JULY 10, 2008 – BERLIN: the wax figures of the “Beatles” with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and George Harrison – official opening of the waxworks “Madame Tussauds Berlin”.
Introduction
The initial release of the Anthology albums and the eight-part television series shown on ITV were big events in 1995/6, even if the viewing figures for the latter steadily declined as the series progressed.
The showing of the final episode on New Year’s Eve when any Brit’ worthy of the name was down the pub or at a party was as inexplicable as the decision to release the new single Free as a Bird after most of us had already bought it on the Anthology One album, a decision that deprived them of their first number one single in a quarter of a century.
But the enterprise was still a big event, and one that, for a time, united both casual and hardcore fans. Before Anthology, the best television rendering of the Beatles journey we’d had was The Complete Beatles. That was good for its time, but here, finally were the three surviving Beatles telling their story in their own words, together with archive footage and audio of John, as well as important contributions from significant others such as their Producer George Martin, and manager Brian Epstein, who sadly, like John, had to participate from beyond the grave, and former road manager and then Apple boss Neil Aspinall.
Through working on John demos donated by Yoko, and with a little help from Jeff Lynne and the, then, wonders of modern technology, the ‘boys’ provided us with new material in the form of the two singles, the aforementioned Free As A Bird and Real Love.
The third song they commenced work on, Now and Then, had to wait until 2023 to get its moment in the sun, and you can read my detailed review here The Last Beatles Song | Counter Culture
It was a project that had been long in the making. Aspinall had produced a rough ninety-minute first draft as far back as 1970, provisionally to be called The Long and Winding Road. Ringo’s comment at the time was that ‘It’s mostly us getting in and out of cars, and on and off planes.’
As they had only just broken up, and were wracked with business and personal differences, it was all way too soon, anyway.
But it was idea which would resurface periodically over the years. John even referred to it, still calling it The Long and Winding Road, though, in reality, neither he nor George was ever going to allow to be called after what was essentially a Paul solo composition, during his final round of interviews to publicise his and Yoko’s Double Fantasy album shortly before his tragic murder in December 1980.
Their interest in the project likely rose and fell in direct collation to the state of these differences.
George, conversely the ‘money Beatle’ as well as the ‘Spiritual Beatle,’ was finally driven to to commit to completing this unfinished business by financial concerns, following the collapse of his initially successful Handmade Films production company (Life of Brian, The Long Good Friday, Whitnall and I – not a bad resume), and some shoddy business management.
Conversely George, as well as being the ‘Spiritual Beatle’ was also the ‘Money Beatle’, just as he was, at various times, both the most and the least willing of the four to entertain the idea of a reunion.
On a personal level, my memory is of being drastically late for work through waiting for Chris Evans to play Free as a Bid, as he promised to do every five minutes or so on his Breakfast Show a day or two before its release. This was not quite the first ever radio play. That distinction had belonged to Anne Nightingale a few hours earlier, in the Radio Two ‘graveyard slot,’ but not even I was that dedicated. Or maybe I simply didn’t know that Annie would be playing it.
So, there I was, waiting for Chris to get on with it as the clock ticked ever closer to the start of my 10-8 shift.
In the end, I didn’t even bother to make up an excuse. My colleagues knew me well enough to forgive and forget.
First impressions? To be honest, I think I had an exaggerated idea of what could be done with a two-track mono tape recorded with the cassette player on top of the piano, even with a great producer like Jeff Lynne, and, presumably, the most cutting-edge technology then available to anyone, anywhere. Those ghostly John Lennon vocals took some getting used, though I came to love it, in time. The moment when George’s half-verse gives way to his cracker of a slide guitar solo is right up there as a truly great Beatles moment.
So, of course, I bought the CDs, and watched the series, and loved it, even if, as I’ve heard many fans comment, I thought the earlier episodes were better than the latter. This was largely, because, save for the ‘rooftop gig’ of January 1969, miming to Hey Jude and Revolution on the David Frost show a year earlier, and to All You Need Is Love at the worldwide One World TV broadcast a year before that, there is no live Beatles footage after the summer of ’66, and, it seemed, aside from that which became first Let It Be and then Get Back, a dearth of in-studio rehearsal and recording material.
The result of this, was a lot more talking heads in the latter episodes, and that can get wearing, even if the heads doing most of the talking are mostly the Beatles.
Still, the series was great, and when the DVD version finally came out, it came with a whole two and-a-half-hours’ worth of Extras material.
But we Beatles fans are never fully satisfied; and why should we be? So, as soon as Blu Rays became a thing, the clamour for a visual and audio upgrade began.
In addition, the release of the superb Super de Lux versions of the latter Beatles albums, Revolver to Let It Be, had shown that George Martin’s comment at the time of the original Anthology albums, to the effect that ‘That’s it, now. If we put anything else out it would have to be called ‘Scraping the Bottom of the Barrell’ because there’s nothing left in the can’, was plain wrong. Those albums had revealed that much better alternative takes of songs, or even previously unheard tracks, existed in the vaults of Abbey Road than were released on the original three-volume Anthology album.
Then, there was the little matter of Peter Jackson’s epic Get Back, which was released, again on Disney, in November 2022. The way that Jackson had taken Michael-Lyndsey-Hogg’s eighty minutes of grainy, narratively direction-less Let It Be, and made of it almost eight-hours of high-definition, sonically superb compelling drama (at least for us obsessives. Get Back is not really one for the normies) had raised the bar still higher by showing what could now be done.
So, here we are. We finally have our long-awaited Anthology upgrade. Maybe not on Blu Ray (another point I’ll return to shortly), but with Jackson again at the helm, with the sonic aspects handled by Giles Martin, whose work on those expanded album collections has been generally excellent (it must be in the genes), apart from the occasional misfire like his sacrilegious butchering of I Am the Walrus on the recent ‘Blue’ (1967-70) remix, there seemed very little that could go wrong.
So, did it?
Positives
The short answer, is no. It’s pretty much positives all the way, for me.
Anthology 2025 is a vast improvement on the original visually. That had been made to be seen on the small cathode televisions of the time, and, watching recently the first four episodes from my DVD Box-set, it shows. The new version is very clearly made to be seen on the much bigger, digital HD screens now present in most of our homes.
Sonically, it’s also massively improved. I don’t possess a 5.1 surround system, but those who do, report that it sounds amazing.
There’s also a lot more John. Of course, he’s the only Beatle who didn’t live to take part in the project personally, but there are more audio and visual clips included than previously, so there’s more of a sense of him being involved. Obviously, a lot of care and attention has been taken in the selection of these clips, presumably at the urging of son Sean, who for the first time is listed among the producers of the series, alongside Paul, Ringo and George’s widow Olivia, rather than the now ailing ninety-three-year-old Yoko.
One disappointment among fans was when we learned, shortly before release, that we were getting an upgrade of the TV series rather than the extended DVD release.
But more is not always better, and I think that the series is much better paced than the old physical release version, where, based on my recent viewing of episodes 1-4, there was a lot of unnecessary repetition and padding. That makes it a better jumping-on point for those who are only now in the process of discovering the Beatles.
For someone like me, born in the same year as the release of Love Me Do, their first proper single, it’s hard to believe that such people exist, but they do.
And the series is still substantial enough to satisfy (more or less) us old obsessives.
It’s not a straight upgrade of what we saw on our TV screens either, and that’s another big positive.
As I’ve said, my own view of the 1995 series was that the earlier episodes were better than the latter, which was no doubt a contributory factor to those declining viewing figures. Now, my opinion has changed, with a definite preference for the latter episodes.
Leaving aside the new episode nine, which I’ll mention shortly, there is a lot more footage of Paul, George and Ringo being interviewed together while making the project than was previously the case, and that helps to fill out the latter episodes, and in a way that is interesting and enlightening.
As Ringo says at one point, ‘My Anthology would be different to Paul’s, Geoge and John’s would be different…’ I’m paraphrasing, but his basic point is that there can be no single ‘true’ story of the Beatles, and what was presented as their official history in 1995, and now, was always going to be the result of compromise between the main protagonists, which is one reason that the original took around four years to make, even once the decision to go ahead had been made.
We’ve long known that there were tensions present at those 1990s meet-ups and recording sessions, especially between Paul and George. But all three were at least self-aware enough, and accommodating enough to one another to acknowledge that there could be no single ‘correct’ version of the story, and this enabled them to move forward and get the job done as honestly as was possible.
Without watching the original 1995 series, the extended DVD cut, and the new version back-to-back, it’s impossible for me to be able to recount every change that has been made, though no doubt more than one super-fan will be painstakingly undertaking this task. But, from memory, definite changes include the appearance of John’s verse-demo for Yellow Submarine, a demo we didn’t know existed until the 2022 Revolver Super de Lux edition (previously, this had been thought to be primarily a Paul song), the replacement of Lindsey-Hogg’s Let It Be footage with clips from Jackson’s Get Back.
I also remember a Paul interview way back when he said that George’s modesty had led to the omission of a whole section on his own development as a songwriter. This is now present and correct, and the series is all the better for it.
On then to that new episode nine. What we all wanted was lots of footage of the ‘Threetless’ working on Free As A Bird, Real Love and Now and Then, interacting together in and out of the studio, discussing the making of the series itself, more of them jamming together acoustically inside George’s modest home, and passing around the ukulele while playing and reminiscing about India in his equally modest garden.
And we get all that. Not enough, of course, especially of the development of new material from John’s mono-cassette demos. But, actually more than I expected. None of this footage has ever been seen anywhere, not on the DVD Extras disc, nor even in the darkest depths of YouTube.
We do get a little more of the indoor acoustic jam, and Aint She Sweet, sung originally by John on the ‘B’ Side of My Bonnie, the record that originally bought their existence to the attention of Mr. Epstein, has been added to the outdoor uke’ session, as has Jimmy Reed’s Baby What Do You Want Me To Do?
Amongst the newly added interviews with the three of them together that have been included for the first time, they address the question of whether the series could have been made in, say, 1975, with a resolute ‘No’ from all three. Too many business problems and personal issues existed. As late as 1988, Paul refused to join George, Ringo and Yoko in being present to accept the band’s admission to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. John’s physical absence aside, the time was right in 1995.
The knowledge that George would die a mere six years after the completion of the series is a reminder of how important it is that they got together to do it when they did.
That their assertion that their issues were now behind them and they were now the best of friends, wasn’t strictly true, because the relationship between Paul and George remained complex, is unimportant when we know that both Paul and Ringo took the opportunity to say goodbye, separately, at George’s bedside shortly before his death in 2001, and at a property secretly owned by Paul, and made available to George so that he might spend his final weeks with his family away from possible press intrusion.
That John and George’s relationship soured after 1974, and that they never did quite resolve their differences, is also unimportant. The other three clearly loved and missed him, and, although we only get to see what they wanted us to see, those that remained were at least close enough to get the series made, and even to record together again.
There is something very special about seeing Paul and George harmonising together at the mic with the ghost of John singing lead in their headphones. As up and down as their personal relationship might have been over the years, their voices blended together as perfectly in their fifties as they had in their twenties.
And, in essence, through all the insanity they shared, the good and the bad, they remained those same kids who talked guitars and Elvis on the ‘86’ bus to school.
Ringo, of course, is always just Ringo, the perfect drummer for the Beatles, and often the glue that held three giant egos together.
‘I’ve loved hanging out with you guys, again’ he says in George’s garden, and you can tell he meant it.
Each episode concludes, before the main credits roll, with the words ‘In Loving Memory of John and George.’ This was a nice touch. I’ve so far watched the whole series through once, and Episode Nine twice. It’s more than worthy of another monthly £5.99 subscription to Disney+.
Negatives
My biggest criticism concerns the Beatles ongoing relationship with Disney. How much more impactful could the series have been had it been free-to-air on mainstream TV, as it was in 1995?
This is made all the worse by Disney’s aversion to physical media releases. A fan-led campaign, orchestrated in large part by Peter Jckson himself, pushed them to make an exception for Get Back, though even then we got only a bare-bones repeat of the Disney stream, with no Extras, let alone the fourteen-hour cut Jackson insists he has ready to go (I believe Star Wars fans forced a similar concession for The Mandalorian). But I don’t think we’ll be so lucky with the Anthology. After all, we’ve had no physical release of the cleaned-up version of Let It Be, or of the Beatles ’64 and Eight Day’s a Week both recent(ish) additions to the growing Beatles-Disney canon.
There will always be a place in this world, contrary to what some believe, for real, physical items you can hold in your hands and put on your shelves, and when it comes to a phenomenon as culturally important as the Beatles, it should be seen as of the utmost importance that physical versions of all of their material, visual and audio, are permanently available and able to be revisited without having to maintain a lifelong subscription to Disney, Spotify or any other corporate conglomerate.
Some have commented that the AI techniques used to upgrade picture quality have at times led to the Beatles themselves taking on an air of visual unreality, overly pasty on the black and white, and almost cartoonish in some of the colour footage. This latter criticism was also made regarding Get Back. I don’t really see that myself. Maybe on the black and white footage, but what we lose in terms of ‘authenticity’ is more than offset by the increase in clarity. For instance, the famous Some Other Guy footage shot at the Cavern shortly after Ringo replaced Pete, has never looked better.
Incidentally, the latest Doctor Who Collection set, Series 13, Tom Baker’s second, looks bloody awful. I bought Series 12, and that looks great, but someone has got badly carried away with the ‘AI enhancements’ with this latest release. Fortunately, Anthology has got it about right.
The Albums
This is primarily a review of the television series but, as in 1995, Anthology 2025 is a multi-media enterprise, with the original albums, 1-3, having been remastered, and a new Anthology 4 added, released on both vinyl, CD and available to stream. So, I suppose I should say a little about these too, though my listening experience has so far been limited to the tracks that interest me most.
Fortunately, Apple relented on their original decision not to make 4 available as a standalone release for those of us who are quite happy to stick with the original versions of 1-3, and not be compelled to fork out for an expensive boxset simply for an improvement in sound quality.
But even here, there is the valid criticisms that only 13 of the tracks on 4 have not already appeared on Super de Lux versions of the latter albums. I probably will buy the last volume on CD at some point, but even though I remain committed to physical media in all things, it’s not a priority. I’m quite happy to stream on Spotify for now.
From what I’ve heard, Giles Martin has done a decent job of improving the sound quality on 1-3, but I’m not a great fan of remastering or remixing outtakes, and I don’t expect, nor want material recorded on a 2-reel tape in Paul’s front room in 1960 to sound like it was recorded yesterday in a modern recording studio, even if that should become possible at some point in the future, which it certainly isn’t yet.
There’s a charm in LoFi, and it’d be a shame if technology was to advance so much that that was lost.
As for the ‘Threetle’ tracks Now and Then remains as it was in was when it was finally released two years ago, i.e. still great, the remixed Free as a Bird is good, though I still prefer the ghostly version I made myself late for work waiting to hear for the first time thirty-years ago, and Giles has made a complete pig’s ear of Real Love.
Personally, I think the material on 4 should have been scattered through the complete set rather than presented separately, as was done recently with the CD versions of the remastered and extended Red and Blue albums. That way, the chronological nature of the project would have been maintained.
I’ll offer Take One of In My Life as the standout ‘new’ track so far. I think I actually prefer the song without George Martin’s sped-up piano solo, which has always sounded out of place to me on the finished recording. Plus, Baby You’re A Rich Man, takes 11/12 (‘Bring some cokes in, Mal; and some cannabis resin’) and All You Need Is Love, take 1.
Still no sign of Carnival of Light, the one Beatles track that, unless you have been a part of the absolute inner-sanctum, you’ve never heard (ignore the many YouTube fakes). As much as I love Revolution 9 (the most widely owned piece of Avant-Garde art in history, as someone put it), I blow hot and cold on this. Paul had wanted it on Anthology 2, and perhaps made a case for it for the new Anthology 4, which would be the logical place for it to be. But those who have heard it, say that it’s nowhere near as good nor as beautifully structured as Rev’9. So, do we really need a fourteen-minute collage of random noises to be added to the canon? Probably not, but it’s bound to come out one day. Paul usually gets his way in the end, as with the belated completion of Now and Then. A four- or five-minute edited version, just to give us an idea, would have been a sensible compromise.
But take 20 of Revolution, the best take, the version that links Revolution1 and Revolution 9 in a single song, should definitely have been there.
It’s a great collection, but the compilation ‘1’ (not to be confused with Anthology 1), or, even better, the remastered Red and Blue are better introductions to the band for new fans. And 13 unreleased tracks is not enough to satisfy the hardcore of fandom.
Plus, the fiftieth anniversaries of both Help and Rubber Soul have been allowed to come and go unmarked. That’s what we really want: Remastered versions of the canon albums, together with whatever outtakes remain worth hearing. But Apple rarely give us what we want nowadays. Sadly, the days when the Beatles left classic singles off albums so fans didn’t have to buy the same song twice, are long gone.
Conclusion
As I’ve already indicated, we true Beatles fans will always want more, and hopefully, as with Get Back, we will get a Bu Ray set which will enable us to watch Anthology whenever we want. Better still, unlike Get Back, we will get an extended version.
But, Disney aside, I’m happy with what we’ve been given, at least as far as the television series goes. It both looks and sounds great, the edit has been done tastefully, and to paraphrase Paul’s habitual response to those who criticise the length of the White Album, ‘It’s the bloody Beatles Anthology, so shut up!’
The Beatles Anthology series is currently streaming on Disney +.
The play tells the story, through words and music, mostly the latter, of Merseybeat band The Liverbirds from their inception in 1962 to their break-up in 1968, with a brief update on the girl’s life after the split and a nice surprise at the end of its two-hour running time.
I didn’t do any research before the play, though I had an awareness of the band and a vague outline of some of their history, so I was unaware that the play had enjoyed a successful run at the same venue, with the same lead players, back in 2019. From some of the reactions of the mainly ageing demographic at the almost packed theatre, I wouldn’t be surprised if many in the crowd were returning customers.
After a couple of false starts, beginning in 1962 as The Squaws and then as The Deputones, with the earliest incarnation including Mary’s sister Sheila and Irene Green as members (both of whom went on to play in other Liverpool bands), the established line-up of Valerie Gell on lead guitar, Pamela Birch on rhythm guitar, Mary McGlory on bass, and Sylvia Saunders on drums was in place by the following year, the year that, through the ascendency of the Beatles, and lesser Brian Epstein managed artists like Gerry and the Pacemakers and Cilla, established Merseybeat as a national rather than simply local phenomena.
Girl groups weren’t, of course, a new thing in 1963. American artists like the Ronettes, the Crystals, the Shangri-las and the Shirelles had all enjoyed great success and greatly influenced the Merseybeat sound. The latter’s song Boys was a staple of the Beatles’ live set from their early days and throughout their touring career, being used as a rare vocal showcase first for Pete Best and then for Ringo Starr. Ringo, I believe performs it live to this day, and we also get a rousing version during tonight’s play.
But these hit girl groups were vocal-only outfits. They didn’t play guitars or any other instruments, either in the studio or live, that being largely the job of men, including, on the records, some of the top session musicians of the day (an exception was the great female bassist Carole Kaye who, as part of the legendary Wrecking Crew graced many of the top hits of the sixties).
The titular phrase ‘Girls don’t play guitars’ is attributed to John Lennon, and he’s depicted in the play as saying this when introduced to the Liverbirds at the Cavern.
That was what made this band different: they were an all-girl foursome who did play guitars, and drums, as well as them all being accomplished singers, both individually and in harmony.
In retrospect, it seems inevitable that there would be an all-girl vocal/instrumental group on the thriving Merseyside music scene. But, although the Liverbirds’ billing as ‘The world’s first all-girl Beat-group’, which is repeated several times during the play, might be a touch hyperbolic, I can’t recall any that came before, or even, now six decades later, a great many since.
