'The Beatles Anthology': Revisiting why Ringo Starr 'hated' the Philippines

The Beatles Anthology was originally released as a vinyl, CD, DVD box set, and hardbound book volume in 1995. It came 25 years after the band had broken up. And according to the interviews with the group in the new Episode 9, it was better off for it.

Doing it after some time had passed, the band members said, allowed for perspective. They also — and by this time, it was just the three of them after Lennon’s assassination in 1980 — were in a better mood to talk to each other.

The acrimony surrounding the band’s breakup would have made it difficult to work on such a project — and 30 years on, the public would have more of an appetite for a retrospective.

This new edition of the Anthology has been restored and remastered by the wizardry of Peter Jackson of The Lord of the Rings fame. It was he who created the Get Back movie in 2021 out of the ashes of the previous footage shot for the Let it Be film by another director in 1969. And so 30 years after the first retrospective, we have another one with some more nuance and certainly better picture quality than before.  There is also the previously mentioned new episode which is essentially a behind the scenes of the making of the 1995 version and now takes on a historical appeal of its own.

Of particular interest to Filipinos is the fate of the 10 minutes of coverage given to the band’s tour date in Manila in 1966, which was famously, or rather infamously, marked by trouble from arrival to departure, highlighted by an almighty schedule mix-up with Imelda Marcos, then the First Lady of the Philippines.

To say the band was unimpressed with their treatment would be an understatement, The segment, which had previously been the start of Episode 6 is now at the end of Episode 5. However, it still opens with Ringo Starr saying: “I hated the Philippines,” and it goes downhill from there. There is footage of people burning records towards the end of the Philippine section, giving the impression that it happened in Manila.  Partly for this reason, I was moved to write an account of The Beatles’ 48 hours in Manila in my new book You Won’t See Me: When The Beatles Ghosted Imelda. It certainly takes the official narrative into account, but it also uncovers a lot of new voices along the way — some of whom give a much more rounded idea of what happened when the band came here and why.

For one thing, the fans were not unfriendly — quite the opposite. Even after The Beatles’ so-called “snub” of the First Lady, the opinion of fans and many of the older generation stayed firmly on the side of the band — in contrast to the notion that they were an unruly mob.

Source: Jasmine Payo/rappler.com

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