Let It Be Has Been Restored and Rereleased

In 1970, it looked like a portrait of the Beatles breaking up. Now it looks like the first rock 'n' roll reality show -- and a vision of them coming together.

Variety
May 7, 2024 6:01am PT

first saw Let It Be when I was a kid, in the summer of 1970, just weeks after it was released. My family was coming off one of those "Vacation" road trips. During the miles of driving, we listened to Top 40 radio, which meant that several times a day I got to hear "The Long and Winding Road," which I thought was the most beautiful song I'd ever heard. (To this day, I adore the Phil Spector heavenly-choir orchestral-layer-cake version and have never understood Paul McCartney's aversion to it.) I knew that the first thing I was going to do when we got back was go to see Let It Be -- and, in fact, it was the first Beatles thing I was old enough to connect to as it was happening.

The Beatles, in their early years, looked alike (same hair and suits, same lemon-shaped smiles), and even after they'd entered the psychedelic zone with Revolver and Sgt. Pepper they dressed and coiffed themselves with a splashy coordinated harmony. They were unified. And that made a kind of supreme sense, since they were the larger-than-life pop avatars of love. They sang about love and made a mantra of it; love was the centrifugal force that held their music together. But Let It Be, starting with that plaintive shrug of a title (which seemed to be telling a planet's worth of fans that the dream was over), had a very different vibe.

Shot in 16mm-transferred-to-35mm, Michael Lindsay-Hogg's inside-the-recording-studio documentary was short and sweet (only 81 minutes long), but it was also dark, grainy, and desultory. The film caught the Beatles in several moments of tension (notably a tiff between Paul and George), but even when they were grooving together they appeared separate. They no longer looked alike (they seemed to be going to four different hippie hairdressers -- or, in the case of John Lennon, none at all). The songs were rough and jagged. The Beatles weren't shaggy lads anymore, they were men. And in their disparate grownup identities, they seemed to embody something about how the entire culture was fragmenting at the seams.

Let It Be ripped the mask of mythology off the Beatles. Arriving just a month after the group's official breakup, the movie seemed to be telling a grand story of dissolution. In A Hard Day's Night, the four of them had been like gods at play. And yes, they recorded the seamless and sublime Abbey Road after the raw and unfinished Let It Be. Yet in Let It Be, the faces of the Beatles now loomed up on screen as if they were ex-gods starring in the first rock 'n' roll reality show.

That, however, was then. When Peter Jackson plunged back into the 57 hours of footage that Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot for Let It Be and assembled it into The Beatles: Get Back" (2021), his extraordinary eight-hour documentary, Jackson's expanded epic revealed that the fabled January 1969 recording sessions were not the downer of legend. There were many moments that were funny, spirited, communal. That said, what of the original Let It Be? After the revelation of Get Back, would it still look like the morning-after hangover of the Beatles' saga?

The film has been out of circulation since the 1980s. It is now being re-released by Disney+ in a version restored by Jackson's team, using the same technological wizardry that made Get Back look and sound like a present-tense epiphany. The restoration allows Let It Be to be sharper, brighter, more alive, without betraying the original film. The early scenes shot in Twickenham Studios still give off that tinge of gloom. But only a tinge.

For me, though, the revelation of seeing Let It Be today, when everything about the Beatles is now ancient history, is that as you experience the movie anew (or for the very first time), it's not the myth of the Beatles that falls away. It's the myth of Let It Be. I now think it's one of the most joyful rock documentaries ever made.

What's changed? It's not merely the Jackson upgrade. It's that the Beatles, viewed with half a century's hindsight, no longer look so separate. Their identities remain separate -- by this point, they were locked into their own lives as complicated adults -- but what we now see, knowing all that in our bones, is the lingering, between-the-lines emotional profundity of the connection between them. We now feel how the music, every gloriously ragged note of it, arises out of their love for each other.

