The Bea­t­les: Get Back

Peo­ple come to love the Bea­t­les in dif­fer­ent ways. For many mil­len­ni­al fans, it was their par­ents’ records that set them on this right­eous path. Oth­ers, like Peter Jack­son, were first intro­duced to the band through the Red and Blue com­pi­la­tion albums. I ini­tial­ly dis­missed the Bea­t­les’ music when my moth­er gift­ed these colour­ful CDs to my teenage self, but then Michael Jack­son died, and Paul McCartney’s sweet voice on the duet ​‘The Girl is Mine’ final­ly led me into an intense obses­sion with the Fab Four.

This pas­sion was in large part fuelled by the blog­ging web­site Tum­blr, which gave me the chance to see and save in a ded­i­cat­ed file on my com­put­er thou­sands of Bea­t­les pic­tures and fan art, the mod­ern ver­sion of what the orig­i­nal Beat­le­ma­ni­acs before me did when cut­ting out pic­tures from mag­a­zines. The Tum­blr-born fan in me is there­fore more than a lit­tle rat­tled by what Peter Jack­son and his team have done to new­ly avail­able footage culled from what was one of the Bea­t­les’ sad­dest if cre­ative­ly pro­duc­tive moments.

On 2 Jan­u­ary, 1969, the band met up at Twick­en­ham Stu­dios to face an unusu­al chal­lenge: they had giv­en them­selves two weeks to write and rehearse new songs for an album that would then be record­ed live in front of an audi­ence, dur­ing a con­cert that would also be filmed for a tele­vi­sion special.

The band that had once played on stage eight hours a day for months at a time in clubs in Ham­burg, Ger­many, in the ear­ly 1960s missed the cama­raderie and excite­ment of live per­for­mance, since they’d stopped tour­ing in 1966. This was, in some ways, a chance to reignite the spark after what had been a dif­fi­cult and tense few months – what must have seemed an eter­ni­ty for the ever-pro­lif­ic group.

The album and film did hap­pen, and until recent­ly were remem­bered more for cap­tur­ing the band’s breakup than any­thing else. Released in May 1970, the film Let It Be came out just three weeks after the sep­a­ra­tion, which inevitably cast a trag­ic light on the footage of their rehearsals and record­ing ses­sions as they were pre­sent­ed in direc­tor Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 80-minute movie. The album sim­i­lar­ly occu­pied a strange place in the Bea­t­les’ canon, as the for­mer band mem­bers dis­agreed on whether Phil Spector’s mas­ter­ing and his famous ​‘Wall of Sound’ effect made the inten­tion­al­ly stripped-down record­ings sound bet­ter or worse.

For all intents and pur­pos­es Let It Be was, for a time, a project that most of those involved and most fans, includ­ing this writer, under­stand­ably tend­ed to ignore in con­ver­sa­tions about the band. Fifty-one years lat­er, film­mak­er and restora­tion afi­ciona­do Peter Jack­son aims to set the record straight (or, at least, straighter) about what exact­ly took place dur­ing these few weeks in Jan­u­ary ​’69. His epic three-part doc­u­men­tary The Bea­t­les: Get Back is based on the 60 hours of footage and the 150 hours of audio record­ings that were cap­tured at the time and kept in Apple Corps’ vaults all these years.

Any Bea­t­les fan should be gid­dy at the prospect of this film; how­ev­er, none could have antic­i­pat­ed that the end result would be so visu­al­ly strange. While the entire enter­prise is wel­come in many respects, the fact that the Let It Be/‘Get Back’ project has once again been exces­sive­ly tin­kered with only rein­forces the feel­ing of a curse sur­round­ing it.

