LONG AND WINDING ROAD
IT BEGINS with a close-up of a bass drum head, and the sight of two people moving a piano across an empty sound stage. It ends in central London 81 minutes and nearly a month later: January 30, 1969, with The Beatles playing a short set on the rooftop of their office at No 3, Savile Row. Much as has been the case for the past four years of their working lives, they can be heard clearly by many, but remain very much out of sight to all but a few.
It’s a strange and intermittently joyous film, but Let It Be, the 1970 documentary by former Ready Steady Go! director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, isn’t universally viewed with fondness by those who participated in it. That may be down to the fact that while it includes jokes, affection and great Beatles music, it also contains footage of rock music’s most notorious workplace argument. Sixteen minutes into the film (an event taking place on January 6), Paul McCartney gently suggests how George Harrison might like to approach his playing, thereby providing documentary evidence of the cracks in The Beatles’ hitherto united front. The part is complicated, Paul concedes, but…
“I don’t remember it fondly, because it was a very difficult time,” McCartney told Uncut, in unpublished interview material from 2015. “For me, it’s quite painful because it was to do with the breakup. I pissed George off, which I never wanted to do in a million years.”
Ahead of Paul and George in the coming weeks were the freewheeling recordings at Apple’s Savile Row studios, which 18 months later ultimately became the Let It Be album. At this time, though, the notion receiving deep consideration was that this new music would form part of something more ambitious: an audio-visual spectacular, to be called ‘Get Back’. Concept: The Beatles returning to live performance. Proposal: a live concert and TV special. Venue/other technical details: to be discussed.
At Twickenham Film Studios and in central London, the band and the project’s director Michael Lindsay-Hogg debated exactly what should occur in ‘Get Back’ and who should be responsible. Relative enthusiasms for the project were gauged (Paul: pro; George: anti; John: noncommittal; Ringo: pro parts of it) and boundaries tentatively marked out. As the month passed, and new songs were rehearsed, film cameras and audio tape rolled every day, recording the project as it took shape, but also tangentially amassing a massive audio-vérité archive of the post-Fab four. Amid rehearsals of what we will come to know as classic Beatles songs, there grew alongside it a chronicle of a vibrant working rock band: chat, rock’n’roll cover versions, discussion of the news, coughing, pleasantries, puns, lunch and fond reminiscences.
The filmmaker Peter Jackson has now gathered all this footage together and dived into it, on a mission to reconsider the evidence. It’s no spoiler to say that in spring 1970 The Beatles will still break up, but speaking to as he assembled his final cut,
