The only band Tom Hanks preferred to the Beatles: “Way better”
It’s no secret that Tom Hanks is one of Hollywood’s most prominent Beatles superfans, with the actor growing up in the cultural sweet spot when the mop-haired Liverpudlians took the world by storm.
He first fell in love with the band in the early 1960s, and that devotion has never wavered. The Beatles even served as the inspiration behind the two-time Academy Award winner’s feature-length directorial debut That Thing You Do!, which chronicled the rise and fall of a short-lived musical sensation.
It makes perfect sense that Hanks would find a career-long friend and collaborator in Robert Zemeckis, another self-proclaimed Beatles lifer. The filmmaker’s first movie, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, was even more of a love letter to the Fab Four, and the duo no doubt spent plenty of downtime on films like Forrest Gump, Cast Away, The Polar Express, and Pinocchio talking about their shared obsession.
Hanks declared The Beatles to have “made the greatest music of any generation. ” He branded A Hard Day’s Night “the most joyful movie I’ve ever seen” and called the quartet “the epitome of glamour.” His fanboy credentials have always been worn on the sleeve, but during his impressionable youth, one band superseded John, Paul, George, and Ringo as his favourite.
“I was eight years old in 1964, and I was the youngest in my family,” he recalled to The Virginian Pilot. “I remember the house being full of teenagers all the time, and the radio played every minute. The girls all argued about who was their favourite Beatle. As for me, I thought The Dave Clark Five was way better.”
It’s borderline blasphemous to hear somebody like Hanks, who’s spent his decades in the spotlight constantly reiterating his adoration for The Beatles, to call any group superior. And yet, the eight-year-old version of the guy who’d eventually become ‘America’s Dad’ was adamant that The Dave Clark Five were the only group who could be put on a loftier pedestal.
Another English band that exploded in popularity and briefly seized the zeitgeist, there were plenty of parallels between the two. Beyond their country of origin, it was The Dave Clark Five’s ‘Glad All Over’ that knocked The Beatles’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ from the top of the British singles charts in 1964, and they also appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show just three weeks after the Fab Four’s seminal performance.
They got their own film, too, with Deliverance director John Boorman helming 1965’s Catch Us If You Can, even if The Dave Clark Five never rose any higher than being the 1B to The Beatles’ 1A when the ‘British Invasion’ was in full swing. Still, they were number one in Hanks’ eyes for a while, even if they didn’t maintain that position forever.
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