6.

Speaker 1:So I've actually been in a bag. Tate Modern here in London did a show of Yoko's art two or three years ago. There's an opportunity to get in a bag and we went in the bag and did a happening.

Speaker 2:Okay, I hate to top you, I've been in a bag with Yoko. Yoko came on the show and she surprised me with the bag and she thought that I'd be too uptight to get into it with her but of course being a terrible ham I said absolutely we both got in the bag. And you're quite tall, was the bag big enough? It was big enough, it was an extra large bag. I take an XXL in a bag but I got into the bag with Yoko and then we were inside and there's a live studio audience and she said what do we do now? She said well that's it, now we just get out of the bag and go to commercial. I said no Yoko, we have to do something because that's the comedy rule. So I start handing my clothes out of the bag and then we emerged from the bag. I didn't take everything off but I took I think I took an article of her clothing and put it on which looked absurd.

Speaker 1:Because Yoko had a thing where people would cut her clothing off, didn't she? I mean it's quite something to have been in a bag with Yoko.

Speaker 2:I mean do you feel one of the great moments of your life or? It's the greatest moment of my life and I have been at the birth of both of my children so I'm a sociopath. You're a big, you're a fan of Yoko's art.

Speaker 1:Yeah, the saddest thing to me about this period are the clips I see where you can tell John is impaired, he's on heroin or trying to come off heroin and it makes me sad.

The kind of being I think a kind of gentleman's agreement among the police that it was fine to arrest the Rolling Stones for drug offenses but you leave the Beatles alone. That sense is starting to fade by now and John and Yoko are arrested and George is arrested. So there's a sense that the Beatles are becoming fair game now.

Speaker 2:There was a hierarchy in the pop world. Beatles are on top, then the Rolling Stones, then the Who, Kinks, way at the bottom, Herman's Hermits. But now things are changing, you can arrest a Beatle, you can arrest a Beatle and charge them.

Speaker 1:So Paul meanwhile, he is still very keen on being a Beatle, keeping the Beatles on track and his response to John's breakup with Cynthia is to drive down to Weybridge from London to see Cynthia and John and Cynthia's son Julian and he writes one of the great Beatles singles.

Speaker 2:Yeah, Hey Jude. Hey Jude.

Speaker 1:They play it live on David Frost Show and it's their kind of first live performance for a very long while.

[It's my pleasure to introduce now in their first live appearance for goodness knows how long in front of an audience, the Beatles.]

[Hey Jude, don't make it bad.][Take a sad song and make it better.][Remember to let her into your heart.][Then you can start to make it better.]

Speaker 2:[Hey Jude, don't be afraid.][You were made to go out and make it better.][The minute you let her under your skin, then you begin to make it better.]

Speaker 1:And also it's inordinately long, isn't it?

Speaker 2:So that's another kind of Beatles first. It breaks all these rules. No track has been that long. And at the time, someone said by that point, people thought, well, the Beatles have had it. And then Hey Jude comes out and it's a massive, massive hit.

Speaker 1:And there's this amazing account of how Paul has the tapes and he's kind of driving through the English countryside and they're going back to London. They want to have, you know, take a break and they arrive in this pitch perfect village and there's a pub and the pub is open and Paul goes in there and he plays Hey Jude on the piano for people there. Then he plays the track and people will always remember it as one of the examples of Beatles magic that you're sitting in a pub and suddenly Paul McCartney walks in and plays Hey Jude for you. That sense that that magic is still there is obviously a kind of powerful motivator for Paul, but also for the other Beatles as well.

And so they are prepared to listen to him when he proposes that they get back, that they get back to kind of doing live shows. The footage that got taken of those sessions, which were kind of often seen as being very difficult and troubled. Peter Jackson kind of took the footage, didn't he? And made it into this incredible film where you can actually witness the process of songs being made.

Speaker 2:I mean, a lot of things I loved about Get Back, just I'm a geek, so getting to see all the equipment, how it really worked is fascinating. But basically, the greatest thing is seeing these guys together and they're still making each other laugh. You get glimpses of the process.

Speaker 1:There are so many bits in it I loved, but I loved the bit where, so Paul by now is with Linda, who he will end up marrying.

[I'm the most eligible bachelor in the world, we'll get hitched to Linda.]

And Linda and Yoko are talking and in the background, Paul is composing Get Back. And it's like kind of watching, I don't know, Michelangelo think, I don't know, should I have Adam and God and their fingers tied? Maybe, I don't know. He's in the background, yeah. It's so brilliant. But also it's the fact that all of them look so cool. I mean, George, George just looks brilliantly cool in it.

Speaker 2:They're also just little fun things. I don't know what time of day it is, but Mal will say, does anyone want anything? And they'll all want some wine or beer.

Speaker 1:Cup of tea. Yeah. There's always a lot of toast. You're like, this is the biggest band in the world. You know, there's not a ball of cocaine, it's toast.

It's all very British. Although you can see that John is really not well. Of the four of them, John is the one who's most kind of faded at that point.

Although they were very keen to have a kind of spectacular climax to this process of filming. And so there was talk about doing them on a cruise ship or doing it in a Roman amphitheater in Africa. But then they haven't really got the energy for any of this. And so they decided that they will have a rooftop concert on the Apple building in Savile Row.

Speaker 2:But there's hemming and hawing up until the moment. This is where Peter Jackson's documentary is so great. He lets you know that they're still in a back room as the equipment's all set up and they're ready to go on the rooftop. They're still deciding whether or not they're going to come out. Because at this point, they have so many wounds from traveling and knowing what the spectacle was all about. They've been just living in a hobbit hole, engineering these great sounds. Why go out there and expose ourselves? So it's amazing when they come out.

