Tag Archives: Mal Evans

October 7, 2026 · 9:09 am

Jan. 14: Two Junkies

John Lennon and Yoko Ono gave a lot of interviews in 1969, the year of Bagism and Bed-Ins. The 30 minutes they spent with a Canadian TV network on January 14, 1969 — what has long been known as the “Two Junkies” interview — was otherwise completely unremarkable save three things.

First, the interview was conducted in the midst of the Get Back sessions and on set at Twickenham Film Studios. Hugh Curry, who conducted the interview for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) television program, probably wasn’t aware George Harrison had quit the group and certainly couldn’t have anticipated it was the last real day of the sessions at Twickenham.

Second, and maybe less of a surprise, John was coming down from a heroin high. “I just was up late, you know,” he said later that day as recorded on the Nagra tapes. “I was sort of stoned and high and watching films.”

His condition alone may not have been remarkable, but halfway through the interview John fled to throw up.

Finally, and we’ll get to this at the end, the provenance of how the full interview survived is an incredible story unto itself, rich with Beatles-adjacent characters in a massive pile-on of coincidences.

In the context of the Nagra tapes and Get Back docuseries, the Two Junkies interview lives in negative space. It’s not on the dozens of hours of tapes, and the interview isn’t seen in Get Back (Peter Jackson told me during our 2021 appearance on Something About the Beatles that he decided not to pursue the rights to the clip to include in Get Back after some consideration). Like so many things Beatle-related do – or did for a long time – it survives as a bootleg.

Curry finalized the timing of the interview (after 10 a.m. this Tuesday) just a few days earlier, on January 10, after George walked out on the sessions. It was originally pitched as a discussion primarily with Yoko.

“If there’s a moment while she’s doing it, I’ll wander into it,” John generously replied to the suggestion he could participate in the interview. “You just set a time to do her, and if I’m not doing anything, I’ll come in on it.”

Speaking decades later in an interview that surfaced on YouTube in 2015 but could date earlier, Curry said he was able to hook up the interview because his cameraman, Phil Pendry, was friends with Yoko’s then-estranged husband Tony Cox. Curry considered any appearance by John to be a bonus.

“We got there, and John and Yoko showed up, and we all had a couple of cups of tea and woke up, because it was fairly early in the morning, and did the interview,” Curry said. “And it went quite well, and John was really good and very kind to do it … it worked out very well, and that was the end of the story.”

(It wasn’t even close to the end of the story.)

John, Yoko and CBC’s Hugh Curry as captured by Michael’s cameras and revealed in Get Back.

Curry already had a history with the group – he interviewed three Beatles for Canadian radio during promotion for the White Album. At the time of this interview at Twickenham, Curry was in London embarking on a six-week assignment collecting interviews for a forthcoming youth-focused TV show, “Through the Eyes of Tomorrow.”

Let’s dig into the interview itself and the scene around it. Remember the last post: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Michael Lindsay-Hogg and others were playfully sketching out movie ideas aware John and Yoko were actively being filmed.

“There’s a camera crew here from CBC who John fixed [up], and they want to do Yoko and possibly John. They want to set up in the other part of the studio. They can easily go to another studio. Do you mind?” Michael asked.

It was OK with everyone, and Paul joked “We’ll just shoot the CBC crew shooting John shooting Yoko. But John and Yoko should be shooting Ringo and I.”

We could hear roadie Mal Evans as part of the conversation on the Nagras, but at the same time, he was keeping an eye on the nearby CBC interview. Photographer Richard Keith Wolff was there too, too, part of Curry’s traveling party. At one point Ringo sneaks by in the background, prompting some laughter.

Located on the familiar Twickenham set (the Blüthner and the rest of the Beatles’ rehearsal stage serves as the backdrop), John sat to Yoko’s right — both were in director’s chairs, with Curry sitting at an angle, in front of the couple and to their right. Occasionally you can see Curry’s leg in the shot, and his questions are audible on the recording. John enjoyed the usual Get Back session combo meal: a cigarette with a side of tea. Yoko worked on a muffin or cake or toast of some kind and was often seen picking at her nails and fingers. Their legs were crossed throughout. John appeared pale, at least at the beginning, as seen in poor quality video and better quality photographs. His speech was uncharacteristically slow and only got slower.

The interview began with Curry asking John for the couple’s origin story, which was familiar in the press by now, leading into how they have since been artistic influences on each other. Yoko was gracious and reflective in her reply.

(Both John and Yoko said “you know” a lot during the interview – for the sake of easy reading, I edited several – but not all — of those out when I quoted them below, like I would if someone said “um.” This sort of thing happens all the time. I went to journalism school, it’s all good!)

“John actually really changed the whole world in a way,” Yoko said. “You know, he influenced the whole world, I think. In that sense, I was sort of influenced.

“I think my work lacked a kind of relaxed type of sense of humor. I mean, there was sort of a cynicism in it, but there wasn’t a real sense of humor and also sort of constructive thinking. And that’s the thing that I sort of got from John, I think.”

Much of the interview centered around John and Yoko’s LP Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, recorded in May 1968 and released that November, only a few weeks before this interview. Curry called the duo’s nearly 30-minute platter of sounds “not a one-time listening experience.”

“If I did anything vaguely like that before, I’d just do it for sort of fun and maybe play it to Ringo,” John said.

John didn’t coin the name “Two Junkies” but came close in the late ’70s, writing that he and Yoko on the cover of Two Virgins were “two slightly overweight ex-junkies.” That description appeared in an autobiographical section of his posthumously released book Skywriting by Word of Mouth, in 1986. Click on for the NSFW version of the cover, but make sure to ask mom and dad first!

When it came to the controversial cover of the LP, John said he originally envisioned it as Yoko alone posing naked. John first pitched the idea to her in a letter he sent from India in February 1968, which included a drawing of her naked sitting on a “huge glass ball.”

John: The natural thing that I got from her and her book Grapefruit … was the simplicity and childlike [nature] and innocence. …

And then I thought the best cover [would be] for her to be naked and sort of say, this is me, you know, no arty cover or no design to it, just a plain straight photo of her naked as her work is. …

Just naturally when we got together and made the LP together [I thought that] that we should both be naked on the cover. You know, I didn’t think anything until I started getting reaction from people. …

Even when I first got it back, I got the surprise of seeing myself actually naked. But I thought, well, why not, you know? We’re all naked. And so it was just when I started showing it to people and people reacted very strongly, I thought maybe there’s some trouble here.

Freshly established as a Beatles B-side and album track, “Revolution” was another justifiable talking point that Curry jumped on. John’s reaction time answering had noticeably slowed by this point, 10 minutes into the interview.

Curry: How do you think [the revolution is] going?

John: I’ve no idea really. … I just know there’s something in the air. That’s all I know. And I don’t know what form it takes. I don’t know whether, you know, five million people in Trafalgar Square or [the] Two Virgins cover is doing it, or are both of them doing it, and to what extent they’re having the effect. …

We’re for the revolution, whatever it is, you know, but as I sort of said in that song, I’m not pro-violence. … I’m not saying, well, get off the streets and start marching and waving and distracting people. But I can’t give a yes to “let’s destroy it all,” you know, I don’t think that’s the answer. …

I really think, if it gets to destruction, you can count me out. But I’m not sure, you know, I’m human and I’m liable to change or, depending on the situation, I prefer non-violence.

It was shortly after this part of the conversation John, in fact, counted himself out.

“Excuse me, I feel a bit sick,” he said a little after the 16-minute mark of the recording, following a short stretch in which John was hiccupping, audibly holding something down, and clearly sick to his stomach.

This is when the Two Virgins canonically became the Two Junkies.

According to Wolff, who shared this account in Ken Womack’s book Living the Beatles Legend, Mal quickly arrived on the scene to help John, who threw up off-camera.

It’s Mal Evans to the rescue, as photographed by Richard Keith Wolff on January 14, 1969.

John recalled this moment later in the day, as heard on the Nagras and seen in Get Back — although for the docuseries, the reveal was edited for dramatic effect. The entirety of John’s admission came after actor Peter Sellers’ visit to the set, which was also in Get Back. It came on the heels of a mention of Ringo feeling sick (a hangover, probably).

“See, you missed me this morning. I did it for CBS [sic],” John said. “Just leapt off in the middle of the interview. No reason at all, except that I mistreated my body.”

A few minutes later, John returned to the subject:

John: I’m just recovering from the day.

Yoko: From the night.

John (feigning shock): Oh, don’t say that! You’re always revealing us. From the night indeed. Next thing you’ll be telling them about our black sheets.

Unlike other days recorded, here John and Yoko bluntly discussed drug use on tape. As Sellers left the stage, John joked the actor shouldn’t “leave the needles lying around. We’ve got a bad reputation now with John getting busted.”

The basement of 34 Montagu Square, where John and Yoko were busted for drugs as well as posed for the Two Virgins LP cover. Photographed on my trip to London in June 2024.

“I know what it’s like for showbiz people,” John continued. “They’re under a great strain and they need a little relaxation. … It’s a choice between that and exercise, you know. And drugs win, hand [sic] down.”

“Well, shooting is exercise,” Yoko added.

(For the record, John maintained they only snorted heroin. “I never injected it or anything,” he said in the 1970 Lennon Remembers interview for Rolling Stone. “We sniffed a little when we were in real pain.”)

In Get Back, the edit shows a concerned Paul suggesting John should avoid discussing drug use in front of the cameras.

