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Popular wisdom is that time travels in one direction. I have my doubts.
Sometimes it feels we have become, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse Five, unmoored in time, dropping in and out at random moments.
Or perhaps it’s more a loop, like manifold science fiction stories, though currently it’s leaning less towards fun Dr Who shenanigans and more dystopian Donnie Darko. Let’s examine the facts...
With an international backdrop of an unpopular war which could become a long-running quagmire, the biggest concert film features Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan is on tour, and there are new albums from The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. What year is it? 1966? Surely not 2026?
This column started here in the early-2000s, shortly after the 1990s wave of Beatlemania, fuelled by the Anthology collection and eight-part TV documentary. That seemed the end of it.
The Beatles. Photo / Supplied
Now, a quarter of a century later, Peter Jackson cleaned up that very same documentary, which turns out to be the tip of a new Beatles iceberg.
No fewer than four
There are currently no fewer than four Beatles films being made, as well as a BBC drama series Hamburg Days. The four films will each foreground a different Beatles, with Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.
Directing all this is Sam Mendes, no stranger to possible conflict after making two James Bond films. Whether he’ll tackle more tetchy moments such as Harrison’s affair with Starr’s wife is uncertain.
All this Beatlesy activity is complicated by the fact that two of the legendarily fab four are still alive and making music. Last week McCartney played the farewell broadcast of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show; both he and Starr have new albums.
McCartney’s is The Boys of Dungeon Lane, the best thing he’s produced this century, a genuinely moving and cleverly-crafted set of songs that suggest he’s stopped chasing pop dreams and is accepting his ‘older statesman’ role with aplomb.
Starr’s is Long Long Road and is...well, it’s Starr. More of his “unique” weird big-band country, for better or worse. As always, he sounds preternaturally cheerful though I’d take the one shared duet on McCartney’s album – Home To Us – over anything on Long Long Road.
New stones album
Meanwhile The Rolling Stones’ Foreign Tongues album arrives next month. They initially slipped out an impressively bruising single, Rough and Twisted, on vinyl only under the name The Cockroaches. I’m sure there was a good reason. They’ve now released the more conventional song In The Stars. McCartney guests on Foreign Tongues, as he did on their last album Hackney Diamonds, alongside Steve Winwood, another man busy making history in 1966 singing The Spencer Davis Group’s Gimme Some Lovin’.
And, as if defying all concept of time, 85-year-old Bob Dylan is still on the road. He played 83 gigs last year, 27 this year so far with 36 more lined up before the end of July. Maybe it is 1966 after all?
Hear Winston’s latest Playlist: