"Suddenly one day, Neil or somebody said "Ringo's gone on holiday"" "I felt two things." "I felt I wasn't playing great and the other three were really happy and I was an outsider" "So I decided, fuck it, I'm leaving" "I went to see John, who was living in my apartment in Montagu Square" "I knocked on the door and said "Hi"" ""I'm leaving the group because I feel unloved and out of it" ""I'm not playing well and you three are really close"" "And he said "I thought it was you three"" "Then I went over to Paul's, knocked on his door and said the same thing:" ""I'm leaving the band." "You three guys are really close and I'm out of it"" "And he said "I thought it was you three"" "So we had to reassure him that we did think he was great" "You know, that's what it's like in life" "You never stop and say "Hey, I think you're great"" "I don't think we'd ever done any of that with Ringo and he felt insecure, so we had to - and he left" "So we had to say "You're great, man, you're the best"" "Then he said "Oh, thank you." I think he was pleased to hear that" "I knew we were just in a messed up stage, all of us" "It wasn't just me, the whole thing was going down" "I came back into the studio and George had had it decked out with flowers" "Flowers everywhere and John had sent me telegrams saying:" ""You're the best rock drummer, come on home!"" "I felt good about myself again and we'd got through that little crisis" "It was great, and then the White A!" "Bum really took off" "Like Yer B!" "Ues was great" "We all left the studio and went to a little room, so there's no separation" "There was lots of group activity going down." "I loved the White A!" "Bum" "There was a lot more individual stuff" "For the first time I think people were accepting that it was individual" "I remember having three studios operating at the same time" "Paul was doing some overdubs in one, John was doing something in another" "I was doing horns on something else in another studio because maybe they'd set a release date and time was running out" "Hey, I'm getting cramp" "If we do that again..." "are we ready, we'll sing the song" "I wanna hear that..." "I wanna hear that" "OK, Robert?" " Take 29" "Reach for this one." "Were any of them any good?" "I'll just be singing to guide you..." "Can you turn it down in my cans a bit?" "The last mistake was entirely when I just took my mind off it for a second" "A lot of the recordings would have a basic idea, then a jam session to end it which sometimes didn't sound too good" "But this is a fairly small criticism" "When they did the White A!" "Bum" "George Martin Record Producer I thought we should have made a very good single album rather than a double" "I agree, we should have put it out as two separate albums the White and the Whiter album" "A lot of information on a double album" "What do you do when you've got all them songs?" "You want to get rid of them so you can do more songs" "There was a lot of ego in that band and a lot of songs should have been elbowed or made into B sides" "I think it could have been made a fantastically good album if it had been condensed a bit" "But a lot of people think it's still the best album they made" "It's not my view but..." "horses for courses" "You can always say that, you know." "'Perhaps' I'll go with, not 'definitely'" "I think it's fine." "The fact that it's got so much is one of the things that's cool" "It's varied stuff, Rocky Raccoon, Piggies..." "Happiness is a Warm Gun, that kind of stuff" "I think it's a fine album" "I'm not a great one for 'maybe it was too many of that... '" "It was great, it sold, it's the bloody Beatles' White A!" "Bum, shut up!" "There was a little trauma with a song called Revo!" "Ution" "I thought it was 'au courant' as they say" "It was about what was going on at the time and I wanted it to be a single" "I said "Put this out." "We should say something and this is what I want to say"" "And they said "No, it's too slow"" "Neil Aspinall Head of Apple The Apple boutique closed down" "I think we just got to the point where we didn't want it any more" "We ended up selling Marks and Spencer underwear" "Not the image we started with of Simon and Marijke, all these colourful clothes" "Great sixties hippy gear" "Then to make it pay we ended up selling..." "St Michael underwear..." "and it wasn't the image we wanted" "Apple Shop Giveaway London 31st July 1968 We came up with the idea to give it all away and stop fucking about with psychedelic clothes shops" "We just gave it to the people who showed up on the day" "You could have one item each, not take two, in the spirit of the thing" "Well, they