And the camera would have a 10-minute roll of film in it, and it would just be quietly rolling. He would get the cameraman to set up the tripod, set up a shot, press the button and then walk away as if they’re off to have a cup of tea. "Michael employs some techniques to try to get them on film in much more of a candid way. "There’s this on-going battle between Michael and The Beatles, ’cause they’re aware that he’s doing this. "Michael is determined to try to capture as much candid material as he can," Jackson tells Uncut in a new interview. He says friction between the original director and the band set up a "wonderful running battle" between the two sides, which subtly plays out on-screen. But the Beatles were often reluctant partners, especially as they set about writing and recording an album inside a proverbial fishbowl.ĭirector Peter Jackson spent four years exploring and enhancing outtakes from the 1970 Let It Be film for his upcoming series, The Beatles: Get Back, which arrives this weekend on Disney+.
Lindsay-Hogg was determined to gather as much material as he could, both candid and otherwise. They played their final show on the rooftop of the building for their multimedia company, Apple Corps, in January 1969, ending with Lennon’s famous parting words: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition.The Beatles agreed to allow director Michael Lindsay-Hogg document the 1969 sessions for what became their Let It Be album, but they didn't make it easy for him. Given the pressure and intensity that surrounded them, it’s almost amazing they lasted as long as they did. Late Beatles albums- Abbey Road and the “posthumous” Let It Be-were lived-in, almost folksy affairs, the loose victory laps of a band with nothing left to prove. In the hands of producer George Martin, they also became one of the first bands to use the studio as an instrument, creating works whose density and complexity (revisit anything from 1966’s Revolver to 1968’s “The White Album”) couldn’t be replicated onstage-innovations that, incidentally, coincided with the band’s retirement from touring. How the band found time to grow is hard to fathom: Listen back to that opening chord on “A Hard Day’s Night” or the proto-psychedelic vibe of “Ticket to Ride,” and you can already hear them pushing against the confines of pop’s sound and form.īy the mid-’60s, they’d become ambassadors for the counterculture, tackling subjects-drugs, Eastern spirituality, the limits of consciousness-nobody had bothered thinking about in the mainstream before. In 1962, they were still ducking beer bottles at late-night shows in Hamburg six months later, “Beatlemania“ was a safety concern. They were around for 10 years, and the culture has been reeling ever since.įormed in Liverpool, England, in 1960, the band-John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr (the replacement for Pete Best)-didn’t have big plans at first. If “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me” made the competition look quaint, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” made it look obsolete, stone bowls in an era of cupped hands. Before The Beatles, you had pop music and you had art after The Beatles, the idea that you could get both in a single three-minute shot-a mirror of a similar shift in painting and visual art-became commonplace, even expected. No model for a band that could be both popular and truly progressive, whose new releases weren’t just products but evolutionary leaps in what the form was capable of.
No model for performers who wrote their own material instead of vocalizing others’. No model for a white band that credibly mixed early rock with real R&B.
One thing you have to remember about The Beatles is that there was no Beatles before The Beatles.
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