I’d say: “John, I honestly don’t know.” “You’re no fucking good then, are you?” he’d say. George Martin: We’d do take after take after take – and then John would be asking whether Take 67 was better than Take 39. Jan 4: Run throughs of One After 909, Don’t Let Me Down, Two of Us, I’ve Got A Feeling and Just Fun, the latter one of the first songs Lennon and McCartney ever wrote together, back in late 1957. It’s a drag to get your guitar at eight in the morning, when you’re not ready for it. George Harrison: It’s like hard work to do it. The group works on One After 909 and Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. Once they are all assembled, McCartney plays them Let It Be for the first time. Jan 3: Filming continues, but the proposed 10am start time has already been abandoned by Lennon and Harrison. We didn’t realise it but we were actually breaking up as it was happening. Paul McCartney: What happened was, when we got in there, it showed how the break-up of a group works. George Martin: Let It Be was the worst time of all, really disruptive. Because he is confident of his own abilities. He took me to lunch, and said: ‘You’re not to worry about a thing.’ I was feeling really awkward about the whole thing, and he was completely at ease about the situation. George Martin, being the gentleman that he is, realised that I had been compromised in a way, and he saw fit to put me at ease about the situation. I was the same as every other punter on the planet, who saw them as these extraordinary icons of marvelousness.
But when I got the call, to walk in and be privy to those guys sitting around, doing what they did, and to be invited in, was pretty astonishing. Glyn Johns (engineer/producer): I was quite used to being around people who were famous. We had two cameras and just about did the same thing. The sound crew instructions were to roll/record from the moment the first Beatle appeared and to record sound all day until the last one left. Les Parrott (cameraman): My brief on the first day was to ‘shoot The Beatles’. Paul McCartney: The idea was that you’d see The Beatles rehearsing, jamming, getting their act together, and then finally performing somewhere in a big, end-of-show concert. The project will eventually morph into the Let It Be album and film.
Jan 2, 1969: At 10am The Beatles arrive at Twickenham Film Studios to begin rehearsals for a proposed TV show, Get Back.