Airdate: Becoming the Beatles

On New Year’s Eve SBS screens a premiere Beatles documentary looking at the band’s early days, Becoming the Beatles.

The Beatles endure as the greatest popular music band of all times as their music and lyrics have transcended the decades to influence generations of musicians and fans across the world. But before the fame and fortune there was the lesser-known story about the six young men who would – and wouldn’t – grow up to become The Beatles.

Becoming The Beatles begins in working class Liverpool in the 1950s, a grim sea port where poverty haunted every street. It was within these hardscrabble streets, though, that a group of young men met and began to create music that would literally change the world.

After exploring the childhoods of John, Paul, and George, as well as that of their friends and former band mates, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best, the film delves into the club scene in Hamburg, Germany, where the band truly learned how to make music and perform as a band and which became the launching pad for Beatlemania and the band’s ultimate success.

Interwoven with interviews with old friends and band members from the early years, and vintage clips of the lads themselves, are rare images, memorabilia and home movies shot by friends and fellow musicians that help recount the compelling early days of the band.

Monday, 31 December at 7.50pm on SBS ONE.