MY favourite scene in The Beatles’ classic 1965 movie, Help! is the moment the Fab Four are chauffeur driven home by Rolls Royce to a row of terraced houses in London.

As John, Paul, George and Ringo walk up the paths to their individual front doors – at Nos. 5, 7, 9 and 11 Ailsa Avenue in Twickenham – they get a friendly wave from a couple of nosy neighbours.

“Lovely lads … adoration hasn’t gone to their heads one jot,” says the first, played by Gretchen Franklin, now best known for her appearance in EastEnders.

While her pal – portrayed by Dandy Nichols of Till Death Us Do Part fame – adds:

“Just so natural, and still the same as they was … before they was.”

What they don’t realise is that the boys all live in the same house. After walking through four separate doors they enter one huge open-plan space that is zoned by a colour for each member of the group.

While Lennon reclines on a sunken bed reading a copy of his book A Spaniard In The Works, McCartney plays on a massive cinema organ.

And as Harrison keeps a close eye on his gardener cutting a patch of grass with a pair of false teeth, Ringo wrestles with row of vending machines full of drinks and snacks.

As a nine-year-old Beatles’ fan I thought it was the coolest house I’d ever seen. Barrie-James O’Neill of Kassidy was also impressed.

The singer has first-hand experience of a similar form of communal band living … albeit several rungs lower down the ladder of pop success.

Kassidy will reform to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their debut album, Hope St.

The band play Barrowland on May 28, after a planned Christmas date next week was rescheduled due to the latest surge by the Covid Omicron variant.

The record was recorded during a period when they lived and worked together 24 hours a day.

In 2009, O’Neill, Hamish Fingland, Lewis Andrew and Chris Potter set up home in Park Lane Studio where bands such as Texas, Del Amitri, Primal Scream, Gun and Altered Images had previously made records.

“The building is an old horse stable dating back to the early 1900s. It wasn’t designed for people to actually live there,” revealed Barrie.

“We thought, how cool would it be if we moved in? We envisioned this dream as a young band where we’d always be together to write or record whenever we wanted to.

“I feel like we manifested it in a way because we called it our house. We were big fans of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young whose logo was CSNY.

“So we bought a stencil with our name which read KSDY and spray painted it on the brick walls.

“We moved beds in to try to make it more habitable. I claimed the only room that didn’t have any windows. It was used for recording drums and had two big tannoy speakers on the wall with thick, dirty curtains to help deaden the sound. The downstairs toilet had a hand-dryer in it, so we got a kick out of that.

“At first it was exciting. We started to write every day. It became a hub where everything came to us. It was a brilliant space and had some real magic to it.”

Kassidy were formed 12 years ago after a chance meeting between O’Neill and Fingland.

“Hamish came up to me in a bar and he was a real bundle of energy. We got talking about music and it was like fate almost,” recalled Barrie.

“Initially, it started off more as a Mamas And Papas type thing with two female singers.

“When that didn’t work out Lewis and Chris were eventually introduced. It felt like all the ingredients were there.”

Their impressive songs, built around four-part vocal harmonies, earned them a deal with Mercury Records.

To pave the way for their first album they released a trio of records - The Rubbergum EPs Vol. 1, 2 and 3 – co-produced with Thomas McNeice, now bassist with Gang Of Four.

“The songs came mainly from Chris and myself. We’d often come in with half-baked ideas – maybe a verse and bridge but no chorus – and were quite good at completing each other’s work,” said Barrie.

“Hamish and Lewis would pitch in with more ideas and harmonies. It was all very collaborative.”

The first sessions for Hope St. began in RAK Studios in London with producer Jim Abiss, whose credits include The Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian and Adele. But after a frustrating period things ground to a halt.

“The problem was us, it wasn’t Jim or the studio,” admitted Barrie.

“He did a fantastic job of producing us. It was an amazing experience. But with hindsight we were listening to the results and thinking … we didn’t really nail this.

“There were some great moments on those recordings. They were much more earthy and authentic sounding than the final version.

“But the only song we kept was The Betrayal. It was difficult to walk away from what was almost a full album. Maybe it was just too early for us.”

