STING ONCE SAID TO ME THAT ‘LET IT BE’ WASN’T A GOOD choice for me to sing at Live Aid. He thought it was implicit that action was required, and that leaving well enough alone wasn’t an appropriate message on the occasion of the huge call to action that Live Aid represented. But ‘Let It Be’ isn’t about being complacent, or complicit. It’s about having a sense of the complete picture, about being resigned to the global view.

The context in which the song was written was one of stress. It was a difficult time because we were heading towards the breakup of The Beatles. It was a period of change partly because John and Yoko had got together, and that had an effect on the dynamics of the group. Yoko was literally in the middle of the recording session, and that was challenging. But it was also something we had to deal with. Unless there was a really serious problem – unless one of us said, ‘I can’t sing with her there’ – we just had to let it be. We weren’t very confrontational, so we just bottled it up and got on with it. We were northern lads, and that was part of our culture. Grin and bear it.

One interesting thing about ‘Let It Be’ that I was reminded of only recently is that, while I was studying English literature at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys with my favourite teacher, Alan Durband, I read Hamlet. In those days you had to learn speeches by heart because you had to be able to carry them into the exam and quote them. There are a couple of lines from late in the play:

O, I could tell you –

But let it be. – Horatio, I am dead

I suspect those lines had subconsciously planted themselves in my memory. When I was writing ‘Let It Be’, I’d been doing too much of everything, was run ragged, and this was all taking its toll. The band, me – we were all going through times of trouble, as the song goes, and there didn’t seem to be any way out of the mess. I fell asleep exhausted one day and had a dream in which my mum (who had died just over ten years previously) did, in fact, come to me. When you dream about seeing someone you’ve lost, even though it’s sometimes for just a few seconds, it really does feel like they’re right there with you, and it’s as if they’ve always been there. I think anyone who’s lost someone close to them understands that, especially in the period of time just after they’ve passed away. Still to this day I have dreams about John and George and talk to them. But in this dream, seeing my mum’s beautiful, kind face and being with her in a peaceful place was very comforting. I immediately felt at ease, and loved and protected. My mum was very reassuring and, like so many women often are, she was also the one who kept our family going. She kept our spirits up. She seemed to realise I was worried about what was going on in my life and what would happen, and she said to me, ‘Everything will be all right. Let it be.’

Mum, Mary McCartney

I woke up thinking this would be a great subject for a song. I just started with the circumstances surrounding me – the ‘trouble at t’mill’.

Around the time we recorded ‘Let It Be’, I’d been pushing the band to go back out and play some club dates – to get back to basics and just bond again as a band, end the decade like we’d begun it, just playing for the love of it. We didn’t get to do that as The Beatles, but that idea did inform the direction of the Let It Be album. We didn’t want any studio trickery. It was supposed to be an honest, no-overdubbing album. It didn’t exactly end up that way, but that had been the plan.

The sad thing is that The Beatles didn’t ever get to play the song at a show. So the performance at Live Aid was, for many people, probably the first time they saw it sung onstage.

‘Let It Be’ has now been in the live show for a while, though. It’s always been a communal song, about acceptance, and I think those moments work really well with a crowd. You see a lot of people holding their partners or friends or family in their arms and singing along. In the beginning, thousands of cigarette lighters would be held up in the air during the song too. Then you couldn’t smoke at shows anymore, and the lights came from people’s phones. You can always tell which songs aren’t so popular, because the phones get put away. But they come out for this one.

Recording sessions. Apple Studio, London, 1969

Then, a few years ago, we were in Japan and played the Budokan in Tokyo. We had just done three nights at the Tokyo Dome, a huge fifty-five-thousand-seat baseball stadium. To balance it out, we finished the tour with a night at the Budokan, which is very intimate by comparison. It wasn’t quite fifty years since The Beatles had played there, but it was a special show and a venue with a lot of memories. My tour crew likes to surprise me, and in this instance they gave out wristbands to everyone in the venue. I didn’t know this was going to happen, but during ‘Let It Be’ the whole room just lit up with these swaying arms. It’s sometimes difficult to continue singing at moments like that.

Some people have said that ‘Let It Be’ has slight religious connotations, and it does sound a little like a gospel song, especially the piano and organ. The term ‘Mother Mary’ is probably primarily interpreted as a reference to Mary the Virgin Mother of God. As you may recall, my mother Mary was a Catholic, though my father was a Protestant, and my brother and I were christened. So, as far as religion goes, I’m obviously influenced by Christianity, but there are many great teachings in all the religions. I’m not particularly religious in any conventional sense, but I do believe in the idea that there is some sort of higher force that can help us.

So, this song becomes a prayer, or mini-prayer. There’s a yearning somewhere at its heart. And the word ‘amen’ itself means ‘so be it’ – or ‘let it be’.