Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane promo director dead

Peter Goldmann, director of the promo films for The Beatles’ songs Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane, and A Day in the Life, has died at age 69. The non-performance Beatles promos were regarded highly innovative when they were first shown in 1967. Peter Goldmann is often credited as one of the creators of the music video.

Here’s a link to a news article on Goldmann’s passing in a Philippine newsletter (see pages 13–15).

(I include the text in full below, in case the relevant newsletter issue would be removed from the net.)

The article is comprehensive, but it is not completely accurate in its details. At 31, Goldmann could hardly have been working as a TV producer in Sweden for 18 years in 1967 – especially as regular TV broadcasts did not start in Sweden until 1956.

I’ve got a DVD with the original broadcast of the first screening of SFF and Penny Lane on American Bandstand. It is really interesting to watch that one. The kids – and the host – look positively bewildered. They apparently can’t quite grasp what it is that they have just seen.

An obituary (in Swedish) from Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter

Scandinavians approaching middle age may remember the children’s TV show Trazan Apansson, which Goldmann produced for Swedish TV 1978–1980.


The full text from Subic Bay Freeport Chamber of Commerce News:

Peter and the Beatles

When popular Subic Bay personality Peter Goldmann passed away on March 1, 2005, so did a part of entertainment history. His legacy lives on in today’s music videos, his work with the Beatles in 1967 opened the door for today’s MTV generation.

With the release of their groundbreaking Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at the height of their fame the Beatles ceased touring with their live shows and demanded more of promotional films to keep their music in the public eye. Two films in particular were to set the standard for decades to come: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever. A third film, A Day In The Life Of… vanished for many years and has recently come to light.

The Beatles record company, EMI, wanted to release a single in a hurry and two tracks were taken from the Sergeant Pepper album to fill the gap, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever. Beatles producer George Martin said “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever was the best record we ever made”. What was then called a PR film or ‘promo clip’, was needed to promote the single on leading British television shows such as Top of the Pops. It would be made by Subafilms, the company owned by the Beatles, and produced by Tony Bramwell.

The Rolling Stones Book of Rock Video History says:”The Beatles anticipated rock video’s function by teaming with Swedish avant-garde filmmaker Peter Goldmann to make the films for their two new singles of the time.”

The late Beatles manager Brian Epstein said of the two films “(They were) Best clips of this type I have ever seen, really great…”

At the time the British Musicians Union had imposed a ban on miming, or ‘lip-synching’ - he had to make a film without the Beatles singing and rose to the challenge with typical panache and the creativity that marked his career.

Peter Goldmann had by then earned a reputation as a talented producer/director in an 18-year career with Swedish Television where he broadcast children’s and live music shows. A friend, Hamburg-based artist and musician Klaus Voorman who was then with the Manfred Mann band introduced Peter and the Beatles. When Voorman told Peter that the Beatles wanted him to direct their films, Peter thought it was a joke and replied “Go to hell”. But it was true.

Says Paul McCartney: “I remember one night meeting this Swedish director in a nightclub and he started saying, “Well, we could really be far out, you know? Yeah, wow, really heavy, psychedelic, up a tree”. That turned out to be the “Strawberry Fields” promo, which was pretty far out for its time.”

Peter told Swedish magazine Vecko-Revyn, “Everything went so fast. It wasn’t until I sat on the plane for London I realized what I was up to. I felt the nervousness and the excitement crawling under my skin. How in the world could I make something funny, bizarre, clever, crazy, sophisticated enough to satisfy the Beatles. It was there in the plane that I came up with the idea of the horses.”

During filming, says Peter, “… The group all said that I was the director and so I must direct.”

Filming for Penny Lane began on January 30, 1967 in Angel Street, Stratford, London. The four Beatles climbed on their horses to trot down the narrow lane. When a crowd of onlookers frightened the horses, Peter, the Beatles and the film crew fled to a nearby pub.

The next day shooting moved to Knole Park, Sevenoaks, Kent together with Ringo Starr’s diminutive poodle and Paul McCartney’s much larger dog. Says Peter: “Ringo had a dog named ‘Tiger’ that he was very proud of. Tiger wasn’t the most terrifying dog in his class, not in the least. It was the smallest and the most taken cared of little white poodle I’ve ever seen. Paul had a dog that looked like a little pony; named Martha.”

