“The Beatles: Get Back” (2021)
“Rehearsed until lunchtime. Left The Beatles. Went Home”.
“Rehearsed until lunchtime. Left The Beatles. Went Home”.
I’ve been a fan of The Beatles since my college days of the late 1980’s and those special storied times of weed, wine, women and a great friend with the middle name of “Willard” with whom I shared a growing interest in more adult music and more becoming of a long haired lover from Portsmouth, exactly 256 miles away from the great city of Liverpool that spawned that fabulous musical foursome. Banished were the days of hair metal and heavy metal, the early 80’s synthesiser pop and the much inferior dross of the machine made pop that followed it before, with the influence of a naturally abundant plant, the raging hormones of a perpetually horny late teenager and the fear of leaving college to enter the “real world”, Willard and I delved further into Springsteen and Dylan, The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses, Radiohead and Pink Floyd, and along that long and winding road we listened to a lot of The Beatles too.
We attacked our listening in much the same way that I still have every Beatles CD released to this very day and, given the same choice I had back in the late 1980’s and coming to The Beatles for the very first time, I’d still play their entire catalogue of album music from the end back strictly in a chronological order to the very beginning, from Let it Be to Please, Please Me, 1970 back through the 60’s to 1963, and the simple reason why is one of the many, many reasons why I ADORE this Peter Jackson curated and created near 8 hour long directorial masterpiece for the ages.
For all their faults and foibles, I adore the final four Beatles albums and revere them alongside my contemporary musical love Radiohead. I adore every Beatles album naturally, but from Sgt Pepper to Let it Be and The White Album and Abbey Road in between? It’s an incredible run of albums far and away eclipsing the stratospheric record breakers in the sharp suits and “mop top” hairstyles of the early 1960’s. This is both my age and musical taste talking, as well as having the benefit of Mr Kite and not actually living within the era of a band who had long gone their separate, often tragic ways, and I was able to pick and choose from a standing start of the band’s entire storied collection.
Who amongst you can’t claim an adoration for “Rocky Raccoon” or “The continuing story of Bungalow Bill” or of a “Blackbird” singing in the dead of night? Does “The Long and Winding Road” make you cry as it does me or do you too enjoy the devilry of John Lennon with the first spoken words on the Let it Be album? I bet you can’t sing “Polythene Pam” in as annoying a voice as I can! Do you sing “Getting Better” when things are well, getting better, and how do you explain the majesty of “A Day in the Life”? That late teenager in the 1980’s was the same age as my son is now, noted for his adoration of so many tracks from the Abbey Road album (my personal favourite) of which so many are brought to these recording sessions in rough cut form, snippets of an idea or the beginnings of a song that would be crafted into the album tracks we love today. The mammoth 3 part series is sub-titled Get Back, a song you’ll see grow and develop wings from Paul McCartney simply, and desperately, seeking yet another song.
Because for several early January days in the year of 1969, with a film crew following their every move, every utterance and every musical note, and with a film, live show, album and a multitude of other all encompassing promotional ideas set to coalesce around the four musicians from Liverpool creating their next album, they tetchily and playfully failed to produce anything substantially meaningful before George Harrison, stoically, and with his patience wearing thin with an overbearing Paul McCartney, simply stood up and declared he was leaving The Beatles before penning this entry into his diary:
“Got up. Went to Twickenham. Rehearsed until lunchtime. Left The Beatles. Went home”.
The rest, as they say, is history. George returned and the boys enjoyed sending up the stories of hand to hand fights and violent recriminations that still permeate the history faithfully restored and recorded here by director Jackson. George’s departure was pure apathy at being on the outside, a member of the orchestra under the direction of his great childhood friend. McCartney is seen as overbearing but with the rift well and truly behind them you have to behold what you have before you:
Ringo — Slipping so easily between the musician and the man, the joker and the best friend. Watching “Ritchie” (as he’s affectionately known) work out the tune to “Octopus’ Garden” with an enraptured George Harrison is a sheer delight.
George — The sly joker noodling his own creations, the master musician and guitar player.
John and Paul — They come in a duo, they seemingly always did. A heated (secretly recorded) row about the future of the band and their great friend George? Now watch those kids, smiles as big as the universe, gazing at each other with absolute joyous creative abandon. It’s a mighty sight to see.
Which is the true heart of the story.
If you’re reading this I’m guessing you’re a fan of The Beatles and hence you’ll know a story I’m not going to tell. The highest possible compliment I can pay this masterpiece and winner of 5 Prime Time Emmy’s in 2022 and currently 40th on the www.imdb.com chart of the 250 greatest television series of all time, is somewhat trite but it’s the best I’ve got. You simply spend near on eight hours in the company of four human beings named John, Paul, George and Richard, and over the course of a handful January days in the year 1969 you get to spend real time with the gentlemen and estranged friends that were the iconic images, backdrops and apocryphal stories that filled our formative growing up years. If you’re a fan of The Beatles then the images of the “Fab Four” on 30th January 1969 have been seared into your fanatic consciousness, but here they are, alive and very well, touchy, acquiescent, driven, loving, frustrated lifelong friends at the end of their long and winding artistic road.
This is marvellous beyond words, I couldn’t stop smiling or singing or wiping away more than the occasional tear, and I hope I’ve passed the audition.
“I’m in love for the first time
Don’t you know it’s gonna last
It’s a love that lasts forever
It’s a love that had no past”
Thanks for reading. Just for larks as always, and always a human reaction rather than spoilers galore. My three most recently published film articles are linked below or there’s well over 200 blog articles (with 400+ individual film reviews) within my archives from which to choose:
“The Master” (2012)
“We record everything. Throughout all lifetimes”.medium.com
“Ed Wood” (1994)
The Best of Tim Burton — Vol 2.medium.com
“The Insider” (1999)
The Best of Michael Mann — Vol 2.medium.com