Unseen Beatles footage of the Fab Four ‘mucking about’ is released

Never-before-seen footage of The Beatles “mucking around” in a make-up studio ahead of a television performance, shot more than half a century ago, has been released. The 49-second black-and-white silent film clip – which the Australia’s national film archive described as “really rare” – was shot with an 8mm camera belonging to Australian dancer and make-up artist Dawn Swane, who was working at Granada TV in Manchester, Britain, at that time. The previously unreleased footage, from November 1, 1965, shows the four members of the legendary band having fun in front of the camera as their make-up is applied.

I don’t know if it was John (Lennon) or if it was Ringo (Starr) but they took the camera off me and said, 'This is no way to use a camera’, and they sort of jiggled it upside down and inside out a bit, and everybody was just mucking around.

Former dancer Dawn Swane

The clip, along with other home movies, including British actor Michael Caine in the make-up chair, was donated by 83-year-old Swane’s daughter Melinda Doring to the national archive. "We don’t have anything as significantly rare in the collection in terms of a home movie,“ NFSA assistant film curator Tara Marynowsky told AFP. ”(To have) something so high-profile is just quite incredible to have, especially when our client Dawn Swane held on to it for quite some time. Years and years later, we get to uncover this and make that available to audiences… it’s really, really rare actually.“

I mean they were a nice group of people. They really were.

Dawn Swane

Beatles footage