Like their contemporaries Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, for whom Ringo played drums before becoming a Beatle, the Liverbirds did not achieve great commercial success, their best effort being a number five hit in Germany with a cover of Bo Diddley’s Diddley Daddy.
They released two albums on the Star Club Hamburg’s in-house record label in 1965, so we do have a fair idea of how they sounded, which is more than be said for Rory and his group, of whom only some very Lo-Fi live recordings exist.
Guitarist/vocalist Pamela Birch wrote three tracks spread across these albums, but they were essentially a covers band, as were the Hurricanes, and again, in common with them, it’s mostly as a hard-driving live act for which they are fondly remembered among the sadly dwindling number of those who can truthfully say ‘I was there’, as a part of the scene in Liverpool and Hamburg in the early and mid-sixties.
It was therefore essential, if the play was to be a success, that the music was done justice, and that through that the audience could experience something of the vibe that those attending a performance by the Liverbirds might have felt.
On this criterion, I can happily say that the play was indeed a resounding success.
It’s obvious from the beginning that the four chief cast members are playing their own instruments and doing their own singing live, and they’re excellent, with great musicianship and superb vocal harmonies. Best of all musically was Mary Grace Cutler as Valerie Gell on lead guitar, even though she was responsible for the only musical fluff of the evening, on the intro to Roll Over Beethoven. But that made the music more real as, had you been there at the time you would have expected the occasional fluff from all of the local groups, including the Beatles.
I haven’t delved into the careers of any of these four actor/musician performers outside the confines of the show. But they sounded so tight together that it wouldn’t surprise me if they worked together on musical projects other than this, perhaps performing their own material.
The set for the play was designed as a standard stage set-up for a four-piece band, with amps, drums and microphones, all looking suitably period, from where the ‘Liverbirds’ performed their songs. At each side of the stage were two large, wavy cut-out guitars rising towards the ceiling, ending at a bank of small screens designed to look like retro 1960s T. V’s, upon which photographs and the small amount of footage that exists of the band, as well as topical signifiers that helped situate us in time were displayed.
At the rare, was a narrow raised area where the all-male supporting cast made their own musical contributions, with these supporting players also coming forwards in ones or twos to join the girls’ front-centre in the non-musical, dialogue-based sections of the play, playing multiple cameos, as the girl’s fathers, Mick Jagger, Ray and Dave Davis of the Kinks (the Liverbirds supported both the Stones and the Kinks on tour and Jagger and the Davis brothers also played with them on an unreleased, possibly lost, demo), Brian Epstein, Bob Wooler, a pivotal Merseybeat figure who is unfortunately best remembered for being beaten up by John Lennon at Paul McCartney’s twenty-first birthday party and, once we get to Hamburg, Klaus Voorman and others. These dialogue scenes tended towards the comedic, and were sometimes rather perfunctory, although they were well-performed and efficiently accomplished their role of relating the band’s story as a coherent narrative.
Less successful and the weakest element of the play in my view, was the narrative songs performed by the boys at the back in a sub-Merseybeat style, sometimes including little snatches of Beatles songs, such as the intro to I Feel Fine or a quick ‘Beep, Beep, Yeah’ and the like. They weren’t long enough to get the Beatles lawyers onto the productions back, but they were long enough to be annoying and, in my opinion, the cheesy lyrics of these original songs added nothing to the production, although they were played and sung well enough.
The acting itself was good all-around and did a decent job of giving us a sense of the environment in which the girls lived and played, partly through mentions of bygone Liverpool landmarks like Hessy’s music shop, and the Littlewoods Pools building, which once employed thousands of young women, and the dilapidated shell of which is still standing just down the road from me.
As we move through the Liverbirds story, the unchanging nature of the stage-set is perhaps another slight weakness of the production. We are told that we’re now in the Cavern or at the Star Club on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, but with nothing visual, besides the contents of the faux-T. V screens, to reinforce these switches of location. The play is fast-paced enough for me to happily suspend belief, but I did feel that if cost or logistics meant that only one set was feasible, then something a little grittier may have been better. After all, the Cavern and the clubs on the Reeperbahn were noted for their grittiness and in the latter case for the ever-present hint of violence.
If the play is to be believed, the girls passed on the chance to be signed by Brian Epstein by agreeing to a residency, against his advice, at the Star Club in 1964. Liverpool bands had of course been making the trip to Hamburg for around six years by this point and it would still have been something of a right of passage, as well as an amazing adventure for four young working class girls, though with the Beatles having performed at the Star Club for the final time in December 1962, and even the likes of Gerry and the Pacemakers having moved on to much bigger things, the Hamburg scene was past its zenith by the time Liverbirds made the trip.
The story of how the girls raised the money for the fair to Hamburg led neatly to one of two moments of audience participatory hissing when the cast revealed that one Jimmy Saville helped them out by securing a little paid national exposure in the Sunday People. We were assured that he didn’t ask for anything in return from them, perhaps because, at between seventeen and twenty-one years old, they were a little above his preferred upper-age range.
The second well-deserved hiss of the night came when we were told that, towards the end of their time together, another regular performer in the Hamburg clubs was Paul Gadd, still two or three years away from becoming Gary Glitter.
What was unusual about the Liverbirds among the Liverpool bands, apart from the fact that they were girls who played guitars, was that, once they made it to Hamburg they never really left, though they did tour extensively elsewhere in Europe. Three of their members even continued to live Germany after the band split in 1968.
‘Girls Don’t…’ is more of a nice family night out than a work of social realism. It must have been hard to be female performers on the Reeperbahn scene, and this is indicated through some of the dialogue and straight narration, though not explored as deeply as it might have been.
It’s a positive play, and through the excellent chemistry between the cast we get something of the thrill it must have been to be four girls coming of age away from the restraints of family, enjoying the acclaim of audiences, drinking, partying, indulging their healthy sexual appetites, and discovering, as the Beatles and others had before them, that tiredness could be alleviated by a little yellow pill or two.
(The Catholic Church also has a cameo in the play, in the form of Mary’s Parish Priest. Mary was still considering becoming a nun when she set off for Hamburg, though this is another theme which could have been developed further)
By 1967, musically, the Liverbirds were in a musical time warp, still playing mostly American covers from the late fifties/early sixties. They were never going to be in the vanguard of the psychedelic revolution, nor, I suppose, did they want to be. But they did get stoned with Jimi Hendrix because he’d heard that Mary rolled the best joints in Hamburg, although she didn’t smoke them herself, we are told, and it’s a nice moment when this story is relayed to us, as suitably vivid colours swirl on screens above us.
The play becomes more poignant after the interval and the closer we get towards the end, as the focus switches from the good times to the fragmentation and final dissolution of the band.
We learn that the first to leave was drummer Sylvia after she fell pregnant and did what most girls did in that situation at this time, she got married and swapped her ambitions for the role of housewife and mother.
That this decision had to be made on the eve of a Japanese tour, added an extra layer of resigned sadness to this part of the story.
The band continued, and the actors made it clear that the Liverbirds still had their moments, but that it could never be quite the same when the line-up had lost one of the original four.
In the most touching scene of the night, we discover that Valerie was the next to leave after her fiancé was paralysed from the neck down following an accident that happened while he was driving back from his eighteenth birthday party. The band was on stage at the Star Club at the time, extending their set as Valerie eagerly awaited the arrival of her boyfriend.
The remaining two originals, Sylvia and Pamela, carried on for a while with ‘whoever Manfred’ (their manager) could find, until finally calling it a day, and beginning their lives post-Liverbirds, with only Pamela continuing in music, still performing and working in other capacities in the Hamburg clubs. She also struggled greatly with addiction to alcohol and cocaine, though this isn’t mentioned in the play, contributory factors to her relatively early death, aged sixty-five in 2009.
Before the last song, regret is expressed that they never got the chance to perform together just one more time, announcing the song as the reunion the girls never had. Strangely, their Wikipedia entry mentions a brief reunion in 1998, though I’m not sure if this is an error or a rather unnecessary use of artistic licence by the writer.
As it turned out, this wasn’t the last song of the evening. At its conclusion, one of the players announces ‘two very special guests’ and the surviving Liverbirds, bassist Mary McGlory and drummer Sylvia Saunders arrive onstage to a fabulous reception, joining those who had so ably portrayed their younger selves for the truly final song of the night, a raucous rendition of Peanut Butter, obviously a favourite from their repertoire in their heyday.
If I had done any research before seeing the play, I would have known that Sylvia and Mary were still with us and that the two had performed this cameo throughout the 2019 run. Hopefully, they will do so throughout this new one-month run at the Royal Court. I suspect I would still have found their appearance moving if I had known it was coming, and I should add that the way Sylvia, a woman in her late seventies, pounded the drums was impressive.
After the song was over the lights went up and she, Mary and the cast received a well-deserved standing ovation.
The Liverbirds may only be a footnote in music history, but such footnotes deserve to be remembered and celebrated. Perhaps they were and perhaps they weren’t the ‘World’s first all-female Beat group.’ But they were indisputably four young working class girls trying to make it in a decidedly male environment, and as such they were trailblazers.
We should add that, for the time their image was also groundbreaking. It might have been expected that they would dress in the type of sexy, revealing outfits that was the norm among many female performers, and increasingly the fashion for young British women. But their choice of masculine shirts, trousers and thin ties (arrived at after some experimentation) was interesting, and something I would have liked to hear more about. It’s not a great surprise to learn that one of the band, Sylvia, after the failure of her marriage, should end up in a committed relationship with another woman, and though we get only a brief hint of it in the play, I’m guessing that they had a substantial following among gay women.
Omissions aside, Girls Don’t Play Guitars is a great night out with great music and solid acting with a special mention on the latter front to Alice McKenna as Mary McGory.
If the play is at all close to the truth, then those four young women had the time of their lives.
Girls Don’t Play Guitars can be seen at the Royal Court until October 26th. Hopefully, it will get the chance to tour outside of Liverpool.
This month, April 2023, marks twenty years since I moved to Liverpool from Manchester. That move occurred twelve-and-a half-years after leaving my home town of Grimsby for the intellectual challenges of life as a mature Social Studies/Humanities student at Manchester Metropolitan University. It’s a sobering thought that I’ve now lived well over half of my life outside of my place of birth, but I thought it might be interesting, and timely, for me to write specifically about my ongoing connection to my adopted home of the past two decades.
This is a connection that, through my own particular cultural tastes, and past political connections, I can easily trace back into my childhood and adolescence, to well before the idea of living in Liverpool even seemed a possibility.
But, in fact, my links to Liverpool go back to a time long before even that, to long before my birth, a connection spanning at least two centuries in facy, though this was completely unbeknown to me at the time of my decision to make a new life here.
More of that later.
Strangely, the precise date I moved here is unknown to me. The journal I kept twenty years ago refers to the time I first raised with my then girlfriend, whom we shall call ‘H’, the possibility of my moving to Liverpool in order to be closer to her. That was in March 2003. In my entry for April 9th, I speculate that it looks like the move is ‘happening and happening soon’. But this was a sporadic journal, and by the time of my next entry, in May 2003, I have already arrived and am commenting on the wonderful spaciousness of my new flat in Liverpool in comparison to the cramped, un-cleanly, high-rise hovel I’d been living in in Manchester for more than eight years.
That said, there is no doubt that my move occurred at some point during April 2003.
One
Mariners v Merseyside
Growing up, as for many children and young people in the 1970’s, Liverpool primarily meant football. It was common for kids from small towns, those whose home football clubs tended to reside in the lower reaches of the football pyramid, which was certainly the case with Grimsby Town, to support their local club, but also to adopt a top-level club, a Big Club. Liverpool F.C was one of the more common choices in the playgrounds of both primary and secondary schools (‘High’ school was a horrible Americanism we were yet to adopt) in Grimsby.
I have hazy memories of the 1970 World Cup, of Pele and Brazil, and of the F.A Cup Final of that year, the real climax of the footballing season in those days, and one of the few matches to be shown live on television. That was between Chelsea and Leeds, and I took the side of Chelsea purely on the basis that my then brother-in-law, Roly, who was living with us at the time, was a committed fan of Don Revie’s Leeds. Chelsea eventually won 2-1 after a replay, the first Cup Final replay since 1912 (no penalty shoot-outs in those days), and I sort of decided I was a Chelsea fan from that point on, though I never stuck to it in the way that, for instance, my best friend Mikw chose Manchester City as a child, and hasn’t wavered from that decision to this day.
I only really became an active football fan during the 1971/72 season. It was then that my other then brother-in-law Roy took me to my first Grimsby match, at home at Blundell Park against, I believe Colchester. That was a good year to be a Mariners fan, a year when we won the Fourth Division championship, clinching the title with a 3-0 victory over Exeter in front of 23,000 fans at our home ground, an unbelievable, and almost certainly unsafe number for a fourth-tier match by today’s standards. I wasn’t at that game, but from that season on, and throughout much of the seventies, I remained a fairly regular attendee at ‘Town’s’ home matches.
I was also a keen follower of the usually downward fortunes of the England national team, seeing them fail to qualify for two successive World Cup’s in 1974 and 1978, kept up with the battle for supremacy at the top of the First Division, took an interest in matters of promotion and relegation throughout the four main divisions, and watched pretty much all of the big matches on television, almost invariably highlights on the likes of Match of the Day, Sportsnight, and The Big Match in those pre-digital, pre-satellite days. Some of the biggest matches occurred on the European stage, generally on a Wednesday night, when British clubs did battle with the likes of Rael Madrid, Bayern Munich, A.C. and Inter Milan, Borussia Monchengladbach, Ajax and Roma, in the European Cup, now the European Champions League, the long defunct European Cup Winners Cup, and the European Fair’s Cup which later became the UEFA Cup and is now the UEFA Champions League.
Liverpool had been a none-descript Second Division Club when the soon to become legendary Bill Shankly, who’d previously had a brief spell at Grimsby, became manager in 1959. But it wasn’t long before he established them as one of the leading English clubs, a rise that more or less coincided with the cities elevation to world-wide cultural significance as the birth place of the Beatles, of which much more later.
Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, Liverpool, under Shankly and then his successor, and former assistant Bob Paisley, followed by his own assistant Joe Fagan (Liverpool had a great ‘keep it in the family’ managerial policy, of course, with Fagan being followed by Kenny Dalglish as player-manager, then as simply manager) were perpetual contenders for domestic and European honours.
Memory inevitably fades as you grow older, and without checking back online, I wouldn’t be able to tell you precisely when Liverpool won what, though I do have a clear memory of team captain Tommy Smith lifting the European Cup in 1977, the first triumph by a British club at that level since Matt Busby’s Manchester United in 1968, an accomplishment they were to repeat the following season. Today, I know the names of few modern players, even England players, but I can still easily recall the names of many of those who wore the famous all-red strip in the days of my youth, players like Kevin Keegan, Ian Callaghan, Ray Clemence, Dalglish, John Toshack, Emlyn Hughes, Ray Kennedy and of course Smith.
Everton, the other Liverpool club, were much less successful at this time, and I think I was only vaguely aware that Everton were a Liverpool club, with their ground, Goodison Park, within walking distance of Anfield. But I do have a strong memory of listening on the local radio, Radio Humberside, in my bedroom in Newsham Dr, Grimsby in 1984, as my lowly home club defended desperately for almost ninety minutes in the League Cup at Goodison, before snatching a shock victory with a John Wilkinson header from a flicked on free kick. The Mariners also beat Everton in the same competition, this time 3-2 and at Blundell Park, five years earlier, and before conducting a quick online search, I could have sworn that that was the occasion of the 1-0 win I listened to in my bedroom. Apparently not. In fact, it transpires, have no memory at all of the 1979 victory.
Such is life.
The infrequent matches between Liverpool F.C. and Grimsby Town are also something I thought necessary to check back on. A list of these David v Goliath clashes reveals that Liverpool thrashed Town 5-0 in the F.A. Cup in January 1980 (in their first meeting since 1958), 3-0 in the Football League Cup in November 1997, with Grimsby pulling off a shock 2-1 victory in the same competition four years later, with all of these matches taking place at Anfield.
Though I do remember keeping up with the scoreline via Grandstand and/or The World of Sport, both Saturday afternoon staples of my childhood and adolescence, for the first of these matches, I don’t remember the second at all, and was only dimly aware of Grimsby’s 2001 giant-killing act. This latter is purely a reflection of my waning interest in football over the years, though since moving here I’ve spoken with more than one scouser who quickly mentioned the subject of Grimsby’s upset victory when he (and it has always been a ‘he’) found out where I was from. The memories of local Liverpool fans are long and unforgiving when it comes to the beautiful game.
Two
When We Became Fab
The second strand of my Liverpool connection concerns music, and that primarily means the Beatles. I do have a dim memory of my elder brother (considerably older, eleven years older), unpacking an original copy of the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album at my first home in Charlton St, complete with cardboard cut outs inside the gatefold sleeve. If that was soon after its initial release, as I presume it to have been, I would have been approaching five-years-old at the time. There is also silent footage, from the Super 8mm silent family movies my dad would record and personally develop, of my two older sisters (again, considerably older, ten and twelve years older respectively), dancing with a transistor radio clamped against one ear, though I can’t recall offhand which sister this ear belonged to. In my mind, I have filled the silence with the Beatles Penny Lane. Is that a later invention, implanted after I became an uber-Beatles fan, and became fully aware of that song, one of my favourites, as it happens? Quite possibly, though I do also seem to remember when this song, coupled of course with Strawberry Fields Forever in perhaps the greatest double ‘A’ side single of all time, was a current hit. Again, who knows what memories are real and which aren’t? I won’t labour this point, though it’s a subject that fascinates me. Frome here on in, we’ll simply take it as red (Liverpool red), that only that for which I have hard, conclusive evidence can be accepted as one-hundred percent, literal truth.
My own journey into Beatles fandom, which at times has reached the level of obsession, began around 1976/77 when I persuaded my parents to let me add The Beatles 1962-66 double-album, now generally known simply as the ‘Red’ album, to my small vinyl collection. It was one of those terrible, corny stereo reproductions that were common at the time, where vocals could be stuck over in one channel, and the musical backing in the other. On my parents’ old-fashioned mono radiogram which was my only means of playing music at this time, this would sometimes have the effect of vocals disappearing from the mix almost entirely, creating an unintended Beatles Karaoke-backing effect. Nevertheless, those early to mid-period Beatles tracks, starting with Love Me Do, track one, side one, and ending with Yellow Submarine as the final track on side four, became the first Beatles songs I knew well. Only later would I discover that some of my favourite mid-period Beatles’ tracks, notably Rain and Tomorrow Never Knows, which should have been included on this collection were omitted. Psychedelia was not much in vogue at the time of album’s release in 1973, though it now also occurs to me that Baby’s in Black, an early classic that is a particular favourite of mine, and which ‘the boys’ themselves loved so much that they were still performing it in 1966 during their last ever tours, was also conspicuous by its absence. There are of course several other Beatles classics I could mention, though admittedly any ‘Best of…’ compilation is the product of subjective choice.
I was not at the time that I acquired this album what could be described as a dedicated music fan in the manner of some teenagers. The first record I ever bought was Devil Gate Drive by Suzi Quatro (I still love Suzie), and I liked pretty much whatever was around at the time, i.e., chart music that you heard frequently on Radio One.
In those days, the singles chart was of much greater importance than it is now, and, for some reason, the new weekly chart would be released on a Tuesday lunch time. It was common to find groups of kids during their lunch break (or ‘playtime’ as we called it, even when we were fifteen) breaking off from their games of war, conkers or marbles in order to huddle around a transistor radio, noting the progress or otherwise of their favourite songs up or down the Top Thirty, which was later extended to the Top Forty. Back then, songs could creep slowly upwards, sometimes to the much vaunted ‘Number One’ spot, over a period of several weeks, rather than in the modern, duller, manner of the most popular artists seeing their latest single zoom straight to the top and then zoom straight out of the charts completely once their fan base has been fully sated and exploited.
