A Love Letter To The Beatles (2025)

Executive Directors: Simon Weitzman and David L. Simon

Executive Producers: Stewart Everett, Keith McCallum

Out Now

Not just a tribute to the Fab Four, A Love Letter To The Beatles documents the immortal Beatles fandom. Kai Marshall attends the Liverpool premiere.

Beatles fans have been treated to so much in the 2020s so far. We’ve had a big budget fly-on-the-wall documentary, remastered albums and even a new Beatles single. This is largely what I would describe as a top-down effort to update and preserve the Beatle legacy. A Love Letter To The Beatles is a grassroots celebration of all things Fab; a fan-funded, fan-produced documentation of Beatlemaniacs by Beatlemaniacs. 

This charming, heart-warming film does an excellent job of reminding us that, even without big budgets and merch sales, the music of the Fab Four will have its lungs inflated by the millions of fans in Liverpool and around the world. The movie starts in that city which provides so much life to the songs that your mother should know. In that underground shrine to rock ‘n’ roll, The Cavern, stories are told of its intimacy by those with recognisable surnames – imagine shouting a request from three feet away and hearing John sing Money right in front of you.  

Talking-head shots of Weller-haired scousers spliced with Japanese tribute bands remind us that the Beatles’ legacy is celebrated internationally in tandem with the various Beatle hotspots across the world, many of which are visited in this film. A touching singalong on Savile Row and interviews conducted on the streets of New York chart the Atlantic axis of Beatles fame, whilst youthful Tik Tok tributes highlight the impact that the band are having cross-generationally.  

The use of Tik Tok perfectly underlines the relationship between updating history and preserving it. It might be hard to imagine that a teenager in the 2020s would take such inspiration from gour blokes who are famous for 60-year old songs. Yet, there are many social media highlights involving young people, including a recreation of the Hard Day’s Night street-sprint in New York. I wonder if the kids of the 1960s were as inspired by the culture of the first decade of the 1900s? 

Surnames like Best and McCartney present us with anecdotes, not to celebrate their god-like status but instead to remind us of their normality. To Mal Evans’s son, the Beatles were just his dad’s mates. That is not to say Beatle-adjacents were immune from the madness generated by the boys – Ruth McCartney tells of Beatles fanatics scooping gravel from their drive as Paul’s car had driven over it. That sort of fandom is once in a generation and this film documents its echoes through the decades. 

For those younger Beatles fans, its hard to imagine a time where obtaining video footage of your favourite band could be a monumental task. This reviewer remembers the internet in its infancy, but consumed music primarily through CDs and concerts via VHS. A fantastic story recreated in A Love Letter tells of a young fan who recorded a Beatles performance on a handheld film camera in the early ‘60s. This footage was remastered and is now the only surviving footage we have of the Beatles performing Paperback Writer on TV. For some readers, the recording of music as a passion-driven form of manual labour may not seem that alien, but for Tik Tokkers who can find any video from any band in a few clicks it’s a unique glimpse in to the history of being a Beatles fan.  

Bringing together the multi-ethnic, faith and aged Beatles fans all in to one film has been a task eight years in the making, according to executive director Simon Weitzman. Simon and the team should be very proud to put this project out and it’s a must-see for those who, like me, would pay a premium for gravel from Macca’s drive.

Find the film’s official website here. Rent or buy the film on Amazon. 

~

All words by Kai Marshall. Read more from Kai on his authors archive and find him on Instagram