by Ken McNab
Decades later, in his first-ever interview on the subject, McBroom admitted he did not play hard to get. He laughed down the line from Los Angeles, telling me, ‘I can’t remember what we agreed, but I do know I sold myself very inexpensively. I never heard any more until about a week later during a lunch break on The Magic Christian. Peter Sellers said would I mind popping into his trailer for a minute? So I went over to his dressing room and Derek Taylor was there with all four Beatles. Of course, I knew Ringo, and Derek then introduced me to John, Paul and George.
‘And I can tell you this, it was a mind-numbing moment to see all four of them right in front of you. We talked about what we could do if we did a photoshoot. It was not meant to be mean-spirited but at some point Paul McCartney said, “This is all really wonderful but we have had so many bad experiences with photographers ripping us off and releasing unauthorised pictures. I have to ask, how can we be sure that you are not going to do that?”
McBroom continued: ‘I did not have an answer. There I am being interrogated by all four Beatles. Peter Sellers then came up behind me and said, “Boys, I would trust Bruce with my wallet.” And that is how I got the job. Peter just defused the whole situation in a way that was so characteristic of him.
‘The thing was that as far as The Beatles were concerned Peter was the big star. They really idolised him, having grown up listening to radio shows like The Goons. That was the backstory but Derek explained to me that there had been a lot of bad press recently and rumours were rife that the boys were breaking up. Which he said, of course, was untrue. So he told me they needed group photographs to rebuff those rumours. They wanted happy photos to put out to disprove the fact: they were all here, they were all mates and they would be continuing to work together. Little did I know or most of the world know they were already at odds. So that was the thrust of my assignment – to come up with happy photos of The Beatles together.’
On 9 April, Bruce met the band at Twickenham where a sound stage had been set aside for the photoshoot. McCartney was accompanied by Linda, who shadowed Bruce with her own camera, a habit he found slightly irritating.
He recalled: ‘I didn’t get any art direction from anyone. There were no wardrobe people or make-up experts. I was mentally trying to figure out what to do so, like any photographer, I put up a white background and lit it so that when they came in we would be ready to shoot.
‘We made small talk before finally one of them said, “So, what do you want us to do?” So I said, “Why don’t you all go and stand on the white sheet?” That was all my direction. All the shots were those four guys arranging themselves without any direction from anyone else. They were talking and joking and they just seemed to have an understanding of each other, which I never experienced again with a group of people. I don’t want to say it was telepathic but you could feel how they reacted to each other.
‘The whole thing was very unprepared. And that is the way I like to take pictures, which is not to tell people what to do but to let it all happen organically. And that way you capture them much more naturally and that is what happened with The Beatles.’
After breaking for lunch, McBroom suggested some outdoor shots, so they headed down to the nearby Madingley Club beside the Thames, where Bruce shot several more rolls of film. Spotting a small rowing boat, Lennon mischievously suggested they all get in and start rowing.
‘In those days we were shooting still film, not digital,’ the photographer added. ‘I had been shooting colour but I wanted to shoot black and white the way I had done that morning. John was steering the boat back to its mooring and I called out to them, “Hey, guys, could you do that again?” And John said from a distance, “Look, people are always asking us to repeat ourselves but we never do. So, no, we won’t be doing that again.” And I totally got it. I suddenly realised why they hadn’t wanted to tour any more and why their music always had to progress.’
His final shots showed all four Beatles leaning insouciantly against Lennon’s white Rolls-Royce, though by this time boredom was clearly setting in.
‘I never detected any attitude between them during the time I spent with them,’ said McBroom. ‘In one of the final frames, McCartney is looking really glum but by then we had been at it for about four hours. Looking back at the pictures now, George Harrison looks a little detached from the rest, which may or may not have been significant. I got the impression that Paul was the spokesman for the group. George was very quiet. John was a free spirit. Ringo was a very zany, loose kind of guy. McCartney struck me as the businessman of the group but in a very nice way. It was a seminal moment in my career.’
For McBroom, it was mission accomplished. The Beatles loved his pictures, especially the moody black-and-white images taken at Twickenham, and immediately sanctioned their release to media outlets all over the world. He had managed to perfectly capture The Beatles in that twilight moment between finishing what would become Let It Be and starting what would become Abbey Road. And for an instant, the gossamer illusion of The Beatles as a working collective remained delicately preserved for an unsuspecting world.
