John just wasn’t ready. It was only eleven weeks since they’d finished recording the White Album and he hadn’t written anything new since then. Yet there the Beatles were on the second day of January 1969, in the chill of Twickenham Film Studios, rehearsing in front of film cameras for yet another album, tentatively titled Get Back after a new song from Paul.
Quite why there was such urgency to return to work has never been clear, other than that Paul was a workaholic who believed that a band that played together stayed together. A better plan might have been to have taken six months or a year off and waited for inspiration; or, as George sensibly suggested, going away and doing their own solo albums, and then getting back together later when they were more in the mood to work together. But ever since they’d met Brian Epstein, the emphasis had been on hard work, with a Beatles album, or usually two, every year, and four singles annually. So here they were, back on the daily grind of being Beatles, and therefore being expected to be brilliant and creative whether they felt like it or not, because that was the level they’d set themselves.
All kinds of ideas had been mooted for the coming year. One was that perhaps they should play three nights at the Roundhouse at London’s Chalk Farm and be filmed there by the BBC – that certainly appealed to the BBC. Then there were crazy notions about performing in front of the Pyramids in Egypt, or at a torchlit Roman amphitheatre in Tunisia, or on an ocean-going liner. They were the Beatles after all. Anything was possible. ‘I’m warming to the idea of doing it in a lunatic asylum,’ John would observe wryly.
But, in the meantime, under the directorship of Michael Lindsay-Hogg, they were going to return to being a live band and spend a couple of weeks rehearsing and then recording a new album before the cameras; letting the public see them and their way of happily working together, trying out what new songs they had, and enjoying playing some old rock and roll numbers. The problem was, they weren’t happy working together. The carefree Beatle days were long gone, as Lindsay-Hogg’s fly-on-the-wall filming would show.
Only a fraction of the material shot and recorded by him made its way into the finished film, but at least forty hours of recordings of the sessions, and the conversations between songs, have survived. And from them, it’s apparent that for Paul and George, Yoko’s ever-presence, with her readiness to voice an opinion about what the Beatles should and shouldn’t do, not only when they were recording but in board meetings too, was still a major problem. John had always been the most garrulous of the band, but sometimes it felt that she was now talking for him, as he would just listen and nod.
Walking on eggshells, Paul was now acutely aware of what might happen if he, or either of the others, complained too loudly. ‘There are only two things to do,’ we hear him reasoning to George. ‘One is to fight and try to get the Beatles back to being four people without Yoko, and to ask Yoko to sit down at board meetings. The other is just to accept that she’s there because there’s no way that John is going to split with Yoko for our sakes. He’s going overboard. But he always goes overboard. If it came to the push between Yoko and the Beatles it would be John for Yoko. John would just say to us, “Okay I’ll see you then.” And, we’re not wanting that to happen. But it’s going to be a comical thing in fifty years’ time if people say that the Beatles broke up because Yoko sat on an amp.’
But it wasn’t all about Yoko. Under-prepared, the Beatles argued among themselves about arrangements and songs, with John frequently complaining that Paul hadn’t given him enough time to write any. These were, he would later say to journalists, ‘the most miserable sessions ever . . . We just couldn’t get into it . . . You couldn’t make music at eight in the morning in a strange place with people filming you, and coloured lights . . . I was stoned all the time and just didn’t give a shit . . .’
That wasn’t quite true. He cared enough to launch into George Martin, telling him, ‘On this one, George, we don’t want any of your production crap. It’s going to be an honest album, OK! I don’t want any overdubbing, or any of that editing you do.’ Which was particularly galling for Martin, as it had been John who had insisted on all the ‘production crap’ on, for instance, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ in the first place.
He was right about the sessions, though. They were miserable. And Paul, who had already written three of his all-time biggest hits, ‘Get Back’, ‘Let It Be’ and ‘The Long And Winding Road’, for the album was obviously irritated by his colleague’s lack of industry.
‘Haven’t you written anything yet?’ we hear him ask John.
‘No.’
‘We’ll be faced with a crisis.’
‘When I’m up against the wall, Paul, you’ll find me at my best. I think I’ve got Sunday off,’ John comes back.
‘I hope you can deliver,’ answers Paul.
‘I hope was a little rock and roller, Sammy with his mammy,’ John says and falls into wordplay.
There was nothing more Paul could say as he watched John return to Yoko’s side. ‘I think we’ve been very negative since Mr Epstein passed away,’ he rather formally tells George and Ringo. ‘We probably do need a central daddy figure to say, “Come on, it’s nine o’clock. Leave the girls at home, lads.”’
But John wasn’t going to leave this girl at home. Paul might feel that he knew what was best for the Beatles, and was still convinced that ‘the band can improve when we’re together’, but John, who didn’t care about the Lennon/McCartney writing relationship now, was no longer listening.
Paul joked with his old friend about expecting to see him performing ‘in a black bag next week’ and got on with his work, which included instructing the other Beatles on how he wanted them to play on the songs he’d written.
