Out of the 12 studio albums the Beatles recorded there was only one their fans greeted without the usual joy and wonder but with a mixture of disappointment and dread. That was Let It Be, released in May 1970.
The title was a phrase used by parents in their native Liverpool to calm quarrelsome or fractious children. It therefore seemed tacit confirmation of the rampaging rumours that the world’s most beloved pop band was imploding.
The album had initially been named after Paul McCartney’s song ‘Get Back’, reflecting the Beatles’ wish to return to a more ‘honest’ style after electronically embroidered tracks like his ‘Penny Lane’ and John’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
With it came a cinema documentary of the same name, intended to be little more than a ‘Beatles at work’ promo to make some amends to their public for having given up live shows four years earlier.
However, it turned out rather differently - so much so that after its theatrical release alongside the album, it disappeared from sight for 54 years, other than in odd Youtube clips and bootlegs.
Now it has been resurrected as part of the relentless monetising of the Beatles in a world which seemingly can’t get enough of them.
A digitally restored version by the Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson is currently on Disney+ as a postscript to Jackson’s eight-hour-plus 2021 documentary about the Get Back album’s recording sessions.
It’s a sweet moment for the film’s director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, now 84, who, despite an acclaimed directorial career (including the opening episode of television’s immortal Brideshead Revisited), has never stopped campaigning for its re-release.
When Lindsay-Hogg got the gig in 1969, he was 29 and best-known as a maker of early pop videos. On the strength of these, and almost unnatural good looks and charm, he’d become a trusted member of the Beatles’ inner circle, so was granted access to all areas.
The documentary that resulted was a lesson to everyone - myself included – who’d previously thought being a Beatle must be undiluted Heaven. Indeed, the band had gone into it with enough problems to break them up without taking another step.
Sixteen months after the death of their first manager Brian Epstein, from a barbiturates overdose, no successor had come forward who seemed capable of matching his almost parental care and protectiveness.
Paul was trying to maintain creative momentum - as previously with the Magical Mystery Tour - but otherwise the world’s four most blessed beings were drifting rudderless.
John had lately left his wife and infant son for the Japanese-American conceptual artist Yoko Ono and with her embarked on a parallel career of anti-war protest through performance art ‘happenings’.
The howls of media derision, much of it outright racism, almost equalled the shrieks of Beatlemania six years earlier.
George was seething with resentment over the grudging space his songs received on albums dominated by John’s and Paul’s prolific writing partnership. And their Apple business organisation, set up in a haze of hippie idealism (and for tax-reasons) in 1968, was already overrun by con-artists and freeloaders and haemorrhaging millions.
The rehearsal space, in which most of the filming would also take place, was a 7,500 square-foot sound stage at Twickenham film studios where, in more straightforward times, the Beatles had made A Hard Day’s Night and Help!
It was January 1961, the huge sound-stage could never be thoroughly warmed up and the band were having to work office-hours instead of whenever they chose at Abbey Road studios.
Away from the privacy of Abbey Road, they were at the mercy of reporters and TV crews from all over the world, clamouring to know if this really was it.
Where they’d always chauvinistically imposed a ‘no wives or girlfriends’ rule, Yoko was as good as superglued to John while Paul’s photographer girlfriend-soon-to-be wife Linda Eastman repeatedly came and went.
George, already deeply into Indian religion, didn’t invite his wife, Pattie, but instead had a member of the Hare Krishna sect seated on the floor like a human bookmark keeping his place in more spiritual matters.
Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary showed megastars beyond measure in the grip of terminal weariness, jadedness and apathy with only Paul committed to the project – which he’d initiated - and urging the others to try harder like a gym teacher hounding lazy pupils up the wall-bars.
At one point, nettled beyond endurance, George snapped sourly back at him - an unprecedented instance of Beatles rowing in public.
The one thing they did agree on was changing the title of both album and film from Get Back to Let It Be even though that, too, was a Paul song, so unlikely to reduce his bossiness on the album.
The film’s anticlimactic climax was their impromptu concert on the roof of their Mayfair headquarters, cut short by the police after complaints about the noise as John wisecracked:
‘I’d like to thank you very much on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition.’
Any other director would have resigned (and probably sought counselling) but Lindsay-Hogg successfully navigated the conflicting egos of his leading players to create an unforgettable portrait of collective genius on the rocks.
Let It Be was an essential source for Peter Jackson, since the 60 hours of footage Jackson utilised for his Get Back marathon were what had had been left Lindsay-Hogg’s cutting-room floor.
And despite Jackson’s promise of ‘revelations’, his more than eight screen hours added nothing significant to what Lindsay-Hogg had shown in 81 minutes.
Jackson seems now to have paused his multimillion-dollar hobbit habit to become de facto house director and film-restorer to the Beatles’ Apple corporation. He is a self-confessed besotted Beatles fan and, like all such fans, incapable of any objectivity where his idols are concerned.