“Is there any need to do this in public, Mr. Lennon?” we hear Paul ask.

But this response from Paul was spliced in from a completely different part of the conversation more than 20 minutes later and explicitly in the context of the Two Virgins nude LP cover. It wasn’t even a criticism – it was Paul role-playing as an aggressive interviewer as they joked their way through the afternoon.

Let’s listen in to be sure. First, here’s the context around Paul’s line “Is there any need to do this in public, Mr. Lennon?” as heard on the Nagra tapes.

Now, here’s John’s description of getting sick.

OK, so John vomited halfway through his CBC interview. Now what?

Consummate professional and self-promotion addict he was, John got right back in front of the camera to complete the interview after the brief absence. John wasn’t running quite at 100 percent, but he enjoyed a little bit more pep in the second half of the interview.

Two Virgins resumed as the focus of Curry’s line of questioning at John’s return. The LP, in John’s opinion, should be analyzed no differently than a Beatles record.

John: All the versions that people have of it, all their interpretations are true for them. If you believe it, it’s true. And it you don’t believe it, it isn’t true for you. It doesn’t exist. If I don’t believe you, in you, you don’t exist.

Yoko: It [was actually titled] Unfinished Music, which means that we were very conscious of that, meaning that you can add anything to it. You own sounds, if you want to, or just in your mind.

John, who said in the interview “it’s a job, writing a song,” put some effort linking his work with the Beatles to what he was creating with Yoko. It’s a thoughtful response that sheds a little light on his thinking — or what he wanted to telegraph publicly — halfway through the Get Back sessions and while George was estranged from the group.

Although we’ve [the Beatles] been married 10 years, it’s still as new as it ever was in the relation. You can’t just sort of bulldoze through because we’ve been together so long. We’ve got to feel our way and try and communicate or reach a certain level together to put it across, otherwise it doesn’t work.

Asked about a potential return to the stage, John derided their final tours in 1966 as “a sort of freak show.”

“The Beatles were the show, and the music had nothing to do with it,” he said. “And as we were musicians, we felt there was no enjoyment. … The only reason to be a Beatle is to make music, and not just to sort of be in a circus.”

John on January 14, 1969, as photographed by Richard Keith Wolff.

Curry pushed back, suggesting the live scene in 1969 wasn’t what it was even a couple years earlier, saying progressive venues like the Fillmore East and West and the Avalon Ballroom were more controlled environments with attentive audiences.

John: But we’ve done that gig. … We haven’t got a strong enough compulsion. …

That’s partly the reason for doing this show, doing a live sort of album with an audience.

With a return to the stage to cap the TV show they were recording still the Beatles’ imminent plan in some form — though at the moment an increasingly quixotic concept given the situation at this low ebb of the Get Back sessions — John was still offering a public face that the plan was still on.

An examination of John’s work ethic concluded the interview.

“I’ve always never enjoyed not having anything to do … but now there’s something to do all the time [with projects with Yoko]”

If he wasn’t making a record but was “in the garden, making eight mil[limeter] films,” John didn’t view that as work until Yoko convinced him otherwise.

John: Just having vague ideas and things, which I didn’t consider work. But when I met Yoko, I realized that was work. You know, that’s another kind of work. And so one way or the other, I work all the time now. I think I always did, but I felt as though I wasn’t working before.

Curry: You’re having to work at not working type of thing.

John: Yeah, but I can’t stand not working, you know.

At the conclusion of the interview, we can hear on the Nagras John and Yoko returning to the others as they’re climbing the chains on set, just killing time.

The Two Junkies interview survived in its entirety, although only a small portion was originally broadcast on Canadian television in 1969. Taken in sum, this wasn’t a groundbreaking or revelatory interview. It was pretty boilerplate, but an accurate, adequate fit for the couple’s public statements at the time. Unlike the other celebrity interviews Curry conducted in this period and apropos of the importance of the subjects, this one was shot in color.

Watched side-by-side with the Get Back documentary — or Let It Be, or any point in his public life, really — the Two Junkies interview is wild contrast for the John Lennon we’re used to. One of the most charismatic cultural figures in modern history, John is a monotone bore for most (all?) of the interview.

John on January 14, 1969, as photographed by Richard Keith Wolff.

Two Junkies is an outlier, existing apart from the Nagras, Get Back or Let it Be. If we want to know what it’s about and what happened, we need to pursue it as a separate entity, part of John’s solo career, in some part. So much of the Get Back sessions witness the Beatles revealing themselves organically. But here, in that same moment and space, there’s an outsider asking the questions in a deliberate manner.

With the interview in the can, Curry struck two prints of the film, one of which he kept, and the other handed off to the CBC. What happened next pushes this story into the late 1980s and in a wildly unexpected direction.

The Toronto Star, January 28, 1969.

The John-Yoko segment for “Through the Eyes of Tomorrow” was promoted as “coming soon” in TV listings only two weeks after the interview was conducted, in advance of the show’s debut the following month (which featured a January 7 chat with Jimi Hendrix).

A short clip from the John-Yoko interview ultimately premiered in May 1969, packaged in an episode that also included conversations with Eric Clapton, Spencer Davis and Fat Mattress. (Curry’s relationship with Lennon ultimately extended later into 1969, when he helped organize the Toronto Rock & Roll Festival.)

A newspaper listing (The Regina Leader Post) promotes “Through the Eyes of Tomorrow” on May 10, 1969. Fat Mattress was a band fronted by Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding, and he was quite slender!

For the wider, global public, a 20-second clip included in the 1988 documentary Imagine: John Lennon – in which John discusses “Revolution,” as quoted above – marked the first broad exposure to the interview. But that clip wasn’t supplied by the CBC, it came from the print Curry made for himself. Thing is, Curry didn’t give it to the Imagine producers, either.

“I’d been hanging out [in the late 1960s] with a guy called Tony Secunda, who was a real character, a real legend in the British music scene at that time,” Curry recalled in the YouTube clip posted in 2015. In his career, Secunda managed the likes of the Procul Harum, the Move, T-Rex and the Moody Blues, among many others. He was a legend! In her 2007 memoir “Memories, Dreams and Reflections,” Marianne Faithful wrote, without elaborating, that Secunda was the inspiration for “Sailor Sam” in Paul’s 1973 hit “Helen Wheels.” (Yes, I know Sailor Sam was in “Band on the Run,” too, but Secunda produced bands from Birmingham, which was name-checked in “Helen Wheels.”)

Certainly, Paul would have known Secunda through Denny Laine, Wings guitarist and one-time Moody Blues guitarist. Curry knew Denny too, via Secunda. “We hung out a lot together and partied together, and probably too hard,” Curry remembered.

Stick with me, I’m about to tie all of this together to the Two Junkies. To do that, though, let’s reintroduce two marijuana junkies: Paul and Linda McCartney. Paul’s drug bust in advance of Wings’ 1980 tour of Japan set off a chain reaction that led us – like, literally you and me – to be able to watch the Two Junkies interview on YouTube today.

Artifacts of the aborted Wings 1980 Japan tour (plus a sweet Rockestra scarf) on display at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this past summer.

Here’s how it played out, and remember, there are no coincidences in Beatles history, only connections we’d never predict:

The cancellation of the Wings tour in Japan ultimately led to the dissolution of the band – they split in 1981 without recording or touring again.
Dealing with the perfect storm of the end of Wings, a divorce and poor accounting advice, Denny filed for bankruptcy in 1986.
In searching though Denny’s assets as part of the bankruptcy proceedings, a film can was discovered at a flat he and Secunda had shared.

“I had totally forgotten [it] even existed,” Curry said of his own copy of the Two Junkies interview, which first found its way into Segunda’s during the pair’s hard-partying days, then via Secunda into Denny’s garage or basement or wherever it happened to be uncovered. Secunda suggested to Curry they “do something” with the reel, but the latter demurred, concerned with rights issues. At the same time, per Curry’s account, Secunda sent him a copy on VHS, which at some point Curry dubbed himself and shared with a friend who was a “very big Beatles fan.”

Meanwhile, in that same 1986 and across the ocean in New York, Yoko commissioned a documentary to be told in John’s words, what would become Imagine: John Lennon, released in 1988. A long lost interview clip — like, say, a joint interview with Yoko from 1969 — would be an attractive addition to the documentary. Secunda thought so too, sending his own copy of the interview to Yoko (he was ultimately credited as a researcher for the film). After the documentary hit theaters, that aforementioned very big Beatles fan suggested Curry give Imagine a watch because one scene was very familiar …

As Curry remembered:

The questions were being asked by this bloke with an English accent. And I said, gee, that voice sounds familiar. … I was thinking, well, maybe John did another interview that day or something. But then I looked down [at] the corner of the frame and I could see my boot that I’d been wearing that day to do the interview. So I knew it was in fact the interview that I’d done with John. I recognized the questions and the answers as well, but certainly I recognized the boot. …

[Secunda] clipped out my voice asking John the questions and put his own voice in. … Maybe he thought that would cover him legally where I was concerned or whatever. Or it would change the content of it and therefore change the copyright. But with Tony you never knew because he really was a lovable rogue, but a rogue nonetheless.

It doesn’t take much of a leap to assume some combination of Secunda, Curry’s friend and/or the production team for Imagine shared the full Two Junkies interview into the wild, where the bootleg market did its thing.