So, Suzy, Mud, the Bay City Rollers, Sweet, Gary Glitter (I know, oh,dear, but this was a time of innocence), Alvin Stardust, T.Rex, these were the big hitters in the Yarborough school playground of the early and mid-;70’s, and these were the artists I tended to own singles by. The only albums I listened to were essentially compilations of this type of music, albums that had been heavily plugged on television, and the few that my parents owned, which was older material by the likes of Jim Reeves, Slim Whitman, Tom Jones (Live at Las Vegas), a double album of 1950’s hits through which I discovered the likes of Oh Carol by Neil Sedaka and Diana by Paul Anka. The more hardcore rock ‘n’ roll of greats such as Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly, the artists who had most influenced the Beatles were missing from this album, and my passion for them would come later.
In short, I can’t pretend to have been a cool kid when it came to music in my early and mid-teens, the type who went from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to the immediate embrace of the raw energy of Punk, and nor did I know any kids who were. As it happens, I did like the Sex Pistols Pretty Vacant when it was first released in 1977, but it was as just another enjoyable sing-along chart hit. My awareness of it as an important component of a vital and necessary social and cultural moment arose slowly, and after the event.
In slight contradiction to what I have said above, I actually was aware of Elvis, having been introduced to him by my aforementioned brother-in-law Roly, and that began another adult-spanning obsession which (almost) rivals my relationship with the Beatles. But initially I was much more familiar with the older, jump-suit clad, big-ballad Elvis than with the young dynamo from Tupelo, Mississippi who’d shaken the world out of its dour, post-war complacency in the mid-1950’s.
It wasn’t cool to like Elvis in 1977, and as chief Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn has pointed out, it wasn’t cool to like the Beatles either, a fact which continued up to the Britpop explosion of the early ‘90’s, and the Beatles Anthology project of the mid-part of that decade. I suppose this was partly because the break-up was still too recent (and I have no memory at all of the break-up) and, for now, the world had moved on, even though the possibility of a Beatles reunion was still a story that would appear and disappear rapidly and sporadically.
It was only when my friendship with Mike, still my best friend today more than four decades on, deepened in the final year or so at school, 1977-78, and particularly once our school days were at last behind us, that my interest in music, and our mutual interest in the Beatles, began to properly blossom.
Mike already had the Beatles1967-70 (Blue) album, and so between us we had the full set of their most famous recordings. But there was still so much to discover, and once that journey begins it never stops.
In those days, of course, music wasn’t nearly so readily available as it is now, and discovering new music, or ‘new to us’ music, actually took effort and money.
I have a very strong memory of being in a record shop in Grimsby, though no memory of which one, and marvelling at the titles on the back of the Abbey Road album: I Want You (She’s So Heavy), You Never Give Me Your, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, The End (I’d never heard of The Doors song of the same name at that time), and speculating mentally on what such oddly and excitingly named titles could possibly sound like?
I would find out soon enough, and then it would be hard to remember a time before they were an important part of my life.
The same was also true of the equally fabulous array of variety on Revolver, the White Album, Sgt Pepper….
Actually, the very first time I ever smoked a spliff, shared with my seven to sixteen years’ old best friend Neil (RIP), I did the cliched thing I’d heard of 1960’s hippies doing back in the day, that is of listening to Pepper on the headphones, though the experience was a little disappointing, tempered by the worry that my mam, who was busying herself around me as I sat on the sofa, headphones plugged into the radiogram (which later moved to my bedroom), would notice something was different about me…
Thinking back now, I must have owned a copy of Pepper quite early on, seeing as Neil left Grimsby to work in the Cowley car plant in Oxford with his brother Carl shortly after finishing school in 1978. It was most likely the second Beatles album I owned, after the ‘Red’ album, and thus at an earlier point than the ‘marvelling at the titles on Abbey Road’ moment.
Anyway, to move forward a little, I was working in a fish factory in the Shetland Isles with Mike, who had family connections there, the first time we heard John Lennon’s Starting Over, on a transistor radio in our wooden hut accommodation, prior to the release of the John and Yoko Double Fantasy album in the autumn of 1980. John’s return to recording after a five-year break really was an exciting event in our young lives, though five years between albums is now commonplace for modern artists. We were actually on the factory floor on December 9th of that year when we learned from a work-colleague of the fatal shooting outside of John’s Dakota home in New York City. This was a truly shocking event.
So, from the early 1980’s onwards, I became a serious-Beatles fan, that is one who not only knew every recorded track and listened to the band regularly, and avidly, but also read the books, learning every minute detail of their life and times as they were known at that point, a project that is still an ongoing and abiding obsession, further deepened by the happy advent of the podcast.
Initially, my books were borrowed from Grimsby Central Library, a great source of literary and general education for me in this period, with Cynthia Lennon’s A Twist of Lennon and May Pang’s Loving John (now hard to find and selling for a small fortune online) being early Beatles related borrows. Later, I would read Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon, and love it despite, and at least partially because of, the controversy surrounding it, and Philip Norman’s band biography Shout (or ‘Norman Philips’ Shite,’ as McCartney rather deliciously calls it). Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of books, and despite wide and varied interests, my Beatles collection still makes up a sizable proportion of my own personal library.
Three
1984 and all that…
1984 was the year when Mike and I, having been making our own music both together and separately since early 1979, recorded our classic Roctober One cassette album, which maybe we’ll get the chance to vastly improve and re-release sometime, once the MAL AI audio separation techniques pioneered in Peter Jackson’s fabulous Beatles Get Back documentary becomes generally available and affordable. We also made our Roctober the Movie video, which was recorded using expensive, for us, bulky hired equipment. It was also the year when we finally made the pilgrimage to Liverpool, the city ‘where it all began.’
I’d actually been to Liverpool before, in either 1982 or 1983, to march in support of Militant controlled Liverpool City Council, of which much more in the next section. Bu aside from passing Penny Lane, with at least one of our Grimsby/Cleethorpes contingent inevitably singing Penny Lane as we did so, immediately marking themselves out as an outsider in the city, I don’t recall seeing anything related to the Beatles.
I should stress again how it wasn’t at all cool to be a fan of the Fab Four at this time, and Liverpool itself had yet to realise what it had in being the birthplace of the greatest band of all time. Consequently, no Beatles tourist infrastructure yet existed when Mike and I visited. For this reason, our personal ‘tour’ would have been made with little more than the assistance of a Liverpool A-Z, a selection of bus timetables, and our prior knowledge of what happened where and when, gleaned from our already expansive Beatles reading matter.
Memories of where we did go, and what we did, are now hazy. This was after all also a period of heavy drinking (and sometimes dope smoking, though not on this occasion), and a period of almost forty years have now elapsed since, two-thirds of my life.
We definitely drank in Ye Cracke pub in Rice Street, and possibly the Grapes on Mathews Street, the latter of course being the epicentre of early Beatledom, and both well-known Beatles drinking haunts. We also visited the site of the former Liverpool Institute, the grammar school once attended by both George Harrison and Paul McCartney, and which is now the site of the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA), the ‘fame school’ whose opening was partly funded by Paul, and with which he still maintains a strong relationship. I’m not sure if we made it to Menlove Ave and/or Fortlin Rd, the childhood homes of John and Paul, though there would have been little of interest for us to see/do there anyway at this time anyway. Strangely, given that I’ve lived here for twenty years now, I only finally did the ‘Beatles houses’ tour, now an excellent ‘must do’ for all Beatles’ fans, last year, accompanied by a visiting Mike.
My online research tells me that the Cavern had re-opened by this point, opposite the site of the original, of course also on Mathews Street, where it still stands. if we went inside though, I have no memory of it, and neither does Mike, though it would seem strange not to have done so, if it was there and open.
I believe we did visit the Jacaranda club, scene of some of the Beatles’ earliest gigs, though like the Cavern, I don’t remember going inside despite, according to Wikipedia, it having remained constantly in operation as a local music venue from 1958 to the present day.
We certainly saw the highly unusual and excellent Eleanor Rigby statue by the well know original British rock ‘n’ roller-come-light entertainer-come surprisingly gifted sculptor, Tommy Steele. This is rather out of the way, on a hidden juncture of Mathews St and Stanley Street, though it would have stood out more at this time than now, when one’s senses weren’t being completely bombarded by Beatles related paraphernalia.
I recall that Paul’s No More Lonely Nights, one of the few highlights of his disastrous Give My Regards to Broad Street film project of that year, seemed to be omnipresent on pub jukeboxes, and I still regard this song, especially the ‘funk’ version, as being one of Macca’s most underrated solo tracks.
We definitely took a trip to the waterside, to what was then, in these depressed, Thatcherite, post ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ times, still just about a working dock. We had a cup of tea in a docker’s café, and stopped to chat briefly with a banjo-strumming, aging busker on the Albert Dock bridge, a bridge which now leads, following the huge redevelopment projects that have since taken place, to the Smokehouse pub/bistro, the Beatles Story Museum, and the magnificent Tate Art Gallery.
The strongest memories I have of the visit though are of Mike and I busking by Lime St, and I think also in Church Street, having to make at least one quick dash to what I’m almost certain would have been Hessy’s famous music shop, where the Beatles themselves purveyed and purchased instruments on the ‘never-never’, and which remained open until 1987, in order to replace a broken string or two. Mike and I had begun busking, primarily for ‘beer-money’, for about three months prior to this November ’84 trip, and it was an activity we would maintain and continue right up until 1989, on and off, sometimes together and sometimes separately. Mostly, we played our own songs, unusual for buskers then and now, a dozen or so played in rotation, with a few covers thrown in, like Elvis’ Marie’s the Name (of His Latest Flame) and That’s All right Mama/My Baby Left Me (medley), Dylan’s The Ballad of Hollis Brown, with the only Beatles related songs in our repertoire being John’s Working Class Hero, and Run For Your Life, the closing song on Rubber Soul, a song much derided in these ‘woke’ times, but which I will continue to defend, to the death If necessary, to this day.
As I’ve said, this visit was at the height of the depressed, Tory monetarist period, a time of deliberately ‘managed decline’ for Liverpool, ordered from the very highest levels of government, which didn’t exactly make for rich pickings when it came to our busking exploits. Better financial rewards would come later, in Grimsby, including a Christmas Eve morning when we retired triumphantly at lunch (or more accurately, ‘pub’) time, having already made fifty quid’s worth of beer-tokens.
I will move on shortly in more depth to the political dimension of my Liverpool Connection, but it should be noted here that I’d joined the Entryist, Trotskyist organisation the Militant Tendency late in 1981, about nine months after my return to Grimsby from Lerwick, Shetland. In 1982, Militant had gained effective political control over the Liverpool Labour Party, and through that the City Council, with Tendency member Derek Hatton as Deputy Leader of the council who, along with all-round working class hero and veteran Militant Tony Mulhern, was the public face of Liverpool’s resistance to the Tory onslaught on Merseyside jobs and services.
I was sort of on a temporary break from political activity in 1984, mostly in order to concentrate more on drinking and making music. But I was still with Militant in spirit and ‘our’ control of a major city council, though Militant members were always a minority amongst the later disqualified and surcharged 47 councillors, was still a big deal to me.
At the time of our visit, we were also approaching the final third what would turn out to be a year-long, epic, heroic, but ultimately doomed miners’ strike, perhaps the last stand of the once mighty British industrial working class.
So, that’s what I remember most, political opposition to the Thatcherite counter-revolution being highly visible around Liverpool city centre, with striking miners, Militant supporters, and a great many other political activists being everywhere, rattling tins and selling their printed matter.
Thirty years later, I would immortalise this first trip to Liverpool in my song Liverpool ‘84: ‘In Liverpool in eighty-four/We were on our Beatles tour/Playing in the great outdoors/While miners’ rattled tins’ (Green 2015).
Four
Militant Days
As I’ve already mentioned, my on/off ‘career’ as a political activist began towards the end of 1981. That was a very political year, with the IRA hunger strikes, the summer of riots, and Tony Benn’s narrowly unsuccessful campaign to unseat Denis Healy as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. I found this latter event, despite the Deputy Leadership in reality being something of a none-job, particularly inspiring, perhaps in the manner that a later generation would temporally, and as it turned out, foolishly, find Jeremy Corbyn’s accession to the leadership of the Labour Party, inspiring.
I’d had a vaguely autistic spectrum-type interest in the statistical, psephological aspect of politics from the two General Elections of 1974 onwards, and became still more vaguely interested in leftist political ideas through a woman called Magda who was amongst our small circle of friends during my three-month stay in Lerwick from October 1980 to January 1981, and whom I remember owning a copy of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. But it was in 1981, following my return to Grimsby and, as I would later put it in another much later song ‘Ten Months of doing not much’ (Ten Months’, Green 2015) when my political interest, at the end of which my long, and spoeadically ongoing, period of political radicalism properly began.
This first truly manifested itself when my mam read out to me an advertisement from the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, for the inaugural meeting of Grimsby Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS).
I went to the meeting, became immediately active, and through that soon joined the Militant, the semi-secret organisation which dominated the LPYS locally with no opposition, and nationally with little, at least not from within the youth section itself.
Quickly, I went from ‘doing not much’ to doing a great deal. Militant provided me with a friendship group (to use a modern term we would have sneered at back then), a much-welcomed drinking circle, a purpose in life, and a set of ideas and values with which to live it. In many ways, it was a cult-like experience, though a relatively benign one. This subject, the existence of political as well as religious cults, of Left and Right, is one that fascinates me, and is one that I will write more about another time. For the purposes of this article, the point to be stressed is the strong role that the city of Liverpool played in the life of Militant, and of its mostly youthful, membership in the heady-days of the 1980’s.
This wasn’t only because of ‘our’ effective control of the city council, and the regular, though naturally biased media reporting of the struggle of that council against the Tory government, a struggle that saw Dereck Hatton and Tony Mulhern in particular become virtual household names. It was also because of the historic role that scousers had played in the development of British Trotskyism in the post-war period, up to and way beyond the establishment of the Militant newspaper, the public face of the Tendency, in 1964.
Despite my Trotskyist days being long behind me, Militant’s iconic red masthead is still highly evocative as a symbol of my youthful rebellion.
Liverpudlian Jimmy Dene had been an early comrade of our founder and chief political ideologue and guru, South African born Ted Grant, though he’d long disappeared from view by my time. Peter Taaffe, the Political Editor of Militant and effectively the General Secretary of the Tendency, was a scouser who liked to remind people that he’d once had trials for Everton, and still fancied himself, a bit too much for my liking, during lunch time matches at the impressively large Militant Centre in London. Tony Harrison was another early, Liverpool-born, comrade who was still on the scene, and Pat Wall, whom I would campaign with during his narrowly defeated campaign to become the M.P for Bradford North during the General Election of 1983 (he would succeed four years later, though his tenure was sadly cut short by death from cancer, aged 58, in 1990) was another Evertonian who had cut his teeth in opposition to the ‘machine-politics’ domination of the city by Jimmy and Bessie Braddock in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Terry Fields, yet another veteran Liverpool comrade, was successfully elected as the M.P for Liverpool Broadgreen at that same 1983 election, one of two victorious Militant candidates that year, the other being Dave Nellist in Coventry South East.
There are others whose names have now faded from memory, but Liverpool loomed so large in the life of Militant during my time, that there was a standing joke, perpetuated mainly by our rivals on the Left, from the likes of the Socialist Workers’ Party, Workers’ Revolutionary Party, and Revolutionary Communist Party (none of whom existed in Grimsby, where we had the Marxist Left field pretty much to ourselves), of young Militant members (‘supporters’ as we called ourselves publicly) affecting scouse accents, as well as attempting to ape the smart suited image of the likes of Hatton. It was true that there was a bit of that going on, even in the backwoods of Grimsby, but it had little effect on me, a vaguely ‘artsy’ working class youth with a fondness for long hair, straggly beards, and John Lennon spectacles, and who couldn’t have afforded a smart suit even if I’d wanted one.
Following my year or so of inactivity, support for Liverpool City council (LCC) became, especially after the end of the miner’s strike in March 1985, the key issue being pushed through the headlines and articles in Militant. It was an exciting time, when we really did see LCC as a model local authority that was delivering for working class people, leading to it gaining had mass support, which manifested itself in the winning of successive local elections, demonstrating that the idea that people wouldn’t vote for hard-left socialist policies was a myth perpetuated by the Labour Right and the Tory press in order to protect their own power and privilege. Unlike the posturing of the likes of Livingstone in London and Blunkett in Sheffield, here were councillors who really were prepared to put everything on the line in order to take on the Tories.
Again, our rivals on the Left, which we disparagingly called ‘the Sects’, derided us, this time for promoting ‘Socialism in One City.’ But we saw our leadership of Liverpool as a shining example to follow, potentially the spark for a nation-wide struggle and Militant’s transformation into a mass revolutionary party.
It should also be remembered that initially the council did win big concessions and extra funding from the Thatcher government, though largely because the Tories didn’t wish to fight on two fronts. The shrinkage of the power and the influence of the Trade Union movement came first, at least once the little matter of a certain South American Junta invading sovereign British territory had been resolved. Renegade local authority councillors would be dealt at a time of the government’s own choosing.
Being in a political nowhere-land like Grimsby, we could do little more than raise the issues around the struggle of LCC through our sales of Militant. These took place in Grimsby town centre on a Saturday morning, door-to-door on one working class estate or another one evening a week, plus the odd factory gate sale in the days when factories were still relatively plentiful. There were also semi-frequent public meetings, and usually unsuccessful attempts to push supportive resolutions through meetings of Grimsby and Cleethorpes Labour Parties.
But I did also get the opportunity to give some personal, in person support.
As I’ve already mentioned, I’d already marched through the city in support of the council prior to the 1984 visit, though exactly when that was is lost to me. All I really recall of that first visit, apart from the touristy singing of Penny Lane as we marched passed Penny Lane, was the huge crowd, almost certainly the biggest crowd I’d ever been a part of to this point, which Hatton, and others, addressed from the balcony of St George’s Hall. Degsy, as he was known locally, spoke of the possibility of ‘gun boats on the Mersey,’ which I already knew, from the comprehensive political and historical education Militant had provided me with, was an allusion to the events of 1911, when troops were deployed against striking workers in the city.
My second political visit was definitely in 1987, as the council’s struggle with the government finally came to a head, with the council refusing to set a rate (or council tax in modern terms) until they were again provided with greater funds from central government, having passed instead what had been deemed to be an ‘illegal budget,’ putting the individual councillors, the ‘47’ as they became known, at risk of disqualification from office, surcharge and personal bankruptcy.
The council was appealing to local authority workers in the city, of which there was still many thousands in these days before excessive centralisation and outsourcing, to come out on strike in support of them. I well remember standing outside the old, now long-gone Liverpool Stadium handing out leaflets, with many comrades from both Liverpool and around the country, agitating for a ‘Yes’ vote as thousands of NALGO (National Association of Local Government Officers) members streamed past us on their way inside to vote. As it was, it was all in vain. The vote was a comprehensively ‘No’, something like 3800-1500.
Of course, there was also all that business of the ‘grotesque chaos’ of the council ‘sending out taxis to scuttle around the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’ in the words of that appalling hypocrite Neil Kinnock. But this is not the place to analyse the minutiae of the tactics of Hatton, Mulhern and co. Suffice to say, it was the beginning of the end for Militant’s control of Liverpool, and although Militant’s best, and my best, ever period as a political activist was still to come through our successful leadership of the campaign against the Poll Tax in 1989-90,I believe differences in tactical approach amongst Militant’s own leaders as to the question of how the struggle of the city council should be conducted, differences that were totally unknown to us rank and file members at the time, played a key part in the split of 1990-91 which led to the effective death of Militant. By the time of the Walton by-election of 1991, when Militant Lesley Mahmoud, standing as ‘Liverpool Real Labour’, was crushed by the official Labour candidate, I’d already left, concentrating on my studies and new life amongst new people in Manchester.
