TV Review – 10 Things About Get Back

Getting Beaten Up in Manila

1. Mal

Practically the first thing you see when you put on Get Back is Malcolm ‘Mal’ Evans. He’s the beefy guy in the massive specs handling the Beatles’ equipment that look like toys in his hands. He’s also the only one who still has a Beatles haircut.

Mal had been with them throughout the crazy years, so much so there’s a version of him in the film A Hard Day’s Night played by John Junkin in the ‘dim but good hearted’ style you might recognise from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

In Get Back, Mal is definitely not a mouse, although he does frequently scurry into the shadows when he’s not required. A former bouncer at the Cavern club, Mal is a typical Road Manager, or ‘roadie’ as they became known; a hulk able to do everything from lifting up the speakers of a PA system to pushing back an army of schoolchildren who may rip apart the guys who are paying your per diems.

But even Mal looks utterly bewildered when Paul McCartney asks him to get a hammer and anvil. It’s something that might perplex the Mals of any era, and sadly we don’t see exactly how he got such items. But Mal is nothing if not a loyal servant and he does indeed manage to source an anvil, and his delight in being asked to ‘play’ it is one of the highlights of Get Back. A shame it’s the truly terrible Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.

Mal comes across as a bit slow, which only increases the shock when you realise it’s he who wrote down all the lyrics to the songs as they are being written. Remember all those ‘handwritten lyrics’ to Beatles songs that were frequently sold for millions at auction? It’s likely they were all written by Mal, which might devalue them a tad. And the bigger shock is, as he’s writing them, he’s suggesting ideas for the next line. Every Lennon/McCartney and Harrisong would be the subject of massive lawsuits were Evans still alive, whether he wanted them or not.

2. Michael

The director of what was then Let It Be, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, might not be a household name but his story is fascinating. As a young man he was told he was the illegitimate son of Orson Welles. When you see one of his many appearances in front of the camera, smoking a cigar and talking in a strangely familiar posh American accent, you will hear this and immediately think, ‘oh, that makes sense’.

It’s probably just coincidence that at one point, the fab four break into the Theme to The Third Man. After all, it was one of the many things they regularly used to play in the clubs of Hamburg and Liverpool before they were famous.

Lindsay-Hogg never quite hit the bigtime of his compatriot and fellow Beatles archiver Richard Lester. Prior to Get Back he was famous for making ‘music promos’, before such things really existed. The Beatles had known him for years as he directed the Paperback Writer/Rain promos.

It’s clear he knows them well as he can be very short with them. The first thing he does is get them on a 9-5 (well, more like 10-6) schedule, something which they hadn’t done for many years by this point. Which is why they look supremely tired all the time. The first thing he does on film is to tell them all to turn down their amps. 

He’s also wonderfully disdainful of some of their barmier ideas. Constant talk of the gig they’re supposedly rehearsing for leads Paul down some daft avenues. At one point, he wants the gig to somehow cause a riot. “Well,” says Lindsay-Hogg, barely containing his contempt, “if you want to get beaten up, play the concert in Manila.”

Afterwards, he stuck to directing TV movies and series, most famously the TV version of Brideshead Revisited. Like a lot of people drawn into the Beatles’ orbit, he was never quite able to escape them. One of the last TV films he made was an obscure thing called Two Of Us, a fictionalised account of a meeting between John Lennon and Paul McCartney in New York long after they’d fallen out in the seventies. It stars Jared Harris as John and Aidan Quinn as Paul.

3. John

“Lennon’s late again,” mutters Paul at one point, before asserting his newfound managerial status. “Thinking of getting rid of him.” He doesn’t mean it folks and, because of the format of Get Back, we can see that John and Yoko are the last to arrive every single day.

John also doesn’t have any songs. He arrives with precisely two pre-written tunes, Don’t Let Me Down and Dig A Pony, both about Yoko as all his songs were at that point, and doesn’t feel inclined to write any more. At one point, Paul tries to confront him about this, only for them both to be distracted by a very obvious boom microphone that circles ominously above their heads like the world’s least surreptitious wiretap.

Paul’s frustration here is partly because he wants the cameras to see them writing stuff as we watch. Paul, as his want, demonstrates by writing Get Back before our very eyes. George gamely tries by arriving with the newly minted I, Me, Mine and trying out Old Brown Shoe. John writes absolutely nothing whilst the cameras are rolling except the deeply shit Dig It.

Partly explaining John’s lack of output is, like many a great painter, Lennon had a series of ‘periods’ and Get Back takes place in his ‘heroin period’, not that you’d know it by looking at him. He’s very chipper for a junkie.

