Watch: Unseen Beatles Footage from 1965
Backstage antics take center stage in newly found clip.
When you’re as popular a defunct band as The Beatles were—and still are—any new content is good as gold. Such is the case with this never-before-seen clip showing less than a minute of the Fab Four horsing around in a backstage makeup studio prior to a television performance. Filmed on Nov. 1, 1965, the silent black-and-white footage was shot by makeup artist Dawn Swane and was released through the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.
“I was in the make-up room,” the now 83-year-old Swane said in a statement from the NFSAA. “And so we were having some champagne … And anyway, I don’t know if it was John or if it was Ringo but they took the camera off me and said, ‘This is no way to use a camera,’ and they sort of jiggled it upside down and inside out a bit, and everybody was just mucking around. But that was great. I mean they were a nice group of people. They really were.”
The film is part of a collection Swane donated to the NFSAA she shot with a Super 8 camera throughout her career, which also includes clips of a young Michael Caine and other celebrities.