The Beatles' Get Back

Peter Jackson’s eight-hour, three-part documentary about the Beatles’s Get Back sessions may well be the greatest arts documentary ever made. It’s certainly the most extraordinary arts documentary I’ve seen.

I’ve been a pretty ardent Beatles fan for nearly 40 years. I never dreamed this sort of experience was possible. I knew, of course, that The Beatles got a film crew to film them in January 1969 as they rehearsed new songs for what started as a TV special, then became a live show, and ended up being an album and a brief but brilliant rooftop concert, their last ever live public performance. But the original movie that came from that footage, Let It Be, is a dreary and depressing affair. Partly this is context: the film came out as the Beatles were splitting up (over a year after January 1969, and with the sublime Abbey Road having been, very happily, recorded in between) but because of that coincidence, the sadness of the split up has imprinted itself on the movie, magnifying the importance of the rows during those Get Back sessions and giving the film an unjustified reputation as ‘the film about The Beatles breaking up’. But the grimness is also internal to the film: the director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, spent a disproportionate amount of the movie on the Twickenham sessions (maybe he was happier with footage filmed on a proper sound stage); this abortive first section of the project did not go well: tensions in the band were exacerbated by the barn-like (lack of) atmosphere in the film lot, the early lack of agreement on what the project was about, Lennon’s withdrawal (in part because of heroin), and Paul’s attempts to rally the troops which clearly got up everyone’s noses. Finally, the footage was shot on 16m and blown up rather poorly to 35m, giving the film a grainy, murky look, as if the very air between them was polluted and dirty. The Beatles themselves seem to have fallen in line with the historiographical consensus.

So first of all, Peter Jackson’s team have performed a miraculous job on the footage which somehow has emerged crisp, sharp, vivid, full of light and colour. They’ve used various kinds of AI on it, and, very very occasionally, you can see that in a couple of shots that look splashy, almost cartoony, but for the most part we just see The Beatles, their instruments, their studios. their dynamics, the studio teams, and the film crew in incredible clarity. It is a cliché, but genuinely you feel like you could be in the room with them. They’ve also managed to work some AI magic on the sound, the computers apparently learning how to separate voices from instruments and then how to distinguish John. from Paul to create a new separation from the low quality, mono Nagra tapes. The whole things sounds rich and full.

What it also does is decisively refute this idea that January 1969 was a miserable month in the life of The Beatles. The idea that we’d all be surprised by how happy these sessions were was a key part of the pre-publicity. I was sceptical at first, wondering if this might be a bit of Apple-led historical revisionism. But this really does not seem to be the case. It’s Jackson who discovered how buoyant the sessions were; Paul himself remembers them as miserable and was startled by Jackson’s reports of seeing the footage.And the joy of this being eight hours of footage is that it really doesn’t seem likely that the team have just cherry-picked the happy bits.

There are rows, sure, and the film shows them clearly - in a way that allows us to judge them afresh. The Twickenham sessions aren’t very productive and George, in particular, is very miserable - and rightly so. He and Paul snipe at each other and George walks out. (The reputed punches thrown between George and John. are not captured and the film makes them seem far less probable.) But even so, I’ve had worse rows than these guys. George is back - and much happier - a few days later once they move to Saville Row. The lead singer and lead guitarist of the Ramones barely exchanged a word to each other for twenty years. Some snappy words in a recording session and a couple of days cooling down seems mild by comparison.

I guess the January 1969 sessions are also judged badly because the eventually resulting album, Let It Be, is a patchy thing and Phil Spector notoriously added some horrible strings and choirs to various tracks, some spurious effects to others (a weird echo effect to the drums on Let It Be) and chooses and sequences the songs really badly (the throwaway ‘Maggie Mae’ gets into the track listing but ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ doesn’t). But, as we’ve already known and this documentary makes clear, January 1969 sees the debut of almost all of Let It Be, quite a lot of Abbey Road, and a fair amount of John, Paul and George’s first solo albums. In any case, a month that produces ‘The Long and Winding Road’, ‘Let It Be’, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, ‘Get Back’ and ‘Two Of Us’ is hardly a failure. I should love to have such failures.

