4 Moments Fans Are Hoping to See in Peter Jackson’s ‘The Beatles: Get Back’
The Beatles are on everyone’s radars right now. Part one of Peter Jackson’s highly anticipated three-part documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, is here, and we have some huge hopes. There are a few things that fans expect to see at some point. Things that have recently been teased and things that fans know were captured, but that didn’t make it into the final cut of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 film Let It Be.
We know that Jackson’s documentary will show the good and the bad, but as long as we get to see certain things, we’ll be happy. Here are the four moments we hope to see in The Beatles: Get Back.
4. A more detailed rooftop performance
The whole point of recording Let It Be was so that The Beatles had new material to show fans during a proposed televised concert special. After George quit it, that plan fell through. When he returned, The Beatles moved operations to Apple headquarters in Savile Row, London, and decided to play to fans in a surprise rooftop concert.
Fans are excited to see their performance in its entirety for the first time. Even Ringo Starr was excited for fans to see it all. He told Ultimate Classic Rock that the scene was his favorite.
“From, whatever, January 5th to the end of January – within a month we’d made a record and we’d done a record,” Ringo said. “On the roof was so great, and we played live again. There’s a great piece in the [footage] for me. Paul says, ‘Who wants to play live?’ and you can hear me in the background going, ‘I do.’ And we did.”
Lindsay-Hogg told Inside Hook that getting the band on the roof was the hard part, but once they started playing, it was like they were teenagers again.
“Once I got them on the roof — which that was the hard part, because they didn’t really make up their minds until they were standing down in the little cubbyhole of a room about to go on the roof — they were great,” he said. “All that had been going on before, them not getting on or them having spats, like people who work together often do, and [once] they started really playing and they knew there was a crowd down below, they were 16 again.”
The rooftop performance is integral because it was the last time The Beatles ever performed together.
3. The joyful collaborations in The Beatles
Ringo once called Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be “joyless.” The film has gotten a bad wrap over the years. Many people thought that the film captured The Beatles’ split since Lindsay-Hogg released it when the band actually broke up. This was a myth. The last album The Beatles recorded together was Abbey Road, released before Let It Be.
However, Ringo, Paul, Lindsay-Hogg, and Jackson himself, have said there was a great joy during the recording of Let It Be.
“I was always moaning about the original,” Ringo continued to UCR. “There’s no real joy in it. [Get Back]‘s got the start, the middle, the finish. The start is very slow, and then we get into it, and then we’re at it. Then we’re out. I think everyone will enjoy it because you’ll see this band work really hard.
“We had ups and downs, but even around all that – which you’ll see with the Peter Jackson edit-we were having fun, which [Let It Be] never showed, joy and fooling around and shouting at each other. It’s what four guys do. I keep saying that: four guys in a room, there’s a lot of joy.”
Paul told the Sunday Times that watching Jackson’s documentary reminded him that the band actually had fun.
“I’ll tell you what is really fabulous about it, it shows the four of us having a ball,” Paul said. “It was so reaffirming for me. That was one of the important things about The Beatles, we could make each other laugh. John and I are in this footage doing ‘Two Of Us’ and, for some reason, we’ve decided to do it like ventriloquists. It’s hilarious. It just proves to me that my main memory of the Beatles was the joy and the skill.”
2. The fights
The one fight scene we hope to see more of is George’s fight with Paul. “It was all based on this little downer incident,” Ringo told Inside Hook, referring to the infamous fight that set the tone for Let It Be.
We know that Paul and John were unusually chummy during these sessions. However, Paul and George were at their wit’s end with each other. Even Giles Martin, The Beatles’ late producer, George Martin’s son, saw how Paul and John ostracized George while working on the reissue of Let It Be.
Martin told NME, “We sort of see this as The Beatles’ ‘break-up album,’ and of course it wasn’t because they were back in the studio doing ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ [on ‘Abbey Road’] pretty soon afterwards… It was quite a collaborative process.
“The strain of ‘Let It Be’ was actually the strain that [John and Paul] put on George and Ringo by trying to force themselves together, and the strain of doing a live show with no songs in two-and-a-half weeks’ time. What I can get [from the outtakes] is that George was being ostracised slightly during ‘Let It Be.’
“I think the attention [John and Paul] were giving one another – almost like they were trying to rekindle their relationship – ostracised George, to a certain degree.”
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1. George Harrison quitting
We know that Lindsay-Hogg captured George quitting the band. However, it didn’t make it into his film, but hopefully, it made it into Jackson’s.
Lindsay-Hogg told Rolling Stone, “We used to have lunch together every day in the little commissary in Twickenham [Studios, where the first segments of the film were shot], and I got our sound guy to bug the flowerpot. George wasn’t there at the beginning of the lunch, and then he came up and stood at the long end of the table.
“He’s wearing this beautiful black corduroy hat, and he said, ‘See you around the clubs.’ Meaning, I’m off. And so I’ll see you in the Scotch Club or the Ad Lib, but I’m gone [from the Beatles]. And John always reacted to provocation very quickly, and so he said, ‘Oh, well, you know, let’s get in Eric Clapton, he’s not such a headache.’
However, the moment didn’t make it into Let It Be because Lindsay-Hogg didn’t get great audio. “But when I played back the audio, all I got was the clatter of cutlery and plates and [inaudible] voices. Peter has access to this extraordinary new audio technology that can separate the audio within a track, and so he’s got some of that lunch, I think.”
There was also pressure from the band not to add the scene. By the time Lindsay-Hogg was editing the film, George was back in the band. So, they felt that it didn’t need to be in the final cut and cause a stir. We don’t know for sure whether Jackson’s added it The Beatles: Get Back, but we hope he did.
Either way, whatever we see in the documentary over the next three days, will change how we see The Beatles.
