Peter Asher signs autographs with Gordon Waller, as seen in Peter Asher: Everywhere Man
PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN (Dayna Goldfine & Dan Geller, 2025)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Thursday, June 18
quadcinema.com
thefilmcollaborative.org
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man is so utterly engaging and delightful, so happy-making and surprising, that I actually wanted to crawl inside the screen and enter Peter Asher’s extraordinary life.
In Terry Gilliam’s 1988 film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, John Neville stars as the title character, who tells a fanciful, impossible-to-believe story based on Rudolf Erich Raspe’s 1785 collection The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, consisting of heavily embellished tall tales loosely inspired by the real-life eighteenth-century German nobleman Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Münchhausen, whose name was given to the mental disorder Munchausen syndrome, a subtype of factitious illness in part characterized by, according to the National Library of Medicine, “pseudologia fantastica, a pattern of fabricating detailed falsehoods regarding personal history, education, and achievements.”
In the extraordinary documentary Peter Asher: Everywhere Man, the title figure tells his fanciful, impossible-to-believe story — but in this case, it’s all remarkably true, including that his father, endocrinologist Dr. Richard Asher, is credited with introducing the term “Munchausen syndrome.”
Born in England in 1944, Asher has lived a charmed, and charming, life. He and his sisters, Jane and Clare, three redheads, were child actors affectionately known as the Carrots of Wimpole Street. At Westminster School, he met Gordon Waller, a fellow guitarist, and they formed a duo, Peter and Gordon, who joined the British Invasion and scored a series of huge hits, anchored by “A World without Love,” written for them in 1964 by Jane’s boyfriend, Paul McCartney, who was living in the Asher home at the time. Other songs followed: “I Don’t Want to See You Again,” “Woman,” “I Go to Pieces,” and “Nobody I Know,” and they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Asher’s mother, Margaret, was an oboist and professor who taught music to George Martin, the Beatles’ innovative producer.
Asher opened the highly influential Indica bookstore and gallery, where John Lennon met Yoko Ono. After serving as head of A&R for Apple Records, he became producer and then manager of a rising young folk singer named James Taylor, which led to him working with Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, and so many others (Diana Ross, Cher, Neil Diamond, Morrissey, Elton John, Rodrigo y Gabriela, 10,000 Maniacs, Robin Williams). He threw the party at which Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull fell in love, even though she was married to one of Asher’s Indica partners, John Dunbar. He put together backing bands with such musicians as King, bassist Leland Sklar, guitarists Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel, multi-instrumentalist Andrew Gold, and drummer Russ Kunkel, and he listed them on albums, something that previously was not done on pop records. And he did all of it with little or no training, just thriving on improvisation and experience.
“I think that Peter just got better and better at what he did,” Kortchmar says in the film. “Producing is a very broad term. Sometimes it means he’s a musical prodigy, and sometimes it means he’s a social worker or a therapist. And sometimes it means he or she just enables somebody who’s musically gifted to do their thing and get out of the way. And I think he probably can wear any of those hats.”
Directors and producers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller structure the documentary around Asher’s cabaret show, A Musical Memoir of the ’60s and Beyond, which they saw in December 2019 with Ronstadt. In the multimedia performance, Asher narrates his story and sings various songs with a band, along with projections of archival photos and videos. Editor Darren Lund intercuts new interviews with Monty Python veteran and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen costar Eric Idle, Steve Martin, Lyle Lovett, McCartney (voice), Twiggy, Kortchmar, Pattie Boyd, Paul Jones (Manfred Mann), Taylor and his sister Kate, Rolling Stone journalist Ben Fong-Torres, Indica cofounders Dunbar and Barry Miles, Natalie Merchant, and Asher’s longtime personal assistant, Chris O’Dell, among others, in addition to clips from a 2006 interview of Waller. They also follow Asher around London as he gives a tour to his daughter, Victoria.
Asher is generous with his time, although every now and then he prefers not to go into deep detail. When he is asked about drugs back in the 1960s and ’70s, he admits that he partook, although Ronstadt points out, “Cocaine was a lot of fun but it ruined everything.” Meanwhile, he had the unique ability to go where the action was, or create it himself.
Peter Asher relaxes in his office surrounded by many of his successes in an extraordinary career
Throughout it all, Asher, with his shock of bright red hair and dapper style, seems to have remained a warm, gentle, and caring individual who would do whatever it takes for his clients and friends, without seeking stardom for himself, at least since Peter & Gordon broke up in 1968. However, Wachtel states, “He’s a ham like the rest of us.”
“I suppose I do have this sort of generally optimistic view of what I set my hand to seems to work out okay, and I don’t think it’s necessarily to my credit at all,” he says humbly. “I think it could all just be a series of fortunate circumstances. But I’ve never really known what I was going to be doing next.”
Asher, a three-time Grammy winner and CBE (Commander of the British Empire), has touched so many people around the world over the last seven decades, whether they realize it or not, and it’s to his credit that he doesn’t get caught up in that, although he is clearly proud of his nearly endless accomplishments, as he should be. The film, to its credit, captures that beautifully. Asher was so often in the room where it happened, and is still happening, and Goldfine and Geller bring audiences into those very rooms.
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man opens June 18 at the Quad, with Goldfine and Geller (The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song) participating in Q&As following the screenings on June 18 at 7:15 (moderated by Alan Light), June 19 at 7:00 (Dennis Elsas), June 20 at 7:00 (Joe Neumaier), and June 21 at 2:30 (Neumaier). You can find a Spotify playlist for the film here.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]