Recalling this from 2026, it’s incredible to consider Paul and Linda’s own drug-related indiscretions indirectly led to the widespread distribution and heightened status of what would otherwise be an obscure Canadian interview with John and Yoko, an interview that’s treated as a prime example of how drug use affected the Beatles.

And very much in the spirit of the Get Back sessions, it’s a bootleg that lets us know this moment exists at all.

Jan. 14: A day at the circus

Ringo Starr works the camera on January 14, 1969, as pictured in Get Back.

While they ultimately became a legend of the silver screen, the Beatles didn’t make as many films as they actually did.

As recently as January of this very 2026, octogenarian Paul McCartney recalled in an online Q&A what could have been the Beatles’ feature film debut, preceding A Hard Day’s Night by about a year.

Originally there was something called The Yellow Teddy Bears. We said to Brian [Epstein], ‘Yeah, OK, great!’ And then he came back to us after talking to the producers, and told us they wanted to write the songs themselves. So, we passed on that.

There may have been more to it. As quoted in Roy Carr’s Beatles at the Movies, published in 1996, Paul said: “It might have been that part of the deal meant that we also had to give away the copyright to any new songs which were featured in the film.”

You’d have to think the film’s limited potential audience – it received an X rating on release – was a further drawback, keeping anyone under 16 years old out of the theater.

Regardless of the actual reasons, they “immediately” turned the offer down, per 1990s Paul, via Carr’s book. And instead of portraying another band for their film debut, the Beatles instead appeared as John, Paul, George and Ringo in their cinematic introduction in 1964: A Hard Day’s Night.

While the Beatles’ participation in The Yellow Teddy Bears never went beyond the discussion phase, A Talent For Loving was explicitly announced as the Beatles third film, right before they started filming their second, Help!

From the February 10, 1965, Evening Standard

“The Beatles have just been signed to star in a Western. It will be their third film,” reported the February 10, 1965, issue of the Evening Standard under the headline “BEATLES TO MAKE COWBOY FILM”.

It is a £1,000,000 comedy based on the novel A Talent For Loving by Richard Condon. The Beatles will act as cowboys.

…

The Beatles will sing and their musical numbers will fit in naturally with the plot.

The role of the girl to play opposite the Beatles has yet to be cast. And it has not yet been decided which Beatle will get the girl.

Only four months after news emerged, while Help! was still being filmed, plans its follow-up were shelved.

“The script is not us,” Paul said. “We turn out like four Roy Rogers singing in the saddle.”

Paul and George elaborated in the February 1966 issue of The Beatles Book Monthly:

Paul: That doesn’t mean we decided to rule out the idea of doing a Western. It would be a comic-type Western, of course. And if we don’t do a Western this time I think it’s something we should keep in mind for the future. There are all kinds of great comedy situations you can work into a cowboy story.

George: Anyway, unless some kind of miracle happens – a script-type miracle, that is – we’ve ruled out “A Talent for Loving” and Walter Shenson has been searching for new script suggestions.

Paul: As George said, the problem is that most writers go by our image as a group. It’s difficult to get across to them the thought of having a Beatles film with a non-Beatles story.

Shades of a Personality was supposed to solve this concern, casting one Beatle (eventually reported to be John) with split personalities (himself and the other three) in something a little less fab than their previous efforts. News dribbled out of the script by prolific playwright Owen Holder in summer 1966, with an expectation filming would begin in January 1967. Ultimately Shades of a Personality never really landed squarely with the group, who took the premise elsewhere.

Looped into the Beatles world in January 1967, subversive British playwright Joe Orton — whose play Loot was financially backed by Paul — took the idea and worked off an unreleased novel as a frame for a very different Beatles film, Up Against It.

From a February 1967 entry in Orton’s diary, as published as the introduction to the screenplay for Up Against It:

I hadn’t the heart to tell [producer Shenson] that the boys, in my script, have been caught in flagrante, become involved in dubious political activity, dressed as women, committed murder, been put in prison and committed adultery. And the script isn’t finished yet. I thought it best to say nothing of my plans for the Beatles until he had a chance of reading the script. We parted at five o’clock amicably. With the contract, according to him, as good as signed. And on my part, the film almost written.

Orton wrote the script so rapidly, he asked his agent to wait three weeks before submitting it to the Beatles in early March 1967. A month later, the Beatles had moved on. Again, from the published version of Up Against It:

By March 29, Orton had still heard nothing from the Beatles. He fixed on Brian Epstein as the culprit: ‘An amateur and a fool. He isn’t equipped to judge the quality of a script. Probably he will never say “yes” equally hasn’t got the courage to say “no”. A thoroughly weak, flaccid type.’ And then on April 4, Up Against It was returned. ‘No explanation why. No criticism of the script. And apparently, Brian Epstein has no comment to make either. Fuck them.’

Decades later, in Beatles at the Movies, Paul offered a direct explanation why the script was rejected.

“The reason why we didn’t do Up Against It wasn’t because it was too far out or anything like that. We didn’t do it because it was gay. We weren’t gay and really that was all there was to it. … Now it wasn’t that that we were anti-gay – just that we, The Beatles, weren’t gay.”

(Thirty years later, Blur’s Damon Albarn performed in a BBC Radio production of Up Against It, another link from the Fabs to ’90s Britpop).

The cover to the 1979 UK edition of Joe Orton’s posthumously published and modified script for Up Against It. Cover art is by Nick Price, who you may recognize as the illustrator of Kate Bush’s Never for Ever album cover.

Aborted efforts of film adaptations of The Three Musketeers and Lord of the Rings starring the Beatles never got far, either, despite the rumors in the late ’60s.

Even after the Get Back sessions, with the Beatles straining to simply stay together as a band, much less as an acting troupe, George enthused over a script for a potential late-stage Beatles film. From the April 5, 1969 DISC and Music Echo:

BEATLES have decided on a script for their next film and shooting should start before the end of the year.

George Harrison told Disc on Monday: “It will be at least as big as 2001 visually with full stereo sound and Cinerama.

“The story is fantastic. It’s based on an idea we had a year ago, but which fell through because of a lot of technicalities at the time. The tables have turned now and we have access to the script again.”

All four Beatles have agreed to do the movie – their third group film – provided they could make it their way.

“And we’ve agreed to let each other do exactly what he wants to do with it. We’ve got to a point where we can see each other quite clearly. And by allowing each other to be each other we can become the Beatles again.”

My emphasis on those last few lines, which is an interesting window on what George believed – or very much wanted the public to believe in what well could have been a giant leg-pull – was happening in Beatledom in springtime 1969.

On January 14, 1969, however, it was the very lack of one George Harrison that prompted further film ideas, as they killed time and entertained each other in this period the Beatles were a temporary trio. Creativity flowed at Twickenham, even if it wasn’t always in song. If the Beatles really wanted to make a new movie, and even if it was completely as a joke, they could define it exactly as they wanted.

“We could make a film, you know,” Paul said, sidelining the film the Beatles were actually making – what would later become Let It Be (1970) and ultimately Get Back (2021) – which remained stalled as the second Tuesday of the year went on.

“Let’s get a script and all that, and really not waste all this camera time and do a little sort-of film today. … We all get parts, and get an old Fabian script or something.”

George wasn’t landing a role — he was still AWOL from the band after walking out four days earlier. John Lennon wouldn’t pass the audition, either, but at least he had an excuse: He was presently joining Yoko Ono in an interview with a Canadian TV network elsewhere on set at Twickenham Film Studios. More on that next time.

Paul was there, and so was Ringo Starr, and the ideas flowed freely from the rhythm section and an increasingly desperate Michael Lindsay-Hogg, with Mal Evans and Glyn Johns chipping in.

We get this sequence in part, chopped up and out of sequence in Get Back. The docuseries gives an accurate if incomplete vibe of what they talked about, but while it was a couple minutes in Get Back, it was more than 20 minutes of real time on the Nagra Tapes, long enough to justifiably dig into it here.

Mal, Glyn, Ringo, Michael and Paul on January 14, 1969, as seen in Get Back.

Let’s start with the cast of characters, led by the public safety staff. Sgt. Badger and Private Cluff (“happily known as ‘Ginge’”) had yet to be cast, but by Ringo’s suggestion Mal would play the “policeman gone wrong.”

The “church-hall lout who commits the robbery” was given to Glyn, who gave the impression he didn’t want to be a villain, at least by Paul’s interpretation.

“Do you want to be a goodie then, Glyn?” Paul said to laughter. “Come on now, you’re sulking, aren’t you? [Glyn] wants to be a goodie.”

It was unclear who would play “the roughneck that changes, the hard-drug-peddling yob turned to religion” but Ringo accepted the role of the schoolteacher on vacation who was just taking children on a tour to see the famous masks of Damascus before finding himself yanked into a crime thriller.

Tony Richmond (pictured left of Ringo) is the fence.

Michael offered to direct, and suggested Tony Richmond do his usual work behind the camera.

“No, Tony’s in it,” Paul countered. “He’s the fence, where Glyn gets rid of the drugs, through him.”

“You’re the traffic sign,” Ringo deadpanned to Michael.

Eventually they worked on diversifying the cast, eyeing a few women present at Twickenham for a Magic Christian casting call, seeking a “couple of groovy-looking blondes,” per Michael, for the spy girl (Lavinia or Titania) and the sex interest – the last of which Paul called for a “closed set for the nude bathing scene.”