[And if somebody loved me like she does, yes she does, yes she does.][Don't let me down.][Don't let me down.]

Speaker 1:And all of London gathers on the streets below and then the police come and stop the fun. And actually that's kind of a perfect way for the film to end.

Speaker 2:Yeah, there was some disappointment. I think Paul really wanted them or George or Ringo, they really wanted the police to grab them and physically roll them off because that would be a better ending to the film.

There's a part in it that's very sad to me, which is they're all, they're sitting in four chairs and Peter Sellers comes in. Do you remember this part? Peter Sellers comes in and says, hello fellas. Five years before they had met Peter Sellers and it was one of the biggest thrills of their life and they're young and they're excited. Now it's the number of years later and John's on heroin and they're tired and they're all sitting in four chairs like mannequins. For some reason that segment, I think John makes a joke about watch out for the needles on the floor. He makes a heroin joke to Peter Sellers and it's just milk is starting to curdle a little. Yeah.

Speaker 1:And adding to the stress is the fact that they're now supposed to be a business. So I mentioned the Apple building in Savile Row. This is the headquarters for a groovy new company. The Beatles have set up as a kind of tax dodge and they've set it up in a very 1960s hope that you get rid of the pigs and the man and the and just let groovy people like Magic Alex, a Greek engineer come up with lunatic schemes and everything will be great. He can make a studio that levitates.

[Hello, I'm Alexis from Apple Electronics.]

Speaker 2:[I would like to say hello to all my brothers around the world and to all the girls around the world and to all the electronic people around the world.]

Speaker 1:Apple basically, they're saying, come in and rip us off. And so loads of people do come and rip them off. And so they've got money problems as well as all the other issues that are going on. Tensions over music, tensions over drugs, tension over their respective spouses and now money. And money is probably the kind of the biggest thing.

Speaker 2:Yeah.

Speaker 1:Because Paul wants his father-in-law, so Linda's father, to run their finances for them. And the other three want a guy called Alan Klein. He seems quite a kind of New York figure, quite a New York character.

Speaker 2:Yeah, I think thuggish is one word people might use. I think the Rolling Stones felt they had had a good experience with him. John hears about this tough guy who can come in and get you a better royalty rate. He's all down. It's actually in Get Back. John's had a meeting with him and he goes and he says to George, I mean, I feel, I think he knows me as well as you do or better, George. I mean, can you imagine George hearing this? He's been with John since 1957, 58. And now John's had one meeting.

Speaker 1:Yeah, when I went to—

Speaker 2:George walks out. I'll see you in the clubs. Yeah. And he walks out, they get him back in. But there's a lot of bad feeling now.

And again, this is all part and parcel of Magical Mystery Tour. Hey, how hard could it be to make a movie? The Apple boutique, how hard could it be to make a shop and sell movie clothes? Apple music, how hard could it be to just get rid of the obstacles and let groovy people be groovy. Stick it to the man. Yeah. And without accepting that maybe what made the Beatles great were hurdles and obstacles and, or added to their greatness. So there's a lot of naivete at this point. Yeah. It all seems kind of fun now, but I think they're pretty miserable.

Speaker 1:So John has gone off and he's got married to Yoko in Gibraltar, near Spain. He's recorded Give Peace a Chance with the Plastic Ono band. So there's a sense there of John looking to a musical future right after the Beatles. An off ramp.

And with Yoko, he is now very into taking radical positions on Vietnam because I think he had recorded a track called Revolution and he'd sung two versions of it. And he said, you can count me out, you can count me in. And he decided to go with, you can count me out and felt embarrassed about that. And so he, political activism is something that he's getting increasingly into. You can see kind of a new career direction for him with Yoko and they've got all these money issues and arguments.

And so it looks as if it's all over, but then there is one last glorious hurrah, isn't there? And we are sat here in Abbey Road.

Yeah. I embarrassed you, but I also embarrassed myself by getting you to pose on the Zebra Crossing outside, which of course is the cover of the album, Abbey Road.

Speaker 2:Yeah. I only objected because I'm the last person alive to not pose. And now you made me do it. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 1:It's okay.

Speaker 2:Sorry.

Speaker 1:It's okay.

Abbey Road, are you a fan of Abbey Road?

Speaker 2:Of course. Yeah. Abbey Road is fantastic. And again, I don't think Let It Be should have been the last album.

Speaker 1:It's such a downer, isn't it compared to Abbey Road?

Speaker 2:There's great songs on Let It Be and Let It Be was, again, the Beatles being part of something that was really happening, which is there was music like The Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival that were stripping it all back, stripping it down, going the other way. So that's what they're doing. They're playing very stripped down.

Speaker 1:Well, they're getting back, aren't they?

Speaker 2:They're getting back as it were. Yeah, they're getting back. And so that's great, but it's not the heroic ending they should have.

Speaker 1:Well, it kind of muddies the water, doesn't it? Because the songs on Get Back are recorded during the Get Back sessions, and it's then released as their final album. But actually, the last time that they're in the studio creating an album is with Abbey Road.

I think the moment on Abbey Road that I find the most moving and well, it's sad, but it's also triumphantly moving is You Never Give Me Your Money, which is Paul singing about you only give me your funny papers. It's a sense I'm bogged down in paperwork and arguments over finance and cash. And you see there the kind of the horror of the Beatles breakup. And then it's such a kind of classic Paul moment where he suddenly, you know, oh, hang this, we're off. And the kind of music soars and they're off on a kind of journey.