Let It Be (Daily Mail, 2007)*********************  

To fulfill a three picture film deal which had begun during  Beatlemania days with A Hard Day's Night and Help!, the Beatles, in 1969, decided to make a film covering the making of their new album, Let It Be. The plan was for a fly-on-the-wall documentary unit to have free access to record all their rehearsals, recordings, and, most intriguingly, their private conversations. It should have been an easy, quick, fun solution to a contract problem, but things didn't quite go as expected...

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Paul McCartney was worried. It was January 1969 and the Beatles were the world's most famous entertainers. Culturally they set the pace: they embodied not only the dreams of a worldwide generation of fans but were also the centre of an artistic maelstrom.
Then suddenly, when they should have been at the height of their powers, they were in deep trouble. For the first time since they'd begun playing together 12 years earlier, McCartney and Lennon weren’t seeing eye-to-eye.
      Indeed while filming the recording of the Let It Be album, a record which was to become their swansong and would contain three of their biggest hits, McCartney found himself afraid to confront Lennon about the issue that was driving both him and George Harrison mad: John’s new girlfriend, Yoko Ono.
      Everywhere Lennon went Yoko went. And she didn’t go quietly. In the recording studio she had an opinion about what she thought the Beatles should be, an opinion which extended to Beatle boardroom meetings and far beyond. Yoko, it was said, talked for John, while he, up to then the most garrulous of them all, just listened.
      Until the day he died in 1980, Lennon would gallantly insist the problem had not been of Yoko’s making, and that the other three Beatles had behaved despicably towards her.
For their part Paul, George and Ringo always maintained a dignified silence. But nearly four decades later people still wonder what went wrong.
Indeed, as a journalist who found himself involved in the band's dissolution, if there’s one question I’ve been asked more than any other it's this: “Why exactly did the Beatles break up?”
Well, the answer can be found in an extraordinary set of previously unheard, fly-on-the wall conversations between the Beatles which have come to light after lying abandoned for 38 years in a film vault.
      Recorded by a documentary unit when the group left their familiar Abbey Road studios to make the new album in Twickenham for the film Let It Be, the conversations are contained among the rehearsals and songs on 79 hour long CDs. And, listening to them it becomes very clear where the problem lay: and it wasn't with Paul, George and Ringo.
At one point, while John and Yoko are away from the studio, Paul is still walking on egg shells, acutely aware of what might happen if any of them dared complain too loudly about Yoko’s irritating presence.
'There are only two things to do,' he reasons. 'One is to fight and to fight her and try to get the Beatles back to being four people without Yoko, and to ask Yoko to sit down at board meetings. The other is just to accept that she’s here because there’s no way John is going to split with her for our sakes. He’s going overboard. But he always does go overboard.
      'If it came to the push between Yoko and the Beatles it would be Yoko for John. John would just say to us, "Okay, I’ll see you then." And we’re not wanting that to happen. But it’s going to be an incredibly comical thing in 50 years time if people say the Beatles broke up because Yoko sat on an amp.’
Those with him at the time, including George Harrison and Paul’s girlfriend (soon to be wife) Linda Eastman, all laughed. It did indeed seem an impossibly silly thought. They were amused, too, when, putting on a funny, working-class Northern accent, he compared the millionaire Beatles to workers contemplating a strike because they didn’t like their new working conditions in Twickenham. 'Right! We're coming out!' he joked, like a militant shop steward.
      But within a year the Beatles had indeed broken up and, metaphorically at least, Yoko was sitting on the highest amp of all. The joke had been on the band itself.
      Later they would all admit that filming Let It Be was a bleak period in their lives, and their discontent is evident on the tapes themselves. Underprepared, the band argued among themselves and with director Michael Lindsay-Hogg about how the film should end, while John Lennon complained he hadn’t had enough time to write any new songs. Actually he was probably too distracted by Yoko to concentrate.
      McCartney, for his part, had already written Get Back, The Long and Winding Road and Let It Be. At one point we hear him turn to Lennon, irritated by his partner’s lack of industry and ask: 'Haven’t you written anything yet?'
      'No,' comes the reply.