Shot on 16mm, the pre­ferred for­mat for tele­vi­sion at the time, the footage from the ​‘Get Back’ ses­sions was blown up to 35mm when the project evolved from a TV spe­cial to a cin­e­ma doc­u­men­tary, and con­tem­po­rary review­ers were not kind about how grainy the result­ing film looked. Amaz­ing­ly, Jack­son and his team appear to have learned the wrong les­son from this his­to­ry. Rather than leav­ing the footage alone, which was shot for TV and will be watched on TV via Dis­ney+, they decid­ed to export the 16mm footage to the extreme­ly sharp for­mat of 4K video and clean it to with­in an inch of its life, remov­ing scratch­es and over­ly pol­ish­ing sur­faces and colours in the image.

Ringo has nev­er looked smoother and the band’s Play­mo­bil hair­cuts appear made of actu­al plas­tic, with Jackson’s cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy turn­ing whole strands of hair into one uni­fied, shiny sur­face. Look­ing at old­er videos of rel­a­tive­ly untouched, grainy but beau­ti­ful footage of the same events on the Bea­t­les’ YouTube chan­nel, it’s clear that things did not have to turn out this way.

It seems Jackson’s inten­tion was to total­ly erase the feel­ing of watch­ing archive footage and the fetishi­sa­tion that comes with it. It is a com­mend­able project, and just like the almost real-time aspect of the enter­prise, the absence of grain is sup­posed to make it eas­i­er to see the Bea­t­les not as demigods or icons divorced from real­i­ty, but as peo­ple like you and me (Jack­son used the same log­ic in his World War One doc­u­men­tary They Shall Not Grow Old, smooth­ing out, colouris­ing, and retim­ing even old­er footage).

The near eight-hour run­time does offer the chance to get over the ini­tial shock, but the glossy cin­e­matog­ra­phy nev­er gives the feel­ing of watch­ing real peo­ple at all. What does help pro­ceed­ings is the edit­ing of footage from the var­i­ous cam­eras that filmed the band in the stu­dio and, lat­er, in the base­ment of the Apple offices. Jack­son and his team have painstak­ing­ly syn­chro­nised the audio with the images from every avail­able angle, cre­at­ing a strange atmosphere.

As the film cuts between long takes and extreme­ly short ones with no respect for con­ven­tion­al edit­ing, it some­times feels as if we are watch­ing a real­i­ty TV show where the Bea­t­les are stuck togeth­er in a big room, which in fact isn’t a bad way to describe the arrangement.

John, Paul, George and Ringo’s instru­ments are set up on stage one at Twick­en­ham Stu­dios, an enor­mous room with an extreme­ly high ceil­ing and, accord­ing to George, not very good acoustics. They nev­er­the­less begin jam­ming, and though they don’t behave par­tic­u­lar­ly warm­ly towards one anoth­er, there is noth­ing to indi­cate any real ani­mos­i­ty. In these first few days, Paul imme­di­ate­ly takes the lead while John, with Yoko by his side, is almost com­plete­ly silent but not appar­ent­ly upset – in one love­ly moment, he leads the oth­ers in play­ing Anton Karas’ theme from The Third Man.

Ringo par­tic­i­pates, and George too: the scene in which he talks about how he came up with ​‘I Me Mine’ the night before is par­tic­u­lar­ly mov­ing, with John and Yoko waltz­ing to the already almost ful­ly-formed song. Yet despite the fast approach­ing dead­line, they spend most of their time play­ing around rather than active­ly cre­at­ing new songs, and there is a sense that the Bea­t­les have not done this kind of thing – sim­ply play­ing togeth­er – in a long time.

Almost every day includes dis­cus­sions about the entire project with the film’s direc­tor and oth­er crew mem­bers. One par­tic­u­lar sub­ject of con­tention is the loca­tion and stag­ing for the live show. This gen­er­al inde­ci­sive­ness would appear nor­mal to any non-Bea­t­les per­son, but those ear­ly ses­sions are full of moments remind­ing us that the band is work­ing on anoth­er lev­el. At one point, some­one comes up with a stag­ing idea very sim­i­lar to some­thing the band had done in 1964. Direc­tor Lind­say-Hogg imme­di­ate­ly rejects it, say­ing that this was four years ago, ​“and we’re all 28 now.”