Having now lived in Liverpool for twenty years, and having had a good few opportunities to speak with local people who were around at the time of the Militant City Council, I’ve found attitudes towards it to be mixed. There seems to be a general feeling amongst working class people, that the council did some good work, in particular through its house building programme, Militant’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’. But that Hatton,, someone who I’ve often seen around town, usually speaking loudly into a mobile phone, still immaculately dressed and looking remarkably young for his age, was a ‘wide-boy’ and a ‘chancer’, and that there was too much ‘jobs for the boys’ going on.
Given the current situation, as we approach the 2023 council elections, with the city again being administered by central government appointed Commissioners under ‘special measures’, and with the former Mayor Joe Ashton awaiting trial on charges of corruption and witness intimidation, this all sounds depressingly familiar. There has been some suggestion that Hatton, in his modern incarnation as a millionaire property developer, may be implicated in this sorry business too, though it’s been a while since I heard anything about this, and it should be clearly that despite very long and very expensive investigations and court proceedings, in the so-called Operation Cheetah in the 1990’s, Derek Hatton was exonerated of any wrong doing during his time as Deputy Leader of the Council.
So, that’s pretty much all there is to say about my political involvement with Liverpool, though I do still occasionally dabble a bit in local issues.
In 2019 I attended the Casa, the bar and bistro opened with the redundancy money of former striking dock workers which also acts a welcoming meeting venue for various Leftist and trade union groups and causes (and where I performed at a Play for Cuba gig that same year) for a memorial meeting for the recently deceased Mulhern, who I’d previously voted for in Liverpool’s first Mayoral elections, partly for old times’ sake, when he received a respectable 5% of first-preference votes.
Tony Mull’, as he was generally known, was in many ways an admirable figure who, unlike Hatton, and me come to that, had never deviated from the political path he’d chosen as a young man. After being disqualified from office, he drove a cab and ended up with a Master’s Degree, as a (very) mature student, in History, his dissertation being, unsurprisingly, on the subject of the political thought of Leon Trotsky. Until not long before his death, he could still often be seen manning the Socialist Party, one of Militant’s two main successor organisations, stall around Liverpool city centre on a Saturday morning. Degsy spoke at the memorial meeting, and spoke well, and it was interesting that the two of them had remained close enough, despite their political divergence (Hatton has effectively become ‘Soft’ Left though, vindictively, he has never been allowed to re-join the Labour Party, even during Corbyn’s period of leadership), for Tony’s family to call him to him to his bedside to see his old comrade one last time, the day before he died. Interesting, and actually quite moving.
Five
Girlfriend ‘H’ and that Wonderful Day
There was very little Liverpool Connection in the dozen years that followed my move from Grimsby to Manchester, and subsequent exit from Militant. I did at one point become a big fan of Julian Cope, not himself a Liverpool person, his dad was actually once the Bishop of Sussex, making him something of a Southern posh-boy, but was formerly the leading member of the iconic late ‘70’s/early ‘80’s Liverpool band The Teardrop Explodes, which had been part of the scene around Eric’s club, the Cavern of its day, along with bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and Wah Heat. As well as Julian’s idiosyncratic solo career, which could be described as the career Syd Barrett could have had if he’d kept his acid consumption within the still not inconsiderable levels of Cope, I also loved his two volumes of autobiography, Head On/Face Off, which introduced me to a lot of great new music, in particular to some obscure British psychedelia and Krautrock, or Kosmiche Musik to give it its less pejorative, more properly Germanic name. Although I’ve never been a great gig goer, like John Lennon, ‘I prefer the records’, I have seen ‘Copey’ live live three times, twice in Manchester and once in Liverpool, gigs at which he was, in chronological order, brilliant, terrible, and OK.
I also continued my Beatles obsession during this period, with varying degrees of intensity, perhaps reaching its height during the Anthology period, and although not as football-orientated as previously, I still recall within the excited thrill of watching live as Liverpool F.C. pulled off the ‘miracle of Istanbul’, coming back from 3-0 down to beat A.C. Milan on penalties in the European Cup final of 2005 (actually, they were 3-o down when I arrived back from a meditation group at Manchester Buddhist Centre).
But my connection with Liverpool began to fully and rapidly gather pace when I commenced my relationship with Liverpool resident ‘H’ in the autumn of 2002. This relationship began in the dying embers of my relationship with ‘V’, a rollercoaster/whirlwind two-year affair of which I’ve written extensively in fictionalised form in my novel The Angela Suite, and which has also been the subject of a fair few of my songs, particularly of those collected on the Last Days of Analogue 2002-5 and Digital in Liverpool 2005-7 compilations
Looking back, myself and ‘H’ were initially, though not exactly rollercoaster, certainly whirlwind. Having first met, I think, in October 2002, by December I was already accompanying her to stay at her mum’s (she’d not long lost her dad) big, rambling, freezing cold house in Cambridge, the city from which ‘H’ originated, having moved to Liverpool initially to become a student at Liverpool University. This was one of two occasions we’d make this trip together. I would write of the first of them in my song Cambridge 2002.
I won’t go into how ‘H’ and I met, as some things should remain personal, but she was in Liverpool and I was in Manchester, so our meetings were at first necessarily infrequent, usually[GC1] taking place at weekends, though sometimes, work permitting, I would also stay at hers, or she at mine, one night during the week.
I was working in Urmston at this time, which was part-way between the two cities anyway. ‘H’ was a keen member of the Rambler’s Association, and walking has been, and still is, generally my foremost means of exercise. ‘H’ introduced me to several very enjoyable ‘Trans-Pennine’ country treks, including one on New Year’s Day 2003.
Anyway, as mentioned early in this piece, in March, lying on my Futon in my hovel of a West Gorton council flat, on the estate where the television series Shameless would begin filming not long after I’d departed, I ‘popped the question’ regarding the possibility of my moving to Liverpool in order to be closer to her.
‘H’ owned her own house which she shared with her teenage son, who had Asperger’s Syndrome, or High Functioning Autism as is the preferred modern terminology, and I think the fact that I worked in this field was part of her attraction to me. This was also true of my leftist political leanings (she’d once been a member of the old CPGB, a Eurocommunist who’d joined the short lived Democratic Left grouping when that party had dissolved itself), as well as the fact that I wrote and recorded my own songs. As regards the latter, she really was the biggest fan I’ve ever had.
Despite her being a house-owner, there was never any suggestion that I would move in with ‘H’. Rather, the plan was aways that I would move ‘near.’ That was at my insistence, and as things turned out, my instincts on this were correct.
As I’ve said, although the exact date is unknown, within a month of my first suggesting the possibility, the Big Move, on that ‘wonderful day’ as ‘H’ would later put it, actually happened.
She sorted out my accommodation, and what is astonishing in the light of the present-day circumstance’ of five-year waiting lists for social housing, is that within a couple of weeks of our mutual decision, she had found me not only one Housing Association flat, but a choice of two.
This was a difficult decision to make. Choice ‘A’ was a small flat in a nice, leafy, suburban type area, close to where the Bluecoat school is, though if you asked me to find it now, I would struggle. Choice B was in the Toxteth/Liverpool 8 area. This area was primarily known to me through the riots that had taken place there during the summer of my year-zero of political radicalisation, 1981. Though that had been more than two decades earlier, Toxteth’s bad reputation had endured, and not entirely without reason. Having lived in another former riot-torn area, on the border of Moss Side in Manchester during my first year as a mature student a dozen years earlier, the idea of living in another danger zone was not exactly appealing.
But space proved to be the decisive in my deliberations. Although both flats were one-bedroom properties in communal dwellings, the living room and bedroom in the Toxteth flat were phenomenally huge by the standards I was used to.
After that ‘wonderful day,’ when ‘H’s ‘man with a van’ transported me, my highly valued book collection (which I regularly have had to cull in the years since), C. D’s and my meagre furniture from Manchester to Liverpool, the process of ‘settling in’ to my new abode began.
On the plus side, as I commented in my journal at the time, I expected my seemingly vast new-found lebensraum to have a positive effect on my creativity, especially on my music, as well as on other aspects of my personal wellbeing. This proved to be the case. More negatively, my few sticks of Manchester furniture looked comically puny in my new home; and, given that there was no central heating, merely a gas fire in the living room, the flat was exceptionally cold, even though I arrived in spring, and soon to get much, much colder. Until the flat was upgraded to a modern heating system maybe three years after my arrival, I would often supplement that woefully inadequate fire with the use of an electric fan heater, and on cold winter nights I would often drag my single mattress from the bedroom into the living room.
But the benefits of my new home very much outnumbered the disbenefits, and a fine old second-hand Rushworth and Draper piano was soon added to my gigantic living room, and musical palette.
I won’t dwell too much here on ‘H’ and I. She really was, and I’m sure still is, a good person, who, initially at least, adored me. I wasn’t used to being adored, and it was a nice experience. She also helped me immensely on a practical basis, assisting me financially in the buying of ‘white goods’ via a local service that supplied good quality items refurbished by young offenders and people with drugs and/or alcohol problems. This company, Create X, is still one that my wife Yingfeng and I still use when necessary to this day.
But, now living in closer proximity, cracks soon began to appear in our relationship. Temperamentally, ‘H’ and I were just too different. Despite my ongoing and varied ‘issues’, I have always been a fundamentally optimistic individual. ‘H’, on the other hand, was prone to a habitual negativity which became increasingly wearisome to be around.
In short, we didn’t work out. Our final ‘date’, after several periods ‘on’ and several periods ‘off’, was a desultorily, dark, early-evening walk around a park in, I think, the autumn of 2005, after which she texted me to inform me that ‘you no longer nourish me in any way.’ I’ve often pondered on the precise meaning of that cryptic message,
and it’s a song lyric/title that cries out to be used, and soon, finally, I hope, will be.
So, after three years, ‘H’ and I ended once and for all, and now, sadly, we can pass each other in the street without even acknowledging one another’s existence.
But the move to Liverpool did work out. I’ve been very happy here, and am happy still. I remember once saying to ‘H’, during one of those earlier, happier times, that part of feeling at home in a new area, based solely on my experience of moving from Grimsby to Manchester, my residency in Lerwick having been too short to count , is when you reach a stage of seeing in the street, perhaps merely glancing through a bus window, people with whom you have some connection or other, either through working with them, having met them once or twice in a social capacity, or those who you merely see on the same journey or in the same place on a regular basis. That, and passing through areas that you have some connection with, again because you worked in that vicinity for a while, or once visited a near-by venue for whatever reason. These are amongst those many little moments in life that enable the place you happen to live at a particular time in your life to start to feel like home.
In the modern divide identified by the excellent political commentator Mathew Goodwin, I am very much a ‘Somewhere,’ very much not an ‘Anywhere.’
Looking back, it’s remarkable how quickly this process of settling in unfolded for me in Liverpool.
Also, I quickly realised once I moved here, how much I was a child of water, of the river and the sea, having grown in Grimsby, within easy reach of Cleethorpes beach, and with many fond memories of long walks along the banks of the river Humber, with my dad, solo, and with others, and of how much I’d become ‘hemmed in’ in by spending too long in landlocked Manchester.
In Liverpool, the river Mersey now plays a similar role in my life to that which the Humber played in the life of my younger self.
In addition, Liverpool had, and perhaps surprisingly still has, an excellent local network system which makes close such fine seaside towns as New Brighton, West Kirkby, Formby, Southport, and for me, best of all, Crosby with its ‘metal men,’ the wonderful open air Antony Gormley art installation, where perhaps I will one day have my ashes scattered, as suggested by my song Scatter My Ashes on my seaside-themed Another Place album, which was named after Gormley’s installation, album from 2020.
I also love the old part of the city centre, with its beautiful, neo-classical buildings, such as the Walker Art Gallery and St George’s Hall, and the ‘Three Graces’ close to Albert Dock, the Liver Building, the Cunard, and the Port of Liverpool building. Legacies of Liverpool’s former imperialist wealth, some of which was undoubtedly founded on slavery, they might be, but they are still fine examples of architectural beauty which still dominate the city’s skyline, refusing to be obliterated by either woke ideology or the proliferation of luxury student flats.
We have plenty of beautiful modern buildings too, such as the two major museums, the Tate Art Gallery, one of my favourite places to visit, and even some of those pesky blocks of flats for rich, foreign students have a certain Modernist appeal. I also like, in a rounabout, slightly knowing way the Brutalist splendour of Belle Vale shopping centre.
And I almost forgot our two marvellous cathedrals, the highly-distinctive modernist wonder, the ‘wig-wam’, that is the Catholic cathedral, and the magnificent Anglican, which looks much older than it is, and where I have often done my ‘Cultural Christian’ thing.
Liverpool is indeed ‘a beautiful city’ as my described it, soon after her arrival here from China.
So, for me that’s Liverpool: football, the Beatles, politics, the sea, great architecture, yes and the friendly, funny people of legend, though we can’t ignore the multi-cultural elephant in the room, the mass immigration that year by year, and now sometimes seemingly day by day, is diluting and perhaps destroying forever the distinct scouse culture.
But I have never regretted my decision to move here, and I can’t envisage a scenario which would ever cause me to do so.
Six
Family Matters
After a few initial problems finding suitable employment, once I realised that frequent commuting back and forth by rail between Liverpool and Urmston was both expensive and impractical, I ended up working for the same Liverpool-based social care company for eleven-and-a-half years, including seven-and-a-half in low-level management positions. This was the only time, if I’m honest, I ever experienced any ambition in my chosen field of employment, that of supporting adults with learning disabilities/autism/mental health problems, other than to be good at what I did.
In fact, it was on the day that I was to travel to China to meet Yingfeng for the first time following ten months of email correspondence, that I interviewed for my first ever team leader job, and had already I discovered I’d been successful by the time I was on the bus on my way to the train to the airport.
I have written about Yingfeng at greater length in my ‘A Very Chinese Wedding’ piece, and so won’t dwell too much on the subject here. Suffice to say that it was to my aircraft-hanger like Toxteth flat that she first arrived as my wife, already six months pregnant following our Beijing honeymoon, which itself took place seven months after that first physical meeting at Guangzhou airport.
And it was to here that we transported our ‘made in China’ baby son Charles on the short journey from his place of birth at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.
The flat had become something of a man-cave by the time of Feng’s arrival, with the huge book collection piled, uncased, against one-wall in the bedroom, the student-style posters, the musical instruments and recording equipment, and the trippy trinkets stuck to walls and hanging from ceilings. It wasn’t really the place for a married man or more importantly a married woman, and although I liked the privacy afforded by the trees outside my living room window, it was clear that Feng found the flat dark and somewhat depressing. Given that she arrived in December, when periods of daylight were short anyway, this was always going to be a problem for someone arriving from a bright, sunny, tropical climate.
Within eighteen months of her arrival, we were fortunate enough to be offered a three-bedroom house in Speke, where George Harrison had grown from childhood to adolescence and fame. Our son Charles attended Stockton Wood nursery school. Paul McCartney was the most famous old boy of its attached Primary school.
Everything connects.
And it was to this house that our second son John (or John Paul, named, inevitably, after Lennon and McCartney) became the final, surprising, but perfect addition to our family, three-years-and-ten-months after the arrival of Charles.
(Incidentally, I so enjoyed the Matrix trilogy whilst Feng was pregnant that first time, that for a time I considered calling our first son Neo. Sensibly, family tradition won out, and Charles it was).
Four years later, we moved again, this time to Wavertree, where George Harrison had been born, to make it easier for Charles to get to his new school of King David, an excellent school which both boys now attend, with John about to join Charles in the High School this coming September. We are very fortunate. King David is one of the best schools in Liverpool, and that it encompasses both a Primary and a High school is very rare. How many children can potentially remain with, mostly, the same group of class mates from the age of four to the age of eighteen? It really has been a pleasure for me, as a parent, something that happened to me late in life, and that I’d quietly assumed would never happen at all, to stand in the school yard with the other parents and watch these babies grow into fine young men and women.
I’ve been happy in all three of my addresses in Liverpool, and I believe my family, once it emerged as an outgrowth from my more meditative, sober mode of consciousness (yes, I sort of do believe in this ‘outer as an expression of the inner’ business) has been, and despite financial issues that, like for so many families, are now worse than they have been at any point, and despite an increasing lack of space as our children wilfully continue to grow, a happy family. If I achieve nothing else in life, I married Yingfeng, as close to my dream girl as I could ever hope to reach, and raised with her two wonderful, bright, intelligent, fit and healthy children.
That isn’t nothing.
It’s only now, looking back, how quickly and easily I took to fatherhood. Parenthood is perhaps the hardest thing one will ever do, but it’s also the most natural, and once it began, although I might do this or that bit differently if I had the chance to do it over, it seemed from the off as though I was born to it.
Maybe that’s just my intrinsic optimism again. Even in the most difficult of times, I had, and still have, an assumption that everything will ultimately turn out OK. Is this because I believe in a Just, benevolent, creative force at work in the universe, God, if you like, or do I believe this merely because I am an optimist?
So, Liverpool is the city where I raised a family of my own:
how could I not feel a strong connection to it?
Yet, there was still one more, unexpected connection to Liverpool for me to explore; and it is to this that I will now turn.
Seven
The Return of the Buckley Clan
In 2013 I decided to trace my Family Tree on Ancestry.com. I had only previously known my family line up to my grandparents, and had always been particularly interested in my father’s branch of the family, as both of my paternal grandparents had been dead before I was born, grandmother Charlotte for six years, and grandfather Charles for sixteen. On my mother’s side, I did at least have the chance to meet and know my grandparents.
The Soldiers Handbook of granddad Charles Green was gifted to me by my dad’s sister, my favourite aunty, Aunty Gwen, when I was in my mid-teens, because she knew I would look after it. I’ve always felt a responsibility fulfil that act of trust in my younger self.
The ‘Small-book’ as it was called, had been issued to Charles on September 2nd 1914, soon after the outbreak of the Great War, and would have been carried by him in the trenches of Belgium and France. Charles was wounded three times during this conflict, until finally being invalided out of hostilities in February 1917. After that, he apparently always walked with a stick (pre 1914 he’d been a walking races competitor, according to my dad), and survived on an army pension, basically raising six children single-handedly during the 1930’s after his marriage to Charlotte, something of a ‘party girl’ it seems, foundered though, as was the norm back then, was never officially terminated. Charles was an admirable figure, it has always seemed to me, and this war-time artefact is a precious family memento, which I hope will one day be taken good care of by at least one of my sons, before hopefully passing it on to yet another generation of Greens’.
It was fascinating to discover through Ancestry that grandad Charles’s father, my great-grandfather, had also been called Charles, and to trace his birth to Legbourne, a small Lincolnshire village about seventeen miles outside of Grimsby. I also discovered that he and his new bride, Mary Jane, had made the move to Grimsby in the early-1870’s, soon after the opening of a railway link, as part of the process of migration from village to town that was a nation-wide phenomenon at this time, the height of Britain’s Victorian Industrial Revolution.
On Ancestry, I journeyed back further, to his father, my great-great-grandfather Thomas (the same name as my dad, it’s interesting how these names re-occur in families, traditions being passed on, a practice I of course continued with our Charles), and his birth, also born in Legbourne, in 1812, in the latter period of[GC2] the Napoleonic Wars.
