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Martin Scorsese discovers the life and soul of George Harrison

31.12.69

It was the winter of 1963, and Martin Scorsese was just 21 years old.

He was living with his parents in a tenement block on the Lower East Side in New York City and was trudging down the stairs from their third-floor apartment on the way to a class at NYU. “The radio was on,” he recalls, “and a voice came on saying that this was the first time in America that we’d hear this new group from England.” Scorsese wasn’t expecting much. “Prior to that, English rock’n’roll, well, it was Lonnie Donegan, the skiffle groups, Cliff Richard and people like that.” But then I Want To Hold Your Hand crackled over the airwaves. “I stopped and listened to the song and couldn’t believe what I’d heard. It was like a whole new world.”

The music of The Beatles has stayed with the acclaimed filmmaker ever since. Now 68, the New Yorker’s knowledge of 20th-century guitar music veers towards the scholarly. Any number of his feature films echo to the strains of the six-string, and his passion for that sound has thus far prompted four of his documentary films: The Last Waltz (1978), with The Band; Feel Like Going Home (2003), his segment of a seven-part The Blues series produced for PBS; No Direction Home (2005), exploring Bob Dylan’s early years in the spotlight; and Shine A Light (2008), his exquisitely rendered Rolling Stones concert film.

Source: Herald Scotland