While the farcical script took shape, so to speak, an authentic prop appeared on the soundstage, a locomotive slated to be used in the imminent filming of The Magic Christian, as starring Ringo.

The train sets for The Magic Christian are loaded into Twickenham, as shows in Get Back.

The Twickenham train, as seen with Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr, et al., in The Magic Christian.

“Hey, we’re getting a train in!” Michael said excitedly. We weren’t left any timetables, but we can be clever and even call that train the one after 9:09 if we wanted to get in the spirit of things and tie things together.

It was a full-circle moment: Less than five years earlier the Beatles filmed the opening performance of A Hard Day’s Night – the sequence for “I Should Have Known Better” as performed on a train – on this same Twickenham soundstage, a point that couldn’t have been lost on Paul and Ringo.

More full-circleness: A Hard Day’s Night led the Beatles to draw no shortage of comparisons to the Marx Brothers. And it just so happened Paul – who to this day owns Groucho’s old bed, by the way (check this excerpt from Alice Cooper’s autobiography) — had a Marx Brothers script in his hands. You can see it in Get Back: He’s reading from a couple of thick, comb-bound, soft-covered books.

“[We can do a] remake,” Paul suggested as he read from the “A Night at the Opera” script. (Ringo conflated this film with “At The Circus,” referring to “A Night at the Circus.”)

As read by Paul:

Groucho: I’m glad you told me.

Maids: (in high voice) We’ve come to make up your room sir.

Chico: Are those my hard-boiled eggs?

Groucho: I can’t tell till …they get them out of me

Fun fact: A Night at the Opera, filmed in 1935, employed backwards masking a generation before the Beatles popularized it on record. Just another little Marx Brothers-Beatles link to share with your friends.

Ringo, still considering “At The Circus,” broke into harmony with someone who sounded like Mal on that film’s “Two Blind Loves.”

“We’re going to make a train movie,” Michael said. “Why don’t we do ‘A Night on a Train’?

“We’ve got a spare few thousand feet [of film], we don’t tell [Let it Be and The Magic Christian producer Denis O’Dell] we’re doing it.”

Remembering one of their missing members, Paul suggested the film crew capture John and Yoko being interviewed by the CBC.

John, Yoko and CBC’s Hugh Curry on set on January 14, 1969.

“But John and Yoko should be shooting Ringo and I,” Paul said. “And we should be taking Instamatic shots of the crew [laughing].” Drifting back into fiction, Paul adds: “And the crew is reading Playboy.”

Earlier Paul pitched a remake, then Ringo suggested a throwback. “Let’s make a silent movie. Slow ‘til its speeded up when we play it back, ’cause they’re always funny to watch.”

For pretty much the first time in this sequence, someone came up with a reasonable idea, and it’s the director of the only film that actually was on the other end of the camera.

“What we could do to save a little money is,” Michael pitched, “figure [we] take one of these songs we’re recording, make it a single and do the promo film for the single here.”

Paul only chuckled a “yeah, right” in reply – while the idea was justifiable, George wasn’t there, and there weren’t many songs in decent enough shape to fully record.

But if they were going to make a “train movie” then maybe Michael was thinking of their completed train song: “One After 909.” He had worse ideas (and I say that as an MLH advocate).

Whether it was for a song promo or fake film, Michael set his sights on the star backdrop in a moment we catch in Get Back.

“Hey, should we shoot the train coming in? Chug, chug.”

Tony shut him down to widespread disapproval, repeatedly rejecting any filming of the set intended for The Magic Christian. “It’s copyright,” he said.

“It’s a documentary. … It’s a good shot for the part of the atmosphere,” Michael said, incredulous. “Oh, c’mon Tony. Oh, fuck.”

Ringo and Paul likewise objected, the latter mocking Tony as Parisian New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard was a bit of a dirty word in Beatle parts, especially around John, so pardon the Frenchman and this huge tangent that revolves around another Beatle movie that wasn’t made.

One obituary for Godard, who died in 2022, called the filmmaker “cinema’s north star” asserting “no one did more to make movies the art of youth.” He was deeply important, and this time and place was his as a filmmaker.

A memorable night at the end of November 1968 – certainly fresh in the mind of the gang at Twickenham, it was only weeks earlier — included Godard imploring the audience to not watch his new film (One Plus One, his production with the Rolling Stones), calling the viewers fascists when they did. Then he punched his producer.

But before he worked with the Stones, he set his sights even higher, on our Fabs. Anne Wiazemsky, Godard’s wife from 1967-1979 laid it all out in her 2015 memoir, Un an Après.

Via Google Translate, from the original French to English:

At the instigation of an English producer determined to make a film featuring Godard and the Beatles, I had accompanied him to London. He had even scribbled a rough outline of a plot in which a young woman unable to get an abortion (me) tried to commit suicide by throwing herself in front of a car. Alas, she kept running into a Beatle behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce, and her attempt would fail. What would happen next? Jean-Luc didn’t know, but he was counting on the Beatles to provide further inspiration.

…

A meeting was arranged with John Lennon and Paul McCartney at their Abbey Road offices. The former was immediately hostile, unreceptive to any of the enterprising producer’s suggestions; he seemed miles away and intent on ending the meeting as quickly as possible. The latter, by contrast, was all charm and kindness, eager to make a film with Godard—whose cinema, he said, he “revered… all of it.” As the discussion dragged on, John Lennon stood up and left the room without a word or a backward glance. “Come back tomorrow,” the conciliatory Paul McCartney told us. “John isn’t having a good day. But I’ll speak to him, and I hope he’ll be more cooperative.”

Godard returned with an idea based on a script “The Assassination of Trotsky,” with Lennon playing Lenin’s co-revolutionary.

“John Lennon will play Trotsky! Undeniable, right?” … Jean-Luc, in high spirits, had immediately launched into a pitch to John Lennon about the Trotsky story. They would make a real revolutionary film together—the first of its kind. He was speaking at breakneck speed … [b]ut John Lennon soon interrupted them; his face twisted with rage and his voice pitched high, he launched into a torrent of words of his own.

…

John Lennon and Jean-Luc were soon shouting at each other. “I think it’s a bust,” Paul said, and seeing my disappointed look, added, “I’m sorry—it sounded really good, your husband’s project… Will you tell him?”

A September 1968 interview with Godard in the International Times blamed the Beatles for being “corrupted by money,” an accusation John refuted in the November 23, 1968, issue of Rolling Stone.

Now that’s sour grapes from a man who couldn’t get us to be in his film. … Dear Mr. Godard, just because we didn’t want to be in the film with you, it doesn’t mean to say that we aren’t doing any more than you.

Returning to Twickenham ’69, Michael eventually got his shot (even if we never saw it in Let It Be or Get Back). With his voice fading in the distance on the Nagras, we hear MLH saying he’ll be somewhere “just for a minute.”

“Shall we get some seats in the train and pretend we’re on a Tube or something?” Michael soon pitched another stab at a fake film.

In due time, Paul occasionally played some piano, but he continued to be a part of the conversation.

“Can we have it in a club? You know, the atmosphere is a club. … That’s it! We’re in a band [and] peddle drugs.”

They weren’t quite done talking movies, but another stage feature – utility chains – seized their attention. They may be at a soundstage, but to mother nature’s son, it was probably like climbing a rope or tree for Paul, a erstwhile Boy Scout.

(The Scouts weren’t a complete footnote in Paul’s childhood, even though it’s a parenthetical reference here. Paul missed his first gig as a member of the Quarrymen in August 1957 because he was away at Boy Scout camp.)

Ringo was the first to dare a climb even though he admitted he “was never very good on the ropes.”

Paul: That’s the trouble you get the panic about halfway up.

Ringo: You realize you can’t stand heights.

Paul: Seen The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

Paul’s question drew a chorus of noes – the film hit theaters in London the previous August and was presently playing in Piccadilly Circus, a mere six-minute walk from 3 Savile Row. They could have gotten some steps in and killed their time seeing real movies instead of making them up.

Good thing no one else had seen it, though — it would have been an intimidating moment, revisiting the scene he was probably recalling.

In a segment we get to see in Get Back, Ringo playfully calls an end to the day’s filming with Paul stuck high on the chains.

“It’s a wrap!” Ringo said to the camera. “There’s no business like show business!”

Ringo, Paul and Mal all gave it a go, they just can’t get away from these chains. And by the time they were done, the group inched closer to reforming.

“OK, John, rise up the chains to the top,” Paul said to his songwriting partner a few minutes later, after John was reunited with the others after his lengthy TV interview.

“I know you could do this, lad. My money’s on him.”

The tapes reveal nervous laughter from Yoko before a commotion and thud from what we could assume was a minor tumble that gave way to huge laughs from the others on set.

“It’s all right,” John said in an exaggerated pained voice. “Don’t worry about a thing, Yoko.”

Still, she sounded genuinely concerned at John’s physical activity.

“He’s not that young anymore,” she said.

“No, I’m not 18 anymore,” said John, who was, in fact, 28. “I couldn’t do it at bloody 12.”

So what’s John to do instead?

“I thought we might make a film this afternoon,” Paul told him.

John was caught a little off-guard, replying, “Well, what? OK. What should we do?”

Paul: A comedy.

MLH: You rejected the guys in the Tube train and the guy whose pimp is the conductor.

Paul: We rejected it.

A lot of rejections. A lot of ideas. A lot of roles. But amateur hour was over, with multiple BAFTA and Oscar nominee and Beatle friend and muse Peter Sellers — the star of The Magic Christian, soon to be filming on this stage — arriving at Twickenham for an impromptu meet and greet.

