Denis O'Dell, one of the original Apple Corps directors and producer or associate producer of a number of the Beatles' films - including A Hard Day's Night, Magical Mystery Tour and Let It Be - has at last written the account of his relationship with the Fab Four from when he first met them in 1964 to the group's demise and beyond. A longtime friend, collaborator and business associate, he was on location in Spain with John during the shooting of How I Won the War, hosted the press conference with the Beatles in New York for the launch of Apple, was invited by the group to join them at the Maharishi's meditation academy in India, worked with Ringo on The Magic Christian and witnessed at first hand the band rehearsing, performing and recording. The book offers new insight into the dynamics of the most famous pop group in history, including the prodigiously creative songwriting partnership of Lennon and McCartney, the band's personal and working relationships - in the recording studio, on tour, in Apple's London offices and during filming - their attempts to live relatively normal lives at the height of Beatlemania, as well as their final break-up at the end of the decade.
Illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs from Denis O'Dell's personal collection, including pictures taken in India with members of the group, At the Apple's Core is an intimate, revealing, entertaining and often moving examination of the phenomenon that was the Beatles as perceived by a genuine insider. It is essential reading for all true fans and an indispensable addition to any Beatles library.
The seeds of At the Apple’s Core were planted back in March 1996, when I first visited Denis O’Dell at his home in Buckinghamshire to conduct an interview for an academic book I was writing called ‘The Beatles Movies.’ I was looking forward to meeting Denis immensely, as few writers or journalists had interviewed him before, and I was aware that this was a rare opportunity to meet a major figure in the Beatles’ history.
There were, it later transpired, two main reasons why he rarely spoke about his association with the Beatles. The first was that he didn’t really enjoy doing formal interviews, and therefore had a general policy of declining to speak to most of the people that tried to contact him about the group. The second was that few journalists and writers really knew that much about his role in the Beatles’ story. You won’t be surprised to hear that reasons one and two are very closely connected. It’s depressing, but if you don’t talk about your role in Beatles’ history, it tends to get forgotten very quickly or worse, barely discussed at all. You want proof? Mention the Beatles’ films to any casual fan and the name that they will most likely associate with them is Richard Lester. Chances are, they won’t mention Denis O’Dell. Yet between 1964 and 1970, Denis associate produced and/or produced ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘How I Won the War,’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour,’ ‘Let It Be’ and ‘The Magic Christian,’ and was one of the original directors of both Apple Films and Apple Corps. It seems extraordinary that somebody who was so important to the Beatles’ career, a man who was even name-checked by John Lennon on the ironically titled ‘You Know My Name,’ should be so little known. But that’s the elasticity and revisionism of history for you. It should come as a shock to nobody to discover that many of the key people in the Beatles story are not necessarily the ones who have attempted to commercially milk their association with the group for every penny they could.
The principle aim of the book was not to try and produce a ‘definitive’ history of the group or Apple or even a critical ‘thesis’ of their work as such. The aim was really to recount Denis’s unique experiences as a genuine ‘insider’ from a first person perspective in a manner that would afford Beatles’ fans the unique opportunity to experience what it was like to be so close to the twentieth century’s greatest entertainment phenomenon. To become, through Denis’s recollections, ‘insiders looking out’ rather than (as is the case with most Beatles books) ‘outsiders looking in.’ As everyone knows, the Beatles were four highly complex individuals that elicited a heady cocktail of emotional responses including exhilaration, frustration, bewilderment, camaraderie, and love. Some Beatles books are so pre-occupied with providing an ‘angle’ or ‘agenda’ that this sense of dimensionality gets lost or overshadowed, and this was a trap that we desperately wanted to avoid. At the risk of sounding pretentious, we wanted the book to have the emotional ‘dimension’ and ‘texture’ that would be necessary for it to ‘work’ both as a valuable addition to existing knowledge, and also-and this is vitally important- as a ‘damn good read’.