4. Heather

It’s long been said that Yoko Ono was a ‘disruption’ to the Beatles method. George Harrison, for one, had nothing nice to say about her throughout the seventies. Sadly for those who hate female Japanese artists, Yoko does absolutely nothing. Sometimes she reads. Sometimes she knits. She just sits there by John’s side occasionally whispering something to him, which, admittedly, was probably unnerving.

(It’s tempting to try to picture what Yoko thought she was doing at the time. She probably thought this was Art. It’s also fairly obvious that Peter Jackson has wisely minimised her contributions.)

But if you want disruption, let me introduce you to an eight year old atom bomb called Heather See. Paul McCartney has just met and fallen heavily for Linda and she already has a daughter, who she brings along to one of their final ‘rehearsal’ sessions.

“I’m a tame tiger. Meow.” Heather arrives like she’s eaten all the sugar in the world. It may be the editing but it looks like she never once had a nap and I doubt the Beatles got anything at all done that day.

5. Mo

The best part of The Rooftop Concert is the end and the polite applause that greets it. Maureen Starkey, whose red plastic coat her husband had been wearing whilst guarding against the January cold, tries her best to do the sort of teenage scream that once greeted this band wherever they went. Instead, no doubt due to the immense amount of cigarettes everybody smoked at the time, it comes out as a hoarse croak. Paul McCartney smiles at this and says, “thanks Mo”.

John Lennon, oblivious to this as he was most things at the time, goes into his admittedly very good “I want to say thank you on behalf of the group” speech.

There’s an earlier sequence which would never have made the final cut if two members of the band were still alive. Paul has been watching his home movies and is talking of their time in Rishikesh with the Maharishi, less than a year before. At the time John was with Cynthia, Paul was with Jane Asher, George was with Pattie Boyd and Ringo was with Maureen.

By the time of Get Back, both John and Paul had moved on to new women, whilst George is in the middle of divorcing Pattie. Ringo would stick with Maureen for a bit before eventually dumping her for a younger model, as was the fashion at the time.

6. Kevin

Who the fuck is Kevin? The ginger headed stepchild just appears out of nowhere, seemingly replacing Mal as main roadie over the course of the January that Get Back takes place in. Maybe it’s another Beatles innovation that we didn’t catch at the time, specialised roadies where every instrument would have their own ‘tech.’ rather than just letting Mal do everything.

I thought I knew all those who hung around in the Beatles’ orbit. I know who Neil Aspinall is and how he fathered a child with Pete Best’s mum. I know who Magic Alex is, alluded to here and there and just on the verge of being expelled from the inner circle.

I also know who Dick James is, who also visits. He’s the owner of Northern Songs, Lennon and McCartney’s publisher, and barely tolerated by Paul and not at all by John. James, sensing the atmosphere on the sessions, will sell Northern Songs soon enough. But if you want awkward cameos, here’s Peter Sellers, about to shoot a film in the studio they’re in with Ringo and proving that he really needs Spike Milligan to feed him some lines.

7. George

1969 is not a happy time to be 26 year old George Harrison. He’s splitting up with Pattie, losing her to Eric Clapton, who he strangely can’t stop singing the praises of throughout Get Back. As a result, his mood is all over the place, effervescent one moment, utterly miserable the next. No wonder Paul has a job of trying to understand him.

It all comes to a head of course. “I think I’ll be leaving the band now,” he says. “When?” asks a baffled John. “Now,” repeats a suspiciously cheerful George and walks out. The cameras don’t catch this moment, of course, but they catch the aftermath, everyone utterly shellshocked at what’s happened.

Even John, although he can’t help himself. “If he’s not back by Wednesday we get Clapton in.” I don’t think it’s a good idea to have Eric replacing George in another aspect of his life, John, although maybe he didn’t know what was happening at the time. Or was indifferent.

George comes back, of course, although you have to admire his confidence. Nobody willingly left bands in those days, especially not million-selling bands like the Beatles. You’d have to be supremely useless on a Syd Barrett/Brian Jones level. George had no inkling that he would have a successful solo career; for him, leaving was more likely the end of his livelihood.

He’s not helped, of course, by having no finished songs. He arrives with All Things Must Pass but can’t quite finish it, despite enthusiasm from the rest. There’s also this song called Something but he can’t finish the first line; he keeps saying “attracts me like a cauliflower” whilst everybody watching Get Back is screaming at the screen “attracts me like no other”!

Meanwhile, Paul is writing songs on the spot and indulging in ill-advised piffle like the Immigration Song. No wonder he drove them all mad. But George taking his massive hair elsewhere planted the seed, and it was within a year that John would announce to the rest that he wanted a divorce.

