THE BEATLES
How the upcoming Get Back films, and a brand new audio package, will make you rethink Let It Be, the album and its context. With Paul McCartney, Peter Jackson, Glyn Johns, Michael Lindsay-Hogg and more.
A logistical car crash, a furious George, a ubiquitous Yoko, then – eventually – the split: the film and the album of Let It Be have been shaded by partial versions of what went on, inside THE BEATLES, in January 1969. Now a book, a box set and three films by Peter Jackson are poised to shed revelatory light on the thing they called Get Back. “It was always something special,” discovers JOHN HARRIS.
Photograph by ETHAN A. RUSSELL.
NEW INTERVIEWS! Paul McCartney, Peter Jackson, Michael Lindsay Hogg, Glyn Johns, Giles Martin.
T’S THE ULTIMATE BACKSTAGE SNEAK PEEK. YOU’RE REALLY THE FLY ON the wall, and The Beatles are working, and you can see it all. There it is. And I love that.”
Paul McCartney is on the phone from Long Island, enthusing about the huge archival project titled Get Back, and the new films – put together by the superstar film-maker Peter Jackson, and due to be released in late November – that draw on the hours of footage originally shot for the 1970 documentary Let It Be, released just as the world became aware of The Beatles’ break-up, and long understood as a grim portrait of a group nearing its end.
Fifty years on, the man who was by then The Beatles’ de facto leader sounds full of a mixture of relief and enthusiasm. As McCartney sees it, a much-misunderstood phase of Beatles history has at last been put the right way up – something vividly demonstrated by what he says about one small aspect of a single day back in early 1969.
On Thursday Januar y 9, The Beatles were spending their sixth day at Twickenham Film Studios, working on new songs and supposedly rehearsing for their first performance in front of an audience since August ’66, which would be filmed for a one-off TV special. They had formed themselves into a circular huddle, amid teacups, wine glasses, ashtrays and pieces of paper full of lyrics and chords, while a camera crew filmed what they were doing in forensic detail and two Nagra tape recorders captured almost all their conversation. This material was intended to be used as a supporting feature: a short behind-the-scenes film that would whet people’s appetite for the big live show.
That day, McCartney worked on The Long And Winding Road, and briefly played early incarnations of Her Majesty, Golden Slumbers, Oh! Darling, and Carry That Weight, which he thought might be a knockabout country number in the style of Act Naturally, the Buck Owens hit they had covered four years before. The whole band went through Don’t Let Me Down, I’ve Got A Feeling and One After 909, which had been largely written by the young John Lennon and first recorded with George Martin back in 1963. The song that would become Get Back also began to cohere.
If all this outwardly suggested a day of bonhomie and creativity, there were also more difficult undercurrents. For a lot of their time at Twickenham, Lennon seemed quiet and withdrawn. Harrison, meanwhile, was sometimes presenting an even more awkward picture. He would walk out of the sessions the next day with the priceless line, “See you round the clubs.”
Yet 24 hours before Harrison temporarily quit, The Beatles were still alighting on real magic – not least when Paul led initial work on She Came In Through The Bathroom Window, a song inspired by a recent incident when some of the Beatles fans fondly known as the Apple Scruffs had illicitly entered his home in St John’s Wood.
The footage of what ensued is a delight. Lennon and McCartney’s vocal harmonies lock in as a matter of instinct, and even at this early stage, the song is audibly becoming the creation that will eventually appear on Abbey Road. There are also smiles and guffaws, as the two of them trade lines:
“And so I quit the police department…”
“Gerra job, cop!…”
“And got myself a proper job…”
“Bloody ’bout time too if you ask me…”
“And though she tried her best to help me…”
“You bloody need it too…”
It was the scene that persuaded Paul McCartney that returning so exhaustively to what we have long known as the Let It Be period was a good idea.
“When I first heard Peter was going to do it,” he says, “we chatted, and I said to him, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to like this, Peter, ’cos I remember [this period] as a nice thing, but the first time round, it became a little bit The
Break Up Of The Beatles, and we were mourning the whole thing.’ He understood. He went away and started e-mailing me, and saying, ‘You know, I’m not finding that at all.’ He said: ‘You won’t believe it – there’s all sorts of great stuff.’ He sent me that Bathroom Window scene, and it really helped me.