Paul makes his pitch to Peter

With the Beatles’ film at a standstill, Paul figured he may as well have some fun with one of his many movie ideas and aim high to land a star lead.

“We’re casting this afternoon,” Paul told Peter.

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Filed under Day by day

Tagged as A Night at the Opera, A Talent For Loving, Anne Wiazemsky, At the Circus, Glyn Johns, January 14, Jean-Luc Godard, Joe Orton, John Lennon, Mal Evans, Marx Brothers, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, movies, Owen Holder, Paul McCartney, Peter Sellers, Richard Condon, Ringo Starr, Shades of a Personality, The Magic Christian, The Yellow Teddy Bears, Tony Richmond, trains, Up Against It, Walter Shenson, Yoko Ono

May 23, 2025 · 7:00 am

TMBP Extra: You are here

Gazing at 20 Manchester Square in London, I squinted trying to visualize the Beatles hanging over the stairwell, flashing their grins. They did it in 1963. They did it again in 1969. What a backdrop was EMI House!

At the same time, my then-13-year-old son stared at the same building standing today at 20 Manchester Square, a structure decidedly not EMI House, which was torn down at the turn of the century.

This was his breaking point. The Mad Day Out had little on our Furious Day Out.

We had been in England nearly two weeks, and on this Wednesday morning, 20 Manchester Square was the second location we purposely visited over the previous five minutes that was purely a street name and number. The first Apple Records headquarters once stood at 95 Wigmore Street, literally in shouting distance of 20 Manchester Square, and in the place of the former Beatles HQ, another modern construction rose where a historic Beatles site once stood.

“These aren’t even the buildings the Beatles went to!” he screamed at me – I was very much in shouting distance. “Why are we here? Why do even you care? It doesn’t make sense!”

And to a point, he was right, even if I wasn’t crazy about my teenager yelling at me in Marylebone. While we were in England, we visited Hadrian’s Wall, Stonehenge and the Rosetta Stone precisely because they survived centuries and millennia. The kids never asked to see the site of the Euston Arch or Crystal Palace, and I get why they didn’t.

95 Wigmore St, Apple’s first HQ (early ‘68). That building is gone; the one here was built in 2013. It’s Colliers UK’s head office.

I knew the names, and I looked up the numbers. But much as I wanted to see where the Beatles made their magic and soak in that residue, 20 Manchester Square and 95 Wigmore Street remain merely addresses on a map. Still, to paraphrase one of my favorite Liverpudlian philosophers: Some places have gone while some remain, and all of them had their moments.

***

I always planned to write about my trip to England. My family of four traveled for two weeks June 2024, mostly split between Liverpool and London and with various Beatles pilgrimages at the center of the itinerary, which included several other non-Fab (but still fabulous) destinations. I’m not convinced you want to read How I Spent My Summer Vacation, but I think I can interest you in a broader review of precisely how I did end up spending my summer vacation, even if you’re from Merseyside or the capital or know the Beatles every bit as much as I think I do.

This is a result of some deep reflection, and will be part-essay, part-travelogue and complete expression of child-like wonder at how exciting it was to step in the Beatles’ footsteps and unlock an understanding of who and what they were and are and why that matters to me.

The trip was special. I gazed at the rooftop and stood by the basement. I crossed the road. The lane was in my ears and in my eyes. There was so much more.

I was very fortunate. I shared a few hours with a man who was on that rooftop. I spent time alone in a very different, but more formative basement. I visited a lot of places that had their moments, and a lot of locations that once did – but really always will, even just as addresses on a map.

I’m not going to tell this story chronologically. How I planned my trip really only mattered to my schedule and ultimately doesn’t matter. This should read as an evergreen story, as we say in the business. But hopefully there’s a tip or two in here if you’re planning your own journey. Extroverted as I am, I hate writing about myself, but without it, this won’t be much of a story.

***

The most striking thing about being in the Beatles’ England was how it felt mundane, in so many ways. At once, I appreciated them and their music much more deeply, although at the same time recognizing I didn’t need to be there to understand that.

I wasn’t expecting grandeur, necessarily, though as I write this out, maybe I was? The Beatles are on that historically vital level. Buckingham Palace, Salisbury Cathedral — these are larger than life destinations I admired in person. So what does that make Mendips or 34 Montague Square? The Beatles certainly mean more to me than the monarchy and Anglican Church.

At the beautiful Chapter House at Salisbury Cathedral (where one of the Magna Carta originals is housed), decorative cushions ring the perimeter, and I was able to compile one variant of the set.

It’s one thing to view, say, John Lennon’s Epiphone Casino behind glass at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (which I’ve done multiple times!). It’s another to see the rooftop, basement and front door of 3 Savile Row as part of its surrounding environment. There it stands between other buildings that have their own rooftops, basements and front doors, too.

The Rosetta Stone stands behind glass at the crowded British Museum, while about a mile away, 3 Savile Row — as important as it is — does not. We have to already know it’s special, blue plaque notwithstanding.

***

It’s really hard to change a first impression. Liverpool long cast to my aging eyes in black and white, its sounds blared in mono. That’s the Beatles’ Liverpool I’ve always known from photographs and films.

The city as viewed (by me) from the Wheel of Liverpool

Personal experience broke that bias. I found the city – our first stop on the trip — lively and electric, full of the color missing in my expectations. It’s not an exaggeration when I say it was a spiritual experience to walk the streets and follow in the footsteps of the Beatles.

Mathew Street, Liverpool

So full of magic, one of Liverpool’s incredible tricks is to effortlessly convince you of something Apple has subtly promoted for years, most recently with the “Now and Then” experience: The Beatles never really split. This is the city of John, Paul, George and Ringo. And Pete. And Stu! Brian Epstein lives. It’s Mathew Street stuffing decades of history over just a tenth of a mile. It’s at once authentic, reconstructed and behind glass.

The Brian Epstein statue is just footsteps away from the former location of NEMS.

The Beatles’ entire origin story happened in Liverpool: childhood, crossing paths, forming a band and superstardom. You can retrace their origins to the depth of your own desire and timetable.

My favorite Mathew Street location was the Liverpool Beatles Museum, which carries a breathtaking, unique collection. It’s a must-visit if you’re visiting Liverpool.

: As displayed at the Liverpool Beatles Museum.

The National Trust conducts tours of John and Paul’s childhood homes only in conjunction. While not the same route they would have taken in their day, we were bussed between the two houses. The Lennon/McCartney partnership, forged when they called these places home, lives in perpetuity as a combined experience.

“It was important then whether you lived near each other or not,” Paul recalled in the Anthology book. “There were no cars for kids in those days.”

Our first stop on the Lennon-McCartney house tour was John’s childhood home at 251 Menlove Ave. Despite Mike McCartney growing up on Forthlin, it was Mendips that was enveloped in scaffold.

I found no light bulb on visiting the childhood homes of, oh, the way this room is laid out is why Paul learned to play things this way. Or John became that way because of the kitchen. The acoustics in the McCartney bathroom, as good as they may have been, didn’t create Lennon-McCartney.

However that magic manifests itself, though, it lingers.

We played Paul’s piano. No, not his childhood piano – that’s now at one of his own homes. But it’s a piano played by Paul, and that’s good enough for me. Who cares when he played it?

20 Forthlin Road

By their natures as simple residences, the Lennon-McCartney homes stood among the more pedestrian destinations, even with some things behind glass: The spot where Paul slept (though probably not his original bed). The room where John ate (though probably not the table).

12 Arnold Grove

Privately owned, George’s and Ringo’s childhood homes were only street-level photo-ops, but just experiencing these neighborhoods added depth to their stories. Seeing the Empress Pub step out of the Sentimental Journey LP cover only a few footsteps away from 10 Admiral Grove in the Dingle was added value.

The Casbah Club is very much alive, with Pete Best and his family literally welcoming you into his childhood home. We visited a couple months too early to stay there (it opened as an Airbnb in August 2024). It’s in the Casbah’s basement that the colors of Liverpool perhaps glow most bright, the paint jobs of the Quarrymen (plus the future Cynthia Lennon) still adorning the walls and star-studded and Beatle-etched ceilings. The club area and the spaces where the Quarrymen and Beatles played stand claustrophobically small when you allow yourself to visualize the crowded houses they played for. Mona Best’s incredible legacy looms and lives strongly.

The remarkable Casbah Coffee Club. What a destination! Thanks to Roag Best Jr. for the fab tour inside.

But beyond the artifacts Beatles once handled and spaces they occupied, the locations they chose to be inspired by made their mark.

Like both sides of the greatest single in pop music history. We visited Penny Lane and Strawberry Field consecutively, with Paul’s contribution our first needle-drop.

Your host at Penny Lane. Squint close and you’ll see Paul’s signature on the sign. Also, gaze upon the shelter in the middle of the roundabout, the one-time bank and the barbershop.

The magic of “Penny Lane” speaks in that the song doesn’t have to be taken as personal at all. It’s observational, and we can see the same surface elements today. The barbershop, the (former) bank building, the roundabout’s shelter – these are tangible, ordinary locations like ones I have in my own town, and every one I’ve ever lived in. We don’t really need to know the motivations of the banker or firefighter or nurse to really understand the song, which still creates a relatable story.

