There is No Going Back

I grew up in the shadow of the Beatles, listened, sometimes danced in the Cavern, lived and breathed the idea that anything and everything was possible. And after all these years finally got round to watching Peter Jackson’s The Beatles – Get Back DVD and enjoyed 60 hours of recorded material condensed into six hours on three discs. 

Four words sum up the experience: awe, joy, tedium and sadness. The awe has many sources, the sheer charisma of the band. Some people ‘own’ the stage. In the footage shot by Michael Lindsay Hogg, the Beatles own the camera which pans lovingly over them for the entire six hours. Without verging on the homo-erotic, I was struck by just how good looking they were and then as the recordings proceeded, struck by their doggedness as much as their magic.

The recordings begin in the desolation of a Twickenham film studio surrounded by hangers-on, over persistent cameramen, and even a walk on part by Peter Sellers who wants to be seen touching the magic but who in fact has nothing to offer but small talk and embarrassment. Throughout you have a young Michael Lindsay Hogg, the rumoured love child of Orson Welles,*  poncing around like a sleek piglet with a cigar in his mouth. The Beatles look bemused, uncomfortable and increasingly bored. It’s not working. Boredom leads to self-indulgence, John Lennon gurning at the camera until it becomes irritating—likely reflecting his own irritation, nervousness perhaps, frustration with the whole situation.

And this is what hit me— the sheer tedium of ‘take after take’ in the search for perfection. I doubt many would buy into six hours of ‘Take That’ or ‘Little Mix’ in a recording studio, but with the Beatles the boredom was an essential part of the fascination—the deconstruction of a myth in loving and heart-wrenching detail. It also revealed why their break-up was perhaps inevitable. 

McCartney summed it up, talking things through with the rest of them. ‘In the beginning we had a ‘boss.’ Brian Epstein told us what to do and when—and we played music. With him gone there’s none of that, just arguments because no one can be or wants to be boss.’ Or words to that effect.

 Other factors would have to include their increasingly separate lives, and the sheer grind of album after album after Album. The White Album had been released just six months earlier, Abbey Road would be recorded a few months after Let It Be (As to which was really the last album you can argue the toss here. Suffice it to say the struggle to carry on becomes apparent in the Get Back DVD. 

The partnership of Lennon and McCartney had once been intuitive, bonded in touring, clubs, and hotel bedrooms; songs flowed, albums could be knocked off in a week. Please Please Me was done in 13 hours. Michael Lindsay Hogg wouldn’t have had time to set up his cameras.

By the time of Let it Be  everything had changed. The magic was still there; watching them conjure songs from a few chords and thin air was riveting, but behind it all was a sense of real effort, conjuring blood from a stone. 

Equally, there are instances of real joy—the exhilaration of playing and coming together as a band. Their faces and body language in the iconic roof-top scene said it all. For a brief magical moment, they recaptured the myth. 

But, as evidenced in the documentary, for them the effort seemed no longer worth it.

Throughout, there is fractiousness and irritation eating into friendship and shared experience. They appear weighed down by expectations – other people’s expectations. Michael Lindsay Hogg for example is overly persistent, pushing them to end the documentary with a grand concert in a Roman amphitheatre. Where? Tunis. How will the fans get there? We’ll charter a liner. Their faces said it all, especially at the suggestion they’d be on the same liner with their thousands of fans. Ringo’s main objection appeared to be Tunisian food. 

And at the end of it all, melancholy – summed up in George Harrison’s first album, ‘All Things Must Pass.’ Sadness pervades those six hours of recording because you already know the outcome and in the film, you see the early signs as they struggle to make something out of nothing. The music is still there but it is as though the ‘Beatles’ as a construct has become limiting, too small, and they know it. You can sense it in their eyes and glances as they play 'Two Of Us'

In this case there is no going back

Oh yes, you also get Yoko screeching. 

And I can't resist the curiosity of this version of Paperback Writer with the music stripped out.

 I miss McCartney's pounding bass but, as always, struck by the power of their  harmonies.

* and a future 5th baronet of Rotherfield Hall after his mother the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald

 went on to marry Sir Edward Lindsay Hogg, 4th baronet of Rotherfield Hall.