The movie has moments that entrance you, that make you swoon, that lift you into rock heaven. Like John dancing a waltz with Yoko to the lilting electric melancholy of "I Me Mine" (Yoko, throughout, looks so serenely supportive and engaged that the idea that she was an intrusive presence now seems nuts). Or the blissful fervor with which the Beatles lay into old chestnuts like "Shake, Rattle and Roll" (they still relish their past). Or the way "Two of Us" evolves from a wobbly ditty into a transcendent ode to brotherly love. Or the double dose of crackling confessional romantic vibrance, from John and Paul, of "Dig a Pony" and "I've Got a Feeling." Or Paul, more soulfully handsome than anyone in rock, doing his indelible gazing-into-the-camera rendition of the title track. Or the way the final rooftop concert, and the London bobbies' attempt to shut it down, plays as a compressed 15-minute parody of the entire counterculture '60s -- the hippies vs. the squares, except that in the Beatles' version there are no bad guys. The message of Let It Be is that even if you are separate, you can come together.

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Let It Be Is Now Streaming on Disney+
The Beatles documentary Let It Be premieres Wednesday (May 8) on Disney+.
Billboard
05/8/2024

For the first time in 50 years, Beatles fans will get to go inside the making of band's final album. Let It Be, the 1970 documentary helmed by Michael Lindsay- Hogg, arrives on Disney+ on Wednesday (May 8).

The documentary, restored by The Beatles: Get Back director Peter Jackson's production company, shares rare footage of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr from the recording studio to the Apple Corps' rooftop in London where the Fab Five wrote and recorded Let It Be and performed live for the last time as group.

"Let It Be was ready to go in October/November 1969, but it didn't come out until April 1970," Lindsay-Hogg recalled, according to Disney. "One month before its release, The Beatles officially broke up. And so the people went to see Let It Be with sadness in their hearts, thinking, 'I'll never see The Beatles together again. I will never have that joy again,' and it very much darkened the perception of the film."

"But, in fact, how often do you get to see artists of this stature working together to make what they hear in their heads into songs? And then you get to the roof, and you see their excitement, camaraderie, and sheer joy in playing together again as a group and know, as we do now, that it was the final time, and we view it with the full understanding of who they were and still are and a little poignancy. I was knocked out by what Peter [Jackson] was able to do with Get Back, using all the footage I'd shot 50 years previously."

"I'm absolutely thrilled that Michael's movie, Let It Be, has been restored and is finally being re-released after being unavailable for decades," said Jackson. "I was so lucky to have access to Michael's outtakes for Get Back, and I've always thought that Let It Be is needed to complete the Get Back story."

Let It Be is a Disney+ Original streaming exclusively for subscribers.

Watch the official trailer for Let It Be below.

https://youtu.be/sHxl6eDYLUs

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Watch The Beatles' new, restored video for Let It Be
The newly restored video features alternate camera angles of the track's recording that were rarely seen before
New Musical Express
10th May 2024

The Beatles have released a brand new restored video for Let It Be.

The video features clips from the newly released and restored 1970 film Let It Be, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and uses rarely-seen alternate camera angles of the Fab Four and Billy Preston as they were recording the song.

The meticulous restoration was done by Park Road Post Production from the original 16mm negative. According to the video's description on YouTube, it was "filmed on the day after the January 30 rooftop concert" in 1969.

The Let It Be film is now streaming on Disney+, marking the first time the documentary has been available in over 50 years.

In a four-star review of the film, NME shared: "There may not be a more punk rock bit of film on earth than George being told the police were on the roof to shut them down, and casually turning his amp back on. For that alone, for all its whitewashing and line-toeing, Let It Be remains a staggering watch."

The documentary was first released in cinemas 54 years ago and has been difficult to obtain since primarily because the original master tapes were stolen from Apple Corps shortly after the film was made.

Speaking in a Q&A hosted by former Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman, Jonathan Clyde, producer of the film and director of production at Apple Corps, explained how Peter Jackson's Get Back documentary "became the trigger that liberated Let It Be to be re-released".

"Compared with the transcripts of the old version you're hearing so much more, there's more dialogue, there's more snippets of music and the picture restoration is extraordinary," he said.

The producer also revealed that The Beatles' iconic rooftop gig at Apple Corps at Savile Row almost never got off the ground.

