Yesterday

Yesterday I watched Yesterday. The film. I’d heard about it, and expected it to be cheesy, which it was. But, for me, a good one never the less.

If you haven’t seen it, the premise is that a young and struggling singer-songwriter (quite a humorous rendition of that particular experience I thought) suddenly finds himself in a different world where he is, almost, the only person who has heard of The Beetles.

After the initial sense of weirdness, he starts to recognise the possibilities and goes chasing the Fame and Fortune dream. But instead of focussing on his own, OK-ish songs, he uses those unknown Fab Four tunes as the vehicle to carry him to success.

Despite the gorgeous melodies and ubiquitous inevitability of the songs to most of our ears, the film does briefly touch on an awkward question. If written now, would they have taken off as spectacularly as they did in the 1960’s. Or even at all?

In fact following through with that particular premise might have made for an even more interesting film: we live in a world of music often written by teams of people in a studio, and focussed far more on polished production values, and hooky rhythm ‘n bass grooves.

Would the old melody driven classics still take off today?

Anyhow, the film assumes that the songs will succeed. And hearing their pure beauty played, unadorned, on acoustic guitar, it’s hard to believe that wouldn’t be the case.

And so the film becomes more of an insight into the moral and personal value dilemmas faced by our song “thief”.

He does (spoiler alert!) successfully re-introduce the world to The Beetle’s fantastic body of work. And the inevitable love story woven in, is used to help to focus our eyes on whether the cost of Breaking Through is really worth it.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the film. Despite the cliches, it still contained enough believability and nuance to carry me through, without any sense of irritation.

And it did happen to contain some quite lovely music.