Prior to A Hard Day's Night, the majority of British and American pop musicals had relied upon the long established tradition of song performance derived from the classical Hollywood musical. Indeed, in the vehicles of Presley and Richard the genre’s central musical sequences were based on the lip-synched performance of songs by a solo singer or group which, occasionally combined with minimal onscreen backing sources (for example, in the case of the Presley cycle, his guitar), essentially attempted to articulate the illusion of ‘real’ authentic, diegetic, performance. While such performances were traditionally, and obviously necessarily, accompanied by non-diegetic background music (the 'unseen' musical accompaniment), the underlying importance of this formal aesthetic was to reproduce an illusory spectacle of ‘genuine’ performance, the key factor being the audience’s belief that the stars’ performances were authentic. However, Lester's partial employment of a humorous surrealism (and its resulting disposal of the conventionally ‘realist’ aesthetic) meant that it was no longer necessary, or, for that matter, uniformly desirable, to interpret the central musical numbers via conventionally representational sequences of performers miming to a backing track and pretending to play instruments. A Hard Day's Night is arguably the first film of its kind to stage central musical numbers which are not tied to performance.
While this approach is employed in the film's opening ‘chase’ sequence, it is also evident from the very first real musical number, ‘I Should Have Known Better’, where the first few verses of the song are accompanied by footage of the group playing cards in the baggage car of the train. Indeed, as with the film’s non-musical sequences, Lester was keen to break with uniform performance realism as early into the film as possible in order to ‘establish the principle that there would not just be realism’.26 However, the most pronounced example of this anti-realism can be seen towards the film’s closure, where ‘Can't Buy Me Love’ is used to accompany a sequence in which, freed from the confinements of their celebrity, the group cavort in a park. In this way, Lester’s film freed the representation of the musical number from its traditional generic slavery; he allowed the pop song the opportunity to work in a similar manner to conventional incidental music, as an abstract entity capable of punctuating action which is not performance-oriented. While this move was evidently prompted by a surrealist aesthetic, it ultimately owes more to the director’s need to convey the emotion inherent in the Beatles’ songs; while the surrealist aesthetic made such sequences ‘possible’, what made them desirable was Lester's feeling that performance was not necessarily adequate to convey meaning on an emotional level. Although he accepts that the film was the first pop musical to break with performance-oriented musical numbers, the director is quick to stress that the form of the musical sequences was ultimately a by-product of a desire to convey emotion. Lester modestly explains: ‘I don't think one ever sits down and says, “I'm going to do something which will change the face of musical history, and will be known in ten years time as MTV”... You don't do it for those reasons, you do it because you think “what do you need?” [emotionally] at this point.’
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