“When I saw it, it was like, ‘I love this.’ That was me and John. It was also me and George. It was also George and Ringo. All of us had that relationship, and that’s what made us strong. When I start goofing at the end, going, ‘Tuesday’s on the phone to me – Hello Tuesday,’ John could have just laughed and carried on, but he would naturally pick it up. And he carries on. That was a big feature of our relationship since we were kids: if one of us started goofing off, one of the others would join in. That’s what I love: the sense of humour comes through, instead of the sense of regret.”
AWEEK AFTER McCARTNEY’S CALL, PETER JACKSON sets aside two hours to explain – via Zoom – almost ever y aspect of the Get Back project, and the new light it shines on The Beatles’ story. When we speak, he is still working on unfinished elements – not least its soundtrack, newly remixed by Giles Martin – and is as energised and tightly-focused as you would expect someone in the midst of such a taxing last stretch to be. It barely needs mentioning that Jackson is the Oscar-winning creator of the film versions of The Lord Of The Rings (floated, coincidentally, in the 1960s as a potential vehicle for The Beatles) and The Hobbit. The New Zealander was also the director and producer of They Shall Not Grow Old, the 2018 film for which original footage of the First World War was restored and cut together to stunning effect. A similar feat sits at the heart of Get Back: everything is pin-sharp, and The Beatles and their world come to sudden and vivid life.
Jackson and his team have been working on Get Back for around four years. Their labours were originally intended to result in a single film, for theatrical release. But when the pandemic placed a huge question mark over the global cinema industry, a rethink opened up the prospect of a much longer piece of work. The result is three two-hour films, largely made up of never-before-seen material.
As Jackson explains, his work on Get Back is partly traceable to a happy accident. In the summer of 2017, he was talking to The Beatles’ Apple organisation about the idea of a touring Beatles exhibition which might use Virtual Reality technology, something pioneered by Jackson’s New Zealand-based company Wingnut. He says he tentatively suggested that unseen footage from early 1969 might be good material for such an experience – whereupon Apple told him that on that score, they had other plans: with the 50th anniversary of Let It Be approaching and exhaustive work tracking down hours of missing audio recordings almost complete, it was maybe time for a new film.
“I’m not a particularly forward sort of guy – I’m quite shy,” says Jackson. “But I just said to them, Well, if you want someone to do the documentary, I’ll stick my hand up right now.”
For around a week, he sat in Apple’s South Kensington HQ, looking at whole days of rushes. Having read innumerable Beatles histories and bought Let It Be-era bootlegs, he was as convinced of the received idea of the period’s supposed unending misery as any Beatles enthusiast. But as he watched, he was struck by “the humour, the jokes, the good-natured spirit of it all”. He agreed in principle to take the project on, and then began immersing himself in 130 hours of audio and video. “Partway through, I remember calling [Apple’s] Jeff [Jones] and saying ‘This is really great stuff. I love it.’”
When it was announced that Jackson was to restore and revive the mountain of footage shot in 1969, suggestions that his work would reveal a sunnier side to the Let It Be period were seen by some as dangerous revisionism. Just before Christmas 2020, a fiveminute montage Jackson made for YouTube – built from some of the sessions’ light-hearted moments, and intended to cheer viewers up in the midst of the pandemic – also fed the idea that the new films might smooth over the period’s problems and tensions. But this perception, as Jackson explains, is nowhere near the truth.
For the YouTube clip, he says, “we chucked together a reel of a lot of goofy, funny stuff. But that’s never been our agenda. I just wanted to try to do it truthfully. And truthful [means] a funny
“WHEN I FIRST HEARD PETER JACKSON WAS GOING TO DO IT, I SAID TO HIM, ‘I’M NOT SURE I’M GOING TO LIKE THIS, PETER.’” PAUL McCARTNEY
“IT’S A FESTERING WOUND, AND YESTERDAY WE ALLOWED IT TO GO EVEN DEEPER, AND WE DIDN’T GIVE [GEORGE] ANY BANDAGES.” JOHN LENNON
combination of goodwill with a lot of moments of tension and stress. It’s all there. I mean, you could easily mount an argument to say that this movie is actually a lot tougher than Let It Be. We’ve got things that are more stressful and tough in some respects than what you see there. The point is that you understand the context. It’s all about context.”