No wonder “Strawberry Fields Forever” made such a natural flip side, it really was the opposite experience, even today as Strawberry Field itself remans a functioning Salvation Army facility that’s also a popular tourist destination. You can still experience the quiet isolation John sought, and find your own tree after a wander in the garden.

Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Field.

Rather than demystify these destinations, walking through I found them enhanced, spotlighting the proximity of the Beatles’ world. Strawberry Field sits so close to Mendips. And then seeing the central terminus that’s Penny Lane plus John and Paul’s childhood houses in the same short afternoon — on a long tour as led by Dave Bedford, bursting with of endless insight and access – it was beyond expectations.

Penny Lane and Strawberry Field weren’t just name checks. These places mattered to the Beatles, but being there put it in such a better context. It’s something they evoked themselves, and they tried to give us an idea to the context on the single’s sleeve and promotional materials (depending on the country).

As seen in Cashbox in February 1967.

“A lot of our formative years were spent walking around those places,” Paul said in Anthology. “Penny Lane was the depot I had to change buses at to get from my house to John’s and to a lot of my friends. It was a big bus terminal which we all knew very well.”

Penny Lane mattered enough to John as a location to originally appear in the the draft lyrics to “In My Life,” along with several other locations.

In his 1980 interview with David Sheff, John recalled how a basic rollcall of locations didn’t work.

‘In My Life’ started out as a bus journey from my house at 250 Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning every place I could remember. I wrote it all down and it was ridiculous. This is before even ‘Penny Lane’ was written and I had Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Tram Sheds — Tram Sheds are the depot just outside of Penny Lane — and it was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did On My Holiday’s Bus Trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all. I cannot do this! I cannot do this!

But then I laid back and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember. Now Paul helped with the middle-eight melody. The whole lyrics were already written before Paul had even heard it. In ‘In My Life,’ his contribution melodically was the harmony and the middle eight itself.

“Ordinary” Beatles should not have been a surprise to me. I study the Nagra tapes the most of anything Beatles, and that is them at (what I always assumed) was their most mundane — talking about TV, food, the news and anything else. I find ordinary Beatles to be extraordinary Beatles.

Want to know why I believe John when he said “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was based after a drawing by Julian and not LSD? Because of the ordinary things they wrote about otherwise.

So much of the Beatles has to do with their time. I couldn’t turn back the clock, but I could get to their place.

Like St. Peter’s in Woolton. It’s the Church of the Immaculate Conception, at least when it comes to the Beatles. Your own bias will say whether this is where Paul met John or John met Paul. Lucky us, the doors to the church hall were unlocked (maybe they always are, I don’t know!) and we stood in the very spot – at least our best guess within a few feet – of the Big Bang.

St. Peter’s

Strip away the origin story, and it’s today a rec room sincerely not unlike any other at this kind of church community building. Here children’s Sunday School scrawls are given equal status to placards documenting the fête-ful encounter in 1957. This could be a room in any one of our hometowns.

Outside the building at the church’s cemetery was one more bit of inspiration, even if the Beatles didn’t realize it deliberately. RIP Eleanor Rigby.

“I don’t remember seeing the grave there, but I suppose I might have registered it subconsciously.” Paul wrote in Lyrics. “We visited her grave in a much more deliberate fashion.”

***

What Liverpool enjoyed and embraced but London lacked is a broad Beatle presence. This wasn’t a surprise, but was certainly tangible after spending time in Liverpool. It’s a big city. I get it, I’m from New York. There’s a lot going on.

I’d been to London before, as a teenager in the 1980s. I had a lot of places I wanted to see myself this time around, with one obvious destination circled several times.

I’ve been writing about the Get Back sessions since January 2012, a long while after Let It Be hit theaters (May 1970), and a quite a bit before Peter Jackson’s Get Back revitalized the sessions into the mainstream (November 2021). My visit to 3 Savile Row – the centerpiece of our busy London visit — was a powerful moment to become a 21^st century Apple Scruff and linger outside the building; there was no entry.

I wasn’t waiting for anyone to arrive or depart, but simply loitering delivered a unique satisfaction. This went beyond the rooftop performance. And that in and of itself was very powerful. The roof didn’t feel as high as it appeared in Let It Be and Get Back. Really, it felt short. It was five stories, like other buildings on the same block and any other five-story buildings in my hometown or anywhere else. I know the Beatles played a concert on that particular one.

The Apple of my eye: 3 Savile Row

And obviously that’s what made it a powerful moment. I was very surprised – like I was at so many Beatles-related destinations – at how few people were there to pay tribute. I visited around 1 p.m. on a Wednesday (the Beatles played at around the same time on a Thursday). Unlike January 1969, Savile Row was very quiet this afternoon in June 2024.

There was a small tour group listening to a stock spiel about the Beatles and the rooftop. If anyone around needed to know the building was special, they could have looked at my idiot self photographing it from all angles, peering into the basement, dodging back and forth across the narrow road – it wasn’t much wider than Mathew Street – and rubbing the metal No. 3 bolted to the front door as I insisted I could absorb the building’s mojo and mystically ascend to the road that stretches out ahead. I made sure to inhale whatever Beatle dust lingered.

The proximity was interesting: The Heddon Street location where David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust LP cover was shot pretty much stands around the corner from Savile Row. From there it was a 10-minute walk to the former location of Trident Studios, where not only Bowie made his mark, but the Beatles cut “Hey Jude,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and a few others. Depressingly it looked like an office today. I could see a printer, but no piano. But that obscures the point: Everything was right there.

The same day we made it to St. John’s Wood — and it was a day, spanning more than 15 miles by foot alone — we did the least surprising thing possible and lined up to cross Abbey Road. It should have occurred to me before but I never thought about it: It was only as I crossed the road that I realized I was – in the Beatles’ footsteps – walking away from the studio. (But they all left together, at least.)

Of every Beatles-related location I visited over two weeks – and there were many – only the rebuilt Cavern rivaled Abbey Road for walk-up crowds. We fans had each other’s backs, gladly offering to take pictures for strangers so we all could have that killer crosswalk photo.

A kind Australian nailed for posterity my family’s crossing in two takes. The reckless New Yorker I am, I giddily stood in the middle of the street, forcing traffic to dodge me – not the other way around – taking photos to make sure a couple from Los Angeles had the perfect picture. It took four takes, and I would have done a fifth. Iain MacMillan I’m not, but I tried.

Abbey Road

Paul famously lived just down the road, and we recreated the quick walk to Cavendish, surprising ourselves at just how close Paul lived to EMI Studios on Abbey Road (not even half a mile).

The home today didn’t seem much different than description in Hunter Davies’ biography of the band, published in 1968:

The front of the house has a paved courtyard with an old-fashioned lamp-post. On the left, attached to the house, is a double garage in which he keeps his Mini Cooper and Aston Martin. The house is guarded by a high brick wall and large double black gates controlled from the house. You speak into a microphone, someone inside answers, and if you say the right thing, the doors swing open and then clank shut again to keep out the fans.

I did talk like an absolute maniac at his security system, but I wasn’t surprised the gates did not swing open. We were the only fans on Cavendish. And this was helpful to give the space to consider things and experience the proximity like the band did – I tried to do this at every destination. We considered crashing Billy Fury’s old place, which was just a few houses down, when the door opened to welcome guests in.

London’s Cavendish Avenue, featuring the homes of Liverpool’s Paul McCartney and Billy Fury

It wasn’t deliberately scheduled this way, but Abbey Road and Cavendish were the last two main Beatles-related destinations on our trip (we left England a couple days later). They were also two of the remaining locations that were as they were when it was the Beatles’ England in their time. Music continues to be recorded at Abbey Road, and Paul still has the keys to Cavendish today.

***

I walked in the footsteps of the Beatles on Abbey Road and rubbed the door at 3 Savile Row for the best of luck. But can a place really leave magic? Do people leave some of their essence? I thought about this a lot when I was in Liverpool, and again when we got to London, especially in Mayfair. When my teenager lost it outside the former EMI House, our next destination was the fascinating Handel Hendrix House.

George Frideric Handel called 25 Brook Street home from 1723 until his death in 1759, composing “Messiah,” “Water Music” and many other lasting pieces in that building, where his legacy is lovingly preserved. I’m no Handelhead, but the site was terrific.

The other half of the Handel Hendrix House is named for James Marshall Hendrix – you know him as “Jimi” – who lived at the adjacent 23 Brook Street more than 200 years later.

Handel, with care: The Handel Hendrix House was a definite highlight among Beatle-adjacent destinations

“I didn’t even know this was [Handel’s] pad, man, until after I got in,” Hendrix told the Daily Mirror on January 6, 1969, in an interview published five days later. “And to tell you the God’s honest truth I haven’t heard much of the fella’s stuff. But I dig a bit of Bach now and again.”

Handel wasn’t any kind of musical inspiration on Hendrix, so if the composer left any juice for Jimi, we can only guess — although Jimi did reveal he once saw “an old guy in a nightshirt and gray pigtail” walk through a wall.

When Jimi moved in, it wasn’t even the most historically significant thing that happened in Greater London rock history that day. Because on January 2, 1969, as Jimi Hendrix schlepped his guitars and other belongings up the stairs into his new pad – it was actually his girlfriend’s apartment — the Beatles began the Get Back sessions 10 miles away in Twickenham. So is there magic in a time, and also a place?

***

While I could approach some places, I could never get to the Beatles’ time. But I could spend moments in my own time with someone who was in the Beatles’ circle.

