Concert day in Kiev started hot and sticky. By ten A.M. the platoons of security ghouls were already gathering, patrolling the orbit of the vast stage, murmuring into radios. During the night, the construction gangs had transformed the heart of Kiev, diminishing the scale of things, dwarfing gilded fountains with giant video screens, throwing up concrete barriers across old cobbled streets.
My film crew, cameraman Roger Chapman from London and assorted Ukrainian technicians, had the look of a refugee family fleeing a war zone. The concert checkpoints around the city center made moving around with our equipment a sweaty ordeal. We piled cameras and microphones and tripods into a wonky shopping trolley, bumping over the cobbles and trundling down alleyways, looking for ways to navigate the security net. Only Roger’s booming laughter helped to sustain our farcical little convoy.
That laugh, a whooping, joyous outburst like the cry of some exotic primate, had turned heads wherever we had filmed together. I had worked with Roger in some odd places. At the Shaolin Temple in China where kung fu was born we had filmed the training ordeals of new recruits, drilled like Mao’s armies as they dreamed of learning to fly and become movie heroes. We didn’t see any flying monks, but we did record kung fu monks breaking baseball bat–size clubs over each other’s heads. “I don’t believe what I just filmed,” Roger had said. The laughter had come later.
Rattling through the streets of Kiev with Roger and the trolley, we decided that those kung fu monks had been more hospitable than Kiev’s guardians of rock ’n’ roll. Now, police in shiny boots and dark glasses were sweeping the concert area, pushing people further and further to the margins. It was all very orderly and well organized. “Why are you doing this?” I asked a handsome young steward in a cream jacket. “Paul asks for it,” the guy said, looking uneasy.
I dodged a couple of cops and found my way to the edge of the stage. A chubby, affable-looking man with Pinchuk Foundation credentials hanging around his neck was taking a breather, leaning on a barrier. “Nikita,” he said, shaking hands. His card told me he was a “Ph.D. in Political Science.” It became clear that he was a Beatles superfan, as well as an oligarch’s enabler. Nikita insisted the Beatles had been his tutors. “My English teacher suggested I should listen to the Beatles, and it changed everything. They opened the whole world.”
Nikita mopped his face and looked up as a helicopter clattered across the sun. A camera crane swooped over the stage, and spiraled up and away. Nikita was talking about the hazards of getting hold of illegal Beatle records when he was a teenager. “My treasures,” he called them as he told me about how being caught with Abbey Road could cost your job or place at university. “The Beatles transformed me very quickly from being a good young Communist, and I understood that I lived in a very strange country.”
As we talked, I was watching the invasion of Kiev’s grand square with its heroic statues and triumphal memorials by the bloated juggernaut of Western rock. But Nikita wanted me to understand what the Beatles invasion had meant for one Ukrainian boy. “The main thing they brought me was the idea of freedom, personal freedom. It’s like you meet friends after being alone for a long time. I understand there’s nothing unreachable, nothing impossible. Everything is in my hands.”
He pointed at a glass-sided building behind the stage. “You should have a look at our Beatles museum. At the opening ceremony, we cut an audio tape. Those secret tapes we made of Beatles songs hanged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—because they couldn’t control the tapes. It was the beginning of the end.”
The museum was only yards away, but the security cordon demanded a sweltering detour with our shopping trolley. At least our little caravan provided some entertainment for the increasingly frustrated crowds.
At the entrance of the Beatles museum there was a giant blowup of the Sgt. Pepper album cover. The scale of it put me in mind of those epic Soviet propaganda posters where brave workers marched toward a Socialist utopia. The museum’s version of utopia was to put yourself in the picture with the cast of Sgt. Pepper by sticking your head through a hole in the blowup alongside John Lennon in his acid-yellow coat. I resisted the temptation, and moved on to look at the other relics.
It was a strange assortment—a life-size cutout of the Fab Four on stage; a 1960s Soviet car—the model I recalled being driven by cosmonaut hero Yuri Gagarin; a photo of a Brezhnev-era Ukrainian footballer; a jolly history of the Beatles decked out in psychedelic swirls. My favorite items were tucked away in a corner. The curators had assembled a modest time capsule of a Cold War teenager’s bedroom. It was an affecting tableau, and it transported me to an era of stifling drabness when the color and fun of the mop-tops must have felt like a heady escape. A spindly chair covered in faded ginger nylon squatted alongside a plastic television set. A gray cardigan hung on the wall. I remembered again Art Troitsky’s lament: “There was nothing that reminded me of my dreams.”
Oleg, who told me he was the secretary of the Ukrainian Beatles Fan Club, was cruising the museum. With his ponytail and Lennon specs he could almost be an exhibit himself. I imagined the ghost of a teenage Oleg haunting that mock-up bedroom in the museum. Like many of the veteran Beatles fans I met, he seemed worn down by the years of struggling to keep the faith.
