Ten years after it was first released on CD, The Beatles have now released Let It Be… Naked digitally Here’s the story of how the album came together. Paul McCartney does the talking.

It’s January 1969 and the lunchtime traffic around London’s Savile Row has been brought to a standstill. John Lennon was struggling to recall the words for ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, George Harrison was warming his fingers around a cigarette and the local constabulary were doing their best to pull the power. Derek Taylor later referred to The Beatles as the ‘greatest romance of the 20^th century’, and here they were amid the rooftops giving their final concert. As history shows, the band played a blinder, which was captured in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s cinema verite Let It Be.

The soundtrack of the same name, when originally released, had been described as a ‘cardboard tombstone’ for rock’s greatest band.

The Beatles began recording the Let It Be album with an aim to get back to their roots. John Lennon told producer George Martin ‘I don’t want any of your production rubbish on this one, I don’t want any overdubbing of voices, I don’t want any editing; everything has to be performed live like it used to be. It’s got to be real, man, it’s got to be honest.’

After the band finished recording/filming at Twickenham Studios and Saville Row’s Apple Studios, they walked away from the tapes under enormous tension. Returning to the sanctity of Abbey Road, they cut their swansong album of the same name.

With Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr at odds with Paul McCartney, John called in Phil Spector and asked him to ‘re-produce’ the Let It Be tapes for release; over twelve months after they’d downed tools on the project. The resulting album, which includes such Beatles’ classics as ‘Across The Universe’, ‘Get Back’ and ‘The Long And Winding Road’, was doused with Spector’s trademark strings and choirs. The bare original concept was a distant memory. McCartney wasn’t impressed with the results, but had seemingly lost his power of veto. On release, in 1970, Let It Be set about scaling charts all over the world.

McCartney always had a hankering for the group’s original vision. This year three Abbey Road engineers, Allan Rouse, Paul Hicks and Guy Massey, were handed The Beatles original pre-Spector tapes and instructed to mix The Beatles from scratch and re-create Let It Be as the foursome had originally intended.

“The music was great and I love the idea of releasing the record stripped down so that it’s just the band,” begins McCartney. “You get a very clear picture of how the band were singing and playing at that point in time (and) what a good little band this band was.”

Beatle enthusiasts have zealously collected Let It Be bootleg recordings over the years, which allowed us to hear the Beatles working up new material, chatting and trying out old rock n’ roll standards. The Anthology series permitted an official listen to a number of tracks free of Phil Spector’s excess. Let It Be … Naked grew out of a chance trans-Atlantic flight that McCartney shared with Lindsay-Hogg.

“I realized that the music in the film is unadorned, or sort of ‘naked’ as I was calling it… without the overdubs that Spector had been brought in to do.”

“The original album was OK; I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it.  I had been listening to the original mixes without any of the overdubs, thinking ‘Wow! These are almost scary, it’s so bare’. I really liked it. I thought ‘this is the band, this is us, no frills, no artifice’.”

“I’ve always had a secret lingering love for those tapes and so, thinking if we were to ever release the film on DVD, then the soundtrack from that would be the original tapes. What I like about this (new version of the album) is that it’s pure. It has the energy that was in that studio, and the great thing about the remixed version is that with today’s technology it sounds better than ever. You’re in a clearer room with the guys. In the new mix I’m right there with John opposite me.”

Let It Be … Naked features one of John and Paul’ last genuine joint-efforts as songwriters, ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’. The Abbey Road engineers created a new version of the song by splicing together two separate takes. It might not hang with the band’s original ‘no overdubs’ ethos, but it sounds fantastic.

“I had a bit of a song that somewhere in the middle kind of ran out,” remembers McCartney, “and John had a bit of a song that started in the middle and then sort of ran out. We’d joined fragments together with ‘A Day In The Life’. So with ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, I set up the song with (sings) ‘I’ve got a feeling, a feeling deep inside…’ and then John came in with ‘Everybody had a good year…’ I think the match of the two was very successful.”

Let It Be … Naked also includes one of the first songs the duo wrote as errant schoolboys, ‘One After 909’. The tune had been originally been auditioned for George Martin around the time of their first or second album. Mike McCartney had pestered The Beatles to record it, though Paul originally thought it too ‘unsophisticated’.