Milton Keynes wasn’t out of the way as we drove from Stoke-On-Trent, the base for our visit to the amusement park Alton Towers, toward London. Paul McCartney adopted sweet pup Martha in Milton Keynes, and dog-lover I am, that’s reason enough to give the town a nod. But I’d be lying if I said it was on our original itinerary.

On a trip filed with journeys to places that mattered, at this vacation’s heart was one destination that didn’t matter at all – it was the person there that gave it meaning. This moment was right in the middle of the trip, between our Liverpool and London legs.

All thanks go to Robert Rodriguez, who you know as the host of the Something About the Beatles podcast and author of several books (buy his newest one now!). He’s also a kind human being who incredibly connected me with someone who was in the middle of it all: Kevin Harrington, former Beatles equipment manager. If you know him for nothing else, you’d recognize him as the young redhead on the rooftop and throughout Get Back/Let It Be.

Kevin spent what he called “three, four years out of a long life” working for Brian Epstein and later the Beatles. We spent about 2 ½ hours at a pub in Milton Keynes. He said it wasn’t his local, and that set the tone for the conversation – he felt he could speak with candor. This wasn’t an interview, but a conversation. I asked about his time working with Tina Turner, Motörhead and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. We talked about instant replay in sports, navigating roundabouts and his recipe for herb sausage.

Obviously, we talked most about those three, four years with the Beatles and the incredible cast of characters that surrounded (and included) him. It was clear there were some “pub stories” not meant for broadcast, and I will hold them near and dear.

In a remarkable happenstance, not even 48 hours before we met, the Lennon Estate released the promo video for “You Are Here” as part of the Mind Games reissue campaign. One of the first recognizable heads in the clip is Kevin Harrington. The very existence of the video – which is drawn from John’s 1968 exhibition of the same name — was news to him.

In a very big life filled with outsized experiences, Kevin watched himself, on my 6.1-inch phone screen, hauling a giant, round canvas down a London street nearly 56 year earlier, during a weekend in the midst of the White Album sessions.

Kevin named every face he remembered as they were shown on screen, a roll call bringing true flesh to the conversation. It was one of those moments when cardiologists be damned, I blindly allowed my heart to skip a few beats.

Going into our afternoon together, I knew how Kevin would approach this sort of meeting. From his 2015 memoir “Who’s The Redhead On The Roof….?”:

The time line is a bit hazy. Do I wish to look up all that happened in those far off days to check dates and so on? Honestly no, I don’t. I’ll leave that to the experts. Maybe if we meet one day you can tell me exactly what I was doing, when and where. I can only tell you what it was like for an 18 year old to work for the biggest band in the world.

Kevin wasn’t a docent speaking from a memorized script. When he talked about John Lennon or Derek Taylor or Mal Evans or former boss Brian Epstein — who more than a half-century later he still referred to formally as Mr. Epstein, just like the Beatles would — those were memories. There’s something to speaking to a person that’s so much more fulfilling than to going to a place or searching for a time.

***

It’s deep into spring now, after a long, cold, lonely winter. I couldn’t get myself motivated to finish this piece. I love to write, and I love to write about the Beatles. Yet, here I am, more than 4,000 words in and not sure if I had anything to say.

In true Get Back/Let It Be fashion, this unfinished mess of words (in my case) sat shelved. I’ve reworked and revised, and I’m still not sure I like any of the finished product. Scraps of unrealized points, salient and otherwise, lay saved in text files, waiting for an eventual bootleg leak.

There’s no Glyn Johns or Phil Spector to bail me out. And where is the ending? To put it in John’s words, I’m afraid “it was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did On My Holiday’s Bus Trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all. I cannot do this! I cannot do this!”

A few weeks after the trip, I saw Pete Best perform live at a venue just 15 minutes from my own home in Ohio (more in the last post about our interaction). I didn’t have to travel across the world to be in a Beatle’s world.

: Pete Best in Kent, Ohio, in July 2024.

Pete Best (and my family) in Kent, Ohio, July 2024

But that’s not an ending, just an epilogue.

Our trip ended quietly. A week after seeing Kevin in Milton Keynes and on the heels of nearly a week in London, we flew out of Heathrow and returned home. The night before our flight, I had to run out to fill our rental car. We were staying in Slough, which I know best from The Office, but it also was once home to the former Adelphi Cinema. One of the Beatles’ performances there was the night after their iconic 1963 Royal Variety Show performance, which prompted this exchange between Paul and the Queen:

“The Queen Mother said, ‘Where are you playing tomorrow night?’ I said, ‘Slough.’ And she said, ‘Oh, that’s just near us.’”

Bonus Beatles site! We fly out early tomorrow to come home, but I snuck in one more place, the site of the former Adelphi Cinema in Slough, where the Beatles played twice. Today, it’s undergoing renovation as a banquet hall. (As in, people were there working at 8pm on a Friday) pic.twitter.com/IqRA8X13Xg

— They May Be Parted (@TheyMayBeParted) June 14, 2024

I didn’t even have to go out of my way to see the former venue, driving right by it on the way to the petrol station. The ex-Adelphi was another address on a map, a building under reconstruction literally before my eyes. One of the running themes took us to the very last stop.

It’s OK for things to change. The Beatles switched drummers. John gave “In My Life” a rewrite – he made it less a travelogue and much more personal. I found inspiration in that.

I would have rather seen 3 Savile Row’s windows dressed in daffodils and the basement door surrounded by Scruffs than its current state, and I wish the original Apple HQ at 34 Montague Square was there to be gazed upon. But it’s just not reality.

: Then …

: and now

I lived in two different houses over the course of my childhood. Both have since been torn down. They’re only addresses now, but I don’t need the buildings to have the memories of the people and things that went before.

There’s a magic in a time and a magic in a place. Most of all, the magic is in the people. Huw Spink – you know him as Teatles — guided me around his Liverpool, centered in particular around beautiful and essential Sefton Park, just hours after I arrived in the city. This set the tone for just how great this trip would be. We talked Beatles, we talked friends and family. We had tea.

Paul Abbott – you know him as half of The Big Beatles and 60s Sort Out podcast – showed me his Liverpool shortly before we left Liverpool. It reinforced how lovely the people, transplants or not, are. We talked Beatles, we talked friends and family. We had beer(s).

: Checking off a true bucket-list item: Tea with Teatles

: Deeply gratified at Big Sort Paul’s mini-tour of his local Liverpool

These places didn’t mean anything without the people. Whether it was our AirBnB hosts in Liverpool who gifted us a Beatles T-shirt in our unit simply because they knew that’s why we were in town or Kevin and his incredible generosity with his time.

It reinforced so much of what this trip exposed to me.

Places can be ordinary. And times aren’t special in isolation. It’s the people at those places and living in those times that make them worth returning to, something I think that’s easy to lose sight of.

The Beatles unlocked the magic of these places in their own time with the people they surrounded themselves with. Now, these locations are inseparable from the people and my own time, like Kevin Harrington and Milton Keynes last summer.

That’s why it’s just another front parlour on Forthlin Road if Paul didn’t write songs in it. No one, I think, would talk about a particular tree at Strawberry Field if it wasn’t John’s.

For me, it’s my wife loving life on the Steeplechase and Valhalla at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, my youngest enjoying baseball at London Stadium.

And it’s my oldest at 20 Manchester Square, no matter what is standing there today.

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December 9, 2023 · 12:46 am

Get Back advent calendar: Countdown to the sessions

In my faith, we count down the 25 days to the start of the Get Back/Let It Be sessions. This is completely normal.

To operate this particular digital advent calendar, simply click the day below and read up on what our boys and their extended circle were doing in these days leading up to their Most Holy Assemblage at Twickenham Film Studios on January 2, 1969.

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July 6, 2023 · 8:00 am

Jan. 13: Looking for the greener grass

Paul McCartney emerged January 13, 1969, as a journalist investigating a story of his own creation, and he spent the back end of his day at Twickenham Film Studios enduring some newsroom drama to sweat a co-byline with John Lennon and attack most of the five W’s of a catchy little tune the world eventually knew as “Get Back.”

True reporters, they worked on a tight deadline.

“OK, let’s try to get words to ‘Pakistani,’” Paul said of the song, which was very much in progress and still politically tinged. “We’ll do an hour,” telling director Michael Lindsay-Hogg “don’t worry,” because the staff will deliver content this afternoon (even if it didn’t last quite as long as promised).

The Beatles didn’t have George Harrison, who fled to Liverpool, but they still had an imminent live show on the schedule and songs to complete. The enduring yet unsettled Lennon-McCartney partnership amounted as the lede of the secretly recorded lunchroom conversation only recently concluded — as well as the lengthy period Paul spent with others before John’s arrival that day — so this songwriting sprint served as a much needed playdate, too.

But before attacking “Get Back” on the Nagra tapes, Paul continued to share what he felt his approach toward George should be right now, as he spoke presumably, to John and Ringo Starr and with the same candor everyone shared in the lunchroom earlier.

‘Look, I once thought the situation was that, and I don’t anymore.’

But I find that the most difficult thing ever to say. Because I hear myself say it, and I haven’t quite said it. I didn’t quite convince him. And as I think that, you think that, he thinks that — blah, blah, blah, it goes on forever.

Paul continued in another instance that’s unclear who he’s addressing, either straight to John or indirectly to George.