Paul McCartney plays Kiev: mega rock with mega security.
Oleg remembered discovering the Beatles in 1968, as the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia to snuff out the hopes of the Prague Spring. “There was the smell of war in the air,” he said, “and we were scared. We listened to illegal radio stations like BBC and Voice of America to try and find out what was going on.” I suggested that didn’t seem a promising place to find the peace-and-love songs of the Fab Four, but his face was alive with the memory. “In between the reports they played music. And that’s where I heard a few of their songs. I didn’t find out the name ‘Beatles’ until a year later.”
Oleg’s memories of trying to improvise his own Beatles collection at a time when the records were as rare and dangerous as plutonium told me how quickly the virus had spread. Somehow, even here five hundred miles from Moscow in a provincial city, when a typewriter was seen as seditious, the idea of scratching “A Hard Day’s Night” onto Grandma’s X-ray photo had been passed on. “The best thing about those records on bones,” he said, “was you could fold them up and hide them in your sleeve where the police couldn’t find them.” I had heard about those folding X-rays in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and the idea seemed to have been handed on through a kind of homemade “Internet,” giving a whole generation a way of bypassing the state’s snoopers to listen to the music they loved. Tapes were even better, of course. Oleg pointed to a clunky reel-to-reel tape deck with big plastic spools in the museum. “I had one like that,” he said.
We toured the museum together, and Oleg peered at an acoustic guitar with the word ROK printed on its belly. I recalled that the word means “bad fate” in Russian, so the guitar must have declared a special defiance. An electric bass guitar with a scuffed body was paired with a Tiger Guitar instruction book. Oleg was talking now about the dangerous times when the first real Beatles records were smuggled through the Iron Curtain. “I was arrested twice for having a foreign LP with me on the street where Beatles fans were hanging around and swapping records.” We stopped to look at a flimsy little gramophone. It reminded me of the Dansette that had a life-saving place in my own teenage bedroom.
Defying the monochrome austerities of Yorkshire in the 1950s, I had painted my Dansette purple, and my bedroom walls canary yellow. The garish reds and greens and blues of my jazz album covers topped off my mild Technicolor rebellion. Looking at the little museum with Oleg, I tried to imagine the desperation of feeling that even my record collection could get me into serious trouble. “Often my precious Beatles records were confiscated by the police,” he said. “It felt like a tragedy. I reckon the police just wanted the records for themselves.”
We came to a scatter of Beatles relics. A color photo of John and George was stuck on the screen of a television set. A battered photo frame had portraits of the four boys, copied from the cover of the Let it Be album. The force of the yearning was soaked into the tableau. Oleg looked at the dusty collection and it triggered a sharp little memory. “I was in trouble once at school. My desk was covered in the Beatles’ names I’d scratched into it. I was accused of damaging state property.”
And then the museum’s spell was broken. A couple of girls with a digital camera climbed over the ropes that corralled the bedroom display. Leaning over the bass guitar, one girl struck a cutie pose borrowed from 1950s men’s magazines, bottom thrust out, finger on chin. It was a version of sexy that used to be accompanied by a beach ball and a big swimsuit. The camera flashed and they swapped places. The other girl peeped out from behind the old TV, displaying a pout and miming a kittenish wave. It didn’t appear to be a retro performance or a postmodern comment on the venerable Beatles. Finally the girls traded poses and photos in front of a sign spray painted KIEV WAIT FOR YOU! A teenager with Union Jack headscarf had been taking in the little charade. I felt I was drowning in the swirl of images and memories.
Camera on his shoulder, Roger followed a fat man with a straw boater and a tuba, marching behind a Dixieland band belting out “Yellow Submarine.” The parade, with Roger in tow, squeezed through a door and into an auditorium at the Kiev Conservatory crowded with hundreds of kids wearing yellow shirts and yellow scarves. One section of the audience seemed to be military cadets with white shirts and epaulettes, upright and unsmiling. The Dixieland band climbed up onto a stage bordered with blue balloons. They finished the song with a flourish and it cued the entry of a striking couple.
The host was a middle-aged man with fading hair and gray shoes. His partner was dressed in the style of a Christmas tree fairy. Her full-length ball gown in shiny cream nylon cascaded around her so that she seemed to be cruising the stage on wheels. Her hair was a torrent of golden curls. Brandishing their microphones like Kalashnikovs, the hosts yelled at the audience, informing them that this was the final of a nationwide talent contest to choose the best young musician performing Beatles songs. The audience looked underwhelmed by the prospect, but Roger looked happy and I couldn’t wait.