The band retreated to Park Lane to work again with McNeice. But, perhaps inevitably, their communal living plan sometimes proved problematic.

“As young boys you like to go out drinking and partying, so it was a bit like The Young Ones,” admitted Barrie.

“And while it helped bring us together, you also had to keep your distance at times.

“At the end of a tour you just want to go back into your own wee shell and maybe see your family or girlfriend.

“But we were always together. And in any relationship like that there is going to be tension. That’s just human nature.

“It did bring us closer but at the same time it also

affected our dynamic a little bit. We did party hard, but we worked hard too. So all in all I’d say the house was a success.”

In creative terms, the Park Lane sessions proved more fruitful with the single, I Don’t Know plus key tracks Stray Cat, Waking Up Sideways and Take Another Ride forming the cornerstones of a solid album.

“We felt more comfortable in that environment and started hammering things down with Thomas. It made sense and felt more natural,” recalled Barrie.

“We’d spend 12 hours at a time recording. If someone was doing a guitar part – even if it took ages as they were trying to work something out – the rest of us would be encouraging them to get there.

“Thomas woke me up one day, at my request, because I wanted him to play a trick on me psychologically at some point on the record.

“I told him to randomly get me out of bed to see if my voice was more raspy and less thought out.

“He got me up at 10am and I wasn’t very happy because I’m not really a morning person and there was no coffee or cigarette.

“He said, right, Baz let’s go. We recorded That Old Song while I was still half asleep and because my brain was not working properly and there was no time to think about it … it just all came out.

“But that’s the way it was for me. When you’re in a band … you’re IN a band. 24 hours a day, even when you go down to the shops. I was always in that frame of mind.”

When Kassidy re-unite to showcase Hope St. they’ll salute an album they feel still has enormous merit 10 years after its release.

“I listened to it one night recently with a wee whisky, and for me it still has a lot of relevance,” said Barrie.

“I feel if Kassidy were around today the album would be just as popular, if not more so.

“At the time we were coming through it was a really strong period of music with acts like The Arctic Monkeys, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry creeping in. The music industry was changing.

“You meet people around Glasgow and they still remember Hope St. and share their memories of the album with you. It’s a good record and it takes me back every time I hear it.”

* THE Billy Sloan Show is on BBC Radio Scotland every Saturday at 10pm.

KASSIDY were inspired by two of their favourite movies when they shot a video for the lead single from Hope St.

In the promo for I Don’t Know, the band members were cast as psychiatrists whose female patients all looked like supermodels.

It makes reference to the Oscar winning films One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Girl, Interrupted.

“Making videos was new to us at the time but we were sent a treatment that really got our attention,” recalled Barrie.

“We filmed in this abandoned mental hospital in London and came up with an ending where it turns out it’s the band who are all crazy. So the girls turn the tide on us.”

They followed the success of Hope St. with another impressive album, One Man Army in 2012.

O’Neill had also begun a relationship with US singer Lana Del Rey. She invited Kassidy to be special guests on her Paradise tour of Europe the following year.

But when O’Neill started to move in a different direction musically it was the beginning of the end.

He quit the band and relocated to Los Angeles to live with Del Rey.

“Kassidy developed me both as a person and musician. Having those guys in my life is something I’ll remember forever,” he said.

“But I was writing songs which eventually made it on to my first solo album.

“I felt my voice, soul and spirit was more suited to them. At that moment I thought … I love you guys, but my heart is not in the music any more.

“I wasn’t just leaving a band, I was leaving a family. But I wasn’t feeling it inside and didn’t want to force it or fake it.

“To this day I still feel sad. It would have been great to keep it going. But I’d fallen out of love with the songs and wanted to try something a bit more intimate and closer to who I was.”

Kassidy continued as a three piece for a brief period before calling it a day.

But celebrating the 10th anniversary of Hope St. has brought them closer together again. Could the reunion be permanent?

“We were taken aback when tickets for Barrowland were gone in one day,” said Barrie.

“We thought … wow, that’s pretty cool after 10 years. We’re sounding better now than we ever did. So who knows? It’s very open ended.”