In this branch of the family, I was able to reach back one generation further still, to Thomas’ mother Mary Green, Brown as was, born in Laceby Acres, five miles from Grimsby, a village to which I made at least one school trip as a child, in 1776, the year of American Independence. A knowledge of world history greatly enhances the enjoyment of the discovery of family history, and this works in reverse also.
I could find no information about great-great-great grandmother Mary’s husband William, other than that that was his name. In fact, it was fortunate that Mary lived long enough to be registered in the 1851 census, Britain’s second ten-yearly survey of the population, and the first with a real degree of accuracy, otherwise I wouldn’t have found her either. Going back to pre-Victorian, pre-census times involves scouring through old church records, and results are by no means certain, as not everyone was Church of England, and not all births and deaths were even recorded.
That’s something I have yet to do.
The high-point of my family research was my first visit to Legbourne, and the discovery, in the All-Saints church yard, of the intact gravestone of great-great-grandfather Thomas’, with his dates, 1812-95, and the inscription ‘Life’s race well won/Life’s work well done/Life’s crown well-worn/Then comes rest’, which I thought was beautiful, and would later use in my song ‘The Wise Old Labourer’ on my Origins album..
But, for the purposes of this piece, it is to the branch of the family married into by Thomas’ seemingly only offspring Charles that is of most relevance.
Great-grandfather Charles lived an unusually short life by the happy standards of my family, dying at a mere forty years of age of heart failure in Grimsby in 1887. But he did have two children, grandfather Charles, and great-uncle William with his wife, one Mary Jane Buckley, whom he married in 1874.
In marrying Mary Jane, Charles literally married the girl next door, the 1851 census clearly showing the Green’s and the Buckley’s as living next door to one another in Legbourne.
But the real surprise, and one which deepened my Liverpool Connection in a manner I could never have expected, was that her father was revealed to have been Christened at St Peter’s church, Woolton, Liverpool, ‘Liverpool, York’s’ according to the census, in 1824. His father, my great-great-great-grandfather Buckley, was also called Thomas, and was also listed as a butcher, a tradesman.
At some point between 1924 and 1841, Thomas Buckley Jnr, most likely though not certainly with his parents, must have made the journey from Liverpool, then a major port, to the tiny North Lincolnshire village of Legbourne. We can only speculate as to why he would have made this one-hundred and sixty-one-mile journey. Almost certainly in search of work, either for himself alone or himself and Thomas Sr. one would assume, and perhaps Legbourne was just another stopping off point in this search for a place in need of hired hands. Maybe he, or they, was escaping urban squalor, though Woolton Village, as it is still known, really would have been a village at this time, long before it was swallowed up by the city sprawl of Liverpool. Our guide for the tour of Mendips, John Lennon’s childhood home, described Woolton as ‘semi-rural’ even in the 1950’s.
At any rate, stopping off point or not, in Legbourne Thomas Jr remained, presumably until his death, though I could find no record of this death, and it was there that, in 1851, he bore a daughter, my great-grandmother Mary Jane, with his wife, Jane Buckley-nee-Laking. Mary Jane married into the Green-line by marrying the boy next door, as I have said, and from this coupling came by grandfather and future World War One hero Charles in 1881.
When Charles Sr. and Mary Jane made the trek to Grimsby around the time of their marriage in 1874, it was to an area known as the West Marsh where I was born eighty-eight later, and where one of my sisters and her family still live to this day.
(Incidentally, great-grandmother Mary Jane lived on until 1922, the year after the birth of my father. I like to think of her, a very old lady by then, of whom a photographic record must exist, though I’ve yet to discover any, holding baby Thomas, my dad, her grandson, in her arms.)
There are no aristocratic strains in my family history, as far as I am aware. We were agricultural labourers who became industrial workers, with only Buckley’s Sn., as a tradesman tradesmen, being but a short-step up from that.
So, when I moved to Liverpool in 2003, it was as if the Buckley branch of the family was returning home after an absence of maybe a century-and-a-half or more. Such discoveries make family history endlessly fascinating to me.
(And did old Thomas Buckley Jn, her father, ever take his daughter to visit Liverpool, his place of birth?)
And there are still further levels to investigate yet. There had always been rumours of ‘Irish blood’ on my dad’s side of the family, and the Ancestry DNA test I took as the culmination of my family history research in this period actually did reveal that I am 17% Irish. It turns out that the name ‘Buckley’ is in fact a derivative of the Irish name ‘Buckleigh,’ thus it is likely that the Buckley/Buckleigh’s at some point, like so many before and after them, maybe in the early nineteenth century, maybe earlier still, made the journey across the Irish Sea from Ireland to Liverpool.
I would love one day to discover where exactly in Ireland this branch of my family hailed from.
That is for a future project…
And finally…
So, a great-great-grandfather christened at St Peter’s church in Woolton, but a short step or two away from where John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time a hundred-and-thirty-three years’ later., and after whom I would name my second son another
Fifty four years after that.
Everything connects.
I have nothing much to add. To misquote whomever said it first, you can take the man out of Grimsby…etc’, and I will indeed be ‘Grimsby ‘till I die’. But Liverpool is very much my home now, in a way that Manchester never was. It is after all where I have, and still am, as a late-dad, a strangely re-occurring tradition in my family, raising a family of my own
My boys are half-Chinese, and I hope that one day they will explore and embrace those cultural roots to the fullest extent possible. But they sound scouse and, being Liverpool born and bred, I suppose that is as it should be.
As far as I’m concerned though, I never thought that I had picked up the accent to any great extent, until recently when I watched my recorded playback of an open mic’ performance at the Beeswing pub on Smithtown Rd.
There is most definitely a Liverpool-twang in my between song patter!
So, there it is. My Liverpool Connection, a connection that has been long, much longer than I ever imagined.
Long and fruitful and long may it continue.
Anthony C Green April 2023
All of the original songs and albums I have mentioned are available on Spotify and Amazon. My four published novels, including The Angela Suite as mentioned in the text, are also available on Amazon.
Peter Jackson’s Get Back is based around the near sixty hours of footage and hundred and fifty hours of audio that the Beatles recorded between January 2nd and January 31st 1969, first at Twickenham film studios, and then at their own new Apple premises in Saville Row close to Central London. The same material was used as the basis for the earlier Let It Be film, directed by Michael Lyndsey Hogg (MLH) and released in May 1970. The full audio, though not the footage, the so called ‘Nagra Tapes’ has long been available in unfiltered form on bootlegs, and periodically in full online.
If you’re a fan of the Beatles, then you’ll love this documentary by Peter Jackson. It’s a must-see for any music lover.
The timing of the release of the Let It Be movie, a mere month after Paul effectively made the Beatles’ break-up official, has led to it being seen in a largely negative light, not least by the Beatles themselves, a negativity that retrospectively extended to the January 1969 sessions upon which it was based. The received wisdom has long been that these sessions were, to use John’s phrase, ‘miserable,’ and that the movie that MLH put together from these sessions was effectively a documentary on the dissolution of the band.
So badly did the Beatles perceive Let It Be that not only has it never had any kind of physical release, be it VHS or DVD, but the band effectively blocked any further showings of it on British television from the early 1980’s until the present day, though digital copies are not hard to find online, and a whole series of cottage industries seem to exist producing bootlegged DVD’s of the film for sale on eBay and at Beatles conventions and such like.
Every now and again we have had news of a forthcoming Let It Be release; and a fully restored version was actually completed by 2003, supposedly to tie-in with the release of the Let It Be Naked album. With this album, McCartney sought to right the wrongs he perceived with the (mainly) Phil Spector produced Let It Be album which was released to coincide with the release of the original movie, in particular by expunging the strings and female choir from The Long and Winding Road. These were last minute additions that Paul never authorised and hated so much that he never forgave Spector, to the point of walking out of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame event in 1989 rather than have to sit and watch the legendary producer be inducted. At any rate, without explanation, plans for the re-release of Let It Be were indefinitely shelved in 2004.
I have seen Let It be several times, the most recent viewing being shortly before the eventual release of Get Back. Through these viewings, I have long formed the opinion that the movie is not as black as it’s been painted, that there are plenty of lighter moments to balance out the famous ‘I’ll play whatever it is you want me to play, whatever it is pleases you I’ll do’ George and Paul argument which has become its most iconic moment. Plus, there is of course the brilliantly climatic rooftop performance, the last live performance the band would ever give. Essentially, even in Let It Be, we see a still functioning band whose demise was by no means a certainty.
But there are also major problems with the film. First of all, it all looks so dark, the poor lighting choices by MLH hugely enhancing the perceived bleakness of the sessions. It also lacks any kind of coherent narrative. Songs are rehearsed then never heard of again, with no explanation as to why. There are nice scenes, as I’ve indicated, George helping Ringo write Octopus’s Garden, Paul doing a ridiculously over-the-top operatic version of Besame Mucho, an old favourite from their Cavern and Hamburg days, John and Yoko waltzing to George’s latest song I Me Mine (though some have seen this as something of a slight on George and his new song, an idea that is not quite debunked in Get Back), and although we do get at least some of the climatic rooftop gig, there is no real sense in Let It Be of how they got there, or why.
Having now seen Get Back in its entirety four times, I can add to the above a sense of mystification as to what MLH left out of his movie. Yes, we see the Paul versus George argument, or some of it, but there is no real context, nor any mention at all of the fact that George quit the band entirely for five days during the sessions (though that was two days after the argument with Paul, not immediately after as both Paul and Ringo misremembered it to Jackson, their recollections apparently formed by their experience of watching the film rather than their actual lived sequence of events). And why on Earth would any filmmaker leave out the very moment when the song Get Back began to emerge from the ether, almost certainly the only time that we will ever see the actual moment of conception of a Beatles classic?
To be fair to MLH, his original cut of Let It Be was either two and a half or three and a half hours long (I’ve seen both figures reliably quoted). One suspects that the process by which it was cut to eighty minutes was one of acrimonious committee, as the band began to dissolve, largely through disagreement as to whether or not Mr. Allen Klein should be trusted with the future management of the Beatles, with Paul essentially left in a minority one in his (correct, as it turned out) insistence that he shouldn’t. The increasingly fraught, fragmented atmosphere cannot have been conducive to rational decision making as to the final form of Let It Be, and no doubt turned MLH’s stewardship of the movie from a dream job to an ongoing nightmare.
…to Get Back
I can at least report that the major weaknesses of Let It Be have been more than corrected by Peter Jackson’s Get Back. Jackson, as one might expect from the master storyteller of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has provided a strong narrative flow, and the film also looks and sounds fantastic through the full use he made of the film restoration techniques he utilised to such brilliant effect in the First World War Centenary documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, as well as the latest in audio separation technology, technology which enables us to hear everything the Beatles said during the sessions, including some things they didn’t want us to hear. As far as magic Beatle moments such as the conception of the Get Back track goes, well Jackson has plenty more where that came from…
That doesn’t mean however that I have no issues at all with Jackson’s Get Back, as we shall see.
When it was first announced, in late 2018, that instead of the long awaited restored and perhaps extended Let It Be movie reissue (which we are still promised will happen, though Beatles fans have learnt not to hold their collective breath on such matters), a whole new film would be made by Peter Jackson from the same material, the idea was that we would get a two to two and a half movie for cinematic release some-time around the autumn of 2020. Covid, or least the world-wide response to covid, put back these plans. This was initially disappointing, but on a positive level it gave Jackson more time to work on his source material. Finally, in the spring of 2021, it was announced that rather than a single, feature length film to be shown firstly in theatres before presumably having some kind of physical release, Jackson had produced a whopping six-hour film to be streamed in three two-hour parts, firstly over three consecutive days on Disney+ in November of that year.
Like many, I had mixed feelings about this change. I would have liked my first experience of Get Back to have been on a big screen, with pristine 5:1 surround sound, with as many Extras as possible then crammed into a later Blu Ray/DVD release. That it was to be Disney who first presented the material also fed into another worry that fans had expressed, that we were to be presented with a complete ‘happy clappy’ revision of January 1969, with most of the rough edges and arguments eliminated. The two beautiful looking and sounding but rather anodyne and overly smiley trailers released onto You Tube prior to release did little to allay these fears (neither of which actually appeared in the finished product, incidentally).
In the end, at the last minute and without first asking permission, thus giving then no time to object, Jackson presented Disney with not a six, but a seven hour and forty-eight-minute final cut of Get Back. This pre-emptive elongation was apparently in response to Disney’s reluctance to consider an extended cut version for the later physical release, on the grounds that ‘people were no longer interested in such things.’ This comment shows a startling lack of understanding of the world of Beatles fandom. As uber-Beatles scholar Mark Lewisohn once put it, ‘there is no such thing as too much Beatles.’
But it is no secret that Disney as a corporate entity are not fans of physical releases at all. They only agreed to the release of The Star Wars Spin-off the Mandalorian on disc after a concerted campaign by Star Wars fans, a fan-base which is perhaps one of the few who rival that of the Beatles in terms of obsessive tenacity. So, for a time, it seemed touch and go whether we would see any kind of Get Back physical release at all. We did, but when it came, belatedly in July of this year, it predictably, though still disappointingly, contained no extra material at all. Disney’s rationale seems to be that by delivering nearly eight hours of footage rather than the agreed six, Jackson has effectively incorporated his Extras into the main feature. Jackson has however made it clear that has a fourteen-hour version of the film ready to go, should he get the go ahead from Disney/Apple/the Beatles (it’s never been made entirely clear who has the final decision on such matters), and has called upon fans to keep up the pressure for its eventual release.
Even without extra material, at close to eight hours, Get Back is a long film, not easily digested in one sitting. The question that now needs to be addressed, as is the remit of a review, is how good is it, and will I, as in you the reader, assuming you have not already seen it, enjoy it?
In answer to the first question, then yes, it is very good indeed. Jackson has provided a fantastic piece of work which both looks and sounds great, as I have said, that has a pronounced narrative story arc that is cleverly worked for a documentary, as well as interesting secondary narratives, both overt and implied. It’s not perfect, but then Jackson, great filmmaker that he is, is not God. The answer to the second question largely depends upon who you are. If you are a genuine, full-on Beatles’ buff, as I am, and as Jackson also clearly is, then you will lap up every one of the 28,080 seconds, at least once, though you may also share some of the criticisms I will mention, and perhaps have a few of your own. If you’re merely a decent level Beatles fan, somebody who has he ‘1’ singles collection and some, maybe even all, of the canonical albums, but who, although generally familiar with the Beatles story, doesn’t really read Beatles books, and certainly doesn’t listen to podcasts or buy bootlegs, then you may get through the whole thing once, and then occasionally play through the climatic rooftop gig footage and maybe a few other highlights when and if the mood strikes. Anything less than that, a Red/Blue collections and/or ‘1’ only man/woman, then I think you will be struggling, and skipping forward through the stream or disc fairly early on, and often quite rapidly at that. Even I found myself occasionally groaning inwardly at times as yet another ragged take of Don’t Let Me Down broke down.
Put simply, if you aren’t at least a fairly big Beatles fan already, then Get Back isn’t really for you, although I’d still recommend you try to gey through it at least once. January 1969 is a niche area of the Beatles career, and Peter Jackson is clearly one of us. He has consequently produced a film to please himself and others like him. If you’re not already a member of our elite little band of brothers and sisters, then you have a lot of catching up to do before you can get the full benefit of Get Back. If you really want to put in that work, then I’d suggest you start with the Anthology series, though that too is long overdue a 21st Century upgrade.
The Prelude
To understand how Jackson established the main narrative theme of Get Back, we must first backtrack a little to see what the Beatles themselves were hoping to achieve with the January 1969 sessions. The band had of course quit touring in the summer of 1966, sick of playing the same old songs in half -hour sets delivered to screaming teenage girls with damp pants. They had been frightened and dismayed by the record burning and death threats that accompanied their American tour of that year, particularly in the Deep South Bible Belt, in response to John’s misunderstood ‘Bigger than Jesus’ comments. The fact that he had made these comments, to journalist Maureen Cleave, in a magazine interview in Britain month’s earlier, to virtually no response in our then comparably sane and United Kingdom, and that Paul’s criticism of America to the same author, in which he said ‘over there if you have dark skin you’re nothing but a dirty nigger’ was ignored completely, and perhaps says more about the difference between our two countries, then and now, than anything else. As if this pseudo-religious-inspired madness wasn’t enough, they were also soundly beaten at Manila airport by Filipino security personnel after apparently snubbing a reception at the Presidential palace held by shoe-loving First Lady Imelda Marcos, an event they had never said they would attend in the first place. ‘Manila’ is still a word to be uttered with a sense of hatred and bewilderment years later, as evidenced during in Get Back.
So, an element of danger had been added to the sheer boredom of the road. Also at this time, really from 1965’s Rubber Soul onwards, but increasingly so through Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and the Magical Mystery Tour E.P/television movie, their music had become more and more complex, making full use of the weird and wonderful sonic possibilities of the modern recording studio, as well as the off the wall genius of their Producer George Martin. To these factors we can add the influences of Indian music, the Classical Avant Garde, olde worlde English Music Hall and Lewis Carrol-type Nursery Rhyme nonsense poetry to the rock ‘n’ roll, Tamla Motown and Doo Wop girl’ group musical palette that had been the main ingredients of the early Beatles magic. What this meant was that they were by now often producing music that was impossible to reproduce live anyway, though this point is often overstated: Yes, there was no way that Tomorrow Never Knows, the closing track on Revolver, their current album as they embarked on their final tour, could be reproduced live, not with 1966 levels of technology. But there were plenty of songs on that album that could have been brilliant live additions to their set, if the effort of diligent rehearsal had been applied. Songs such as Taxman, Doctor Robert, I’m Only Sleeping, even Yellow Submarine for Ringo, spring immediately to mind. But the truth was that, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned and more, the Beatles had grown so sick of live performance by then that it was far easier to knock out yet another perfunctory version of Rock ‘n’ Roll Music or She’s a Woman than to put in the time and effort required to perform songs as a live unit that had been largely recorded piecemeal, painstakingly overdubbing separate instrumentation, track by track.
The mostly more simple, by the standards of their more recent albums, music of 1968’s The Beatles (though for evermore to be known as the White) album, an album mostly composed whilst studying Transcendental Meditation under the Maharishi Yogi in Rishikesh, India earlier that year, plus a rather enjoyable, though carefully staged live performance of their Hey Jude/Revolution single on a special edition of the David Frost Show, led the Beatles to begin to reconsider their negative attitude to live performance. The idea now being floated was that they could perhaps play a few small-scale shows in order to promote material from their latest album.
This was an eminently doable idea, and one of the many great ‘might-have-beens’ of the Beatles’ story. A set including such tracks as Yer Blues, Helter Skelter, Back in the USSR, George’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps (perhaps again with Eric Clapton guesting, as he did on the album), Birthday, Happiness is a Warm Gun and Everyone’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey, plus Revolution and Hey Jude, is indeed a fascinating component of an alternative Beatles universe.
But somehow, presumably in late ’68, this achievable notion morphed into something much, much more difficult. The idea was now that they would write and rehearse fourteen brand new songs, the Beatles seeing fourteen as the optimum number of tracks for an album, and a number they return to frequently during discussions in Get Back. Not only that, but they would then perform these songs in front of a live audience, with two shows being decided upon, with the whole thing being recorded for a live album, and the best of the performances from the live shows also to be shown later as a television special. It’s possible that Elvis’ triumphant ‘comeback’ special which was shown on British television in late ’68 and which the Beatles certainly discussed and enjoyed, may have been an influence here.
There was a natural limit as to how long the band had to spend on this project in that Ringo was due to begin filming the surrealistic comedy movie The Magic Christian in the final week of January, actually at the same Twickenham film studios where the Beatles assembled for their new project on January 2nd 1969. Consequently, they pencilled in January 16th and 17th for the live performances, with the Roundhouse in London originally mooted as a possible venue.
