In today’s insta-fame world, it could be easy to forget that there used to be a time when getting your art seen and heard by the public was left in the hands in a precious few gatekeepers. For musicians, there was this rather odd and ancient tradition known as the “demo,” wherein they would record songs and submit them to these sentries of taste known as “A&R” who would proceed to cherry pick from their submissions which artists they believe could make it worth their time and money to work with. All that’s prehistoric lore nowadays with the advent of MySpace, DIY indie labels, and iTunes. But once upon a time it was a really special achievement to get your art through those barriers, and it was all the sweeter if you could do it by getting your work to somebody really special and getting them to work with you.

Well, once upon a time, one band managed to accomplish hitting that pinnacle…and almost nothing else. The band was the ironically-titled Focal Point. The special someone was Paul McCartney. And theirs is the story of how they became the very first band to sign to the then-nascent Apple Music label owned by The Beatles. The story itself is pretty brief: The chief band members stalked Paul McCartney. He brushed them off, but gave them the phone number of an Apple Records associate. They auditioned for him, and slowly won over Lennon and Brian Epstein as well. They recorded a few songs, and almost immediately the label lost interest and banished them to the dark, creaky attic of history, where they remain mostly unheard of even now. In the Wikipedia entry for Apple Records, there’s no mention of Focal Point whatsoever (How could Wikipedia be inaccurate? NOOOOOOO!). Googling them takes you all over the place including modern bands with that same name. But eventually you may stumble across a mention or two of founding member Paul Tennant, and his book All You Need Is Luck… or How I Got a Record Deal by Meeting Paul McCartney.

Tennant not only made this briefest of brushes with greatness into a book, but he’s dredged every possible mix, demo and finished recording they ever did into a compilation record (First Bite of the Apple, because that’s exactly what you want your music to be known for even after all these years…sigh) released a year or two ago, and now he’s sold the story as a feature to Filmstreet Productions, a company best known for doing a little seen Showtime series….and almost nothing else. You gotta give it to the guy a bit for squeezing this for all it’s got. I think the story of selling this story is probably more interesting than the band’s music ever was. But I don’t know if the film would have such a broad scope. More likely, it’ll be a pretty conventional biopic with incessant voiceover.