cleaned out the shop" "Only one free dress for each customer" "But I think personally it was a good way to do it" "We weren't seriously in the rag trade." "It was "Look, it didn't work, so..."" ""That's it!"" "We went round the night before we gave everything away and took what we felt we wanted" "I didn't go" "Derek Taylor Apple Press Officer I saw a half-acquaintance outside Apple and said "Where are you going?"" "He said "I'm going to join the queue to get some of those clothes"" "I thought that was awful" "I didn't want them to close the shop and wrote an impassioned open letter:" ""Dear boys, you know, if you do this..." and a lot of other hoo-ha because I dreaded to see the thing falling apart" "Frost On Sunday 8th September 1968" "Beautiful... absolute poetry" "Welcome back to Part III with the greatest tea-room orchestra in the world" "Are you in colour?" " No, black and white at the moment" "But as you can see, making their first audience appearance for over a year" "Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles!" "I was driving out to John's house after John and Cynthia had got divorced" "I was just going out to say hello to Cynthia and Julian" "I came up with these words in my mind as if talking to Julian..." "Hey Jules, don't take it bad." "Take a sad song and make it better" "So I got the first idea on the way out there with this 'Hey Jules' as I thought it was going to be called" "It seemed a bit of a mouthful so I changed it to Jude" "I liked the song a lot and I played it to John and Yoko when I'd finished it" "I actually had finished but I thought there was a little more to go with the words:" "The movement you need is on your shou!" "Der" "I'm playing it and I say to John "I'll fix that" - he said "What?"" "I said "The movement you need is on your shou!" "Der..." ""I've used the word 'shoulder' once and anyway it's stupid, I'll change it"" "He said "You won't, that's the best line in the song"" "He said "I know what it means." "It's great"" "The great thing about John." "I'd have knocked it out, he'd say it's great" "I'd see it through his eyes and go "Oh, OK"" "So that is the line now, when I do that song" "That's the line when I think of John and sometimes get a little emotional" "This was the period when everything was going up and up and rosy" "Then suddenly it started to go down like everything goes in a cycle" "Once it starts going down, as anybody can tell you... when you get knocked to the ground, they start kicking you" "The world was a problem but we weren't" "That was the best thing about the Beatles" "Until we started to break up like White A!" "Bum and stuff then even the studio got a bit tense" "It was evident on the White A!" "Bum" "I think it was evident in India when George and I stayed there and Paul and Ringo left and it was a slow death" "It was like the wind-down to a divorce" "A divorce usually doesn't just happen, there's months and years of misery" "They were going through a very revolutionary period at that time" "They were trying to think of something new" "They actually had a good idea which I thought was well worth working on" "They wanted to write an album completely and rehearse it then perform it in front of a large audience, a live album of new material" "We started rehearsing at Twickenham Film Studio and I went with them" "Twickenham Film Studios London I'm not sure whether everybody was behind the idea of going to Twickenham" "They decided to film whatever they were doing and they were going to start making a new album" "The original idea was that you'd see the Beatles rehearsing, jamming, making up stuff getting their act together and then finally we'd perform somewhere as the big end of show concert" "Michael Lindsay-Hogg was going to direct it" "This should be built like a film set so you can glide all over the place on tracks with your cameras" "Go places that TV cameras don't go" "You can come down from that roof on one long shot, down on a thing" "Slowly like a chair-lift" "Right down into Ringo's face on the one shot from right back there" "Have all sorts of cranes and lifts for your cameras to float around us" "Just all that flowing movement and then the songs" "Just stay with us and that will create your sets, with cameras hanging all over" "I thought, it's a new year and we've got a new approach but it soon became apparent that it wasn't anything new" "It was just going to be painful again" "The days were long and they could get boring" "Twickenham wasn't conducive to a great atmosphere." "We were just in a big barn" "I'd just spent six months producing a Jackie Lomax album