The Beatles’ break-up: have we all got it completely wrong?
As popular history has it, the making of Let It Be destroyed the greatest band of all time. But a revealing new documentary on The Beatles’ final year together tells a very different story.
It’s every boy’s, or rather middle-aged man in a state of arrested development’s dream: to play with the Beatles during their final concert on the rooftop of 3 Savile Row, London. I have even replicated John Lennon’s outfit of a black polo neck, black cords and dirty white sandshoes for the occasion. OK, he had an Epiphone Casino guitar and I’ve got an old Hohner with the strings the wrong way round because my left-handed son has been using it. OK, Paul, George, Ringo, the real John and any discernible musical talent are nowhere to be found. But apart from that … it’s almost like being there.
The Beatles’ 42-minute rooftop concert of January 30, 1969, which was brought to a halt by an embarrassed policeman who told them to stop after complaints from neighbouring offices, forms the centrepiece of The Beatles: Get Back, Peter Jackson’s three-part, six-hour documentary on the making of Let It Be. This is the 1970 album that, as popular history has it, destroyed the greatest band of all time. Financial disagreements, George Harrison’s increasing frustrations at not having his songs recorded, the growing influence of Yoko Ono on Lennon and the basic reality of four teenage friends growing up and moving on are an inarguable part of the story. However, on the eve of a new version of the album, remastered by Giles Martin (son of George), and accompanying book featuring the transcripts from the sessions and Jackson’s film, a very real possibility has arisen. We have all got it completely wrong.
“I had always thought the original Let It Be film was pretty sad as it dealt with the break-up of our band,” says Paul McCartney, whose idea it was to have the film as a document of the Beatles’ return to live performance. “But the new film shows the camaraderie and love the four of us had between us. It also shows the wonderful times we had together. It’s how I want to remember the Beatles.”
Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director of the original 1970 documentary, gave Jackson more than 55 hours of footage to shape into the new film. “What I like about the rooftop concert is the surprising degree of pleasure showing on their faces,” Lindsay-Hogg says. “They loved it, right up to the moment of John saying, ‘I hope we’ve passed the audition.’ The making of Let It Be was actually a happy experience. The problem was that by the time it came out the Beatles had broken up. As Jackson says, “My film was an orphan. It wasn’t even allowed to have a nice pair of sandals.”
The story began in November 1968, when Lindsay-Hogg got a call from McCartney. In September the director had shot a promotional film for Hey Jude, the Beatles enjoyed the experience, and now McCartney wanted to know if Lindsay-Hogg would be interested in shooting a TV special on the band. That goes to the heart of Beatles lore: whether or not McCartney’s leadership proved overbearing for the other members.
“Paul was certainly the driver of the bus, but the others didn’t show any signs of wanting to jump off,” Lindsay-Hogg says. “He suggested that I shoot some documentary footage of the band rehearsing at Twickenham studios, to make a little trailer before the TV special. What could be better?”
The engineer and producer Glyn Johns also got a call from McCartney about recording rehearsals for a live concert and TV show of new material. His previously unreleased 1969 mix of the album is included in the forthcoming new edition. “The Beatles were four blokes who were subject to the same emotional shit as everybody else,” Johns says. “They were much like every other band I’ve worked with in that way. But they certainly weren’t falling out. For most of the time they were in very good spirits.”
At the beginning of 1969 Lindsay-Hogg started filming the rehearsals, including a famously terse conversation between McCartney and Harrison on January 6 during a run-through of Two of Us in which the former said: “I always hear myself annoying you.” McCartney thought the TV special could be shot in the Beatles’ old stomping ground of the Cavern in Liverpool. Lindsay-Hogg said it was too small. Another suggestion was to play in a field. During rehearsals on January 6 Ono offered the Royal Albert Hall, with no audience or as “something completely formal, you know, kings and queens coming to see it”.
Lindsay-Hogg had seen a feature about an amphitheatre in Libya and envisioned the Beatles playing at the site at sunrise. He thought the band could travel there by ship, alongside a few hundred fans, but Harrison did not relish the prospect of being “stuck with a bloody big boatload of people for two weeks”. Then, in a session on January 9, Harrison mumbled: “I think I’ll be … I’m leaving.” Everyone stops playing. To Lennon’s “What?” he replies: “The band now.” He came back, of course, even after Lennon suggested replacing him with Eric Clapton, but it is generally viewed as the point where it all went wrong. Johns dismisses the incident as a storm in a teacup – “Somebody went off in a huff and got over it” – but Harrison had come back from hanging out with Bob Dylan and The Band in upstate New York, they thought he was great, and he was smarting at being the perennial kid brother to the two songwriting geniuses he had grown up with.
“Neil Aspinall, who used to drive the Beatles’ van before becoming the director of Apple, said that when they were teenagers John and Paul would walk down the street discussing their great plans while George would be a few feet behind, carrying their guitar cases,” Lindsay-Hogg says. “George was a particularly sensitive man and he felt he wasn’t getting a fair shake creatively and financially, but he was not the guy who screwed things up. He did leave the group for three or four days, but he came back – on the condition that we all stopped talking about the TV special.”
This is where history has misled us. Once Harrison returned, the band left the cold, wintry mornings of rehearsal sessions at Twickenham for the far more conducive environment of the basement studio at Apple’s Savile Row building. The keyboard player Billy Preston came on board and a period of real harmony and creativity ensued. “When you have someone else at the dinner table the family tends to be less argumentative,” Lindsay-Hogg says of the effect Preston joining rehearsals had on the Beatles. With plans for the TV special abandoned, they were concentrating on recording an album that would reconnect with their rock’n’roll roots. It left Lindsay-Hogg without a focus for his film until he came up with a brainwave.