Fourteen new songs in fourteen days, honed to a sufficient level of expertise for them to form the basis of a live album and a television special might seem like an impossible task. But they were after all the Beatles, and so confident of success were they, outwardly at least, that tickets for the shows were even offered as prizes to fans in the December edition of Beatles’ Monthly magazine.
What’s it all About?
It’s the idea of the live performances that gives Jackson his primary narrative focus. To present this, he makes clever use of the visual device of a calendar that pops regularly onto the screen, with January 2nd identified as Day One, and so on in chronological order as the days pass, with the 16th and 17th initially circled, as the dates when the performances are due to take place. Much of the between rehearsal/jam chatter between the band and their coterie concerns exactly what form the shows, later to become singular, will take and where they/it will take place. Jackson very skilfully manages to create a ’will they won’t they’ and ‘if so when and where’ narrative, with various twists and turns and stories within stories along the way, that works despite the fact that we all know (given at least a modicum of prior knowledge) that it will end on top of the roof of their own new Apple studios in Saville Row on January 30th (The Magic Christian having thankfully been put back a week or so).
So, we see the days pass, Day Three, Day Four, etc etc, and we see them marked with a clear ‘X’ on Jackson’s calendar as they do so. I’m not going to attempt a day-by-day analysis, otherwise the review will take longer to read than Get Back takes to watch. Suffice to say, that the scale of the task the Beatles have set themselves quickly becomes apparent, as do tensions within the band. Too often they revert to their comfort zone of jamming their way through rockers and standards ingrained in their memories from hundreds of hours of performances in Hamburg, the Cavern and elsewhere during their early days, as well as half-remembered, never recorded, early ‘Lennon and McCartney originals’, as they’d been grandiosely labelled in scribbled teenage handwriting in cheap notebooks. Some of these performances are ragged, some are great, and it’s particularly interesting to hear snatches of these early John and Paul songs that most of us had previously known only as titles, titles like Just For Fun, Because I Know You Love Me So and Fancy My Chances With You. We even hear, though sadly don’t see, John singing the song that Paul has always cited as being the first song he ever wrote, before he even met John, I’ve Lost My Little Girl.
One After 909 is one of those early songs they plucked from the air, a song recorded and then rejected for inclusion on Please Please Me, their debut album back in 1963. Clearly surprising themselves with how great it sounded and how great it was to play together as a band, this one stuck, and made it to the rooftop, complete with the words they admitted during discussion between performances that they’d always hated and John had always intended to, but never did, ‘fix.’
As they had been a purely recording outfit for so long, and had never really been the sort of band who endlessly rehearsed, still less ‘jammed’ in any case, the Beatles clearly needed this time together. But, in terms of the impossible task they had set themselves, it was time that they simply did not have. Quickly, the days on Jackson’s calendar disappear, as does the idea of live performances on the 16th and 17th. At one point, Paul, after again stressing the magic number of fourteen, asks simply ‘so, as it stands, how many do we think we have, good enough to perform?’ (I’m paraphrasing a little throughout). John says simply, with a resigned smile, ‘none’. He’s exaggerating, actually. By this point they do have at least two or three songs of performance standard. But they are clearly way off their target, and will in reality never come close to achieving it, although what they did achieve that month was still remarkable by anyone else’s standards, as we shall see.
Jackson has arranged the Get Back footage in such a fashion that it is allowed to speak for itself. There are no after the event talking heads, no interviews, no explanations (untold numbers of hours of interviews with all of the surviving key players were however conducted, for research purposes, and hopefully we will one day get to experience these too). Everything is in the moment, and it can at times almost feel as if you are right there in the studio with the Beatles. You really do get to feel both the joy and the tension in the room as it arises, whilst being left to form your own opinion as to its source.
Somehow, the mantra that had apparently sustained them throughout the struggle of their musical apprenticeship, that ‘something will happen’, seems still to have sustained them here. Despite all of the problems they encounter, it hardly seems to have occurred to the band at all that they would leave the project without having given a live performance of some description. Thus, the discussion of ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how?’ continues almost to the point where they finally climb the steps to the Apple roof.
There is a pleasing meta-aspect to Jackson’s filmmaking. As well as everything else that it is, Get Back is also in large respect also an extended ‘Making of…’ of the original Let It Be Movie, in which the man behind the lens for that film, the man we have to thank for all the footage that Jackson had to play with, MLH, himself becomes a character in this new film, one of the extended group of individuals that comprise the Beatles inner-sanctum. Jackson has been keen to heap praise on MLH for making Get Back possible, and it must be a strange experience for Hogg, now in his eighties, to see himself now, in all of his youthful, idealistic, sartorial elegance, as well as to see, five decades on, how Jackson has been able, through the miracle of modern technology, to transform and improve his raw footage to levels of pristine elegance that would have seemed the stuff of celluloid/sonic Science Fiction back in 1969.
The Beatles treat MLH with an irreverence which sometimes borders on contempt; and he does come across as a rather obsessive, unconsciously comedic character at times. He has his own clear idea of where the Beatles should perform, and his refusal to let the idea of the show taking place in a disused Roman Amphitheatre in Libya drop becomes almost a running gag, at first indulged, and eventually mocked by the band.
‘Imagine 10,000 torch-lit Arabs at dawn!’
‘Yes, Michael.’
It was actually a terrible idea, even if the logistics of it had been possible in such a short space of time. Such grandiosity was simply not the Beatles. Ideas like that would have to wait a few years, for the dawn of Prog’ Rock, for Rick Wakeman and his Six Wives of Henry V111 on Ice, and Pink Floyd Live at Pompei, the latter being perhaps the closest we ever got to MLH’s vision for the Beatles.
The Trouble with George
What is clear, from Day One onwards, is that the Beatle who least wishes to give a live performance of any sort is George Harrison. He is of course totally dismissive of MLH ‘torch-lit Arabs’, and greets the additional suggestion that they take their fans with them on a cruise-ship with something approaching horror. Not only would they have to perform to people, but they would have to be cooped up with their fans on a boat for God knows how long it took to reach Libya too. This was not George’s, already struggling with his relationship with John and Paul in particular and his place in the Beatles in general, idea of how he wished his life to precede.
It’s perhaps here that we need to turn our attention to Jackson’s main secondary narrative, which is of course closely allied to that of the first, that of George’s walk out and eventual return to the band.
The walk out happened on January 10th, or Day Nine, and is effectively the climax of the first of the three parts of Jackson’s film. The famous exchange: George: ‘I think I’ll leave the band now.’ John: ‘When?’ George: ’Now’, is one of the few occasions where Jackson had the audio but not the accompanying footage, so had to make do with a ‘near match.’ He has been criticised for this trick, and indeed it is a little strange to see the band member’s mouths moving with the wrong words coming out of them, as though we are watching a badly dubbed foreign film. But it doesn’t happen often, and what choice did Jackson have anyway? This piece of audio in particular demanded inclusion, and it was better to have at least some full colour action going on at the same time rather than a blank screen, or a simple transcript of the words spoken, though he did have one clever visual trick up his sleeve for a similar occasion later, as will be seen.
George’s actual final parting shot, which has gone down in Beatles folklore, was delivered as he exited via the Twickenham canteen at lunch time: ‘See you around the clubs.’ Sadly, not even audio exists of this and so we have only the testimony of those present, including George, that he said it.
So, why did he leave?
Clearly there were tensions. ‘The whatever it is that pleases you…’exchange with Paul had happened two days earlier, during rehearsal of ‘I Got a Feeling’ with its tricky microtonal guitar riff. On the 10th, problems arose again as they worked on the newly minted ‘Get Back’ which, as has been mentioned, is one of film’s clear highlights, as we see the song literally emerge from scratch as Paul strums his bass like a guitar, something he often seemed to do in this period. Really, the primary issue was about preferred methods of working. George, as was also generally true of John, liked to jam through the basics of a new song first, the band members learning the chords, and Ringo finding the appropriate beat, whilst the lyrics were refined before the nitty gritty of working out finalised individual parts, riffs, solos, bass lines, fills, backing vocals etc would properly begin.
Paul had a markedly different approach to rehearsal. Basically, when Paul wrote a song, he more often than not, especially during this purple patch of his career, had a clear idea of how the final arrangement would sound, leaving less room for individual input. As John once put it: ‘Paul can hear the flutes, I can’t hear the flutes.’ John would more likely turn up, especially during this period, when he seems to have had a bit of dearth of new material (hardly a crime after contributing a dozen or so to a double album that had been released only a few months’ earlier), with a sketch of a song. At the start of the Get Back project, Don’t Let Me Down, which features heavily throughout the film, was merely a single verse and a chorus. He literally used the band as his instrument for turning his material into a finished work, with particular respect to the input of his writing partner Paul. For a musician, it’s easy to see how this approach would be much more fun than to be essentially given pre written parts to learn by Paul.
In addition, George had been much impressed by the collegiate method of working of Bob Dylan and the Band whilst hanging out with them in Woodstock a short time earlier. He had also seemingly had his head turned a little by the way that these great musicians, and also his great friend Clapton, treated him as an equal. To now be back with the Beatles was very much to be back in a junior position to John and Paul, a position he clearly felt he’d been stuck, almost frozen in aspic, since first joining them in the Quarrymen as a ridiculously young looking fourteen-year-old back in 1958.
Anyway, after Paul criticises his vamping for covering up John’s vamping during work on Get Back, George walks.
Of course, this wasn’t the first time a Beatle had left a session. Paul had walked out during the recording of She Said, She Said for Revolver, over an undisclosed argument concerning the arrangement, leaving John, George and Ringo to finish the track without him. More well-known is Ringo’s walk out during disagreements that took place during early sessions for the White Album, apparently after Paul criticised his conga playing. Both of the opening tracks on that album, Back in the USSR and Dear Prudence are Ringo-free, with Paul taking on the main role of drummer, (with some fills from John and George on the former).
Previous walk-outs’ notwithstanding, there does seem to be a clear understanding, at least as it is portrayed in Get Back, that George’s exit is more serious, and perhaps even permanent. In response, John confirms to MLH that he is still prepared to play the show without George, to ‘get Clapton in’ if necessary. Paul and Ringo are seemingly keener to attempt to resolve the situation.
At any rate, Day Nine is definitely one of the most exciting days of all in Get Back. A fair amount of alcohol is consumed in the studio on a daily basis (and Paul smoked cigars at this time, who knew?), with a glass of wine or a beer never far from reach, but on this day, it seems to have been ratcheted up a few notches, especially after George’s lunch time departure. After lunch, we are treated to an insane jam, with John and Paul enticing screeching feedback from their amplifiers, whilst Ringo uncharacteristically flails wildly all around his kit as Yoko does her screeching thing into the microphone, vaguely in tune with the feedback. Incidentally, this is one of two Yoko jams included in Get Back, out of three in total, and her omni-presence in the studio undoubtedly contributed to the problems in the band, especially for George, as we shall see. But on this day at least you can see from the manic glee on their boozy faces that Paul and Ringo were as much willing participants in this Avant-Sonic madness as John and Yoko.
There was of course more to George’s leaving than a simple argument or two, about what to play and when. The official line, pushed by Harrison until his death in 2001, and maintained by his estate executors, widow Olivia and son Dhani to this day, is that George was simply tired of perpetually playing second fiddle, or perhaps more accurately third guitar, to John and Paul. That he had simply outgrown the junior role assigned to him as a schoolboy at the very beginning of the band. When they had first made it big, in Britain in 1963 and globally the following year, John and Paul had been not only the principle, but generally the sole writers of the band’s original material. It was they who could literally sit down together of an afternoon and, in John’s words, literally ‘write a swimming pool’ or a ‘write Rolls Royce’. George’s role had been to provide decent, memorable guitar solos and riffs, be the essential third part of the band’s remarkable three-part harmonies, and to take occasional lead vocals on either covers, songs written for him by Lennon and McCartney, and more rarely by himself.
But, the argument goes, by 1969 Gorge had grown up, matured as a man, as a musician, and as a writer. He now had a surfeit of excellent self-written material he was keen to record, but was stymied by the reality that they’d have to work on ten John and Paul songs before they’d even consider working on one of his. This was the main source of his growing resentment.
Personally, as much as I love George, I don’t think the ‘Harrison-party-line’ quite stands up to scrutiny.
During Get Back, George is still working on what would perhaps become his masterpiece, the song Something, which no less a figure than the great Frank Sinatra called ‘the greatest love song of the twentieth century’ before performing it live, though gallingly for George, he announced it as being written by ‘Lennon and McCartney.’ George had begun writing this during the White album sessions, but six months on, in January 969 was still hitting a brick wall as far as the lyrics were concerned. He is seen and heard in Get Back requesting assistance from John and Paul: ‘…loves me like a..?’ he asks. ‘Just put anything in there until you get it,’ suggests John. ‘like a pomegranate.’ The casual ease with which he both asks for and receives suggestions does not at all suggest a relationship where, in George’s later words, ‘they never helped me.’
The truth is that, as George grew as a writer, then so did his role in the band. On Revolver, which many consider to be their best album, George had no fewer than three of his own songs, including the excellent opener Taxman (which demonstrated his pre occupation with money. As well as being the ‘spiritual Beatle’ George was also the ‘money Beatle’, whilst apparently seeing no contradiction between the two). What happened then however, is that George temporarily all but abandoned his day job as a rock/pop musician and writer in order to immerse himself in all things Indian, learning sitar at the feet of the maestro Ravi Shankar, and leading the other Beatles to a Transcendental Meditation retreat in Bangor, North Wales in December of 1967, an event at which they learnt of the death from a, probably, accidental drug overdose of manager Brian Epstein.
(It’s interesting that whilst in life they’d always called their manager Brian or Eppy, after death, in Get Back, they call him respectfully Mr. Epstein).
The whole band would also follow him on his journey with the Maharishi to Rishikesh the following year too, which shows that, rather than being regarded by the rest of the band with a lack of seriousness, George became almost the de-facto cultural leader of the Beatles at this time.
But musically, he was most notable by his absence during extended sessions, their first after quitting touring, for their ground-breaking Sgt. Pepper’ album, only fully engaging, it seems, for his self-penned side two opener Within You, Without You, where he led a sizable troupe of Indian musicians, with no other Beatles appearing on the track. The most memorable guitar solo on the album, on Good Morning, Good Morning, came from Paul.
Finally getting back into the swing of conventional writing, George had four of his songs on the White Album, one on each side of the double. Arguably, this was a regression from the days of Revolver, but the songs he presented for consideration which didn’t make the final cut don’t really suggest a large cache of unrecorded classics being hidden from the public through the arrogance of John and Paul. His song Not Guilty also dispels the myth that the band weren’t prepared to put in the effort on his material. It was attempted no fewer than 101 times before being omitted from the album at the last minute. He would finally release this, in much simpler form, over a decade later on his eponymous album of 1979, with a released Beatles’ version having to wait until the Anthology project of the mid-90’s.
Those who have listened to the whole of the Nagra tapes, in their raw, hissy, noisy form, before Jackson and his team got to work their technological magic on them, will know that George presented several tracks to the Beatles early in January 1969 which would finally appear on his solo debut triple album All Things Must Pass in December 1970. However, the fact that none of them were played on the roof, nor made it on to the Let It Be album, is again not an indication of a lack of interest in George’s songs. Songs like Let It Down, Isn’t It a Pity (which had actually been around from the time of Revolver), Beware of Darkness, and Hear Me, Lord where in far from finished form at this stage, and it’s arguable if any of them were of a standard that would have significantly improved any Beatles album.
Plus, of course, John and Paul too worked on songs during January 1969 which would not find their finished form until the Beatles’ days were over. On Day One, John is shown working on Child of Nature, first written in India, which makes several appearances in Get Back before John dropped the lyric entirely, later making use of the beautiful melody for the classic Jealous Guy on his second solo album, Imagine in November 1971. Intriguingly, he is also seen, on Day Two, working on Gimme Some Truth with Paul, though Paul would later concede to Jackson that he had no memory of ever having worked on this song, which again wouldn’t appear until the Imagine album. In Get Back, Paul too presented material which wouldn’t be finished until his solo career was up and running, for instance Another Day, his first solo single in 1971, and the opening few bars of Back Seat of My Car, a McCartney classic which would be recorded for his second solo album Ram, and was initially played by him at the piano the day it first came to him before setting off for the studio that day. The point here is that George was not unique in having material that was not yet considered either ready or suitable for the Get Back project.
The idea that George was being held back by the Beatles at this time, rests mainly with the fate of the song All Things Must Pass, an absolute classic which would become the title track of that ambitious triple album debut. A whole mythology has built up, perpetuated by George, his estate, and various Beatles authors, that the Beatles ‘rejected’ All Things Must Pass. This has been thoroughly debunked by the excellent Matt Williamson on his You Tube Channel Pop Goes the 60’s. In reality, the Beatles attempted 71 takes of the song, including several complete takes, some of which sound, to my ears at least, to be almost complete, with excellent backing vocals from John and Paul. All it would have taken would have been for the various parts to have been refined, and tracked. It’s a major disappointment to me of Jackson’s film, given how much effort was put into ATMP, that we see only a few seconds of it in Get Back, though I suspect that, given that we get what is essentially a George solo demo on Anthology 3, despite the existence of complete Beatles’ versions, there was/is a determination by Harrison and his executers that this song be solely associated with his solo career and not regarded as the lost Beatles’ classic that it also is.
ultimately it is George who decides to pull all of his own material from consideration for the live performance that eventually manifested itself as the rooftop, because they would ‘end up sounding shitty anyway.’ This is a shame, as For You Blue, which was written during the sessions, with John contributing excellent Hawaiian slide guitar on this classic if straight forward twelve-bar blues, would actually have been a perfect addition to their set.
This may have seemed like an unnecessarily long and negative detour concerning George. But the walk out is crucial to both Jackson’s film, and to an understanding of how the events of that month panned out. Whatever the basis in reality for the way George was feeling towards John and Paul, there was no doubt that huge feelings of resentment had been building for a long time. The I Got a Feeling argument with Paul was actually a continuation of a difference of opinion that had taken place as the band worked on Hey Jude a few months’ earlier. George had wished to play call and response guitar lines between McCartney’s vocals. Paul wanted a much simpler, piano plus rhythm guitars and drums arrangement. The brilliance of Hey Jude shows that Paul was right, but the argument festered and Paul was foolish enough, as captured in Get Back, to refer back to it during renewed tensions in the January 1969 sessions.
It may of course be narrative manipulation, of which Jackson is not innocent, as we shall see shortly, but we definitely see the resentment building up within George during the closing stages of the opening part of Get Back.
There seems, in particular to be very real feelings of jealousy at the continuing, or perhaps renewed, strength of musical bond between Lennon and McCartney. Watch George’s face and body language as the two work together once again, to use the phrase both John and Paul would continually use to describe their method of working together in the early days, ‘eyeball to eyeball’, literally gazing into one another’s eyes as they trade lines and ideas on the song Two of Us.
The very title, Two of Us, although written about himself and Linda according to Paul, a claim not really supported by the lyric, could well have seemed exclusionary to George. That’s how it comes across in Get Back anyway. Two of Us – in a bubble of creativity which no outsider, even from within the band, can ever penetrate…
In his infamous Lennon Remembers interview with Rolling Stone magazine 1n December 1970, an interview which did much to cement a certain idea of the reasons for the Beatles break-up in people’s minds, John was adamant that he and Paul rarely wrote together after 1963, certainly after they gave up touring in 1966, though they he did concede that they sometimes helped one another to finish off this or that song during their later period. But in Get Back, the discussion around John’s eventual solo track Gimme Some Truth, which I’ve mentioned, clearly indicates that the two had already worked on this together, presumably in late ’68. Also, in discussions, Paul admits that the presence of Yoko has clearly been an inhibiting factor during writing sessions with John. He particularly mentions enlisting John to help finish off the White Album’s I Will, and how having arty Yoko in the room made him feel that he should be writing about ‘white walls or something.’ Who knew he tried to involve John in writing ‘I Will’, which is about as purer Paul ballad as you can get? Who knew that the two were still having scheduled ‘writing sessions’ this late in the Beatles story?