and hanging out with Bob Dylan and The Band in Woodstock, having a great time" "For me to come back into the winter of discontent with the Beatles in Twickenham it was very unhealthy and unhappy" "It was just a dreadful feeling, and being filmed all the time like that" "I just wanted them to go away... and we'd be there at 8.00 in the morning" "You couldn't make music at 8.00 in the morning in a strange place with people filming you and coloured lights" "As everybody knows, we never had much privacy" "They were filming us rehearsing" "There was a bit of a row going on between Paul and I" "You can see it where he's saying "Well, don't play this", or something" "I'm saying "You know I'll play what you want, or I won't play if you don't want" ""Just make up your mind." That kind of stuff was going on" "They were filming and recording us having a row." "It was terrible" "But it's complicated in the bit..." " It's not complicated" "I'll play the chords if you like" "I'm trying to help you, but I always hear myself annoying you" "OK, look, look, I'm not trying to say that" "You're doing this as though I'm trying to say..." "And what we said the other day, you know, I'm not trying to get you" "I really am trying to just say..." "look, lads, the band..." "Shall we try it like this?" "It's funny how it only occurs..." "It's like, should we play guitar all the way through Hey Jude..." "I don't mind, I'll play whatever you want me to play or I won't play at all if you don't want me to play" "What it is that pleases you, I'll do it" "I thought, I'm quite capable of being relatively happy on my own" "I'm not able to be happy in this situation, I'm getting out of here" "The whole pressure of it finally got to us" "So like people do when they're together, they start picking on each other" "It was "You got the tambourine wrong so my life's a misery." It became petty" "But the manifestations were on each other as we were the only ones we had" "It was wait a minute, George has left and this isn't good enough" "I'm not sure what happened." "Maybe Neil or one of the people looking after us would probably ring George and say "They're sorry, it was a mistake"" "I remember being called to a meeting in Elstead in Surrey" "It was Ringo's house that he'd bought from Peter Sellers" "It was decided it would be better if we got back together and finished the record" "Also, Twickenham Studio was very cold and not a nice atmosphere so we abandoned that and went to the Savile Row recording studio" "In the end we recorded in the Apple studios in Savile Row" "There was a guy called Magic Alex, who was a great friend of John's" "John thought he was the bee's knees because he gave John electronic toys" "He said EMI was no good and he could build a better studio." "Well, he didn't" "Hello." "I'm Alexis from Apple Electronics" "I would like to say hello to all my brothers around the world and to all the girls and all the electronic people around the world" "And that is Apple Electronics" "When we finally got him to do a recording studio..." "We had a 16-track studio and we walked in there, it was chaos" "We had to rip it all out and start again" "He had 16 little speakers all around the room" "There wasn't anything he did - except a toilet with a radio in it or something" "So we just took the same portable equipment in there" "But the studio itself, the actual room to play in there was much cosier and much more at home" "Apple Recording Studio Savile Row London" "I think everyone was getting a little tired of us by then because we were taking a long time and there were many heated discussions" "Billy Preston was a great help, a very good keyboard guy" "His work on Get Back alone justified him being there" "He was an amiable fellow, very nice" "He was a kind of emollient, if you like" "He helped to lubricate the friction that had been there" "It's interesting to see how people behave nicely when you bring a guest in" "They don't want everybody to know they're so bitchy" "This happened back in the White A!" "Bum when I brought Eric Clapton in to play on Whi!" "e My Guitar Gent!" "y Weeps" "Suddenly everybody's on their best behaviour" "So I put a message out to find if Billy was in town and told him to come into Savile Row, which he did" "Straight away there was 100% improvement in the vibe in the room" "Everybody was happier also to have somebody else playing in the band" "Every number's got a piano part" "Normally we overdub it..." "but this time we want to do it live" "We were working on a good track and that always excited us" "His part was also part of it" "Suddenly, when we were working on