Though The Beatles were touring for barely half of the eight years they recorded together, it is that time which still contributes most to the popular image of The Beatles. It was a period of Beatlemania: hordes of (mostly) screaming teenage girls laying siege to the band in hotels and dressing rooms worldwide, making such noise in concerts that the band could barely hear themselves. It is these years that are the focus of Ron Howard’s new documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years.

Mr Howard set himself a difficult task: telling the story of these pivotal years in just over 90 minutes. It is a task that the film largely succeeds at, though many interesting strands are frustratingly dropped before they’ve been adequately explored. The remastered concert footage itself is excellent, and the sound quality is much-improved as well thanks to the work of Giles Martin, who has taken up his late father George Martin’s mantle as Beatles producer (the elder Martin is suitably praised highly for his role in bringing the band’s ideas to life.) However, the sound is still inevitably quite poor in places.

The entirety of the band’s 1965 Shea Stadium performance which follows the end credits is a particular highlight. The viewer gets a good sense of the tremendous aural impact the band had in concert; the energy of their performances comes across even through the diluting effect of the cinema screen. Hearing the band through cinema speakers is worth the price of admission in itself.

However, the film is not simply a collection of concert clips but a true documentary, featuring new interviews with the two surviving members of the ‘Fab Four’ as well as archival footage of George Harrison and John Lennon. Incidentally, both Paul McCartney’s and Ringo Starr’s remarks are actually quite funny, though the former’s comment that many of their early songs were written just by “bashing one out” was perhaps unintentionally so.

The film spends a lot of time on The Beatles as a social phenomenon, and as emblems of the social changes taking place in the 1960s. One of the few sections which won’t be as familiar to those with even an encyclopaedic knowledge of the group is the section on their relationship with the American Civil Rights movement, and how in some ways they helped break down barriers between white and black youth culture there (at least according to Whoopi Goldberg, one of the rather random selection of celebrities interviewed). Notably, at their insistence, their performance in Jacksonville’s Gator Bowl stadium was desegregated, a stipulation which was then included in their contract from then on.

The interviews form part of what is the most interesting story, the relations between the bandmates and their own development in this period. Harrison’s quip that the band was “force-grown like rhubarb” serves as a pithy summary of this period. Eight Days a Week seems an apt title for the workload the band were under in this four-year period, recording four singles and two albums every year, making two films, and playing over 800 shows. The group’s comments as to the incredibly close, almost fraternal relationship between the four are quite a touching insight into this world.

It would have been only too easy to neglect the most important side of things, the music, but this was happily avoided. For a film with a running time of only 97 minutes, Ron Howard has done an excellent job of covering all the most important aspects of The Beatles’ early years. The section on Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting process was possibly the most interesting of the film, with the insights into how they actually went about recording the tracks of particular interest as we’re taken through the development of the track ‘Eight Days a Week’ itself.

Ultimately, the film serves well as a basic introduction to these hugely important years in popular music, though it does suffer somewhat from picking up and then dropping so many threads over a relatively short running time. For The Beatles adept, this film will most likely tell you little you don’t already know, but you will certainly be entertained. For those who aren’t as besotted with the group, you will be both informed and entertained. Despite some shortcomings, the film does an excellent job of appealing to both audiences.