“That was one of the very first things that John and I had ever written in the parlour of 20 Forthlin Road, where I lived with my Dad and brother,” he admits. “We started it as a kind of country bluesy thing. (That song) was something of a bond between us. It was our childhood coming back to us; it was a sort of raw energy from our youth. It was always a friendly song, because we were great mates when we’d written it and I think it reminded us of those teenage years. It was a great joy to sing it for both of us, because it took us back. It took us away from all the pressures, the high profile life we’d been leading as very famous Beatles.”

The title track came to McCartney after a dream about his late mother Mary. One of the original bonds between Lennon and McCartney was that they’d both lost their mothers tragically young.

“’Around the time of Let It Be,” he continues we were all getting a little crazy and I’d gone to bed one night and had a dream about my Mum, Mary, and she said ‘Don’t worry, it’s all going to be OK; let it be’. She was very sort of calming and I woke up thinking ‘I feel better about things now’. I thought ‘What did she say? That’s a nice phrase, it’s got to be a song’. So I literally started working on the song… ‘When I find myself in times of trouble mother Mary comes to me’, realizing at the time that some people would take it as a double meaning, mother Mary being The Virgin Mary.”

As well as capturing the recording of an album, Lindsay-Hogg’s film also caught the band ‘breaking-up’. Tensions were high, and the strain on The Beatles was evident. George Harrison stormed out of a session after a row with McCartney, and threatened to quit the band.

“The filming did contribute to the break-up,” continues McCartney. “At the same time we had some great times; but it’s the opposite of a holiday where you forget the rain and remember the great bits you had. In this scenario I think we all just remembered all the bad times because they were caught on camera.”

“There were arguments, but there were lots of friendly moments. There was a lot of emotion, there was a lot of love going between us all, but it was in a new way, it was in quite an intense way that this was all happening, which wasn’t the worst thing for the music. It’s actually very good for art, you work it out and it adds an edge that you don’t necessarily get when you’re happy.”

Relations between the band eased when George suggested bringing in Ray Charles’ then keyboard whiz Billy Preston in to jam and record. The relationship between Preston and the band had begun years before during their apprenticeship in Hamburg.

“When Billy came onboard,” beams McCartney, “we all got a bit more civilized and it was like ‘We wouldn’t want to do that in front of Billy, it wouldn’t be nice’. So he was very helpful; he just made us be nicer to each other and consequently we had a bit more fun on the whole thing. He was a very helpful force to have onboard – plus he was a fantastic musician and he lifted us. Just the little solos he would put in; you’d be like ‘Wow! Yeah, this is great!’ He really helped the whole project along.”

The pay off for the band, and their fans, was the rooftop concert on January 30. Featured on Let It Be … Naked, for the first time, is John’s inspired second take of ‘Don’t Let Me Down’. The production team has managed to source a performance directly from the tape that adds to the emotional and sonic weight of the finished album.

“It was great,” recalls McCartney of the final gig. “It was an open-air concert and it was very freeing. We’d been working on this music and we knew it needed some kind of pay-off. We just got up there, sang all the songs as we’d rehearsed them and then the word just filtered through ‘The police have told us to stop it’. And we said ‘Well, it’s too bad; we’ve started, we’re not hurting anyone. We’re only going to be here an hour or so, so we don’t really think it’s the end of the world’. So we said ‘Let them catch us’”.

The next day, the group reconvened downstairs to record ‘The Long And Winding Road’. Let It Be … Naked includes, for the first time on disc, that very take.

The Let It Be film has disappeared from film festivals and television long ago. Word is that The Beatles’ company Apple is now sifting through hundreds of hours of tapes in the hope of an eventual DVD release. The music, as again heard on Let It Be … Naked, still shines like a beacon.

“The making of the film and the tensions involved around then will always be a bit of a sour memory,” concludes McCartney. “I don’t think there’s any route around that – it was my favourite group in the world breaking up and I can’t say that was easy to deal with or that it’s a great memory. But, what is great and what is a great memory is the music we made. And now, in its unadorned form, there it is exactly as we made it. So, that’s a beautiful memory and the shining glory of the events that took place was the music.”

Let It Be… Naked is on iTunes now.

Sean Sennett