"They'd set up the day before the gig, all the crew were ready, all the equipment was there and the band were like, 'Yeah not today' and Michael Lindsay-Hogg was pulling his hair out because he as the director had to find some climax to this, this period of filming," said Clyde. "He felt some responsibility."

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The Beatles' iconic rooftop gig in 1970 'Let It Be' documentary "almost didn't happen"
"They'd set up the day before the gig, all the crew were ready, all the equipment was there and the band were like, 'Yeah not today'"
New Musical Express
9th May 2024

The restored version of The Beatles' classic 1970 documentary film Let It Be was premiered in London earlier this week (May 7), before arriving on Disney+. Speaking at the press launch, creators explained how one of the most vital scenes - and significant moments in music history - never happened.

The film was screened in front of an audience at the Curzon Mayfair which included original recording engineer Glyn Johns and Giles Martin (son of legendary Beatles producer George Martin, who remixed the music in Let It Be), Louis Theroux, James Bay, The Lightning Seeds frontman Ian Broudie and Captain America and Indiana Jones actor Toby Jones.

The documentary, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was first released in cinemas 54 years ago and has been difficult to obtain since primarily because the original master tapes were stolen from Apple Corps shortly after the film was made.

Speaking in a Q&A hosted by former Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman, Jonathan Clyde producer of the film and director of production at Apple Corps, said: "When we first started talking about [restoring] it with [head of Apple Corps] Neil Aspinall in 2000, he said rather unenthusiastically, 'I suppose we'd better do something about Let It Be.

"But the problem was that the master sound, that's 450 to 500, 15 minute reels of master sound from the 20-odd days of shooting, had been stolen from Apple [Corps] in the early '70s."

He continued: "So in truth, there was not a lot we could do except whoever it was who pilched them was licensing them to bootleggers who were then bootlegging vinyl and CD box sets. So we thought maybe we could take the CDs and try and sync the rushes but that didn't really work, the sound and the picture drifted. Then in 2003, Neil got a call from the City of London police saying 'We might have some property of yours we found in a warehouse in Holland'. So we got the sound back."

Clyde then explained how Peter Jackson's Get Back documentary "became the trigger that liberated Let It Be to be re-released". "Compared with the transcripts of the old version you're hearing so much more, there's more dialogue, there's more snippets of music and the picture restoration is extraordinary," he said.

According to Clyde, when The Beatles made "The White Album", they were all recording in separate studios and the sessions seen in Let It Be at London's Twickenham Film Studios was the band "attempting to reconnect with each other".

"They were like, 'Come on, let's get back to where we started, to where we belong, where we used to play The Cavern or play in Hamburg, let's try and rekindle that'," he explained. "They really got themselves in sync with each other personally and musically and they just kept recording the album that came from that, which turned out to be Abbey Road."

However, matters went downhill from there.

"In the background there was trouble at mill, a decline arrived and that drove a wedge between Paul [McCartney], John [Lennon] and George [Harrison] and Ringo [Starr],"said Clyde.

"It was then in April of 1970 that it was announced officially that they were breaking up. And then the film and the album which had now been reproduced by Phil Spector had come out together as a sort of odd post script to the end of their career. So they didn't have a great love for Let It Be because it was associated with all the troubles [within the band]."

The producer also revealed that The Beatles' iconic rooftop gig at Apple Corps at Savile Row almost never got off the ground.

Guardian columnist John Harris, who previously compiled 120 hours-worth of audio recordings that were made during the sessions in January 1969 into a book of The Beatles: Get Back, added: "It kind of is a happy ending in the sense that they made it on to the roof. It was touch and go. The story is that the four of them until the evening before, George said he didn't wanna do it and there was general scepticism.

"They get to the door out on the roof and they stand there and John says: 'Fuck it' and out they came. It really beautifully in a modestly spectacular wayit's not about pyrotechnics, it's about what great musicians they were, it's about London at the time as well."

When asked about the band splitting, Clyde concluded: "At some point they would have broken up. They were the first big band to break up and this was shocking at the time. It's not as shocking now because big bands break up all the time, it's natural.

"They'd sort of outgrown The Beatles in a strange way and it affected their relationships for a few years but then it all healed over."

The restored version of Let It Be is now streaming on Disney+.