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‘Let them kick the crap out of the songs’: how we recreated the Beatles to make Backbeat

‘I knew people who said John Lennon was angry, insecure and cruel in the early days. When I met Ian Hart, I saw he could provide that’

I’d heard about the Beatles becoming a great live band while playing the clubs in Hamburg, but not the background story of Stuart, the group’s first bass player, and Astrid, a brilliant German photographer. The clubs on the Reeperbahn did the opposite of what we requested then demanded more money Astrid invited Klaus Voormann along to our meeting – he was the boyfriend who had dragged her to see the Beatles in the first place, and he went on to be in the Plastic Ono Band and play bass on the Imagine album. I thought: “How am I going to do the Liverpool accent?” I was auditioning against lots of English actors, but I’d just done a film where I played a British kid living in South Africa, and for that I had an incredible dialect coach called Julie Adams.

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