“THIS WAS LIKE YOUR PARENTS GETTING DIVORCED”
Photographer ETHAN RUSSELL was there for every day of Let It Be, and it still amazes him: “That they could do what they did under those circumstances is unbelievable.”
WHAT GOT ME into Let It Be was that I had shot John and Yoko in 1968, one of the first things I did in London, and they’d liked me. One of those shots, from a contact sheet I took into Apple, made it into the collage inside The White Album, which they didn’t tell me about but of course I was really excited. I rang John, and mentioned that they’d used my picture and he said, “What do you want, a royalty?”
I knew they were going to be filming in Twickenham because I’d just shot The Rolling Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus and I knew Michael Lindsay-Hogg and the crew, so I asked [Beatles tour manager/Apple exec] Neil Aspinall if I could come down and he said, “No, absolutely not. Anyway, David Bailey’s going to be down there,” which I’m convinced was a complete lie. So I just drove down there and walked on the set. Aspinall’s first words to me were, and this is such horseshit, “We’ve decided to let you come down.” So the next day I started shooting. My approach was, ‘What would it feel like to be standing right here with The Beatles?’
George’s walkout? I didn’t see it, but I witnessed the brouhaha. I remember a bunch of hushed whispering and Michael [LindsayHogg] trying to get the story out of them with this pen mike concealed in his top pocket – a real James Bond thing, right? But there was no question that George was unhappy. He looked permanently miserable. And he had a point: what the fuck were they doing getting up at 9am and trying to make a record on a sound stage?
Even when they moved to Apple – and it was better there and Billy Preston made a big difference – it’s still this tiny basement room, and you’ve got three or four cameras floating around and I’m there and Michael’s there and Yoko’s there and Linda’s there and Heather’s there. And Yoko’s going through this horrible experience with the British press: ageist, racist shit. I mean, it’s stressed. That they could do what they did under those circumstances is unbelievable. I mean, starting with a bunch of not-really songs and 30 days later playing them on the roof of Apple? I mean, who does that? Certainly not The Rolling Stones!
Shooting the roof gig was an experience. I realised that from the front, I couldn’t get them all in, even with a 24mm lens. So I had to get as far away from them as possible. So I had one leg over the scaffolding pole at the lip of the roof – after that, it’s straight down. Earlier on, I’d taken my pictures to Apple and projected them in Pete Brown’s office. Out of that slideshow came the idea of doing a book and putting it with the album – 160 pages with transcribed speech from the film. Unfortunately, it wasn’t well made – the book fell apart quite quickly – and it didn’t happen in the States; Capitol wouldn’t pay for it.
Looking back, I kind of think about Let It Be similarly to how I feel about Altamont. In the ’60s it had felt everything was going up and up. Neither Let It Be or Altamont had been well enough set up, but the ethic was you just kept going.
And it’s easy to forget how much we were dependent on The Beatles. They defined our world, and this was a bit like your parents getting divorced. It’s like, “No, no, no, get over yourselves, because you’ve got
me to look after!” But why did they have to look after us? When had they
ever signed up for that?
Ethan Russell’s photographs, along with shots by Linda McCartney, illustrate the Get Back book.
“MY APPROACH WAS, ‘WHAT WOULD IT FEEL LIKE TO BE STANDING RIGHT HERE WITH THE BEATLES?’”
M