When Paul McCartney put out a solo album titled “Memory Almost Full” in 2007, veteran British Broadcasting Corp.producer Kevin Howlett might well have smiled.
Memory can indeed play tricks on anyone — even Beatles — as the years roll by. That’s one big reason Howlett has spent much of the last 30 years tracking down hard evidence of the group’s long and rich legacy with the BBC.
He relied heavily on the storehouse of documentation related to the Fab Four that the network socked away more than half a century ago. For instance, there’s the first global television broadcast of “All You Need Is Love,” a song introduced to the world in 1967.
“In ‘The Beatles Anthology’ series in which they were telling their own story, they couldn’t agree on whether ‘All You Need Is Love’ was written for that broadcast,” Howlett said in an interview from England to talk about “The Beatles: The BBC Archives 1962-1970” (Harper Design, $60), the exhaustively researched book about the band’s history with the U.K.’s premiere radio and television network.
“One of the great finds for me in going through the written archive was a telegram from a producer who was working at Abbey Road [recording studio] that did confirm that the song was indeed specifically written for this worldwide broadcast that went out to 350 million people,” Howlett said. “We have a copy of the memo on Page 221.”
That’s but one of many moments in Beatles history in the book Howlett has assembled in conjunction with “The Beatles: On the Air Live at the BBC, Volume 2” being issued Tuesday, Nov. 11. The latter is a two-CD set, a long-in-coming sequel to the 1994 two-disc “The Beatles: Live At the BBC” release that significantly expanded the range of Beatles recordings commercially available. The performances were live on the air or recorded live in the studio for airing later.
The new volume encompasses an additional 63 tracks, including 37 songs plus interviews with BBC staff and studio banter among the Beatles. Howlett and co-producer Mike Heatley compiled and researched the tracks, often using far-flung source material they had tracked down because, as Howlett points out, “The BBC did not keep its master tapes at that time.”
