Tony Barrell (1940–2011)

Like McCartney on that first day of filming, the other Beatles didn’t always arrive on time for their rehearsal duties. Though their individual timekeeping was erratic, The Beatles nonetheless became everyday commuters at one of the worst times of the year, the middle of winter. The weather wasn’t the main problem: in fact, January 1969 was an unusually mild month, thanks to a gentle airstream caressing England from the south-west. It was the shortness of the days: the fact that the sun didn’t come up until around 8 a.m., but went down again as early as 4 p.m. At this time of year, many ordinary commuters know the misery of leaving their homes before sunrise and returning to them after sunset, as each day’s window of light is eclipsed by their hours in the workplace. The Beatles would have suffered – more than many office and shop workers, who at least had windows to look out of – from daylight deprivation. The term “seasonal affective disorder” (SAD) had yet to be coined (it wasn’t named in print until 1985) but these short days would likely have had a negative bearing on the musicians’ wellbeing, mood and mental health. SAD is a form of depression, whose symptoms can include lethargy, anxiety and irritability.

During their discussions in Twickenham, it emerged that there was a problem with the new material – apart from the fact that there wasn’t that much of it. Both George and Paul admitted that many of the songs they had written were slow numbers, echoing John’s complaint about his own songs the day before, when he had suggested they try to write some rockers. One uptempo song that they played that day was new to most of the people around them – the film crew and the sound technicians – although it wasn’t new to the group. ‘One After 909’ was a song begun by John as a teenager back in the late fifties: a juvenile homage to the American tradition of songs about trains, and to skiffle numbers like Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’. The Beatles had recorded it at EMI back in 1963, but it hadn’t been deemed good enough to release. Now they dusted it off, though they had reservations about the words. “I never, sort of, knew what it was about before,” admitted Paul. “So she’s on a train and he, sort of…” “He goes to the station and misses it,” explained John. “But he goes back and finds it was the wrong number,” said Paul. “Wrong location,” said George. “To rhyme with ‘station’, you know,” said John. Paul added that his brother, Mike, had been suggesting for years that The Beatles use the song. “But I said, ‘Well, you know, Mike, you don’t understand about these things, you know.’” George made a case here for meaningless song lyrics. “Most people just don’t give a shit what the words are about, as long as it’s ‘pop of the month’,” he said. And John confessed that “we always thought it wasn’t finished. We couldn’t be bothered finishing it.”

The BBC had some interesting TV shows that weekend. Saturday evening brought Happening For Lulu, a variety showcase for the eponymous pop singer, broadcast from the corporation’s Shepherd’s Bush building and entailing a bit of singing, dancing and comedy plus some special guests. The Daily Express, which described Lulu as “that explosive little cracker from the Glasgow backstreets”, warned that each show “will be informal and unscripted, with an audience of teenagers”. The show was also live, so there was no telling what might happen.

The guests that evening included The Jimi Hendrix Experience, performing ‘Voodoo Chile’ and a couple of minutes of ‘Hey Joe’ – at which point Jimi departed from the script. “We’re gonna stop playing this rubbish,” he announced (you could almost hear the distant wailing from his public-relations team), “and dedicate a song to the Cream… I’d like to dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.” They immediately tore into a cover of Cream’s ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’, which ended up crashing the sacred evening news slot and prompted the producers to take the show off air. The following week, the programme was billed simply as Lulu, the Happening no doubt dispensed with for fear of something similar occurring again.

The Beatles discussed how inspiring the feedback from an audience would be, but George, remembering their previous concerts, was concerned that the audience might consist only of screaming young female Beatlemaniacs. Yoko Ono chipped in with a highly conceptual idea: that The Beatles perform to 20,000 empty seats, which would represent “the invisible, nameless everybody in the world”. Paul ran briefly with Yoko’s idea, suggesting that they play one concert to a real audience, and another to empty seats. Paul raised the possibility of The Beatles playing in the nude, to which George added that it might be better if the audience were naked rather than the performers. When they returned to the subject later that day, Paul was advocating building an artificial set resembling the Colosseum in Rome, and having The Beatles come in together with some real, live lions.

But on this winter’s day in Twickenham, he wasn’t noticeably inspired by his bandmate’s grandiose but well-meaning proposal to improve the lives of thousands of starving Africans. “Don’t they say charity begins at home?” he remarked. “So we will do it at George’s house,” Paul fired back. “Let’s do the show right here,” said Ringo, echoing the old movie cliche´. Picking up from his Biafran suggestion, Paul continued: “Say we were doing it in an airport: you could stop the people from coming and going. They’ve all got planes to catch; like, you get a lot of people all the time going for planes and looking. It would be a scene. Or in a hospital: they can’t get up – except at the finale, when John walks over to the little girl and says, ‘Come, ye,’ and she gets up and walks.”

