The Let It Be reels re-edited: a long and winding new perspective from The Beatles?
IT WAS 30 days of thumb-twiddling, flounces and set-backs, interspersed with occasionally inspiring, mostly rudimentary Beatles music, a project that didn’t quite come together. But out of that month’s work – the whole of January 1969 – came 140 hours of audio tapes (including several legendary unheard performances and two complete dry runs for the album), unused artwork, a book of photographs and material subsequently used for singles.
Meaning there’s scope for a ton of stuff to be included in the inevitable deluxe and super-deluxe packages when Let It Be, The Beatles’ documentary and accompanying album reaches its 50th anniversary in May (though at press time Giles Martin and his team have not done any new remixing, and the fate of 2003’s stripped-back Let It Be… Naked is yet to be decided).
But it’s the revisiting of the 55 hours of footage shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg that gave us the 1970 Let It Be film which arguably offers the most latitude for new and unexpected perspectives on what was effectively The Beatles’ farewell. Director Peter Jackson is restoring all the film and making a new edit. Will his film be Let It Be (Another Director’s Cut) or something else entirely? A version with more music than the original seems likely; one that, now there’s no need to be coy, is less circumspect about the cracks appearing in the band (“See you ’round the clubs”).
Alternatively, this Month In The Life, which only became sad or significant after the split, could easily be repurposed with a positive spin. “The reality is very different to the myth,” Jackson said of the films. “Watching John, Paul, George and Ringo work together, creating now-classic songs from scratch, is not only fascinating – it’s funny, uplifting and surprisingly intimate.” In an interview with Billboard in November, McCartney similarly recalled the director telling him that, “the overall impression is of friends working together,” rather than the terminal melancholy of the end of the adventure.
Lennon leant toward the latter when he said in 1970, regarding Glyn
Johns’ album, “I thought it would be good to go out – the shitty version
– because it would break
The Beatles. It would break the myth. That’s us with no trousers on…
[but] we ended up doing
Abbey Road quickly and putting out something slick to preserve the myth.” We’re sure there’d be a market for the myth-busting Get
Back With Let It Be And
11 Other Songs, as it was originally titled, in its proposed Please Please Me redux sleeve. After
Beatles biographer Mark Lewisohn’s recent unveiling of a recording made post-Abbey Road, in which The Beatles discuss making another album, we’ve arrived at a juncture where the memories and motives of those that were there are up for questioning as never before.
There would be less controversial, but still fascinating, on-screen bounty if the new film includes the full Savile Row rooftop performance which appeared on the original Let It Be movie in edited form. Lasting 42 minutes, featuring nine takes of five songs, it’s never been made officially available, and is a possible release in itself – The Beatles Live At 3 Savile Row, maybe?
“The reality is very different to the myth.” PETER JACKSON