THE CONTEXT OF THE ORIGINAL LET IT BE MOVIE was Paul McCartney’s announcement in April 1970 that he considered The Beatles dissolved. When the film was released the following month, reviewers broadly agreed with the judgment of the Sunday Telegraph: “Let It Be is rather like watching the Albert Hall being dismantled into a block of National Coal Board offices.”
In 2021, Let It Be director Michael Lindsay-Hogg still regrets how his film became a hostage to fortune. “No one was looking after the movie at all,” he tells MOJO today. “They’d broken up. They didn’t care. It was a bit like the little child abandoned in the doorway, which didn’t help the way it was received.”
Lindsay-Hogg, now 81, had made his name on the trailblazing TV pop show Ready Steady Go!, and directed the 1966 promotional shorts for The Beatles’ Paperback Writer and Rain. In late 1968, around the time he took charge of The Rolling Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus (made for TV, also featuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and unreleased until 1996), he oversaw the filming of clips for Hey Jude and Revolution at Twickenham. It was the presence of an audience for the former song that sparked the idea for a live, televised Beatles performance.
“We did six takes,” he says. “And between each take, we’d have to put on a fresh two-inch video tape. There was a 10- or 11minute break between each take. Their Hamburg instincts kicked in: they were surrounded by a couple of hundred people, and they started to play. The go-to at that time was Tamla Motown, and Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Of course, the crowd loved it. And they loved it. And then Paul called me and said, ‘You know, when we were doing Hey Jude, we had a good time. And it gave us the idea that maybe we could play to some kind of an audience again. What we want to do is a TV special. Do you want to direct it?’”
As the filming at Twickenham began, Lindsay-Hogg had visions of a live performance that would be spectacular. The venues discussed included the Albert Hall, a bandstand in Hyde Park, and a Roman amphitheatre at Sabratha in Libya, with a suggestion that The Beatles and a selection of fans might sail there on a P&O liner.
“I was looking forward to delivering – to the world – the great Beatles extravaganza: the wonderful songs they were writing, coming out of these four extraordinary people who represented optimism and enthusiasm,” says Lindsay-Hogg. “The television special would show all that, and subsequently there would be world peace and everyone would have ice cream (laughs). Once I saw it was going awry, which was when George left, we sat around in a desultor y way, wondering what was going on. I saw, obviously, that the all-time great Beatles extravaganza was going [away], but I was also thinking, ‘Now what?’”
The answer soon became clear: he was now making a long-form documentary for theatrical release, but the fact that it took well over a year to complete meant that it collided with The Beatles’ split, and was understood accordingly. “What irks me is, because they broke up before it came out, not clocking that it actually was made a year before, everybody sees it as the breakup movie,” he says. “And consequently thinks it’s sad, it’s a downer, it’s a bummer.”
The original Let It Be was only briefly available to watch at home – in the early 1980s – and was withdrawn from TV screenings at around the same time, but LindsayHogg says he is looking forward to a fully restored version of his film coming out some time after the release of Jackson’s Get Back. Not that he has any problems with the latter. In fact, when he was informed that Jackson was set to work on the original footage, he says his response was simple: “I said, ‘You’re going to be surprised to hear this, but I’m delighted, because I wouldn’t want to do it.’
“The bits I’ve seen that Peter’s done are really fabulous,” he says. “And also, very early on, he said, ‘You know, I think you’re going to be in this movie a lot. Even if I wanted to get you out of it, I couldn’t, because in you’re in it so much.’ He’s always said he’s making a documentary about the making of a documentary.”
FIFTY YEARS AGO, THANKS TO RAW WOUNDS AND the limitations of a single film, going deep into The Beatles’ relationships and chronicling their changed plans and abandoned hopes would have been unthinkable. But the new films push all that into the foreground. The result is the complex story of four people drifting apart but mostly getting on very well, and how they end up doing something spectacular, almost despite themselves.
“It’s a story of planning for a concert that never takes place,” says Jackson, breaking into a smile. “And then it’s the story of a concert that does take place, which wasn’t planned.”
Contrary to received opinion, it is also a portrait of one of the most prolific spells in The Beatles’ career, when music was pouring out of McCartney and Harrison in particular.