The length of the documentary means we have space for creativity and here is the most important band of all time creating some of the most famous songs of all time before our eyes. There’s a moment in the first episode where Paul is sitting with his bass and he’s strumming chords (chords on a bass? who knew!) and Ringo and George are sitting on the drum riser, looking a little listless. But you realise Paul sees there’s something here, he’s locked into the instrument trying to find the tune that’s just out of reach. There’s an intensity to him. He’s in the zone. And within a minute, suddenly, we realise he’s coming up with ‘Get Back’. And the song tumbles out of him; even a lot of the final lyrics are just there. And Ringo sees what’s happening and starts clapping out a rhythm and George picks up his guitar and John comes back from a break and sits in and the song starts to take shape.

It is electrifying. I’ve never seen anything like it. It captures, on film, the most mysterious and wonderful thing about creativity. At one point, there is nothing, and then there is something. The song comes unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, and it’s not just any song; it’s one of the most famous rock singles of all time and we see the very moment of its birth. It’s like watching Picasso paint Guernica.

It’s also surprising - but, really, why should it be? - that the other Beatles immediately understand how great this song is. George, who, by repute, is the most miserable in these sessions, most hostile to Paul, understands how great it is (it makes sense of why, in the middle of recording All Things Must Pass, a record which is a decisive and deliberate critique of and break from The Beatles, George and his fellow musicians jam on this song, for no other reason than it’s a great song and he loves it). George continues to champion it through the rest of the month. And egos are put aside, as the band immediately spot that this should be their next single; and as they say so, you see Paul looking rather bashfully proud.

It’s also fascinating about friendships and groups and ego. There’s no question that, despite the positivity of the documentary, some of the problems are structural in the band. John, formerly the de facto band leader, is now more into his new life with Yoko; George has been inspired by the more collective spirit of The Band who he’s been hanging out with and resents being patronised and dismissed by John and Paul; Paul knows that John has taken a back seat and he is prepared to step up and urge the guys on but he also knows they haven’t agreed to that. They’ve notionally agreed to rehearse songs for a TV show or a live concert, but, in fact, George really doesn’t want to do that and John is on the fence. Paul knows that by pushing, he’ll probably make it less likely to happen, so he’s stuck. Anyone who has been in a collaborative creative project will recognise the quandaries and tensions, when the collective spirit of the creativity is, in some ways, covering up the differences and inequalities between everyone, creating a jagged stasis made up of perfectly balanced opposing forces.

It reveals each of the Beatles anew. John is fascinating. He does seem checked out in Twickenham, the camera at one point lingering on his vacant, glassy expression. But, as with Yoko’s much-maligned presence by his side throughout, we have to remember that John and Yoko lost a baby only six weeks earlier and if heroin-fuelled codependence was what they needed for a bit, can we blame them? And once they’re in Saville Row, John appears to be a changed man. It is striking that John is not writing many songs in this period: ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ is the only really substantial new song (but what a song!); ‘Dig It’ is a rather aimless jam. ‘Dig a Pony’ is musically rather wonderful but the lyrics are, to my mind, a bit daft and empty. But, watching this documentary, I realise none of that matters. He is still the leader of the band. It’s his wiry, electrical energy that powers The Beatles. And he is so funny. I guess we all know The Beatles are funny, but, god, John Lennon just crackles with a kind of anarchic humour throughout; he’s quick, he’s mercurial, he’s caustic, he’s mischievous, but he’s just constantly alive in this footage. And after George walks out, it’s not Paul but John who is the most perceptive, the most emotionally empathetic. While Paul does seem not to want to spend much time on George’s songs, John, in Saville Row anyway, is repeatedly supportive (‘For You Blue - I love that one’ he says as the band are listing all the numbers they’ve rehearsed). John’s impulsiveness, his reliance on instinct, makes him much more alert to what is happening in the room than Paul who, I think, is living more in his head where all this music is happening. But it also means that John’s an easy target for someone like Allan Klein who he praises in one rather excruciating scene. (You realise that he’s impressed by Klein in just the same way as he’s impressed by ‘Magic’ Alex. John doesn’t see when someone has got his number.)