These high expec­ta­tions are keen­ly felt in McCartney’s behav­iour and com­ments as the most proac­tive and least patient of the group. Although the breakup of the Bea­t­les is most often put down to the rift between Lennon and McCart­ney, here Har­ri­son is the one to call out Paul on his dis­mis­sive atti­tude. Whether it is due to the effect of the cam­eras or not, how­ev­er, every­one shows a refresh­ing self-aware­ness and lev­el-head­ed­ness that does not fit with the com­mon con­cep­tion of this tense peri­od in the band’s history.

Paul admits to being con­scious of his bossy atti­tude: lat­er on, when asked about Yoko’s pres­ence, he imag­ines the sim­plis­tic read­ings that some peo­ple might have of the sit­u­a­tion in 50 years time – today – about the band break­ing up because she sat on an amp. And no one ever rais­es their voice. When, at the end of the first week, George announces he is leav­ing the band, he might as well be talk­ing about break­ing for lunch.

Just how mis­er­able they all were in that first week only becomes clear lat­er, once John, Paul and Ringo con­vince George off-cam­era to return and promise to change the way things will be done going for­wards. Leav­ing behind Twick­en­ham Studio’s ​“bad vibes,” as George describes them, they move to a makeshift stu­dio in the base­ment of their own Apple offices on Sav­ile Row, and in the much small­er room, their con­nec­tion is restored. George smiles more, but it is John’s trans­for­ma­tion that is the most strik­ing. His brand of absurd humour makes a tri­umphant return and George even helps Paul on his new song ​‘Get Back’.

An ele­ment Jack­son han­dles very well is the sound, and one feels for him and his team whose thank­less task it was to try and deci­pher some of the band’s con­ver­sa­tions. One of the strongest impres­sions left by the series is the par­tic­u­lar way Paul, John, George and Ringo com­mu­ni­cate when writ­ing songs. Not being clas­si­cal­ly trained, they have their own ways of mak­ing the oth­ers under­stand what they are going for, and their almost ama­teur­ish meth­ods appear incred­i­bly fer­tile ground for their lim­it­less creativity.

Though the detailed, expe­ri­ence- and process-focused film does not exact­ly rely on shock val­ue to sus­tain inter­est, it does pro­vide some­thing of a rev­e­la­tion in its por­tray­al of the infa­mous rooftop con­cert. After reject­ing ideas such as doing the show on a cruise ship or on Prim­rose Hill, the band agrees to per­form on the roof of their own build­ing, with­out any sort of per­mit and sim­ply hop­ing that the ceil­ing won’t give way.

Although I’ve per­son­al­ly always loved the footage of this per­for­mance for its raw­ness and pow­er, it does devi­ate great­ly from the wob­bly heads and high ener­gy of ear­li­er Bea­t­les shows – the Fab Four look pos­i­tive­ly freez­ing, and the puz­zled passers-by in the street below and on near­by rooftops do not seem par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ed. By includ­ing a lot more footage of the band as they per­form ​‘Get Back’, ​‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and oth­er songs, Jack­son accli­ma­tis­es view­ers to this cold Jan­u­ary day just as the band itself would have been.

The four men appear to become increas­ing­ly elat­ed as they play, and though Lennon soon com­plains about his freez­ing fin­gers, this is the hap­pi­est he has looked in the entire series. Addi­tion­al street inter­views with ran­dom peo­ple react­ing to this impromp­tu, com­plete­ly unan­nounced per­for­mance fur­ther ground the event in real­i­ty, and reveal a crowd of peo­ple who are far from faint­ing with excite­ment, but nonethe­less dis­be­liev­ing and delighted.

Jackson’s series is not with­out its (glar­ing, annoy­ing) faults, but it suc­ceeds in doing what even my younger, over­ly-excit­ed Bea­t­les-obsessed self nev­er dared hope for: it solves a lit­tle of the mys­tery of how these four lads from Liv­er­pool achieved what they did, with­out tak­ing away any of their magic.