Eventually this was too much for George and a row blew up on film. Along with Yoko doing, in George’s words, ‘her screeching number’, the lead guitarist had had enough. ‘I’ll see you around the clubs,’ he told the other Beatles, walked out and drove back to Liverpool. For a session and a film that was already struggling, this presented a problem. When Ringo had left the previous year, Paul, who is a decent drummer, had sat in for him. But neither John nor Paul was as good a guitarist as George.
John and George had grown close in the past few years, but although John sympathised with the guitarist’s belief that he was considered less equal than the two paramount Beatles songwriters – ‘it’s a festering wound,’ he tells Yoko. ‘It’s only this year he’s recognised who he is and all the fucking shit we’ve done to him’ – the tapes reveal him to be indifferent to George’s absence. ‘If George leaves, he leaves,’ he says. ‘If he comes back, we’ll go on as if nothing happened . . . If he doesn’t come back by Monday or Tuesday next week, we’ll ask Eric Clapton to do it.’
For him, the concept of the Beatles had already changed. ‘I don’t think the Beatles revolve around just four people,’ he says at one point, which was an opinion shared, one suspects, only with Yoko.
The days at Twickenham wandered on. On one of them John and Yoko entertained the film crew by dancing a waltz around the studio, while on another Yoko wailed ‘John . . . John . . . John . . . John’ like a lost wraith so manically and so insistently that the normally placid Ringo was heard to say bluntly to her and John: ‘I think you’re both nuts, the pair of you.’
After two weeks they’d all had enough of Twickenham and agreed to return to the Apple headquarters in Savile Row, where George rejoined the group with a new song, ‘I Me Mine’, telling everyone, ‘I don’t care if you don’t like it.’ They told him they liked it very much and that they would record it.
But where would they record it? Magic Alex Mardas had promised, and been paid, to build them a modern state-of-the-art recording studio. But he hadn’t, because he didn’t know how to. By all accounts what he’d done was to put in an antique oscillator on a few planks of wood with a few small speakers around the walls in a badly soundproofed basement. At this point the scales must have finally fallen from even John’s eyes. Magic Alex had been his man, and John had been led up the garden path once again.
According to George Harrison, the studio ‘was the biggest disaster of all time’ where Mardas ‘would walk around in a white coat like some sort of chemist . . . but didn’t have a clue what he was doing’. George Martin was simply astonished.
Magic Alex didn’t stay around Apple for much longer. And as EMI technicians from Abbey Road ripped out his equipment and, under Martin’s guidance, installed a portable system of their own, the Beatles got back to work, now with keyboard player Billy Preston as a welcome guest at George’s invitation.
Making the album took just over a week, with the film crew crowded around the group in the little studio, but no longer would the film be called Get Back. Another of Paul’s songs, ‘Let It Be’, seemed, in view of everything, a more appropriate title for the movie. Nor was anyone talking about ending the film in a Roman amphitheatre in Tunisia. For one thing, ‘Ringo won’t go abroad,’ said Paul. For another, all four Beatles just wanted to end the bitter experience as quickly as possible. Then director Michael Lindsay-Hogg had an idea.
The phone calls to the news desk at London’s Evening Standard, and passed on to me at my desk, started shortly after midday on 30 January 1969. ‘A tremendous racket is coming from the roof of a building in Savile Row,’ came the first report, to be quickly followed by calls from excited office workers who had identified the sound as that of the Beatles. The band were, it was said, playing on the roof of their heritaged eighteenth-century building, with their guitars and voices carrying right across Mayfair and beyond.
As people leant out of office windows, or left their typewriters to join others who had abandoned shopping in nearby Regent Street and hurried to congregate on the pavement outside 3 Savile Row, far above them the Beatles were giving a free concert. Accompanied by their staff and a few friends, with John wearing a fur coat, George in what looked like an astrakhan rug, Ringo in orange and Paul, now with a full black beard, in a dark suit and open-necked white shirt, the Beatles were playing on a temporarily boarded stage not much larger than that at the Cavern.
They hadn’t been particularly keen to play. The day was cold and grey. They were miserable. But Lindsay-Hogg had been persuasive. If the police could leave them alone to disturb the peace for just thirty minutes, he would have enough material to finish the film with some élan, and put an end to this unhappy album and movie that they all regretted having started. And for the first time in months, Yoko wasn’t at John’s side but tucked away against a chimney. It was the Beatles, just the Beatles, playing together as a band in the way they’d started out.
As Paul sang ‘Get Back’ and ‘One After 909’, and John pleaded ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, none of them thought much of the moment, other than hoping to quickly get it finished. But as a reel of film, it would turn out to be one of the most remembered moments of their careers. They didn’t realise it at the time, but it would be the last time they would play together in public, too . . . well, in semi-public. ‘Thank you very much. We hope we passed the audition,’ said John, as the police arrived and the session was ended. It was as good an end-line as you will get. They had indeed passed the audition. He’d always had a way with words.
As for the album they’d been making, with none of the Beatles or George Martin wanting to face wading through the hours of music, all the tapes were handed over to EMI assistant Glyn Johns to see if he could edit together a decent LP from them. There was no hurry. It would take a year to cut the film that was to accompany the record, and who knew where any of them might be by then.