Here they completed the Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever films over the next week. Peter recalled: “In John’s special built Rolls Royce they had a real big laugh. Through a microphone and a loudspeaker they tried to shore me up with comments and advice that echoed out over the neighbourhood.”

The ‘Tree piano’ in Strawberry Fields Forever brought its own problems: “The wind blew on the strings and they kept falling all the time and made a mess.”

Ahead of their time, the films were made in colour for the US market.

Two weeks later part of the Penny Lane film was shown on the BBC’s Juke Box Jury, followed by a showing of both films on Top of the Pops on February 16. Later they appeared in the US on the Ed Sullivan show. The films proved to be a remarkable achievement, one not always recognized. In The Rolling Stones Book of Rock Video History, Michael Shore notes: “In America, they were shown on The Hollywood Palace (I can still remember host Van Johnson shaking his head and clucking, “What was that all about?”) and American Bandstand (after showing them in an atmosphere of hushed reverence, Dick Clark polled his teen audience for their generally mystified reactions to the two clips)”

Beatles Historian Richard Porter comments: “His promo films for the Beatles were pioneering and really brought the songs to life.” Says Bill Harry’s The Beatles Encyclopedia “ It was really the beginning of the pop promo as we know it.”

Penny Lane was special but, says The Rolling Stones Book of Rock Video: “ “Strawberry Fields” was something else again: Richard Lester meets Kenneth Anger in the Twilight Zone, with surreal settings, chiaroscuro lighting, slow – and – backward motion, multiple overlapped images, and ominously slow dissolves to enigmatic close-ups of the Beatles faces. None of it made any sort of conventional sense; it was a nonliteral extrapolation of the song’s disquieting mood. Penny Lane was a more or less literal visualization of the song’s cheerily offhand pop surrealism.”

Says another writer: “These clips were not meant to be art, but none was ever more evocative than the Peter Goldmann-directed film for “Strawberry Fields Forever”… That was a perfect example of a medium which did not rely on lip-synched vocals but instead provided an ideal visual accompaniment for the song and its heady period.”

Peter continued to work with major music influences of the time, including a TV special with Simon and Garfunkel, The Troggs and Donovan to Duran-Duran and Stryx.

His early personal history was just as colourful. Born on September 17, 1935 in Hannover, Germany with a British born father. He was a translator for SHAEF in France, a rally driver and motorcycle racer and, infiltrated East Berlin in an intelligence gathering operation. After he got his degree in optics, he was sent to Sweden as a specialist in ultra violet microscopy with the National Swedish Research Council. He found time too to take a degree in Theatre History, another in Mass Communications, yet another in Drama, was a lecturer in television broadcasting at the University of Lund and Gothenburg, certified as Captain by the Royal Naval School in Stockholm and a member of the Royal Swedish Yacht Club. His sport was fencing.

His earlier works moved from news and documentary coverage for ITN London, Italy’s RAI and NDR Hamburg both for television and newspapers that also took him towards Vietnam as a war correspondent, Los Angeles for international productions “Saigon” and “Close-Up Hollywood”, “Bread & Roses” for the Ford Foundation, N.Y. and finally the Philippines, where he settled in 1987 where he produced and directed the documentary “Close-Up Philippines”, among others, directed the Fringe Theatre of the Philippines in the Miracle Worker, and helped start “The Foreign Post”.

In the mid-1990’s Peter and his wife Lalaine, made Subic Bay their home, where he continued to share his amazingly deep knowledge of his craft, becoming a familiar life-filled figure in the community.

Peter may have passed away, but next time you sit in front of your television be it news, documentary or music videos. He’s still with us.

Text box: Peter Goldmann died at the age of 69, at TLC hospital in Olongapo City. He is survived by his wife Lalaine, children Ivan and Jean, his granddaughter Alva, daughter Bella and son Robin with his former wife, Marianne, his niece Yvonne and brother Gunter.

Lalaine, Ivan and Jean wish to thank all the friends that helped them, whether materially or simply by the act of caring.


Photo caption: Avant Garde, Swedish film director, Peter Goldmann on the 1967 set of the “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields with John Lennon (left) and Paul McCartney (right). Photo Courtesy of Lalaine Goldmann.