In Get Back, despite all that was said later, it is very clear that John and Paul still respected each other musically as they respected, and never would respect anyone else. It’s also clear that there is also still a strong personal bond between them, a bond that I believe, despite the break-up, despite many harsh words, some of them coded in song, especially from John, endured until Lennon’s death, and beyond.
And it’s clear that this continuing relationship is a huge factor in escalating George’s feelings of insecurity in the band, to the point that he felt the need to walk.
The Manipulation Question
Jackson has performed a great service in re-establishing Lennon and McCartney as an ongoing partnership into 1969, finally (one would hope) laying the Lennon Remembers mythos to rest. It is however in his treatment of George’s absence from the Beatles between January 10th and January 15th that Jackson can, to use the phrase I’ve already used, be most plausibly accused of narrative manipulation.
The most glaring example is the day after George’s walk out. Paul and Ringo have arrived at Twickenham and are sat talking with the extended group that comprise the Get Back cast, of which more below. There has been no word from George, and no indication either as to whether John will make an appearance that day. Paul says sadly ‘And then there were two.’ This is followed by a long, lingering twenty-five second close up of his tearfully expressive face. It’s one of the most powerful, it is near-universally agreed, moments in the entire film, the clear implication being that his expression is an outward manifestation of the inner turmoil he is feeling as he contemplates the possible, even probable, end of the band to which he has devoted his life since that fateful first meeting with John at the Woolton Village Fete. The shot is only broken by Linda (Eastman, soon to be McCartney) taking his hand as he softly sings the chorus of ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ a recent hit for the Foundations. This is followed quickly by one of the Beatles’ aids announcing ‘John is in the phone,’ to which Paul replies ‘I’ll talk to him.’ We then see Paul rise to leave the room, and cut immediately to him returning to announce ‘He’s coming in.’ We then further cut to the band, still obviously sans George, back at work.
It is indeed powerful filmmaking. But, as those who have combed through the unfiltered Nagra tapes (of which I am not one, perhaps surprisingly) have testified, it isn’t really how it happened. Paul’s sorrowful expression may or may not be linked to George’s walk out and John’s none-appearance that day, but it didn’t immediately follow the ‘then there was two’ remark, and it is unlikely that he regarded John’s failure to arrive at the studio as being linked either to George’s seemingly definitive resignation, or as being potentially terminal for the band. John hated being expected to be ‘on set’ at ten in the morning, and usually was the last to arrive. Laziness was of course an ongoing feature of his character, and wasn’t exactly helped by his heroin usage in this period. Nor did John’s phone call occur when Jackson implies it does. In addition, part one ends with Paul, John and Ringo engaged in a group hug and unheard conversation. Again, the implication is that this is linked to the ongoing situation with George. In reality, this did not occur when Jackson’s film suggests it did, and in fact may simply have been the band mugging for the cameras. Plus, in previous interviews John had talked about how when greeting or taking leave of each other, being Northern men of more or less working class stock, they’d hide their macho feelings of embarrassment behind elaborate, jokey, over-the-top handshakes and the like ‘though recently we’ve got into the Buddhist hug thing.’ Thus, it may not have been as unique an occurrence as it was made to seem, and may not have been linked to George walk-out.
Is this a case of dishonesty on Jackson’s part? I would suggest not, at least not quite. He was employed to craft a narrative from the large amount of available footage and audio, and in this he has succeeded magnificently. On the other hand, I think it’s worth asking if such an overt use of dramatic license was really necessary. Surely, it would have been possible to tell the story of January 1969 with due respect to the precise order of events? There was enough real drama around George’s temporary exit, without needing to quite so blatantly play with our emotions. Plus, as a Beatles buff himself, he must have known that his work would have every last detail combed through by other Beatles buffs, he would have known that he was opening himself up to unnecessary levels of criticism.
There are other points of contention concerning Jackson’s narrative which need to be addressed.
Yoko and the Flowerpot
Of course, the idea that ‘Yoko broke up the Beatles is and always has been a reductive over simplification. But there can be no doubt that she was a contributing factor. Get Back plays down this factor considerably. Apart from the two occasions where she is seen ‘jamming’ with John, Paul, and Ringo (and Billy Preston, of whom more later, during Yoko jam 2) the impression is given of a quiet, almost to the point of being mute, inscrutable (excuse the racial stereotyping) presence, of a woman who is there to support her man, John, whose side she rarely leaves, and nothing more. One of the rare occasions when we hear her speak is in part three when she asks George Martin where she can buy classical sheet music. But, again through those who have been through the whole of the Nagra tapes, we know that she was much more vocal during the sessions, not being in the least bit shy about offering musical advice to the Beatles, and playing an active part in the discussions as to where the band’s proposed live performance should take place, and in what form. One of her suitably cryptic, Yoko-esque suggestions was ‘in front of a row of empty chairs.’
The very fact of Yoko being in the studio beside John being a problem is alluded to in Get Back, but not made explicit. For instance, in discussion, Paul mentions that ‘it would be a shame if in fifty-years-time people would say the Beatles broke up because Yoko sat on an amp,’ which shows that McCartney already knew we would still be talking about the Beatles in fifty years-time, and that Yoko would be seen as a major factor in that break-up. He goes on to say that ‘of course at the moment John is going overboard, but that’s John’, before concluding ‘so, let the young lovers’ be together.’ We can draw from this that he felt Yoko was simply John’s latest fad, which would soon be replaced by something else, and that he realised that if Lennon was asked at this moment to choose between her and the Beatles, then he would clearly choose Yoko, so best put up with her for the time being. The idea, put forward in some reviews, that Get Back ‘proves’ that Yoko did not break up the Beatles is fallacious. No, she didn’t, singularly, but we don’t see or hear nearly enough to be able to form our own conclusion as to the part she did play.
We are informed through a text-caption that a (unrecorded) meeting of the Beatles at Ringo’s house to try to resolve the situation regarding George ‘ended badly.’ But we are not told that in addition to the four Beatles Linda and Yoko were also present, and that this, particularly the presence of Yoko, was a big problem for George. This fact is only alluded to in discussion at Twickenham by Linda, who mentions that the problem is that ‘Yoko spoke for John.’
Jackson has always maintained that all editorial decisions as to what was and what wasn’t included in Get Back were his and his alone, with no interference from Paul, Ringo, Olivia/Dhani Harrison and Yoko/Sean Ono Lennon. Taking him at his word, we can only conclude that he took a conscious decision to downplay the role of Yoko during this period, presumably to further weaken the whole ‘Yoko broke up the Beatles’ oversimplification?
I also need to mention here the now legendary ‘flowerpot discussion.’ We only have this discussion thanks to MLH secretly placing a microphone inside a flowerpot in the Twickenham canteen, unethical of course, but few Beatles’ fans will criticise him for that. This discussion has been very much sold to us as being likely the only opportunity we shall ever have to hear how Lennon and McCartney spoke to each other when they did not know they were being recorded. The audio-only discussion is presented to us accompanied by a single, still image of the said flowerpot, and again it is a powerful, fascinating example of Jackson’s filmmaking skills. The few minutes of discussion we hear naturally centre on the leaving of George, and the two display an impressive degree of what we would now call ‘Emotional Intelligence,’ with John opining that George was ‘wounded’ and that they, he and Paul, had ‘failed to provide him with a band-aid.’ We also hear John criticise Paul for making the band go through numerous takes of Ob-La-Di Ob-la-Da, which the rest of the band apparently hated (though John’s barrel-house piano part ended up making the song at least bearable to listen to). This would still be a sore point during John’s last interviews in 1980, as would the amount of work put into another Paul song, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, a song which would eventually appear on Abbey Road and was first introduced during the Get Back sessions, a song loathed by all of the band but its composer. McCartney also, obviously highly conscious of the precarious nature of John’s relationship with the band since the beginning of Yoko’s omnipresence beside him, reiterates that John has always been the ‘boss’ in the band he had first formed, a state of affairs that he believes must always continue.
It’s gripping stuff for first level Beatles fanatics. However, the bootleg of this conversation has been available for a long time via the Nagra Tapes. The problem was that the clanking of cutlery, plates, cups etc, as befits a conversation in a canteen, made much of the conversation virtually inaudible. Using the cutting-edge audio separation technology that he makes such brilliant use of throughout Get Back, Jackson has solved this problem in such a way as to allow us to hear every word spoken. At least, that is, every word Jackson wishes us to hear spoken. Because, as poor as the sound quality of the canteen discussion was before Jackson set to work on it, one thing we do know for certain; and that is, that this was not a conversation between John and Paul alone: Ringo was also present, as was Linda, as was Yoko, present and fully involved in the conversation. I can’t help but feel a little bit disappointed that Jackson didn’t make this clear.
Maybe, and let us hope, the fourteen-hour cut will eventually see the light of day and some of these problematic issues will be resolved…
One thing worth mentioning in Jackson’s defence is that there is at least one occasion, and possibly more, where he corrects a misleading impression given by MLH’s Let It Be. This is in a scene where Paul is talking to John at Twickenham about future projects. He says that ‘George says no films…’ and goes on to agree that they can’t go back to the days of A Hard Day’s Night or Help, but points out that ‘this is a film’, meaning the current Get Back/Let It Be project, and that he (George) had no problem with this. Paul speaks at some length, whilst John merely looks at him, and smiles enigmatically without speaking as Paul concludes. The impression we are clearly left with by this scene is that John has no interest at all in future projects. In Get Back, making use of MLH’s’ multi-camera set up, we see this conversation at greater length, and at a greater distance from its participants. Through this, we learn that it is actually a much longer and wider discussion, involving not just John and Paul but several people, including Ringo, MLH, and producer Glynn John’s. We also learn that John, contrary to the impression given in Let It Be, was fully engaged in this conversation. Here, at least, Jackson is not revising but correcting the historical record.
From Twickenham to Apple
To push on, we don’t know the entirety of the concessions that were made to George at the second, again unrecorded meeting, which led to him agreeing to re-join the band on the 15th January. We do know that they included the relocating of the project from the cold, cavernous, film studios at Twickenham, to their as yet incomplete Apple recording studio at Saville Row. The idea of a live album and television special were also dropped. Although it was not yet explicit, and discussion as to exactly what they were doing would continue periodically at Apple, from here on in we can safely say that it was essentially established that they were making a film of the recording of an album, though the original rootsy, no overdubs ethos remained, as did the notion that the film should still conclude with a live performance of some sort, though this performance would include none of Harrison’s original material.
At any rate, after a false start due to the ‘state of the art’ recording studio promised by their flavour of the month guru/inventor Magic Alex (who is unseen in the film, though we get a glimpse of his ‘genius’ through his prototype combined bass/rhythm guitar, which is essentially a child’s toy that causes the band much merriment) being an unusable shamble. After George Martin and Glyn Johns oversee the insulation of temporary recording equipment, we finally see George arrive at the Apple studios and pronounce it has ‘good vibes.’
From her on in, though the cameras were deliberately absent from the first working days at Apple, the Beatles are back to being a more or less cohesive unit, a foursome, and soon, at least temporarily with the arrival of Billy Preston, a fivesome.
Certainly, the relationships within the band improve at Apple, with a clear sense that they have collectively resolved to avoid conflict as far as possible. From now on, as seen in Get Back, it’s pretty much a forward march towards the climax, even though it is not yet known, and won’t be almost until the last minute, what that climax will be.
The Players
Before covering that climatic performance, it’s necessary to say a little about the main participants in what would eventually become Peter Jackson’s Get Back. Within the band itself, Paul and George have been covered in some detail, and there is no need to say more here.
It’s generally agreed that John is shown as much more engaged once the band relocate to Apple. There is some truth in this, though personally, on the evidence of Get Back, I think he always seemed pretty engaged, perhaps surprisingly so. At any rate, whatever he might have said later, he was clearly up for the project from day one. As he himself points out at one point late in the film, he agrees to every single suggestion as to where they should perform, not even rejecting outright MLH’s fantasy of ‘ten thousand torch-lit Arabs.’ He even says he’ll be happy to ‘play on the Moon.’
It’s known that at this time he was increasingly using heroin (as was Yoko), though we don’t see too much evidence of that in the film. There is a longstanding ‘Two Junky’s’ bootleg video of an interview he and Yoko gave to Canadian television, from which a gaunt looking Lennon had to break off to be sick. We see the aftermath of this interview in Get Back, though not the interview itself, during which John, rather embarrassingly I thought, though some seem to have enjoyed it, speaks by quoting a selection of his own song lyrics. It is also at this time that we see a little of a rather awkward visit by Peter Sellers. In addition, John begins to speak at one point about ‘getting high’ the night before, only to be gently rebuked by Paul with a ‘do we really need to do this on camera, Mr. Lennon?’ comment. All in all, this whole scene is the low point of John’s Get Back. For the vast majority of the film, despite the heroin, despite the Yoko infatuation, and accepting that he did lack new material in comparison to Paul and George, he is fully ‘there’, and shows amongst other things that, as well as the great vocalist we know him to have been, he was also a highly underrated and innovative guitarist.
I realise that Ringo hasn’t got much of a look-in so far in this lengthy review. Put simply Ringo, at this time, before heavy drinking almost destroyed him in the seventies and eighties, and long before he took to doing that annoying ‘Peace and Love’ thing he does, comes across as a calming, likable, surprisingly quiet presence: ‘We all love ‘Rings’’ says Linda at one point, and this seems to have been the case. As a drummer he is of course superb, the perfect drummer it was possible for the Beatles to have had. As Mark Lewisohn has pointed out, you can listen to hundreds and hundreds of Beatles outtakes, and songs break down perhaps because John fluffs a line, George or John mess up their guitar part, a stoned Paul gets a fit of the giggles. But they are almost all reasons that are entirely none-Ringo related. Ringo almost never makes an error, and his time keeping is second to none. As he once said, with justification, when asked if he ever used a metronome as a guide, ‘I am the metronome.’ In Get Back, whenever another band member begins to play, be-it a take of one of their new songs, a run through of a work in process, an old cover, an early John and Paul original, a simple exploratory riff, Ringo is immediately there, doing his thing, playing correctly and appropriately. He intelligently stores material away mentally for future use too. For instance, when the decision is made to change the song Two of Us from a fast electric rocker to a softer, mid-tempo acoustic number, he utilises the beat he had originally developed for the fast version of this song for the new McCartney-led work-in-progress Get Back; and it fits perfectly. Also, given his temporary walk out during the White Album sessions, he is surprisingly open to direction from other band members as to how to develop his drum parts.
Briefly, a few of the other members of the extended Beatles family. First, the BWAGS (Beatles’ Wives and Girlfriends, and yes, I did just make that up).
Yoko we have covered in some detail. Linda we have mentioned, but it should be said that I don’t think anybody has ever captured her natural beauty in the way that Jackson has here. To see her taking photographs of the band at work, and then to see these beautiful developed photographs onscreen is a fitting tribute to the clear love of McCartney’s life. A highlight of the film is the day she brings her, and soon to be Paul’s adopted, daughter Heather, then aged six, into the studio. Her on mic’ Yoko impression, after some amusing banter with John about her new kittens, which Lennon suggests they eat, is simply priceless.
Maureen Starkey, Ringo’s then wife, is seen mostly towards the end of the film, bopping away on the rooftop, and again in the control room as the band listen to a playback of the recording of their performance. She comes across as essentially a super-fan, and it’s easy to imagine her boogying in similar fashion just as enthusiastically in the Cavern a few years and a lifetime earlier.
It’s known that George was already having marital problems at this time, and we see his then wife, the utterly gorgeous Patty Harrison nee Boyd only very fleetingly, entering the studio to whisper something in George’s ear, and to give him a rather awkward looking hug, as he hunches over his guitar.
Of the rest, we have covered Michael Lyndsey Hogg at some length. It’s worth adding however that he was a natural choice for his role in the original project, having worked with the Beatles on the Paperback Writer/Rain promo films (arguably the first rock videos), on the recording of the Frost Show appearance, and having also directed the Rolling Stones Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, at which John and Yoko performed, though this was to be unreleased for three decades. Yes, he’s the butt of much Beatles’ humour, but he’s also an engaging character who clearly wants nothing more than a successful conclusion to the project.
Like MLH, Glyn Johns (generally ‘Glynnis’ to the band), employed as the producer of whatever music was recorded during these sessions, is a figure of sartorial excellence, an almost quintessentially late-sixties figure; and also like MLH, he is treated with a high degree of irreverence by the band. Ultimately, they would reject both of his mixes for the album that was then called Get Back and would later be renamed Let It Be, despite (perhaps because) of his adherence to the original, simple, rootsy ethos of the project (and Paul has always been keen to emphasise how much he liked these bare, basic productions). He clearly knows his stuff musically though and, with a little help from his friends and collaborators, principally George Martin, he gets an amazing sound out of the rooftop performance, which is quite a feat given the biting , open-air-wind, and the sheer logistics of trailing numerous wires down steps, through corridors and into the studio control room.
George Martin, the Beatles’ regular and legendary producer since 1962, had been assigned the rather vague title of Executive Producer for this project. He is to be seen much more in the latter parts of Get Back, where he is clearly keen to play a much greater part in proceedings now that it has been established that they are recording a conventional album rather than preparing for a television special, though an album that would retain a live feel, avoiding the studio trickery of which George was a master. He cuts a dapper figure, posh despite his working-class origins, handsome for a man nearing fifty, and is certainly treated with greater respect by the band than is ‘Glynnis’.
Of the others, two people stand out: Mal Evans and Billy Preston.
Evans had been a humble telephone operator in Liverpool when he fell in with the Beatles during their Cavern days. He was soon appointed their road manager, a role that gave this down to Earth working class scouser the opportunity to shoot pool with the Memphis Mafia during the brief, Bel Air Beatles/Elvis, Epstein/Parker summit of ’65 and, for him most excitingly of all, to drink JD and get royally smashed with Frank Sinatra and a few of his gun-toting Italian ‘friends’. Although a family man at heart, Evans is also said to have taken great advantage of the opportunities that close proximity to the Fab’s afforded him in terms of female ‘companionship.’ By the time of the Get Back sessions, with touring long – two-and-a-half-years is long in Beatles years – a thing of the past, his job had evolved into that of general gofer. If the Beatles wanted it, Mal was expected to arrange it, from making a simple cup of tea, to replacing guitar strings, to sometimes more obtuse demands. In Get Back, Paul suddenly decides that what the song Maxwell’s Silver Hammer really needs (other than dumping into the dustbin of history, as the other Beatles would have preferred) was extra percussion provided by an anvil and a hammer. What the Beatles want, the Beatles get, and in a nice piece of cinematic editing by Jackson we see Paul make the request to Mal followed immediately by a cut to the next day where a delighted Mal is seen excitedly wielding the hammer against the anvil as they run through yet another take of the song. We also see Mal contributing creatively in other ways, suggesting to Paul that ‘you left me standing here’ is better than ‘waiting’ here in the song The Long and Winding Road, a suggestion that Paul readily accepts. Without going too deeply into the story, things didn’t go well for Big Mal post Beatles. Though he continued to work and socialise with the ex Beatles (though not Paul), and had some success as a producer, notably with Apple band Badfinger, he slid into ever greater depression worsened by drink and drugs and the break-up of his marriage, and died in what may well have been a ‘death by cop’ incident, or was perhaps simply the victim of a trigger happy LA policeman whilst Mal was having a psychotic episode in 1976. Paul’s comment that ‘anybody who knew him well would have been able to talk him down, to say to him ‘don’t be so stupid Mal’’, suggests drug crazed, erratic behaviour from the seemingly lovable Mal wasn’t unknown even in the Beatles period. But we see none of that in Get Back, and now, thanks to Jackson’s film, he is about to gain a slice of posthumous fame that will forever cement his place in the Beatles story, being the subject of not just one but two books by respected Beatles author Ken Womack. The first, expected next year, will be a straight biography, and the second a selection from the personal diaries that have always been regarded as the Holy Grail of Beatles ‘lost’ items (actually one of several Beatles ‘Holy Grail’s of Beatles ‘lost’ items), but have hitherto, apart from the odd extract, remained secreted away within the Evans family.