something good the bullshit went out of the window" "We got back down to doing what we did really, really well" "I think it works OK with just the two verses..." "Sweet Loretta Martin, the first verse" " Just have two for now" "I'll sing it and shout where I think it should go." "If you disagree, I'll change it" "Maybe if we had an intro, a verse and a chorus..." "To me the Beatles were always a great little band" "Nothing more, nothing less, for all our success" "When we sat down to play, we played good from the very beginning" "From when we first got Ringo into the band, and before" "But when we first got Ringo, the band really gelled." "We played good!" "We've never had too many of those times where it's just not working" "We had them like any other band but for a great little rock'n'roll band - we could play any little blues or rock'n'roll thing - and it seemed to work" "The original idea to rehearse all these new songs and then make an album in a live show never really happened because the album became us in the studio" "As we rehearsed the songs, they were recorded" "They were talking about doing a concert on a boat or in an amphitheatre in Greece or maybe at the Roundhouse in London" "There were lots of ideas about where they should maybe do a concert and nothing was ever really agreed" "What do we want to do?" " I'll tell you what" "We're still rehearsing and we'll get it together" "So then you must collect..." "We'll all collect our thoughts on what we want" "You still expect us to be on the chimney with a lot of people or something like that" "Or even a stage at the Saville or anything" "We won't worry about that so don't give us that one" "'Expecting' is not a word we use any more... 'thinking about'" "'Praying'" "What about the move tomorrow, do you want to..." "No, let's decide on that a bit later, let's keep off that" "We're getting into too diverse..." "we'll do the numbers, we're the band" "Whatever, I'll do it..." "if we've got to go on the roof" "But I mean..." "I don't want to go" "I would like to" "I'd like to go on the roof" " It diverts people" "That's all right." "Anyway, we won't discuss it" "I want to record them as tracks and I want to do 14 numbers" "Any time is paradise when I'm with you" "That was looking for an end to the film and it was "How are we going to finish, there's not going to be a big concert"" "By then it was looking like... can we do this, finish in two weeks' time?" "Then it was suggested that we go up on the roof and do a concert there, then we could all go home" "30th January 1969" "And in the end it started to filter up from our roadie, Mal who crept in, trying to keep out of the camera:" ""Police are complaining." "You've got to stop." We said "We're not stopping"" "He said "The police are going to arrest you"" ""Good end to the film." "Let 'em do it." "Great!"" "We thought that's an end:" ""Beatles busted on rooftop gig"" "The thing on the roof that always I feel let down about were the police" "Someone called the police and I was playing away and I thought, oh great!" "I wanted the cops to drag me off - "Get off those drums!"" "We were being filmed and it would have been really great" "Well, they didn't." "They just bumbled in:" ""You've got to turn that sound down"" "It could have been fabulous" "By the time we got to Let It Be we couldn't play the game any more" "It had come to the point where it was no longer creating magic and the camera in the room with us made us aware that it was phoney situation" "In fact what happened was when we got in there we showed how the break-up of a group works" "We didn't realise we were actually breaking up as it was happening" "Just the same as it was before" "The year before when we were last in the studio" "There was a lot of... kind of trivia and games that were being played" "I think it shows as an absolute fact that we were going different places" "I've mentioned it before, the energy for the Beatles was waning" "We put in 1000% but it was dwindling now" ""Oh dear, do we have to turn up?" "Do we have to do that thing again!"" ""I want to do this and John wants to do that"" "And George was off and people were... you know, we had families" "I remember thinking of it like army buddies" "One of the songs we used to love in the past was Wedding Be!" "s" "Those wedding bells are breaking up that o!" "D gang of mine... and this idea that you'd been army buddies but one day... you kiss the army goodbye and get married and act like normal people" "It was like that for the Beatles, we always knew that day had to come" "London, weepy time down south" "The last bachelor Beatle