Yet George’s exit stalls their concert plans and commences one of the Get Back films’ most compelling passages, in which the remaining Beatles engage in candid conversations about their future. Thanks to a microphone secreted in the Twickenham canteen by Lindsay-Hogg, we hear John frame George’s departure in stark terms: “It’s a festering wound, and yesterday we allowed it to go even deeper, and we didn’t give him any bandages.”
Paul McCartney, meanwhile, is a careful, sensitive, emotionally literate presence, trying to orientate four increasingly different in
dividuals in the same direction, while remaining respectful of their differences, particularly when it comes to John’s relationship with Yoko (“It’s not even so much of an obstacle, as long as we’re not trying to surmount it”). And as they discuss the prospect of The Beatles coming to an end, he is visibly distraught.
“Paul was getting very, very upset,” says Jackson. “People have heard bootlegs [of these conversations] for years. But because nobody’s ever seen the pictures, you haven’t seen the tears that well up in Paul’s eyes. He’s desperately trying not to cry, and he’s breathing like a goldfish to sort of try to push the tears away. That’s all in the picture. I mean, there’s such a big difference between the audio that has been out there, and actually putting pictures with it. It transforms it.”
Having seen so much of him, what did Jackson make of John? “The most unexpected thing, that I didn’t even contemplate going into this – is how immensely patient he is: how patient and quiet and friendly,” says the director. “I said that to Paul, actually. Over the years, whenever Paul’s been asked to talk about John, he usually ends up saying that John was a lovely guy. Well I’ve seen John be funny, I’ve seen him be witty, I’ve seen him be sarcastic, but I’ve never really seen him be lovely. But the lovely John that Paul has been talking about for years was actually captured on film.” And Ringo?
“The weirdest, strangest thing is that Ringo is always regarded as being the upbeat member. [But] of all of them, he looks the most down and depressed of the lot. You’ve never read about that in the books, because on the bootleg tapes, he doesn’t say much. When you have the pictures… certainly in Twickenham, we struggled to find any shots of Ringo smiling.”
Whatever his mood, it should be noted, Starr’s musicianship is dependably astonishing, and his garish-yet-dapper attire marks him out as the most stylish Beatle at the Get Back sessions. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Jackson enthuses. “Him and [engineer] Glyn Johns, who’s a bit of a of a style bunny, too. (Laughs) The ’60s look so much more fun than the world today.”
And what of George Harrison? “I understand George almost more than I understand the other Beatles,” says Jackson, “because he’s very much like a New Zealand male. He’s pragmatic. There’s not one iota of George that gets swept up in a romantic notion of doing this or that, or the excitement of it all. He’s just, ‘How are we going to do this? That’s not going to work. That’s a stupid idea.’ And his reasoning is good. You want that kind of guy in your group. I mean, my favourite thing is when they’re talking about getting the ocean liner. You know, and that P&O will give them one for free. And he says, ‘We can’t even get Fender to give us a free amp.’ That’s one of George’s great lines.”
A lot of the pathos of Get Back derives, Jackson thinks, from an unresolvable problem. “The Beatles really want to be the Hamburg band again. That’s the bittersweet part of the whole story. It’s a band who has achieved so much fame that they can really no longer be a band again. They really sort of want to go back to the Top 10 club [in Hamburg] again, or the Cavern. It’s not talked about, but you get the sense that the time of their lives that they loved the best was back then. They’re trying to chase something that’s sort of impossible.”
McCartney acknowledges the films’ more awkward moments, and the need for them. “I’m glad Peter has put in the little arguments, because it would’ve looked like a whitewash other wise,”
“I WANTED TO DO IT TRUTHFULLY. YOU COULD EASILY MOUNT AN ARGUMENT THAT THIS MOVIE IS ACTUALLY A LOT TOUGHER THAN LET IT BE.” PETER JACKSON
he says now. “But those arguments are really quite mild… A lot of families argue a lot worse than we did. A lot of bands argue a lot worse than we did.”
JACKSON’S GET BACK FILMS ARE ONLY ONE ASPECT of 2021’s Let It Be renaissance. A Let It Be album box set put together by Giles Martin includes conversation and outtakes and a new mix of the version of the LP so controversially assembled in early 1970 by Phil Spector. On the 5-CD and expanded vinyl versions, the raw, pre-Spector album named Get Back, completed by Glyn Johns in May 1969, finally gets an official release.