      'We’ll be faced with a crisis,' worries Paul, obviously wondering what the film crew is going to shoot when the supply of new songs runs out.
      Lennon comes back defensively: 'When I’m up against the wall, Paul, you’ll find me at my best….I think I’ve got Sunday off.'
      'I hope you can deliver.'
      'I was hoping for a little rock and roller…Sammy with his Mammy,'
Lennon mocks, falling into flippant wordplay.
      But it was Johnny with his new girlfriend that was causing the most consternation.
To blame Yoko Ono entirely for what was happening would be unfair. But it's clear from the tapes that she was a negative catalyst for the Beatles implosion.
      Timing, though, was an important factor, too, and Yoko had appeared
at Lennon’s side just as a vacuum in his life had been created. When the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein died from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills in 1967, shortly after the release of the Sergeant Pepper album, the band was left without a leader and a sense of discipline.
      'I think we’ve been very negative since Mr Epstein passed away,' says
McCartney. 'We probably do need a central daddy figure to say. “Come on.
It’s nine o’clock.  Leave the girls at home, lads!”'
      That, of course, was how it had always been for them, Beatle wives
and girlfriends always being left behind as the group got on with their
work. But after Lennon left his wife, Cynthia, in 1968 when he began his
affair with Yoko, all that changed. Yoko was a strong woman, an avant garde artist. She didn’t know anything about Beatles music, but she wanted to be in the studio with them. And Lennon wanted her there at his side all the
time.
      She was also present at the Lennon and McCartney songwriting sessions, which had begun when Paul was at school and John at art college, and which had continued through the days of touring when they’d shared hotel rooms. Although the two had been writing less frequently together since they stopped touring, the music had been the ultimate bedrock of the Beatles’ success. But now, Paul was disturbed by the presence of this new third party.
      'I’d rather write without Yoko, thank you,' we hear him comment on the tapes, 'because that’s the way I write. It’s difficult starting from scratch with Yoko there, because I get off on a Yoko beat. It’s embarrassing. I start writing songs about white walls because I think John and Yoko would like
that…and they wouldn’t. I give them too much credit for what I think they’d like.'
      Paul could see the problem clearly, but the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership would never be revived after Yoko came onboard.
      Nor would the group ever be as close again. Despite the tension, however, the band still shared a few jokes. John even teasing Paul that he would be performing 'in a black bag next week' (as Yoko was prone to do).
      But as frustration built during the sessions, the Beatles amused themselves by repeatedly lapsing back into all their old rock n' roll favourites. It was as though they were seeking comfort in the past. At one point, however, the tension had become too much for George Harrison and he’d walked out the previous day after a row about being told how to play his guitar by Paul. As the best guitarist in the band, but who couldn’t play on demand exactly as dictated by Lennon or McCartney, his patience had, not unreasonably, snapped.
But would he come back to finish the album and film? No one knew.
“It isn’t easy, it’s a festering wound,” John explains to Yoko. “And yesterday we allowed it to get deeper because we don’t give him any confidence. We all have egos and we can afford to be more encouraging. We both do it to him, Paul and me. We treat him like a mongol.”
Astonishingly, however, while sympathising with George’s frustration at years of feeling less than an equal in the Beatles, Lennon seemed callously indifferent as to whether or not he returned.
'If George leaves, he leaves,' we hear him say coolly to Ringo. 'If he comes back we’ll just go on as if nothing has happened. If he doesn’t come back by Monday or Tuesday of next week, we’ll ask Eric Clapton to do it.'
      Clapton had already played with the Beatles on their previous White Album but Lennon’s tone suggests that to him the concept of the Beatles had changed since Yoko had become involved.
      'I don’t think the Beatles revolves around just four people,' he
says pointedly, an opinion shared only, one suspects, with Yoko. Certainly
it must have unnerved the other three.
      Of course George did return, and with a new song to play to them
called I, Me, Mine. But then, as if to illustrate his lack of confidence
with the Lennon/McCartney axis, he says: 'I don’t care if you don’t like
it.'
      He already had, he admits later, about 20 songs they’d turned down, one of which, Isn’t It A Pity, he was trying to get to Frank  Sinatra.
