Fifty years after their debut album, the Beatles have a new music video. The Fab Four’s early days — specifically the suit-and-tie, mop-top era of 1963 and ’64 — recently yielded the massive retrospective On Air — Live At the BBC, Volume 2. Now, because the Beatles are in such desperate need for extra press, Capitol Records has shared an official clip for “Words of Love,” a Buddy Holly cover that appears on the compilation.
Directed by Pete Candeland, the visual cuts together archival footage of Beatlemania’s heyday. The boys try to ward off mobs of crazed fans, girls scream and faint, and we get a glimpse of Paul McCartney long before he was buddies with Johnny Depp and Kate Moss. Touches of the Beatles’ latter-day psychedelia creep in via some animated effects, but the two-minute short is largely a snapshot of the Beatles before they picked up their Revolver and joined Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Time-travel half a century backward by hitting the play button above, and then look at SPIN’s history of the ’60s with The Top 100 Alternative Albums of the 1960s.
