![]() The brief detour into avant garde film-making they titled Magical Mystery Tour, let us not forget, centred on a coach trip around Devon and Cornwall. In John Lennon’s case, even his most surreal imagery often originated in the ordinary: “newspaper taxis”, “4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”, I Am the Walrus’s “stupid bloody Tuesday” and “choking smokers”. Later, such McCartney songs as Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane and She’s Leaving Home brilliantly mixed the everyday with the poetic. The band’s reach, it seemed, was formidable – and, to some extent, this had happened by design.Īs McCartney has pointed out in the past, the early run of singles – Love Me Do, Please Please Me, From Me to You, She Loves You – had deliberately used personal pronouns, to maximise their popular resonance. Composite: Apple Films Ltdīy and large, the array of people with positive opinions of the rooftop performance outnumbered the detractors, proving that the Beatles had an almost universal appeal – from female twentysomethings to a passing cab driver (“Is it their new record? Oh, great! I’m all in favour of it”) and the trilby-hatted man who offers the opinion that the Beatles are “real good people”. ‘Working people tended to get us’ … the Let It Be vox pops with people in the streets below the gig, which Jackson has recut for Get Back. And occasionally, you would get the kind of snob who would get angry. Working people tended to get us, and understand what we were doing. We always knew that there’s the establishment, then there’s the working people. There’s the young secretaries, the young guys in the office, or the tradesmen or the cleaners. But you’ve got to remember, as we always did, there’s the people who work for that guy. ![]() ![]() “He’s never going to like it, and he thinks you’re offending his sensibilities. “There’s always the guy in the bowler hat who hates what you’re doing,” says McCartney. He responds to Ringo Starr blaring music from a radio with a line that, back then, was common currency: “I fought the war for your sort.” The four are portrayed confronting a bowler-hatted commuter who objects to sharing space with them in a train compartment. When I ask Paul McCartney about these scenes, he mentions a sequence from the first Beatles film, 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night. “In the right surroundings,” he shoots back. “But I think it’s a bit of an imposition to absolutely disrupt all the business in this area.” A man next to him is asked if he ever enjoys the Beatles’ music. “This type of music is all right in its place – it’s quite enjoyable,” says one man whose slicked-back hair, horn-rimmed glasses and double-breasted overcoat give him the air of a character from a late-60s sitcom. This is shown by the responses of a gaggle of businessmen who gather in the doorway of 2 Savile Row. Down below, on streets dominated by the elegant facade of the Royal Academy, a swelling crowd gathered, and their opinions were sampled by camera crews who asked the most simple of vox pop questions: “Do you know what music you’re listening to?” “Do you like the music you’re listening to?” “Do you normally like listening to the Beatles?”Īmong other things, the resulting footage – used in the original 1970 documentary Let It Be, and now recut by Jackson – proves that the Beatles could still tease out the prejudices of age and class. What happened that day highlights one of Get Back’s themes, something that is often overlooked: the group’s fascinating relationship with their audience and the wider public. Photograph: Ethan A Russell/Apple Corps Ltd ‘I think it’s a bit of an imposition to absolutely disrupt all the business in this area’ … the gig on the roof of Apple Corps. But for the viewer, that knowledge makes everything more compelling. Neither the band nor the people watching on the rooftop and down below are aware that this will be their last ever live performance. This magical performance forms the finale of Get Back, Peter Jackson’s new three-part documentary series about the Beatles. They played with a tightness and confidence that belied the last-minute nature of events, while a sense of urgency and drama was provided by two police officers, determined to shut everything down. On 30 January on the roof of 3 Savile Row, the London HQ of their company Apple, the four – joined by the US keyboard player Billy Preston – performed five songs: Get Back (three times), Don’t Let Me Down (twice), I’ve Got a Feeling (ditto), Dig a Pony and One After 909. The occasion is now fixed in their iconography. After weeks of sometimes difficult rehearsals and recordings, the Beatles and their new songs finally – and spectacularly – collide with the outside world. I t’s lunchtime on a cold Thursday in January 1969.
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