The Beatles had known the young, brilliantly gifted and black keyboard player Billy Preston since Hamburg 1962, where he’d been part of one of their heroes, Little Richard’s, backing band. He would apparently often be found in the audience at the Star Club to watch the band, and would always request they perform the old standard A Taste of Honey. In January 1969, now attempting to make it as a solo artist, he was in Britain for an appearance on the Lulu Show, and popped into the Apple studio merely to say hello to his old friends. Unbeknown to him, and we see this in Get Back, the band had already spent some time discussing how great it would be to have a dedicated piano/keyboard player for some of their new material. Paul was, and is, of course more than adequate himself on the keys (John and George weren’t bad either, though not at the level of Paul) but given the no overdubs ethos of the project, and the prospect of a live performance still looming, leaving this job to McCartney would have meant either John or George having to play bass, a role neither of them particularly enjoyed (though musical equipment nerds will take an interest in the six string Rickenbacker bass which both favoured when they absolutely had to take on the role). Thus, after Billy wafted, a word that perfectly sums up Preston’s persona in Get Back, into Apple he, after they obligatorily play him a self-parodic version of A Taste of Honey, immediately ask him to sit in. A request he is clearly delighted to oblige.
The way Paul’s eyes light up when he first hears what Billy’s electric piano flourishes add to I Got a Feeling, is one of those classic little touches in Get Back. The recorded versions of this song and Don’t Let Me Down, in fact all of the songs performed on the rooftop, are now hard to imagine without Preston’s invaluable contributions. ‘You’ve lifted us, Billy,’ said John accurately on the first day of his appearance; and George would later talk about how the presence of another musician not only improved the sound of the songs, but also the relationship within the band. Another highlight is John and Billy together improvising an embryonic I Want You (She’s Heavy) which would later appear in finished form on Abbey Road. At this stage it was simply Lennon’s classic riff, embellished masterfully by Preston, with improvised lyrics based around Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream Speech’ (John had already talked animatedly earlier about MLK, who’d actually been assassinated whilst they’d been in India nine months’ earlier. John’s renewed interest had apparently been sparked by a television documentary about him shown on British television at this time.) Sadly, life hadn’t dealt Preston a great hand. He’d apparently been badly abused as a child and, despite having some solo success in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, and being an in-demand sideman, working with the Rolling Stones, the solo Beatles (again minus Paul, the ex Beatle least keen to maintain Beatle era connections, it seems), he never really broke free of the trauma caused by this, dying aged 59 in 2004, after a long history of drug and alcohol abuse.
In Search of an Ending
So, with the pressure of a live television performance now out of the way, and with Preston onboard, the sessions proceed relatively smoothly. There are still tensions, and still highlights and details to revel in, but there is little further need for any great detail.
The main problem remained exactly what form the climatic Beatles live performance would take. Gone now was talk of Roman Amphitheatres and Torch-lit Arabs. The consensus, which it seemed initiated with Paul, became that they should just turn up and play somewhere, preferably somewhere they shouldn’t, with any intervention by the forces of Law and Order being seen as a cinematic bonus. For a while, Primrose Hill is favourite. Why this is dropped is never quite made clear. But, with time running out, with the days on Peter Jackson’s screen-filling calendar being crossed off one by one fifty years in the future as we move rapidly towards the end of January deadline, we do see the moment when MLH whispers something in Paul’s ear in the studio with one finger pointing suggestively upwards. Paul nods and smiles, and it seems that in that moment the idea of simply locating their performance on the rooftop of their own studio was born. George’s earlier comment that ‘the best things with us just sort of happen, without too much planning’ are apt and prophetic.
It was still not a done deal. In discussion on January 29th, the day before the day they had finally chosen for their, sort of, return to live performance, we see George state that he doesn’t want to do it. Ringo does, Paul, well Paul sort of does, but doesn’t think they are ready and would sooner wait until they’ve reached the magic number of fourteen songs and then perform them then, even if it’s straight to camera without an audience, once the Magic Christian is out of the way and the band can reconvene. John, surprisingly given what we thought we knew about his waning interest in being a Beatle at this time, still seems to be the keenest on performing, reasoning that although they might not have achieved what they set out to achieve, they might as well go with what they have, and as they have no better idea on the table than the roof, then the roof it should be.
We don’t see the moment before the Beatles mount the stairs towards the roof the following day, but the whole idea still seems to have been in jeopardy until the very last moment. From what we can glean from various after the event accounts, George still doesn’t want to do it. Ringo states ‘it will be bloody cold up there’, Paul is still wobbling out of a fear that they won’t do themselves’ justice. Finally, it is said, it was John Lennon who, perhaps for the last time, asserted his leadership of the band he had founded as The Quarrymen: ‘Fuck it, let’s do this,’ he said before leading the band onwards and upwards.
Or so the story goes. We’ll probably have to wait until volume three of Mark Lewisohn’s massive, definitive Beatles’ biography, sometime around the mid 2030’s, to learn whether or not it is true.
The Toppermost of the Poppermost
We move now towards Jackson’s treatment of the rooftop concert/recording session itself. We cannot of course do this without reference to the treatment of the same event in Let It Be.
In MLH’s movie, we see approximately half of the Beatles’ forty-three-minute performance, one performance of each of the five songs done, minus the duplication the band used, both to stretch out their short set and to enhance their chances of getting usable recordings. Footage of the band playing, from differing angles, is interspersed with cut-aways to the street, where we see short vox pop style interviews with passers’-by, mostly positive but with some complaining local business owners, upset over the disruption to normal, lunch time, London commerce. The performance of course ends with the appearance of the representatives of the local constabulary onto the roof, giving the Beatles pretty much what they wanted as far as a climax to their film went, and John’s iconic comment, often somewhat wrongly taken as a coded farewell forever from the band, that ‘I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group, and I hope we passed the audition.’
Let It Be’s handling of the Roof is perfectly fine, a great finish to a highly uneven documentary movie. But we now know that so much more was available to MLH. He had in fact employed an innovative nine camera set-up which is only made proper use of by Peter Jackson five decades on. We get of course the full forty-three-minute Beatles performance (three versions of Get Back, two each of Don’t Let Me Down and I Got a Feeling, and singular versions of I Dig a Pony and One After 909), again with cut-aways to, now extended street vox-pops. In addition, and unlike in Let It Be we get to see the unfolding drama taking place, as the band played on, in the Apple reception area as the police, led by the incredibly youthful looking PC Dagg, whom Get Back has made into a minor celebrity in his own right, responding to the complaints of local businessmen about the noise and disruption, are expertly stalled for as long as possible by the Apple receptionist Debbie Wellum. She initially plays dumb as to the source of the music, and then tries to claim she doesn’t have the keys to enable them to access the roof. This is once the police have finally asserted that the source of the sound[GC1] is indeed the rooftop: ‘I thought these places were soundproofed’ says Dagg, at least displaying a rudimentary knowledge of how recording studios generally work: ‘Oh, they’re on the roof: why are they on the roof?’ ‘To do something different…it’s for a film.’ ‘But can’t they just dub on the music later?’ asks Dagg, now venturing into the realm of movie soundtrack creation, which was almost certainly above his pay grade. I should mention that PC Shayler and PC Craddock are also on the scene, and that some of these comments may actually have come from their direction. But history has chosen to appoint PC Dagg as the representative lawman of that day, and I’ve decided to place all of these words into his mouth. If a dramatisation of these events is ever to be made, which it almost certainly will be one day, adding yet more meta-aspects to the whole project, then that is almost certainly how it will be portrayed.
At any rate, the venerable Miss Wellum does a sterling job of allowing the Beatles to keep on doing what they needed to do for long enough for them to do be able to do it. They were it seems pretty much done when the police finally gained access to the roof anyway: there is sadly no fantasy extended Beatles’ set that was prevented from taking place by the forces of the Establishment. Only when top brass arrives in the form of no-nonsense Sgt David Kendrick does she finally relent and send for (who else?) Big Mal Evans, who reluctantly leads the forces of law and order to their destination. The shimmy of delight we get from Paul when he first catches sight of the policeman on the roof as he effortlessly does what he does best, playing harmonically complex bass lines whilst singing a completely different melody, is one of the great moments of Get Back. I also love a defiant George Harrison turning his amplifier back on after, under police instruction, Mal had turned it off.
Jackson has come in for criticism from some fans for not showing the Beatles final public performance unadorned, with no cut-aways to the street or the Apple reception area. I see their point, and there is certainly an argument for being able to view that forty-three-minutes as the Beatles and nothing but the Beatles somewhere, in some form. This would have been an excellent bonus disc had we got a decent, Extras packed Get Back physical release instead of the disappointing reproduction of what has already been available on Disney for months. Or, it could be released as a standalone disc, or maybe as part of the restored Let It Be we have been promised, but which I restate I’ll believe when I hold it in my hands. For now, you’ll have to make do with the audio Playlist of the whole set on Spotify, which sounds fantastic, by the way. From a personal perspective, I think Jackson got this spot on in Get Back: the Beatles performance, the view from the street, the comedic farce in the Apple reception, all blended to perfection. A superb piece of filmmaking.
I want to say a little more about the street scenes. Firstly, from this level, you get an idea of how loud the Beatles were that day, something that doesn’t come across in Let It Be. They were fairly blasting it out, and this must have been quite an experience for them, given the still insubstantial equipment they were saddled with even for their final tours in ’66. But then there is the whole cultural dimension too, what Get Back tells us about the changes Britain has gone through in the intervening five decades. Firstly, for someone of my age, who grew up in the seventies (1969 is the first year I can remember being aware of what year it was, although I’ve no idea why), there’s a lot of nostalgia to be had from seeing those police officers in their traditional ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ uniforms, custodiam helmets and all. How much different do police officers look today; and how would today’s Woke-Robocop’s handle such a situation if it was to occur now? Perhaps by battle ramming open a few doors before dashing up the stairs fully armed, followed by forcibly carrying off the band (which Paul wanted to happen, though I doubt he would in the form it would take today), pausing only to take a respectful Black Lives Matter knee before a bemused Billy Preston?
It is very instructive and interesting to look at the street scenes. With the single exception of a lone, dapper, very posh sounding black man, everyone interviewed, or at least everyone being shown being interviewed in the film, though I’m sure this is more or less representative of the truth, is white. What would be the demographic make-up of random people being solicited for comments in that exact same spot now, I wonder, given that white British people are now a minority in our capital city?
Then, there are the issues of cultural recognition and the fragmentation/atomisation we have seen taking place over the subsequent decades.
Pretty much, every single person interviewed on the street, or again at least every interview shown on camera, knew immediately when asked that the source of the music from on high was the Beatles. This was despite the fact that the band were performing material that had not been heard by anyone outside of the Beatles’ inner-circle. One of the interviewees even distinguishes between lead vocalists: ‘That’s Paul singing now….or that was Paul….’ As a song concludes. How many bands, artists, figures from any walk of life would have that instant recognisability now? Perhaps Oasis was the last to come close circa 1994/5, but only with younger members of society. It’s doubtful if random middle aged taxi drivers or businessmen would have known an Oasis song that had never even been played on the radio.
(And I am concluding this particular edit four days after the announcement of the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 11, perhaps our last surviving symbol of national unity. Look at the throng crowding around Buckingham Palace and other Royal residences. They look more representative of Get Back era London than they do of modern London. What does that tell you?).
So, what of the Beatles’ performance itself? Objectively, given the impossible task they had set themselves, they had failed. They didn’t have fourteen new songs honed to a standard that could be performed live on television, and later released as a live album. They had five songs they felt confident enough to perform, and one of them, One After 909, wasn’t a new song at all, as we have seen. But, given that they hadn’t played live in two-and-a-half-years, that they were playing material they’d never performed before (possibly One After 909 had been essayed at the Cavern, in Hamburg or on the road pre their conquest of the world? I’ll leave that one to Lewisohn), and that they had only really worked on twenty two of those thirty January days available to them, given John’s lack of preparation and new material, and George’s clear feelings of under-appreciation within the band, then the Beatles, with the absolutely invaluable addition of Billy Preston on keyboards, positively rocked. Despite all the tensions and problems, for forty-three minutes in the bitingly cold open air, they proved themselves to be an almost unbelievably tight unit.
Mick Jagger has said that the Beatles couldn’t be compared to the Stones as a live act, because they only played barely audible thirty -minute sets to audiences of screaming girls. Leaving aside the days when they played eight-hour, Prelude fuelled all-night sets in Hamburg (and please, please Apple, can we apply some of the technological wizardry employed by Jackson in Get Back to those Star Club tapes from December 1962, so we can further grasp how great the band were live on the cusp of fame?), he ignores the rooftop and the tantalising glimpse of what might have been. If the Beatles had been able to put aside their differences, particularly regarding Paul’s refusal to accept Allan Klein as manager (Klein is referenced in Get Back, but you have to know a fair bit of the back-story in order to grasp the implications of John’s effusive praise of him), had continued to rehearse, and had embarked on a tour performing a selection of the material premiered in January 1969, and maybe an oldie and a cover or two if they felt like it, still with Billy on keyboards, then they would quite frankly have blown the opposition away. The Stones, the Who, the Kinks, all as great as they undoubtedly were, none of them could have touched a honed and focussed late-Beatles live, just as none of them could come close to them as innovative recording artists. Interestingly, when the Stones returned to the stage at Hyde Park later in 1969, shortly after the death of Brian Jones, following their own withdrawal from touring (even in this they had followed the Beatles’ lead), and on tour the following year, their set consisted of precisely fourteen songs…
A month wasn’t quite enough for the Beatles, and as I said they really only ‘worked’ for around two-thirds of that. And yet, in that short space of time they produced enough material for what became the Let It Be album (which I, like many others, have gained a much greater appreciation of through Get Back), premiered several of the songs that ended up on Abbey Road, and even a few that wouldn’t be heard again until the band had broken up and the solo years had begun.
Not a bad three week’s work, is it? Doug Sulpy produced a book called ‘Get Back: The Beatles Let It Be Disaster.’ Great book actually, an invaluable source of documentation of exactly what was done and when by the Beatles in that eventful first month of the final year of the sixties. But a truly terrible title. ‘Great Let It Be Miracle’ would be more apt, because no band in history could have achieved what the Beatles achieved in such a short space of time.
Some Closing Thoughts
The Beatles continued to work on the day after the rooftop, putting the final touches (minus a few contentious overdubs) to the recordings of Let It Be, The Long and Winding Road and Two of Us. And Jackson has come in for some criticism for dealing with this concluding day of the project only very briefly over the closing credits. But, in my opinion, he had no choice, given the narrative structure he, correctly, chose, he could really do no other than effectively finish with the rooftop. Quite simply, after the band finally made the live appearance, of sorts, to which the whole month, and whole project had been building, where else was there to go?
There are though I think valid questions to be asked about the decision to omit complete takes almost completely from the film. Towards the end, when the band are engaged in a take that ended up as being the take used on the Let It Be album, we are informed of this by Jackson via a caption. A nice touch. But we still don’t see the full take itself. I think this is probably a mistake. We do see full takes of Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road in MLH’s movie (a sore point with John, who was afforded no similar opportunity to sing perfectly straight to camera in the way that Paul was here), and Jackson has always been clear that he didn’t see his film as a replacement for Let It Be. So, there is an argument for avoiding repetition, and hopefully (again) we will soon see the restored, extended version of MLH’s film made available. But still, I would have liked to have seen more complete songs from the Beatles, and less broken down or simply truncated versions. This applies not only to material that ended up on the Let It Be album. There are much loved, amongst hardcore fans at least, bootlegs that it would have been nice to have heard in full, cleaned up form. A strong case in point is the song Suzie Parker (sometimes referred to as Suzie Parlour), which I always thought was an obscure fifties cover, but is in fact a John and Paul original. Many were mystified that this was left off the Anthology 3 collection in 1996, and even more mystified that it failed to appear in the Let It Be De Lux Box Set a couple of years ago. I thought we would get at least a substantial chunk of it in Get Back yet, as with All Things Must Pass, we disappointingly get only a few tantalising seconds. This song, in my opinion, would also have been a worthy addition to their rooftop set, had they worked on it.
But these are nothing more than personal gripes really. Whatever he did and didn’t include, Peter Jackson was always going to come in for criticism from one quarter or another.
What we have got from him is a comprehensive and rounded view of a remarkable month that challenges and changes our perception of the latter part of the Beatles career, and which looks and sounds utterly beautiful. Yes, he cuts and pastes events and scenes a bit in order to fit his chosen narrative, and he even misleads those who aren’t full up to speed with this material on occasion.
But, more importantly than any of that, we get to spend real quality time with the Beatles as they worked; and what we see is a still functioning band who, whilst showing awareness that the end is perhaps not far away, are not done yet; and we learn that, despite the coming recriminations, mainly emanating from John, team Lennon and McCartney, the greatest and most important song-writing team in history, were at this point still Lennon and McCartney, a two-person creative bubble which could not be penetrated from outside, even by fellow Beatles, a creative partnership which neither could ever successfully replicate, operating at a level of musical genius that, alone, neither of them, despite some fine work, could ever equal or surpass.
By way of conclusion, generations to come will study and dissect Peter Jackson’s Get Back. I would suggest that students of filmmaking would benefit from such a study, as well as Beatles fans and fans of music in general. Like me, those who are here for the Beatles, will have their own favourite bits and their own criticisms. But most of all, again like me, they will thank Jackson for the wonderful gift he has given to the world.
Now, what about that fourteen-hour cut Apple/Disney, and the restored, extended Let It Be?
As the man said, ‘You Can’t Have Too Much Beatles.’
Get Back is still streaming on Disney+, and is available to buy on DVD or Blu Ray in all the usual places.
I couldn’t quite find the right place to fit one of my very favourite Get Back scenes into this review. That is early in part three when the band are shown reminiscing about their time in Rishikesh with the Maharishi the previous year. This is inter-cut by Jackson with some of the private footage taken by Paul and John at the time, the former of which Paul had mentioned he’d been watching the night before this discussion takes place. None of this footage had ever been seen before publicly, and it was nice to see some figures who had, by the time of the Get Back sessions, left the Beatles circle, people such as ex Paul fiancée Jane Asher (dignified Jane, the one person who has never, and will never sell her story) and John’s first wife Cynthia. Again, we get a great meta-moment when John says that if a film of the trip is ever put out for public consumption, then he wants his two reels to be labelled ‘Produced by John Lennon.’ More than four decades after his tragic murder, Jackson of course makes John’s wish come true. I would love to see an official Maharishi and the Beatles or The Beatles in India film made (there’s been plenty of unofficial ones) using all of the footage and photographs taken by the band and their coterie, and utilising some of the earliest demos of the songs that were written there for what became the nucleus of the White Album. Paul also apparently took his daughter Stella and son James to meet the old mystic about a year and a half before his death in early 2008. Stella took video footage at this meeting too, so we could also have a bit of that…
Us Beatle uber-fans are nothing if not dreamers, though probably not the only ones.