Paul is thrilling in Get Back. Where John is a little short on songs, music is just pouring out of Paul. In Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald cites someone suggesting that Paul wrote both ‘Let It Be’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’ in one day; I’ve always thought that unlikely (could anyone produce two such imperishable standards in one day?), but I’m inclined to believe that now; we certainly hear both songs for the first time soon after one another here. But he’s also got ‘Two of Us’ and ‘Get Back’ and ‘Another Day’ and ‘Back Seat of My Car’ and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window’ and ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’ and ‘Golden Slumbers’ and ‘Carry That Weight’ and ‘Oh! Darling’ and more. If he seems to be dominating, well he’s got all the best songs and - unlike John and George - songs come to Paul fully-formed; he’s not really finding the form for them in the studio; he needs to tell people what to play and how to play it because his instincts are great and they’re right and he knows it.

That doesn’t mean he’s always right about how to treat other people. He doesn’t pick up on George’s sullen mood, so driven is he to get his song rehearsed as he wants it. Interestingly, the event that precipitates George’s departure seems to be based on a different kind of emotional intelligence; Paul can see that John is out of it, depressed, reluctant to participate in the sessions and Paul wants to lure his best friend and collaborator back into the process. He’s already played ‘I’m So Tired’ to try to awaken John’s interest. He does it with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as well. And then John and Paul are playing ‘Two of Us’ and it’s obviously John loves this song - he clearly thinks it’s about him (and though Paul’s said again and again - most recently in his Lyrics book - that it’s about him and Linda, I cannot help hearing it being about John and Paul). And Paul wants to build on this excitement and they start playing it with more and more enthusiasm, standing face to face, the old partnership reawakening. But in doing so, they both completely ignore George who barely has a role in the arrangement and is being sidelined as his two more successful bandmates sing a song whose very title appears to exclude him. I’d be pissed off too.

George is a complicated presence. He is a quite negative presence at times. He is a dark cloud all over the Twickenham sessions, though, in fairness, he is the only one prepared to say that hiring an ocean liner to take fans and band over to Tripoli to perform a one-off concert in an ancient amphitheatre by torchlight is a thoroughly stupid - and entirely unBeatlesy - idea. He also sees that the whole Get Back project is misconceived and that all the participants seem to have entirely different conceptions of it and want wholly different things from it and he says so. But in Saville Row, he’s very enthusiastic about the songs that are coming in and his additions to all the songs, without exception, improve them. His aversion to the idea of performing live means that he’s the last hold-out to the rooftop gig (‘I don’t want to go on the roof,’ he says rather cheerlessly), but once he’s up there he seems to be loving it. At one point in the sessions, he tells John he’d quite like to do a solo record, because he has a lot of songs built up. John is supportive - it sounds to me as if George is wondering if The Beatles might be his backing band on that, though it’s never quite said. It’s not surprising that he’s having this conversation with John because Paul does seem strangely uninterested in George’s songwriting. He clearly just doesn’t rate him at all. Now obviously Paul is writing some of the greatest songs in the world at this moment, but it does seem peculiarly obtuse to spend so much time rehearsing ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ complete with hammer and anvil and to ignore ‘All Things Must Pass’. I’ve read elsewhere that in the negotiations that bring George back into the studio, he pulled all of his songs from the putative live project. That sits oddly with the fact that they work on ‘For You Blue’ and ‘Old Brown Shoe’ after that, both of which could - but didn’t - have fitted well on the roof. And George is very funny too, with a particular line in bone-dry humour. ‘Is that called “I’ve Got a Feeling?”’ he asks politely after a stumble through a song whose lyric, at this point, largely consists of the words ‘I’ve got a feeling’.

Ringo is a star. There are people in the world who claim Ringo’s not that great a drummer. They must be feeling pretty stupid now. Ringo is a fantastic, versatile, sensitive listening drummer. He’s also a supportive reassuring presence throughout, absolutely rock solid. The other Beatles take him for granted because, well, they can; he is always there, always right, always playing just what’s needed. And, in one of the most touching moments, he’s talking to Michael Lindsay-Hogg while Paul is playing a song on the piano and he says ‘I could watch him playing all day’. It’s a beautiful moment and just an example of the rightly uncomplicated affection that binds these four men.