was no longer a bachelor 12th March 1969 Paul McCartney married New Yorker Linda Eastman at Marylebone Registrar's office" "Paul's new step-daughter Heather was one of the shrieking, sobbing, devoted fans who surged round the newly-weds as they made for their car" "London bobbies and photographers tangled with tear-stained teenagers bidding farewell to the bachelordom of the Beatle who resisted marriage so long" "At last the new threesome found sanctuary in their car" "But clearly Paul's plan for a quiet wedding had gone drastically wrong" "Exit the McCartneys, a very popular group" "And they chose Paul's wedding day to bust me" "George was in my office" "Pattie rang, saying that Sgt Pilcher, if that was his name... was swarming all over the house in Esher" "George said to me "What should I do?" "What should I tell Pattie?"" "I said just tell them where the stuff is because they'll find it anyway" "Save yourself a lot of hassle" "He said he had a bit of grass and maybe some hash in a box on the mantelpiece" "So he rang Pattie and told her to tell them where it was" "By which time they had found a chunk this big in a boot in his wardrobe" "Sgt Pilcher was gaining great notoriety by busting pop stars such as George, Mick, Keith and John - always was the same cop" "Nobody realised, nobody put two and two together" "There was a kind of social pecking order that was in the pop world" "The drug squad decided to go round and this fellow thought he was Oliver Cromwell" "He decided to go round and clean up what was going on" "They busted Donovan first" "Anybody who was in England at that time will remember" "Then they bust the Rolling Stones and they worked their way up" "They they busted John and Yoko and me" "Sgt Pilcher's successful career with the drug squad was short-lived" "He was later sent to prison for perjury" "Sentencing Pilcher to 4 years in prison, Mr Justice Melford Stevenson said:" "But now my life has changed in oh so many ways" "We wanted to get married on the cross-Channel ferry" "That was the romantic part - when we went to Southampton" "She couldn't get on because she wasn't English and couldn't get a day visa" "Anyway you can't get married." "The Captain's not allowed to do it any more" "We called Peter Brown from Paris. "We want to get married, where can we go?"" "He said "Gibraltar's the only place"" "So "OK, let's go" and it was beautiful" "When John hooked up with Yoko so intensely it was obvious there could be no looking back after that" "I always felt he had to clear the decks of us in order to give her enough attention" "It takes a lot to live with four people for years and years, which is what we did" "We'd call each other every name under the sun" "We'd got to blows, we'd been through the whole damn show" "We knew where we were at, we still do" "We've been through the mill together for more than ten years" "We've been through our therapy together many times, you know" "On a lot of days, even with all the craziness, it really worked still" "Instead of working every day, it worked two days a month" "There were still good days" "We were still really close friends then it would split off again into some madness" "It was quite obvious that the Beatles became..." "The thing that it started out being... gave us a vehicle to be able to do so much when we were younger, and we grew right through that" "But it got to a point where it was stifling us, there was too much restriction" "It had to self-destruct" "It's easy for people to say about Apple and the Beatles "Why didn't you?"" "You sit there with millions of dollars and try and work it out" "It's so easy afterwards to say "Why didn't you?"" "With Apple we were great creators and we could do all of that but nobody had half an idea about a budget" "So we were spending more than we were earning" "There was nobody managing Apple" "It was wasting away all this money" "Nobody had any ability to be a business manager" "So it was a question of who was going to do it" "I was doing it but only on the basis that I'll do it until you find somebody you want to do it." "Because I didn't" "That's why somebody like Allen Klein had the opportunity to say he could do it, but so did a lot of other people" "Klein had been managing the Rolling Stones... and I believe Donovan..." "and John had met him" "He came in one day and said:" ""I'm going to get Klein to manage me, and that's what's happening"" "And Allen was... a human being the same as Brian was a human being" "It was the same thing with Brian in the early days, it was assessment" "I make a lot of mistakes character-wise but now and then I make a good