8. Yoko and Linda

David Hepworth once said that no live cameras ever catch genuinely unpredictable moments. Football uses millions of cameras, each covering every aspect of the game, but there’s no clear footage of that Divock Origi goal against Barcelona in the Champions League semi-final in 2019 (passim) because no-one expected Trent Alexander-Arnold to take the corner early.

So it is here, where the cameras miss the bit where George leaves, despite seemingly catching every mug of tea drunk and every slice of toast eaten, in those far off days before bands discovered catering.

There’s an awkward disconnect throughout Get Back between visuals and sound. For a start, they recorded far more audio than there is on film and the need to include bits of dialogue that are not on film – for example, George leaving the band – has to have some kind of visual aspect to it, which just means you can’t work out why the words aren’t matching the visuals.

There’s also the disconnect between the footage we can see and what we can hear. Peter Jackson has talked about inventing a filter on the sound that eliminates the various drums and guitars the band were playing when they were talking about stuff they didn’t want to be in the film. Mostly this involves them talking about people like Allen Klein and some of George’s more inane spiritual nonsense.

Or it’s genuinely funny stuff not meant for general consumption. “I’ve decided to wear continuity clothes,” announces John on arrival one day, referring to him wearing the same outfit day after day, little knowing he wasn’t appearing in a film but reality TV. “With moss growing under the arms.”

Another thing that probably wasn’t meant for general consumption is, just before going for a take on a song, John grabbing the microphone and/or camera and announcing down the lens: “Ladies and gentlemen, your hosts for the evening, the Rolling Stones,” no matter what the song. He’s being annoyingly self-reverential, as this was his line from the Rolling Stones’s film Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, filmed the year before which wouldn’t be released for many years. The director of Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus? Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

(If anyone is thinking of some kind of follow-up to Get Back, the raw footage of Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus would be fascinating)

Despite this, there’s one piece of dialogue that hasn’t been recovered in this way. On the day of Heather’s visit, Linda can be seen in conversation with Yoko. Do we hear this conversation? Do we heck.

9. Ray and Ray

There’s a character in a Douglas Adams novel who so doesn’t want to be in a particular situation, he wills himself out of existence. This character is based on the policemen who arrive to shut down the Beatles’ final performance.

The actual policemen who arrive at Savile Row that day don’t do anything so extreme but they’re clearly not happy to be there. The first two to arrive are both called Ray and are baffled as to what’s going on – shouldn’t the band be in a soundproof room or something? – little knowing that disturbing the peace is the closest Paul has gotten to getting beaten up in Manila.

It’s astounding how quickly the rooftop concert causes such disruption. The police arrive with “30 complaints” minutes after the ‘concert’ begins. The owner of the building opposite is absolutely furious that this is happening. Even people being interviewed on the street react blithely to what’s happening. “Oh, it’s the Beatles? Yeah, I like them.”

Looked through history’s prism, the rooftop concert is an epochal event, something that would inspire a million parodies and Douglas Adams’ imagination. But at the time, there were no such things as epochal events. In the sixties, the nearest we in this country got was England winning the World Cup and a lot of people thought that would happen every four years from then on. Once in a lifetime moments just didn’t happen.

So both Rays had no problem shutting down the Beatles’ last performance. After all, who honestly thought it would be the last time they ever performed together?

10. Phil

It’s generally agreed that Let It Be is by far the Beatles’ worst album, yet Get Back paints such a rosy picture of the band. What happened? In a word: John.

Let It Be, the film, took a while to be edited and, in the time it took, the band made Abbey Road, this time at their usual pace without everyone having to be in the studio at the same time. Then John said he was leaving the band, which was kept quiet until the film was finished.

By the time they got back to the film, everyone hated each other. They’d fallen out over Allen Klein and one act of revenge on Paul that John perpetrated was to make Let It Be, the album, shit. He sent the tapes of Paul’s songs Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road to Phil Spector with the remit to do anything with them, to which Spector went typically over the top. 

John also included rubbish like Dig It and Maggie Mae as well as little studio snippets such as him saying ‘now we’d like to play hark the angels sing’ before the unashamedly religious Let It Be, the song. It would be many years before Paul corrected this act of sabotage with Let It Be Naked but by then the damage was done.

I’ve watched Get Back many times now and will probably keep watching it until I get thoroughly sick of it. It’s a perfect show for dipping into when you can’t sleep and just need to turn your brain off. You can start it from anywhere in its eight hour duration. Although it’s presented as reality TV with a deadline, there is no pressure really. It’s more of a collage of things than an episode of Big Brother. You don’t keep watching to see what happens next as you already know. They split up. But it’s nice to see them together before that happens.

TV Review – Eight More Things about Get Back ->