I’ve always wondered how Pete Best coped with being turfed out of the Beatles in mid-1962. There’s few men on earth who could empathise wth him (Aaron Burckhard, Nirvana’s first drummer, reportedly dismissed after turning up drunk to a practice session is one), but the other day I saw a rare interview with him on the BBC’s Love Me Do anniversary documentary. If you’ve time it’s worth watching before it vanishes and it tells the story of Pete’s replacement by Ringo. I didn’t look to me as if he’d quite got over it, but then again when you think of what happened just a few months later, who really could?

Anyway there’s been a clump of Beatles-related stories recently sparked, perhaps, by Hunter Davies’ publication of a collection of John Lennon’s letters. Jarvis Cocker has written an interesting review of this for the Guardian imploring us all to stop being so bloody sentimental, but just at the moment I was pondering his advice (“We, the children of the echo, should get a life. We, the children of the echo, should know better. Time to move on. Imagine that.”) I found this fascinating YouTube video that I thought I’d put up here. It shows the development of Real Love, a late Lennon composition that was revisited by the other three Beatles during their Anthology sessions in the ‘90s. It gives a beautiful sense of Lennon the composer and it charts the evolution of one of his his works of art.

So if you’ve time (20 minutes) for a little more sentimentality, here’s:

How John Lennon wrote Real Love

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Photo: Dani Sarda