      As it happens the other Beatles did like I, Me, Mine, and it went on to the Let It Be album. Another Harrison composition, however, All Things Must Pass, which the tapes showed they rehearsed endlessly, obviously didn’t pass the quality test. It was rejected and wasn’t heard again until it became the title song of Harrison’s first solo album two years  later.
      Occasionally listening to the tapes there’s a sense of  overhearing moments from the spoof rock film Spinal Tap, as when Paul plays the piano we hear Yoko calling loudly  'John...John...John…John' over and over like a mad wraith, while Lennon is  trying to engage in another conversation. It would have tried the patience of a saint.
      'I think you’re nuts, the pair of you,' says Ringo plainly at one point when Lennon joins in with Yoko’s wailing.
      Perhaps the final nail in the Beatles’ coffin came when suddenly John excitedly announced to all of them that he’d been to see the manager of the Rolling Stones, American Allen Klein, and that he was 'fantastic'. In McCartney’s opinion Klein was anything but fantastic. Another battle
with John had begun.
      In the end the Beatles’ professionalism drove them to finish the filmed album, though plans to record a torchlit concert in a Tunisian Roman amphitheatre were ditched when Paul pointed out that Ringo had vetoed it. 'He won’t go abroad,' he said. Instead the documentary ended with their famous appearance on the roof of their Apple headquarters in central London.
      With nothing resolved about the Beatles’ future, and the public
totally unaware of the problems, 1969 dragged on. Soon Get Back was top of the charts, Allen Klein, despite Paul’s opposition, was their new
manager, and John and Yoko were sitting in bed in Amsterdam for a week
'for peace'.
      Then while the Let It Be film was being edited another album, Abbey Road, was quickly recorded, this time without the cameras, though at no time were all four Beatles in the studio at the same time.  It was as though they’d become jobbing musicians for one other.
      Inevitably, as a journalist covering the band at the time, I heard rumours that the Beatles were on the brink of a break-up, and when I wrote an article for the London Evening Standard suggesting that the group was dead, I received a white rose from John and Yoko.
      A few weeks later while in Canada with John and Yoko, John admitted to me that he’d left the Beatles, asking me not to write about it  until Let It Be was released the following March. I didn’t.
      But then Paul decided to make his own solo album, and released it with an ambiguous statement about how he had no future plans with the Beatles. Immediately that was interpreted around the world as an indication that he’d left the group, thus breaking them up.
      The irony was bitter. The Beatle who’d tried hardest to keep the band together, as can be heard all through the Let It Be tapes, was now being blamed for their demise.
      For his part Lennon was furious Paul had got the 'credit' (his description) for ending the Beatles. As he’d started them he thought he should end them, too. 'Why didn’t you write it when I told you,' he demanded of me angrily the day the news broke.
      'You asked me not to,' I  replied.
      'Fucking hell! You’re the journalist, Connolly, not me!'
      Finally the Let It Be film and album were released in March 1970.
None of the band attended the premiere, and none of the critical conversations about Yoko’s unwelcome involvement appeared on the screen. Of course, the song Let It Be became a Beatles classic, but already teams of lawyers were sharpening their pens for the dissolution of the group. It would be a long and expensive farewell.
      But was the break-up inevitable? Yes. As George Harrison would have said, all things must pass. The four Beatles were exhausted after eight years continuous work, unbelievable fame and the pressure to endlessly improve on what they’d done before. I think psychologically they snapped in
1969. They needed time away from each other, time to grow up and develop away from the juggernaut that the Beatles had become. John Lennon was also believed to have been dabbling with heroin at the time. And that can’t have helped.
      And then there was Yoko. Perhaps without John’s  insistence that she be with him at all times, and the insensitivity of both of  them to the other three Beatles, a break-up wouldn’t have been so acrimonious, and lines would have been left open for occasional regroupings through the years.
      Paul certainly knew that the sum of the total, the Beatles, was greater than the individual parts of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr. He would certainly have liked to work with Lennon again. But he never did.
      'When you’re together something grows,' he says at one point on the tapes. 'When you’re not, something goes.'      

Daily Mail:  April, 2007

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