“We were having lunch one day when I said, ‘Why don’t we do it on the roof?’ And John said, ‘Do what on the roof?’” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “I had the idea that if I could get them to go two floors up from their Apple offices at Savile Row, I could salvage the documentary I was making.”
Lindsay-Hogg set up a shoot with 11 cameras, including three in the street and one inside a two-way mirror in the lobby to film the police should they arrive (which they did). The footage captures the generation gap at the end of the 1960s, with hippie royalty on the roof and working stiffs on the street. Aware that next door was a fabric distribution company run by men in bowler hats and Crombie coats, paranoid that as an American without a proper work permit an altercation with the police could end in deportation, Lindsay-Hogg tried to prepare for any potential showdown as best he could.
“I had a sense that if there was a problem it would come from the fabric company, which is exactly what happened,” he says. “The rock’n’roll musicians were children of World War II. These were men who actually fought in it. They called the police and said that this rock music is all very well in its place, but it was upsetting the customers, and in the event a young bobby came up onto the roof and stopped it. I kept thinking about what he was going to tell his wife when he got home that night.”
The impromptu gig captured the Beatles at their best: a raw rock’n’roll band, fired up by playing dynamic new songs like I’ve Got a Feeling and Get Back – and in the case of One After 909, one Lennon had written when he was 15.
“They were rehearsing to play live, not to compete with the extraordinary avenues of production they had broken the rules of previously,” Johns says of the Let It Be era. “I was there to capture the sound of them playing. What gave me the idea for my version of the album was to be a fly on the wall to the most successful musicians in the world as they behaved like normal people, took the piss out of each other and played brilliantly as a group.”
Johns also remembers the rooftop gig being extremely cold, with Lennon and Starr borrowing fur coats from their wives to get through it. “Thank God it was only half an hour,” he says.
It was during the rollout of Let It Be when things went seriously wrong. In April 1969 Johns suggested releasing the recordings he had made as a vital capturing of the rehearsals and the concert with no production and mistakes included. The Beatles, though, had moved on to Abbey Road.
“John and Paul told me to just get on with it on my own,” Johns says. “That’s how interested they were in the whole thing. They didn’t even want to be there when I did it.”
As for the film, there was a screening on July 20, 1969, the day of the moon landings, after which Lindsay-Hogg was told there was too much footage of John and Yoko. Then Let It Be had its official premiere in London in December 1969. “None of the Beatles showed up for it,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “It felt that nobody was looking after the film except me.” By the time it came out in the US in May 1970, the Beatles were no more.
In early 1970 Lennon sent the recordings for Let It Be to Phil Spector, much to the dismay of McCartney, who objected in particular to his simple piano ballad The Long and Winding Road being smothered in the producer’s trademark orchestration. It proved to be the final nail in the coffin.
“I don’t remember being told about it,” Johns says of Spector’s intervention. “We were waiting for the film to be edited and my version of the album was meant to be coming out with that. Then they started work on Abbey Road, George Martin took over, and I went off to America and didn’t think much more about it. I do remember being sent the finished album. I put it on, listened to the first eight bars and thought, ‘What a load of rubbish.’ I haven’t played it since.”
All of this has led up to Jackson making the film, Giles Martin remastering the album and the real story of Let It Be coming out a half-century later. Giles Martin, who has remixed 50th-anniversary editions of Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road, insists that his life does not actually revolve around the Beatles. It is just that it’s the only thing he ends up being interviewed about.
“Working on it I realised they were making the album because the marriage wasn’t working and they were looking to rediscover the magic,” Martin says. “That was very much John and Paul. They put huge pressure on themselves: you know, we’ll spend three weeks writing and rehearsing new songs, then we’ll do a gig and we’ll film it too. It was that Beatles thing of ‘we can do anything’.”
Martin says he remembers his father talking about how much more protective Harrison was of his songs than were Lennon and McCartney. “John used to say, ‘Is Harrisongs here?’ But that’s understandable when you consider that George was trying to compete with the two behemoths of popular music. Still, it is hard to understand why George’s All Things Must Pass wasn’t on Let It Be when (the jokey folk song) Maggie Mae was.”
Going through the hours of footage, Martin was surprised at the lack of rancour. “My dad always said that they had outgrown each other. The White Album was arduous – nobody wanted to do 76 takes of Sexy Sadie – and Brian Epstein dying, no touring and a lack of discipline was taking its toll. And they were knackered: 213 songs in seven years is a big outlay. It was certainly fractious at Twickenham, but when they went to Apple things changed and Let It Be was not the break-up of the Beatles. They were singing harmonies together on Two of Us, which you don’t do if you are at each other’s throats.”
Glyn Johns sums up the appeal of Let It Be. “This band started off by writing great songs,” he says. “They went on to reinvent the wheel with Sgt Pepper. The only place left to go was back to the beginning.” The sheer joy of the rooftop concert proved that Let It Be did not cause the break-up of the Beatles. Instead it marked their brief, late career return to what they started out as: a fantastic rock’n’roll band. And, 52 years later, we’re still waiting for a better one to come along.
The Times
Let It Be: Special Edition packages are released on October 15.
Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back screens on Disney+ in November.