We were not disappointed. First on stage was a big band, identically fitted out in shimmering silver jackets that looked as though they had been supplied by Mikhail Safonov’s tailor. They were conducted by an enthusiastic veteran with a silver mustache and a golden tuxedo. The band launched into an upbeat version of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” featuring enthusiastic but ragged solos by assorted teenage saxophonists. Then a young woman teetered onstage in heels high enough to qualify as stilts. She seemed alarmingly certain of her sexiness, belting out her vocal with a fine disregard for pitch. There was a scatter of bored applause and the band straggled off the stage.
We filmed as the roll call of Beatles wannabes wound on. A fresh-faced little boy with a set of pan pipes as big as his head trilled a version of “Yesterday.” A tiny girl in a party frock pounded a piano in an oddly moving “Hey Jude.” A couple of gawky youths with saxophones offered an off-key reading of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” Yet another shot at “Can’t Buy Me Love,” this time reworked as a Balkan dirge waltz, came from a girl with dreadlocks and matador pants who climaxed her vocal in a growling rant.
My favorite by far was a slender youth with long blond hair whose solo version of “Let It Be” moved from a cooing murmur to an alarming falsetto howling that sounded like a wounded animal and seemed to go on forever. The audience looked stunned. With Roger, I wandered the backstage corridors where hopeful contestants were practicing their trumpets and guitars and saxophones. It was all endearingly earnest, and the unjaded determination of these kids to make the Beatles’ music their own felt like a series of small triumphs.
They had even managed to bring some fun to the gloomy conservatory. “You have to see this,” Roger said as he tracked into a side room. We shot a cameo that seemed to sum up the spirit of the competition, dotty and unexpected. A large woman watched over a monster cake, lovingly crafted in the shape of a yellow submarine. It floated on a sea of aquamarine-colored icing sugar. “Love it!” Roger murmured.
We walked back toward the auditorium, where I could hear a girl singer tearing into “Come Together,” along the oppressive acres of turd-brown linoleum, past a succession of closed doors. The conservatory reminded me of that visit I had once made to the fearsome KGB headquarters in Moscow. The memory illuminated the reality of what was happening here. In a place where this music was once derided and banned, and even listening to it could derail your life, these youngsters were finding excitement and inspiration in the old songs that had changed the lives of the Beatles generation.
Back on the street, the joy evaporated instantly. We trundled our shopping trolley into Independence Square, where it was almost time for Sir Paul’s sound check. By now, the security put me in mind of the protective fantasy surrounding a visit by an American president to a war zone. Solid ranks of police had pushed the crowds back into side streets where there was no chance they would catch a glimpse of the great man. When the sound check began, even the giant video screens stayed blank. “Hey Jude” echoed somewhere in the distance.
The music that had shifted my guts all those years ago in a Liverpool cellar had become this thing, vast and remote and untouchable, sealed behind barriers, summoned by oligarchs, pumped around the planet like gas or oil. But here, of course, Beatles also meant the timeless songs millions sang along with, the melodies claimed by those kids at the conservatory and hummed by the geezers in the Kavern Club.
We found a café where we could park the trolley and watch the crowds streaming by. They looked like crowds in any city now, differences of twenty years ago scrubbed away. Most of these kids, I guessed, had no memories of living with Communism. Just across the street, I could see teenage girls pouring into the new Kira Plastinina mega-store, in pursuit of pink fripperies dreamed up by a fifteen-year-old Russian-American fashion phenomenon.
Abruptly, it began to rain, and soon Kiev was inundated by a torrential downpour. People crowded under awnings and cowered under huge Coca-Cola umbrellas. In minutes, the street was a river, inches deep. A gang of young braves seized the moment to rip off their shirts and dance dementedly in the deluge. I wondered if they had ever heard of the Woodstock Festival when thousands of hippies stood in the mud intoning “No Rain! No Rain!” In Woodstock and in Kiev, the rain poured on.
For a while it was fun. Four hours later we were huddling in the crew van with the deluge still pouring down on Kiev. Just an hour before the concert, it felt somewhere between farce and nightmare. In the darkness, Independence Square was an endless maze of barriers and checkpoints. We made a long detour through backstreets to get as close to the stage area as we could. The crowds packed into the “fanzones” were taking the full force of the storm. Even the trusty shopping trolley had to be abandoned as we sloshed our way to a gap in the fence where McCartney’s chief gatekeeper, Stuart Bell, was fighting a losing battle with gangs of sodden pressmen. Peering out from a lilac-colored plastic rain hood, Bell struggled with a sheaf of release forms that were rapidly dissolving into pulp. As I reached him, he yelled through the hammering rain that I must sign one of his mushy releases, guaranteeing that I would not bootleg any of Sir Paul’s performance, restricting my filming to ninety seconds of the opening song. It was hard to believe Bell could see anything through his rain-spattered glasses, and he seemed to be giggling at the absurdity of it all.
