Ringo and John

This was off the telly today. It was a BBC News feature on Peter Jackson's new three part film about the Beatles1969 sessions which later surfaced on the 1970 Let It Be album. If you are not interested in The Beatles, best look away now.
 
I love the Beatles. I haven’t seen Peter Jackson’s Get Back movie because I am not a subscriber to the Disney Channel. It purports to show a happier version of the fateful 1969 sessions.. Call me a cynic, but I wonder if it will say more about the power of editing, than it does about The Beatles.

What’s it going to say that we don’t already know?  That the Beatles could have fun, even at times of tension and strain. Well, they were a brotherhood. Most likely they did enjoy lighter moments because playing music would have been a diversion from the business and legal wrangles that were going on. It might though, scotch the myth that these sessions show the group breaking up, the way the original Let It Be film was allegedly edited. The truth is that the Fab Four had been growing distanced from each other since the death of Brian Epstein in 1967. It was an elongated and painful process.

The one thing you can’t change is that the material being rehearsed, with a few notable and stellar exceptions, wasn’t that good. I’d still like to see this film though, for the much enhanced picture quality, if nothing else, but in a way I wonder if the original film might have been braver