We’ve got the same problem that causes you to get on your guitar and wail. It’s the same one over and over. I’m wailing with ya. But I don’t say it right there and then, because I suspect we mightn’t be wailing about the same thing. So I won’t quite say it, and I never have quite said it, but some time I hope to say it. I may never say it, and fuck it if I don’t.

If Paul was speaking to John, he still wasn’t quite saying it. If it was directed to George, it remained theoretical — George was in Merseyside, as Ringo reported.

Mal sticks around, with pencil

This was a half-hour on the tapes resembling something closer to a vintage McCartney-Lennon writing session. Mal Evans — who Paul implored to “stick around with pencil” — took dictation and, as he did so many times over the past decade (including these sessions), participated uncredited in the songwriting process, too.

Jo Jo Jackson eventually lost his surname, though it stuck for now. Loretta kept her saccharine sobriquet, but her family name was very much up for debate on the 13th, with Paul souring on John’s suggestion: “Marsh.”

“We’re not sure about that, but put it in,” Paul told Mal early in the sequence, though he would quickly revisit that decision. We get to see this next bit in Get Back in an edited fashion.

Paul’s first choice suggests a tapping into the character-rich McCartneyverse.

“Sweet Loretta Mary. it’s got to be a name.” Paul tries out the name a few times, but Mary found her way in only one song from these sessions.

The process continued.

John: Sweet Loretta Marvin.
Paul: It’s got to be a meah [sound]
John: Meatball
Paul: Martin

In other words, “Sweet Loretta Meatball” enjoyed a non-zero chance of being a Lennon-McCartney lyric.

Sweet Loretta Martin was already an option Paul suggested days earlier.

While the surname search continued, it’s notable the established first names — Jo Jo and Sweet Loretta — never encountered debate.

Decades later, Paul maintained Jo Jo had no specific inspiration. From Barry Miles’ 1997 authorized biography Many Years From Now:

Many people have since claimed to be the Jo Jo and they’re not, let me put that straight! I had no particular person in mind, again it was a fictional character, half man, half woman, all very ambiguous. I often left things ambiguous, I like doing that in my songs.

Paul’s 2022 memoir Lyrics reveals no additional information on the people named in the song.

Upon his suicide in 2000, Joseph Melville See, Linda Eastman’s first husband — whom she met and later married in Tucson, Ariz., in 1962 — was commonly referred to as the inspiration of “Jo Jo.” There’s not much to go on beside the name Jo(seph) and the locale — his biography doesn’t otherwise fit the lyric. Moreover, he commonly went by “Mel.” So it’s a nice idea, but he doesn’t seem to be the answer.

(If Paul sincerely wasn’t writing about his future wife’s ex-husband here, that changed in a couple years. Paul openly claimed “Dear Boy” off 1971’s RAM was about See — and not Lennon, as is commonly suspected.)

Paul conceded to the other Beatles less than 100 hours earlier that ”Get Back” was “not about anything,” so it’s fair to take him at his contemporary word. “Sweet Loretta” doesn’t seem to refer to anyone either. He used “Theresa” in place of “Loretta” at one point as he first started working through the song the previous week. As Paul put it about another lyric earlier on January 13, “It sings all right.”

That same singability informed the where of Get Back, too.

Since the song’s origin, the character in the first verse escaped the same southwestern state, Arizona. On January 9, as that verse developed, Paul sang on a few occasions “I left my home in Arizona.” Subsequently, including on January 13, he toggled between “Northern Arizona” and “Tucson, Arizona” as the point of departure. (Tucson is on the southern end of the state, for those unfamiliar.)

After one of the run-throughs, John fact-checked the lyric.

John: Is Tucson in Arizona?
Paul: It’s where they make “[The] High Chaparral.”

January 13, 1969, BBC-2 listings

The American Western was a fixture on BBC-2, broadcast Monday nights, so it made for an obvious benchmark. More relevant to Paul, the second-largest city in the state was the former home of his girlfriend, who studied art history at the main Tucson campus of University of Arizona. Linda’s first child, Heather, was born in Tucson in 1962.

(Paul’s affiliation with that area was only just beginning: A decade after these sessions, the McCartneys purchased a ranch in Tucson.)

Just across Arizona’s western border lies the Golden State, and the line “California grass” predated most of the lyrics in “Get Back” as Paul sang it at the song’s origin on January 7. But the California reference wasn’t finalized, and this led them to work on the what and why of the lyric.

“Joey ran away from his home in Arizona,” Mal said, searching for a line.

Paul: Looking for a … something to last? … Looking for a what? What is it? Looking for a home to last …
Mal: Looking for a love to last?
Paul: Something like that, yeah.

Ringo played the long game, approaching the title of his 1975 greatest hits compilation with “blast from the past.” (This scene, editied, was featured prominently in the official trailer for Get Back.)

Mal jumped off the suggestion and proposed both “looking for his blasted past” and “trying to escape his past.”

At the end of the day, Paul ultimately settled on “looking for the greener grass,” which comes off a little boilerplate and lazy, especially when he already had the more evocative “California grass” lyric in his back pocket for the time being. Paul was sure to this point, however, that he “had to be a loner,” with that lyric, also dated to January 7, remaining in the song today.

Upon the conclusion of the session, Paul settled on the first verse as such:

Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona, looking for the greener grass
Joey said you had to be a loner, but he knew it couldn’t last

“Leave that verse, exactly as it is,” he told Mal. “And next time it might be better.”

Throughout this 30-minute sprint working on “Get Back”, the power trio thrashed at full throttle. Like their jams following George’s walkout the previous Friday, they’re edgy and loose. Paul and John often share lead vocals, singing in unison.

With the Beatles’ lead guitarist 200 miles northwest, Paul appointed John for a spontaneous solo. He replied with something rudimentary, but the assignment stuck — the solo remained John’s own through the song’s final performance on the roof.

Even with the song unfinished in so many parts and rushing through a brief window this afternoon, Paul remained characteristically mercurial, criticizing Ringo’s drum outro (“you’re doing a bit too long on those breaks”), vocalizing exactly how he wanted it to sound and offering specific instructions.

“So once you go on to the top tom-tom it’s like four from there on,” instructed Paul.

For a band highly conscious of poor focus and squandered studio time — a week earlier, Paul complained, “I think we do waste, physically, waste a lot of time, the four of us together” — this concentrated “Get Back” session was a very efficient use of time. Whether it was because there was one less cook in the lunchroom or a general understanding the three of them had their own reasons to wail, this particular afternoon was not squandered.

Satisfied with their progress, Paul called it a wrap.

“OK, and we’ll go home now,” he said. “We’ll come in tomorrow and try to do a bit more.” They settled on an 11 a.m.-ish Tuesday reunion in the studio.

But was that aspirational? After all, citing the Twickenham facilities crew, Michael said Apple Films head Denis O’Dell “canceled all his stuff for the show.” That decision, made off screen, set off an obvious chain reaction.

Paul: The [show scheduled for January] 18th should be canceled. So we have to be flexible, we’re going to have to be very flexible now. The 18th today has changed to the 19th, cause we lost a day today. Tomorrow it will change to the 20th. The day after it’ll change to the 21st. If George comes back, put it back a full week.

MLH: I think to stay flexible is important.

John stuck an optimistic tone to close out the day in another sequence captured in Get Back. “I’m leaving my favorite guitar here as a sign,” he promised. Paul meanwhile brandished his Hofner bass, replete with the setlist from their final show.

As Paul read song names for the cameras, nobody was certain if that artifact would remain the setlist from the Beatles final live performance. A token from John may not be good enough, and the other Beatles didn’t have time to hang a sign on George.

The new Beatles show would now be pushed to about two weeks out from January 13. While the songs were gradually taking shape, it was a concert that still lacked form otherwise. But even as the producer was canceling “all his stuff,” Michael said in the closing moments of the day’s tapes, “I think at some point we need to talk conceptually about the show.“

With the future fuzzy and Michael clearly feeling the pressure, Paul played for the cameras.

“So I’d like to say to the cast of this whole production, good night, and thank you very much for having us, it’s been wonderful working with you. ‘Cause I know it’s been wonderful working with me, but it’s been wonderful working with you too.”

“Do you think this will help my movie career or not?” Michael asked.

“You know you need this kind of traumatic event,” Paul replied.

***

The Beatles lost a day, but January 13, 1969, wasn’t a lost day. A Beatles ‘69 Comeback Special clearly required George’s participation — otherwise, why put the show off any longer? — but the other Beatles proved they could at least cover the gaps, produce and adapt in his absence. The attention to the lyrics, John’s guitar solo assignment, the care paid to the music are all proof.

Paul’s Monday was exhausting and cathartic. As the workday began, he described the failure to lure George back into the band, detailed the difficulties of his songwriting partnership with John and shared a vision for the breakup of the Beatles. In the lunchroom, the band’s interpersonal relationships were laid more bare in a presumed private setting. And the day at the office ended with a concentrated, successful songwriting session.

The Beatles — minus George and plus Mal and Yoko — at work on January 13. (Photo by Ethan Russell)

John’s day played out differently. We can sketch a scenario in which he probably slept in and deliberately left the phone off the hook — this was when “telephone’s engaged” prior to the “and then there were two” moment — before dragging himself with Yoko to Twickenham in time for the lunchroom discussion. It wouldn’t be any sort of revelation to say drugs may have been involved in his day. In front of the cameras, in the visual we see in 2021’s Get Back, John didn’t look like he was entirely there. But, there he was.

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