera, a playful nod to the hopeful headlines of a live Anthology component. “Mud wrestling,” McCartney sarcastically clarifies, before Starr adds, “I’ll be the ref.” They play their roles perfectly, with timing so sharp that it almost seems scripted.  

For Murray, the “emotional spine” of the new episode comes from previously unseen footage of the three surviving members sitting on the floor of Studio Two at Abbey Road, the room where they recorded the bulk of their music. Gathered on the site of their greatest creative triumphs, Harrison and Starr good-naturedly gang up on McCartney — the band’s famously exacting taskmaster — for the long hours he often kept them there.

“They always used to think I was some work fiend!” McCartney protests. “We could sit in the garden longer than you,” Starr fires back, while a deadpan Harrison suggests that McCartney only wanted to work after he finally ran out of beauty pageants to judge. 

“Who can poke fun about Paul being in the Beatles other than those two?” Murray says. “It’s like, ‘Ahh, get over yourself about being a Beatle, Paul McCartney!’ It’s only those two, in jest, that can get away with that.” 

The humorous exchange sets up one of the episode’s most candid moments, as McCartney’s mock outrage melts into something unexpectedly sincere. “I like the Beatles!” he declares. “I like to work with the Beatles. I’m not ashamed of that. It’s what I love in life.”

He’s repeated that sentiment in countless interviews over the years, but hearing him say it in front of his gently needling bandmates gives it a different kind of resonance. He’s not talking about “the Beatles” as an idea or a legacy — he’s talking about the two men sitting beside him. And in that context, the line lands less as a defense of the past than as a quiet expression of love for them.

Characteristically, McCartney was the driving force between the two “reunion” songs created for the Anthology project, though the initial idea came from Harrison — who briefly considered filling the late Roy Orbison’s spot in the Traveling Wilburys supergroup with an unfinished vocal tape from another departed legend: Elvis Presley. “We never did it because at that point I thought it seemed a bit too gimmicky,” he admitted. “But I was talking to Yoko [Ono, Lennon’s widow] and telling her this idea, and she said, ‘Oh, I think I’ve got a tape of John.’”

The surviving bandmates had previously nixed the idea of making an official “Beatles” song without Lennon’s inclusion in some capacity. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be the Beatles. (Harrison likened it to a pot of soup: “Take one of the ingredients out, and it can be very similar, but it doesn’t quite taste the same.”) But they were intrigued by the notion of completing his demos. “I got much more excited about that,” McCartney said, “because it was really now like, ‘Wow, this is impossible — John’s dead but we’re actually going to get to play with him again.’ ” 

Ono reportedly made the handoff to McCartney after he inducted his songwriting partner into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in January 1994. With Electric Light Orchestra maestro — and Harrison’s Traveling Wilbury bandmate — Jeff Lynne acting as producer, the trio gathered at McCartney’s studio the following month to begin work on Lennon’s composition “Free As a Bird.”

Its half-finished state allowed it to become a genuine collaboration, with all three contributing to the arrangement. The process stirred complicated emotions. “It was emotional listening to the tape for the first time,” McCartney recalled. “I said to Ringo, ‘You better have your hanky ready.’ ” Starr found the experience “very, very strange” at first. “John’s coming out of the speaker, but he’s not here now. It was a very heavy time for me.” 

McCartney shared a scenario he imagined to help him cope. “I’d said to the guys, ‘Let’s pretend that John’s just gone on holiday. We’d nearly finished the album, and he’s rung up to say, ‘Look, here’s a song I kinda like, but I haven’t finished it. Will you finish it up for me? I trust you.’ ” 

In the studio footage, there are moments when the others call out to Lennon offscreen, as if he’s just out of frame getting tea. Murray handled those moments “delicately” while assembling the edit. “You don’t want to force anything,” he says. One of the most affecting shots shows McCartney glancing forlornly at a seat beside him at the mixing desk. “It’s like there’s an empty chair in the place where [John] used to be,” he says, his voice brimming with emotion.

In addition to feeling cheated out of an occasion to make more music with their old friend, Harrison also mourned the fact that Lennon never got the chance to reclaim his Beatle memories the way the others eventually did. (Harrison died in 2001 at age 58.) “When we split up, everybody was a bit fed up with each other,” he says. “But for Ringo, Paul and I, we’ve had the opportunity to have all that go down the river and under the bridge and to get together again in a new light. I feel a bit sorry that John wasn’t able to do that. I think he would have really enjoyed that opportunity to be with us again. We’d all had enough time to breathe.”

The joy of seeing the three together again is tempered by an unavoidable sadness — an emotion seldom associated with the Beatles. It helps explain why so little footage of the trio together was used in the original episode. “It’s melancholic, because of John’s absence,” says Murray. “Every time they’re talking about bringing John into the story and making all these recollections, it’s really sad. George says that he is happy to have gone through this kind of therapy of talking about his journey. But then that journey involves losing a friend who was murdered. It colors their experience of being a Beatle with darker shades. ” 

The experience of recording the two “Threetles” songs — “Free As a Bird” and, the following year, “Real Love” — proved healing for McCartney, who cherished the chance to sing along with Lennon in his headphones. (He would revisit that feeling in 2022, when he completed a third Lennon demo, “Now and Then,” originally attempted during these sessions.) “Having not done it for so long, you become an ex-Beatle,” McCartney says. “But…working on this Anthology, you’re in the band again.”

The end result felt almost miraculous. “I listen to it and I think, ‘It sounds just like them,’ ” Starr marvels. 

Throughout the series, McCartney, Harrison and Starr often refer to the Beatles in the third person, as if the band were an entity that existed outside of themselves. “It was a healthy thing for them to keep a distance,” Murray observes. Giles Martin says that perspective is exactly what gives episode 9 its power. “For them to open up and talk about the process and talk about what it was like to be in the Beatles humanized it. And, as a band, they’re way more honest than most other bands are!”

“I tried to do this when I was selecting tracks for [Anthology] 4,” he continues. “By humanizing them, it shows off their brilliance. Because they’re going, ‘We were trying to do the best we could, and we’re always trying to do something new — and it kind of worked.’ That’s their attitude. What was their secret? ‘The secret was we had each other and we tried to make great music. And all these other forces hit us.’ That’s what Anthology is about.”

At its core, the project circles the same unanswerable question that has hovered over the Beatles for six decades: how did four twenty-somethings from northern England end up reshaping the world through their music? Even in its expanded form, the series doesn’t get any closer to explaining it. The band themselves never cracked the code, either — and there’s a strange kind of comfort in that. “It was all an accident, really,” Harrison says in the new episode. “I think we were very simple and naive.”

Martin hears the same bewilderment from McCartney today: “Paul recently said to me, ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? I don’t really know how it works. Out of this little body comes these songs, and I don’t quite know where they come from.’ They’re sort of detached from the process. They lit this spark that they still can’t really control.”

He believes the new Anthology helps illuminate that mystery rather than solve it. “I think it opens up a conversation from their point of view — this sense of, ‘We don’t really know how it happened, but it was quite a journey.’ ”