And then there were five. Oh my word, Billy Preston is fantastic. The moment that he comes in and starts playing, you just see all of the Beatles eyeing each other, because they know he’s brought exactly what they need, that their arrangements have just become ten times groovier, and that they are in the presence of a terrific musician. And he’s so cool. Imagine being invited into the studio with the world’s most famous rock band and then being asked to play and then basically to join the band for a month. He’s handles it with humility, warmth and some beautiful work on the Fender Rhodes. John, in a typically bit of impetuous enthusiasm, suggests Billy join the band permanently at which Paul slams on the brakes (‘it’s bad enough with four of us!’), but I think Paul, on this occasion, is wrong. I’d have loved to hear what Billy Preston would have done on ‘Oh! Darling’ and ‘Bathroom Window’ and ‘Something’ and ‘Golden Slumbers’ and ‘The End’…

And then there’s the rooftop. Oh my. It’s the climax of the original Let It Be film too, but here Peter Jackson opts for a split screen to show the action on the roof alongside what’s happening on the street and, soon, within the Apple offices. The passers-by are mostly delighted by what’s happening. We hear a range of vanished London accents spoken by men and women in vanished London fashions. Given that the band are playing a series of songs that no one has ever heard before, it’s fascinating that so many people immediately recognise The Beatles from their sound alone (‘I think that was Paul singing’ says one woman). There’s no sense of The Beatles as the iconic, epochal band we now think of them, just as a great and glorious addition to life in the sixties, a group that magnificently unites men and women, young and old. Of course, it doesn’t unite the stuffy and pompous businessmen who object to the noise and consider it an imposition. (‘This sort of thing is alright in its place,’ says a man who does not care to name a place where it would be alright.) They are the ones who summon the hapless police officers who are stalled hilariously by the receptionist, doorman, and then Mal Evans. They are plainly unsure about what is going on, the limits of their authority, what offence precisely has been committed and what they can do about it. Will they really arrest the doorman? I feel sorry for them, because they look like fools, but they’ve been placed in that position by the unsmiling proprietors of the buildings over the road.

And then the band. Given how little The Beatles (apart from Paul) seemed to want to perform live, it’s magical to see how, as soon as they start, they get into their groove; they realise how great they sound, how great it feels to be performing again. There are looks of sheer joy between them all; they can’t quite believe how great this is - regardless of the cold - they are just having the time of their lives. They have become a band again and all the tensions of the previous month seem to be briefly suspended. They know what they are doing is iconic, imaginative, the perfect kind of concert for the kind of band they are now. It’s not a concert; it’s an event. They are taking over the city, as an exhilarated George says afterwards. As the police officers get onto the roof, there’s a fabulous moment where Paul looks round, sees the policemen, and looks back with a huge grin on his face and ‘woo’s into the microphone. Surprisingly, given his reputation as the rebel of the band, it is John who is the first to turn off his amps (‘it’s off’ he tells his bandmates), but it’s Paul who decides fuck ‘em: he just carries on; John’s amp goes back on and they give us one last go at ‘Get Back’.

I feel slightly sorry for Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Although Peter Jackson has done nothing to make him look foolish, he does come across as a bit of a twit, continually harping on about his Tripoli concert idea. But in fairness to him, he was brought in to film rehearsals and then a live concert by The Beatles. Anyone in his position would desperately want it to end with a live concert, because that would be (a) a great thing and (b) a great ending to his film. Because he knows The Beatles are entire to themselves and outsiders cannot tell them what to do (‘We’re bloody stars you know!’ says a mock-offended Lennon at one moment), he knows he can only nudge, cajole, suggest and hope that they will slowly get used to the idea. He can also see that they are divided amongst themselves and he does have an idea that will give a focus to the project. It’s the wrong idea but at least it’s an idea. Also credit to him: he and his team created this amazing footage and also he has the brilliant idea of performing on the roof.

There are rumours that - in Peter Jackson’s usual style - there may be a much longer director’s cut at some point and all I can say is TAKE ALL MY MONEY I NEED YOU TO PUT YOUR DIRECTOR’S CUT IN MY EYES. If you have the slightest interest in The Beatles, rock music, creativity, and friendship - which basically means all of you - Get Back is intoxicating, addictive, and essential.