Lennon claimed he was haunted by the number nine: he was born at 6.30am (6+3 = 9), on October 9, on a Wednesday (which has nine letters) The Beatles played the Cavern Club for the first time on Februthey made their America-breaking debut on the same date three years later. His apparent belief in numerology was a favourite topic. While McCartney chucked buckets of water over the press, Lennon preferred to tease them with cryptic pronouncements. As their renown grew, he increasingly took a performative, Warhol-esque approach to their fame. Indeed, Lennon was largely responsible for The Beatles’ flirtation with the more far-out elements of the counterculture. In The Beatles: Get Back, for instance, he seems visibly off his rocker for much of the footage.
With his owl-like glasses and flowing hair, John Lennon embodied the wigged-out wackiness of the 1960s, especially towards the close of the decade and the band’s final recording sessions at Abbey Road. Here, then, are a few of the stories you won’t find in Jackson’s goody-two-shoes documentary. Like Low Traffic Neighborhoods, or US presidential elections, the Beatles were so big, so important, that they couldn’t but generate paranoia, conspiracism and urban legends. Jackson’s sober, hagiographic approach doesn’t quite capture the white heat of Beatlemania, the far-out dedication they inspired. You can’t help wondering what might have been. It’s the record of four friends, many fag breaks and the struggle to make an album in a fractious, fuggy room. And yet, despite its sprawling size, Get Back feels narrow. Culling 200 hours of video and audio footage from The Beatles’ 1969 Let it Be recording sessions, it’s an exhaustive and exhausting three-part series, clocking in at nearly eight hours of viewing time. Then there was a cap-doffing New Yorker profile of McCartney, and a special episode of Radio 4’s This Cultural Life, teeing up the book’s release.Īnd now we’ve got Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back. First, we had the release of Paul McCartney: the Lyrics, a two-volume slab of retrospective musical analysis.
The Beatles’ reputation has looked especially granitic this year. Even the debates around the band move at a tectonic pace – you’re either Team Lennon or Team McCartney. Such is the gravitational pull of their fame that the scrappy energy of the Fab Four has solidified into the pop-culture equivalent of Mount Rushmore.
It’s easy to forget that The Beatles were once four beanpole yobbos from Liverpool.