Paul was edging into biblical territory here, daring to suggest that the group – and John in particular – replicate one of the Miracles of Jesus, as when the Son of God raised Lazarus from the dead. Though this is likely to have been tongue-in-cheek, a casual jest to keep the desperately needed ideas for a live show rolling along, there were echoes here of John’s troublesome “Jesus” remark. Later, after they tinkered with a few half-hearted numbers, Paul addressed his frustrations with the attitudes of his old friends. “I don’t see why any of you, if you’re not interested, got yourselves into this,” he said. “What’s it for? It can’t be for the money. Why are you here? I’m here because I want to do a show, but I really don’t feel a lot of support.” Paul went on to deliver a petulant ultimatum. “There’s only two choices,” he said. “We’re going to do it or we’re not going to do it. And I want a decision. Because I’m not interested in spending my fucking days farting around here while everyone makes up their minds whether they want to do it or not. If everyone else wants to do it, great, but I don’t have to be here.” If the experience of this project ended up like that of the White Album, he said, maybe it should be their last venture together. “There’s no point in hanging on.”

It was at this point that ‘Get Back’ began to develop as a song. As he often did when working up a composition, Paul sang snatches of gibberish while they played; some of the words and phrases that emerged would be discarded and some would remain in the finished number. He riffed about Pakistanis, Arizona, California grass, Puerto Ricans and Mohicans, and introduced two characters, Joe and Theresa. Paul sang about somebody with an uncertain sexual identity, who thought she was a woman but was really “another man”, and other lines were present that are now preserved in the finished song. The chorus was now fixed as “Get back to where you once belonged”. Paul laughed and commented on the lack of meaning in the lyrics, though he was only following the long-established Beatles tradition of writing vaguely plausible words that scanned with the music. George commented that it wouldn’t matter if he used any “rubbish” for the text of the song, as The Band had done on their track ‘Caledonia Mission’, with its watchman, garden gate, magistrate and hexagram. But for a while, one of the lyrical themes of ‘Get Back’ would be a satire on racist attitudes to immigration. Sticking to the lyrical theme of ‘Get Back’, Paul began to improvise another song about Enoch Powell and his arguments for repatriation. The lyric had Powell telling immigrants to “get back to your Commonwealth homes”, and Ted Heath (leader of the Opposition, who had sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet the previous April) telling Powell: “Enoch, you’d better go home.” Harold Wilson came into the song at this point, saying something barely intelligible. The song’s chorus was simply the word “Commonwealth” called out by Paul, who was audibly amused when John responded with the word “Yes?” in a high voice with a distinctly proletarian accent – a quick-witted interpretation of the word “common”. Paul continued the number by name-checking various Commonwealth countries, including Pakistan, India, Australia and New Zealand, though one decidedly non-Commonwealth destination stood out: Tucson, a populous city in southern Arizona.

After an agonising silence, John Lennon suddenly came through as the leader of the group, as he had been from the beginning. “Fuck it. Let’s do it,” he said. With John on side, George and Ringo immediately dropped their objections, and within minutes all four Beatles climbed up the spiral staircase, one by one, to play music together in public for the final time.

Tom Brown wondered about the legality of what The Beatles were doing: the police did not seem to be intervening, but surely they couldn’t get away with creating such a major disturbance in the middle of London. So he and Mike came down from the roof and walked towards West End Central to make some enquiries. “We went round to the police station and we just asked the obvious question – were they going to stop it? The guy behind the desk said no, they were happy for The Beatles to have their fun. Apart from the fact that it had brought that part of London to a standstill, it wasn’t doing any harm. At least that’s the way he saw it. It was something different, in the spirit of the time. So at that point they were happy to let them play.”

After The Beatles finished their second go at ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, they rounded off the performance with the song they had started it with: ‘Get Back’. Despite the deal that had been made with the police, an officer made a remark that caused some confusion and prompted Mal Evans to turn off the Fender Twin amplifiers that John and George were using. Ringo cried “Don’t touch that!” and George turned his amplifier back on and Mal revived John’s, and they were able to finish the song, with Paul tossing in a spoken section about the song’s Loretta character “playing on the roofs again” to the displeasure of her mother, who would have her arrested. As the song ended, there was a final “Yay!” of enthusiasm from Maureen Starkey, eliciting a “Thanks, Mo” from Paul. John lifted the Epiphone Casino off his body, turned to the microphone and inspired peals of knowing laughter for the immortal lines: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”