one" "The alternative to Klein was possibly Lee Eastman but I'm not at all sure that Paul wanted Lee Eastman to be a manager in the sense that Brian Epstein had been a manager or Allen Klein to be a manager like Brian Epstein had been a manager" "I put forward Lee Eastman, Linda's dad as a possible sort of lawyer and possibly someone to do it" "But they said no, he would be too biased for you and against us" "Oh yeah, we had great arguments with Paul" "We felt the three of us have gone this way, why don't you?" "So there it was, and it was a three-to-one situation" "In the Beatles, if any one doesn't agree with the plan it was always vetoed, it was very democratic that way" "So the three-to-one thing was very awkward" "Things would happen like... at Olympic Studio one evening we were supposed to be doing Abbey Road and we all showed up at the studio ready to record and Allen Klein showed up as part of the party with his henchman" "They said "You've got to sign a contract for Klein to take to his Board"" "I said "It's Friday night, he doesn't work on a Saturday" ""Anyway, Allen Klein's a law unto himself, he doesn't have to report" ""We can easily do this on Monday." "Let's do our session now" ""You're not going to push me into this." They said "You're stalling"" "They said "He wants 20%"" "I said "Tell him he can have 15%." They said "You're stalling"" "I said "No, I'm working for us." "We're a big act"" "My exact words: "We're a big act, the Beatles." "He'll take 15%"" "I think they were so intoxicated with him that they said:" ""He must have 20% and he's got to report to his Board tomorrow" ""Sign now or never"" "I said "Right, that's it." "I'm not signing now"" "There was a big argument and they all went, leaving me at the studio" "What changed at Apple after he arrived?" "Everything!" "It was a completely different situation" "First and foremost, Paul wasn't there" "Let It Be was such an unhappy record, even though it has some great songs and I really thought that was the end of the Beatles" "I thought, what a shame to go out like this" "But Paul rang. "We're making another record, would you produce it?"" "My immediate answer was "Only if you let me produce it the way we used to"" ""We want to do that." "John included?" He said "Yes, honestly"" "So I said "If you really want that, let's get together again"" "And it was a very happy record - everybody knew it was to be the last" "I think the deal was that through Let It Be" "I left and we got back just to finish it, to make it tidy" "Then everybody decided we ought to do one better album" "I think it shows on the record that when we were excited the track's exciting" "It really all comes together" "It doesn't matter what we're going through individually on the bullshit level" "When it gets to the music you can see that it's really cool, we'd all put in 1000%" "Nobody was sure it was going to be the last one, but everybody felt it was" "The Beatles had gone through so much, and it was a long time" "They'd been incarcerated together for nearly a decade" "It was a very happy album." "Everybody worked frightfully well" "And that's why I'm very fond of it" "There was always a possibility that we could have carried on" "We weren't sitting in the studio saying "OK, this is it" ""Last record, last track, last take"" "But when we'd finished Abbey Road the game was up, we all accepted that" "It was magical" "There were some really loving, caring moments between four people" "A hotel room here and there" "A really amazing closeness, just... four guys who really loved each other." "It was pretty sensational" "They gave their money and they gave their screams but the Beatles gave their nervous systems which is a much more difficult thing to give" "I'm really glad that most of the songs dealt with love, peace, understanding" "Hardly any said "Go on kids, tell them to sod off, leave your parents"" "It's all very "all you need is love" or John's "give peace a chance"" "There was a very good spirit behind it all" "It's just natural." "It's not a great disaster" "People talk as if it's the end of the earth." "It's only a rock group that split up" "You have all the old records there if you want to reminisce" "22nd August 1969" "That's what they ask you." "On tours round the world and press conferences:" ""Getting the Beatles back together?" You say "What are you talking about?"" "They say "How about Julian?" I feel sorry for him in the middle of all that" "Or Sean or somebody" "Well, let me ask you this way:" ""Are you getting back together?" No!" "And yet with Free as a Bird we somehow did, yeah" "Subtitles:" "Screentext"