We trudged into the square, along corridors cordoned off by police tape. The place was unrecognizable now through the sheets of rain, slashed by searchlights. The arena in front of the stage felt like a scene from Blade Runner, packed with steaming people. Water flooded over my shoes, and when I looked down I saw that tangles of electric cabling were completely submerged. Didn’t I remember a bunch of rock guitarists who were incinerated on rainy stages, victims of that killer cocktail of electricity and water? I didn’t fancy being a footnote to Sir Paul’s rain-spattered Kiev gig, remembered in Beatles legend as “the barbecued film guy.”
I noticed that the VIP platform behind me stood well clear of the flood, and I tried to talk my way to privileged safety. My way was barred by Denis, the guardian of the VIP stairway. Denis was as cheery as his canary-yellow waterproofs, and while he was unyielding about access to privileged heaven, he was happy to talk about the Beatles. As the rain cascaded over us like a pressure hose, he told me his story. “I was born back in the U.S.S.R. Rock music was just forbidden. I was six years old, and we would sit at night in the kitchen, trying to catch Radio Liberty. For us, Beatles was a touch of freedom—of another life.”
McCartney was due on stage in just a few minutes now, but Denis told me they were talking about canceling the concert. For him, that would only confirm the impossibility of his fantasy. “I could imagine being a cosmonaut in outer space, but I could never imagine that a Beatle would be playing right here in the heart of Ukraine.”
Foiled in the quest for safety and dry feet, I hauled myself onto a little perch provided for photographers. Roger found a nearby perch for himself and the camera. For the first time, I had a view of the stage. It was an unforgettable spectacle, tens of thousands of umbrellas heaving and glistening like a black ocean. Roger zoomed in on a single rain-crazed fan, hoisted above the throng, gyrating naked in silhouette against the arc lights. On the giant screen alongside the stage, they were playing a video now, an express trip through Beatles history. I caught a fragment of my little Cavern film, and then the familiar parade of images: arriving in New York, singing for the queen, filming A Hard Day’s Night, sending “All You Need Is Love” to four hundred million TV viewers round the world, playing a sad gig on a London rooftop as the band fell apart. And now a Beatle was in Kiev to sing for a billionaire.
Victor Pinchuk was the very model of a modern oligarch. Relaxed in a leather jacket and white Paul McCartney T-shirt, he talked to me about his concert as the rain hammered on his umbrella. “It was my dream for many years. You know the influence of Beatles and Paul McCartney during Soviet times was so huge, so great. Maybe it was the only source of fresh air, of freedom for Soviet people.”
It was obvious that this was not a man who was about to cancel a concert his TV stations were due to broadcast to an audience of millions. He told me his first open-air concert was when he played his precious record of “Can’t Buy Me Love” through his bedroom window at the age of six. Now he had the impregnable assurance of a man in command of a billion-dollar fortune, and the power to make his dreams come true. “I thought I would invite Sir Paul. If he will sing his songs about love, about friendship, about freedom, about real human values it will help to unite our country.” Pinchuk looked up happily as if welcoming the storm to do its worst. “Now in this incredible weather, people are speaking about freedom, and unity and love, and this proves I was right.”
With the concert only moments away, my mobile phone rang. An anxious voice fought with the drumming rain. “You must stop shooting and return camera immediately! Rain will destroy my camera.” It was the man who hired us the only DigiBeta in Kiev, and he was desperate. So were we. I shouted “Yes!” and we carried on shooting.
“Are you ready?” boomed a voice. The crowd roared from beneath its umbrellas, counting down “Three—two—one!” And here was Paul McCartney, tiny in the distance, vast on a video screen. He gave us the inevitable thumbs up and, in Russian, a cheery “Privyot druzhi”—“Greetings, friends.” The familiar cheeky boy’s face still haunted the old features, powered up still with the adrenaline that has fired this man through thousands of concerts. How many gigs, how many countries? I remembered those crappy Manchester clubs, those cheerless TV studios. What drove this man, rich beyond imagination, one of the most famous faces on earth, to do it one more time on a wet night in Kiev? I guessed that the hunger I’d witnessed on that night in the Liverpool Cavern Club, the need that fed the spaniel charm, was still burning inside McCartney, the unstoppable Beatle. “It’s going to be great here in Kiev,” he declared through the deluge. “We’re gonna have a great evening, OK?”
And then, thrillingly he roared into the opening riff from “Drive My Car,” and I was back in the Cavern forty-six years earlier. Cutting through the lasers and the gargantuan staging, and the impossible weather, somehow the spark was still there, and the visceral contact with the crowd. And for this crowd in this place, there was something else. But, as Denis said, “to understand what really happened, you had to have been born back in the U.S.S.R.”