Get Back is also the title of a 240-page book – at which point, your writer should declare an interest. In 2019, I was approached by Apple about editing the conversations recorded on those Nagra tape machines. And for the next six months or so, ploughing through 20-odd spiral-bound volumes of precise transcripts and listening to the original tapes, I went through a mountain of music and conversation and did my best to shape it into a coherent story.
As well as hearing The Beatles’ musical work, I listened to them ordering breakfast and lunch, talking about what they had seen on TV, and discussing everyone from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Martin Luther King. I found everything from a cod-German version of Get Back (“Geht raus nach deinem Haus!”), to Lennon enthusing to Harrison about Allen Klein, the American impresario who would soon take control of Apple, repulse Paul, and thereby seal The Beatles’ fate (“he knows me as much as you do – incredible guy,” said John). Going through the sessions’ more painful moments was almost as fascinating and moving as eventually seeing them on-screen; hearing the first stirrings of so many songs was an amazing pleasure.
As I read and listened, I got the same impression as Peter Jackson – that the received understanding of the Let It Be period had long since departed from a complex and nuanced reality. For instance, if you see Abbey Road as some kind of spectacular return to form, it’s worth bearing in mind how much of its music originated at these earlier sessions. It’s clear, moreover, that once The Beatles reconvened after Twickenham in the basement studio at Apple’s Savile Row headquarters on January 21, there was a huge creative and emotional upswing. Some of this was traceable to Billy Preston, the virtuosic keyboardist who adds so much to the music they proceed to make. But there was also a sense of the four Beatles suddenly feeling at home, and re-finding their bond. “You’re working so well together – you’re looking at each other, you’re seeing each other, you’re… just happening,” said George Martin, who became a more noticeable presence at the sessions.
What Martin saw is conclusively illustrated by the Get Back films’ 45-minute finale. When they finally play the show they’d debated since January 2, it’s January 30, on the rooftop of Apple’s offices. Jackson presents most of what happens in split-screen, divided between the group (plus Preston) and its performance, the mayhem on the street below, and the hilarious efforts of three police officers to call everything to a halt. His rendering of this most familiar occasion makes it newly thrilling. Apart from anything else, it confirms what a brilliant musical unit they remained, to the end.
“Like it had happened thousands of times throughout our playing career, there we were,” says McCartney. “Each one of us knew exactly what we had to do. And we knew we’d enjoy it, the minute we locked in… the minute the song was counted in, we all joined in with… (pause)… a great vigour and verve (laughs). We loved what we were doing. Every time we played together, everything else was forgotten. We were just the band, playing together. And it was always something special.”
THAT MUCH IS TRUE, BUT THERE IS OBVIOUSLY a bit more to what the cameras and tape recorders captured in 1969, and what is about to be released to the world. Get Back is full of so many revelations partly because no group has ever been filmed so intimately; the crucial thing is that the group in question are the most accomplished, fascinating band there has ever been, which makes just about every moment completely compelling.
Paul McCartney, for one, sounds like he is still mar velling at a lot of what he has seen. Like the precise moment that Get Back – the song that, advertised as “The Beatles as nature intended”, would reach Number 1 (US and UK) in April 1969 – came into the world. “Peter and I were in quite good contact,” he says, “because he would talk to me and Ringo to get the sort of realistic Beatle perspective. And he sent me a thing: ‘Did you have the song written before you came in the studio?’ I said, ‘No. We didn’t. It kind of came out of a jam. We just sort of made it up.’ And he said, ‘I’ve got this little bit of film.’ There’s me, in the rehearsal room, and I think I’m just clonking on the bass – (sings) ‘Dong-chuckadong-chucka-dong-chucka’, making a little rhythm. And then I start something that turns into Get Back.
“I knew we’d jammed it, and I knew we’d kicked it around. But seeing the actual moment when a melody emerges from a little bit of rhythmic noise – it was fabulous for me. Anybody I know who’s seen this says that. That’s what’s amazing: the intimacy. You get a free ticket to the room The Beatles are doing it in. The room where it happened.”