His Get Back documentaries were what might be called the Pollyanna view of the Beatles: that the three weeks they spent on the album – the only one they ever aborted – were ‘the most prolific and creative of their career’ and that, far from being fed up and fractious, they were ‘warm and jovial’ with each other throughout.
Given the favour Jackson has done Michael Lindsay-Hogg by restoring his lost baby, it would be understandable were Lindsay-Hogg diplomatically to go along with the Pollyanna line.
Interviewed by the New York Times last month, he said the famous blowup between Paul and George over the latter’s guitar-playing:
‘wasn’t really a fight […] because it was the same kind of conversation any artistic collaborators would have.’
He’s unlikely to have forgotten that after a similar ‘conversation’ off-camera a few days later, George walked out of the sessions – and, seemingly, the band - but was persuaded to return when a deputation consisting of John and, surprisingly, Yoko turned up at his psychedelic bungalow in Esher, Surrey.
Pattie Boyd, who answered the door, recalls that they were both wearing sunglasses which they preferred not to remove. Then a few minutes later John said “It’s very dark in here.”’
The Beatles’ inspirational producer, George Martin, had initially taken charge of the album, despite a briefing by John in terms which - as Martin told me later - as good as wrote off all their previous achievements together:
‘He came to me and said “On this one, George, I don’t want any of your production crap [as on Strawberry Fields Forever or Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.] I don’t want any of the editing or overdubbing you do.’
Martin had little memory of the creative euphoria ‘discovered’ by Peter Jackson’s documentaries:
‘It became terribly tedious because without editing the Beatles couldn’t give me what I wanted – a perfect performance… On the 61st take, John would ask me “How was that?” and I’d say “John, I honestly don’t know.” “No fookin’ good then, are you?” he’d say. That was the general atmosphere.’
George’s price for staying a Beatle had been that they abandon the frigid sound stage and move the recording and filming to their own studio in the basement of Apple’s headquarters.
He also brought in his friend Billy Preston, as the first-ever supernumerary Beatle, not only for Preston’s genius on keyboards but in the hope that his abounding good humour might improve the ‘vibes.’
The studio was being built by ‘Magic Alex’ Mardas, a Greek-born, self-styled electronics wizard who had dazzled the gullible John with his plans for such life-changing inventions as a camera that could take X-Rays, a protective force-field that would surround a building with coloured smoke and a house capable of hovering in mid-air.
However, when George Martin recce’d the studio, he found that Magic Alex’s promised 72-track recording desk and other sonic marvels had failed to materialise, so Martin had to truck in the necessary equipment laboriously from Abbey Road.
Even when the studio was up and running, as Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s film unsparingly recorded, a terrible lethargy seemed to grip even the once-conscientious Paul.
Miles of tape and film were wasted in jamming old rock ‘n’ roll songs, show-tunes, even Liverpool’s porno folk anthem ‘Maggie May’, with the Beatles often sounding like a bad Beatles tribute band.
As Lindsay-Hogg described it to me a few years ago, with objectivity at full strength:
‘It was like Sartre’s play No Exit […]the characters trapped together in a room, uncertain why they were there and not knowing how to get out. There didn’t seem any way of stopping it.’
The director had wanted to stage the live Beatles concert at the end of his film in a 2,000 year-old Roman amphitheatre in Tunisia in front of an audience of British fans transported there on the ocean liner QE2.
But the band couldn’t agree on a location and in the end said ‘Oh fuck it, let’s just do it up on the roof.’
Hold on. Despite a poor critical reception, the album topped the charts in the UK and the US. The Long and Winding Road went to #1 in the US. Which fans were the ones that greeted the album with ‘disappointment and dread’?
I grew up without ever having seen the original film. People who had seen it would shame their heads and say things like, “it’s so sad,” or “it’s like watching a divorce.” The knowledge passed down was that it was a sour end to a wonderful career, and not worth seeking out.
Get Back then, was a revelation. Maybe there’s a bit of revisionism, but actually, for all your complaining of Pollyannaism, it’s phenomenally revealing. John doesn’t show up until late every day, it’s clear his attention is elsewhere. George is tense and visibly grumpy. There are prolonged sections where Paul is close to tears. Even Ringo looks frayed. It’s here in Get Back, not in Lindsay-Hogg’s original that the row between Paul and George is shown in full.
Either as a result of Lindsay-Hogg’s inability to impose any kind of order on proceedings, or because the band imposed their will upon the finished product, the original film is a mess. Lindsay-Hogg seems to have managed to edit out almost every element that was worth watching — both the acrimony and the moments of creative brilliance, and it’s clear that despite this rather dismissive take on proceedings, there was an abundance of both.
Jackson’s film benefits immeasurably from being presented chronologically and being given a narrative structure of sorts. Many people, including Mark Lewisohn, have noted that the perception of the sessions as “hell” (John Lennon’s own words) are not supported by the evidence, namely the recording of almost every second the band were together throughout the month of January 1969, both on film and on the original Nagra tapes, all widely available.
Lovely. Was there for the first time in October. Sorta underwelmed, but whatever.