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McBroom’s stellar images of four smiling Beatles could paper over the cracks but there was really only one way to disprove the lie that nails were being hammered into the band’s coffin and that was by releasing new music. Eight months had passed since the release of ‘Hey Jude’, the longest gap in the group’s studio history. The obvious solution was to record a single, but in the first few days of April neither Lennon nor McCartney was prepared to offer anything. Harrison had, of course, recorded several songs, including ‘Something,’ ‘Old Brown Shoe’ and ‘All Things Must Pass’. But the indifference shown to his material – their version of ‘All Things’ especially was shockingly contemptuous – by Lennon and McCartney still burned deep. Hard-bitten cynicism was hotwired into Harrison’s DNA. The quiet one was more often the droll one and that combination of mistrust and misanthropy was commonly woven into his songs. ‘Here Comes The Sun’, though, went to a more optimistic place. Still a work in progress, it had been sparked into life during a carefree, slightly guilty stroll round the manicured lawns at Eric Clapton’s house in Surrey sometime around the middle of April.
Harrison, of course, hated the business machinations of Apple more than any of The Beatles. For him, music had always provided an escape, either from school or from Beatlemania at its height. Songs such as the optimistic ‘Here Comes The Sun’, alongside a fully realised ‘Something’, would eventually see him finally get his due and lasting recognition as a songwriter of note.
He said: ‘ “Here Comes the Sun” was written at the time when Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: sign this and sign that. Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on for ever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to slag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote “Here Comes the Sun”.’
In Martin Scorsese’s 2011 documentary, Living in the Material World, Clapton recalled watching the song take shape in his friend’s hands. ‘It was one of those beautiful spring mornings. I think it was April, we were just walking around the garden with our guitars. I don’t do that, you know? This is what George brought to the situation. He was just a magical guy . . . we sat down at the bottom of the garden, looking out, and the sun was shining; it was a beautiful morning, and he began to sing the opening lines [to “Here Comes The Sun”] and I just watched this thing come to life.’
Back at Apple, meanwhile, Glyn Johns had been diligently sifting through the ‘Get Back’ tapes in an attempt to compile an album that would please everyone. At first listen, very few would pass Beatle quality control, but EMI were pressing hard for a radio-friendly 45.
Eventually, a compromise was reached: Lennon and McCartney agreed to release a single version of
Paul’s ‘Get Back’ on 11 April from the January tapes bracketed alongside Lennon’s fevered hymn to Yoko, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, perhaps his most notable contribution to the January sessions.
As was often the case, acetate copies of the new single had clandestinely been given to a few, select Radio 1 DJs a few days earlier – in this instance, John Peel and Alan Freeman. But when McCartney heard ‘Get Back’ on the airwaves for the first time, his ears pricked up with a perfectionist’s disapproval. It still didn’t sound right, so, on 7 April, he sat down with Johns at Olympic Studios until a new mix of the song was tweaked to his satisfaction.
The single version of ‘Get Back’/‘Don’t Let Me Down’ owed its existence to the back-to-basics concept that kickstarted the January sessions: no overdubs, no studio trickery, no compromises. But the song that flooded into record stores broke every one of those taboos. The finished version ended up as an amalgam of two takes from 27 and 28 January and differed from what would be the album version with the distinctive coda replacing Lennon’s quip – ‘thank you on behalf of the band’ – that would end the version on Let It Be.
‘Get Back’, The Beatles’ nineteenth single, was unexceptional but, powered by Starr’s inventive drumming, it became the first Beatles single to enter the UK charts at number one – a position it held for six weeks during a seventeen-week stay in the Top 20. In America, it hit the summit after two weeks, enabling the band to overtake Elvis Presley’s record of sixteen chart-toppers. It was also the first Beatles single to be released in proper stereo and the first to fully credit an outside musician. The song’s distinctive electronic keyboard solo ensured Billy Preston was given rightful commendation.
‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw my name out there,’ he would recall. ‘It was such an honour. I thought it was a good solo and I was just happy that they liked it. I wasn’t looking for any kind of validation, but I knew they liked it.’
Equally unusually, the country blues lead guitar was played by Lennon, who was forced to learn the chords during the time Harrison had gone AWOL in January. ‘Paul used to let you do a solo when he was feeling generous,’ he said later, somewhat disdainfully.
For all their recent business headaches, Lennon and McCartney had been reunited by the same musical forces that had shaped their friendship from the start. They had spent more time together in the first two weeks of April than at any time since the end of January.
On the afternoon of Monday, 14 April, they met at Paul’s house before heading to the EMI Studios for what was ostensibly a mixing session. McCartney immediately picked up on the excitement and impatience in Lennon’s voice. Lennon had a new song swirling around inside his head and he wanted to get it down on tape straightaway. The title of the first fully formed song he had written for weeks might have given McCartney serious pause for thought. ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko (Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy)’ was too self-serving in its title to be a Beatles song. To his credit, McCartney did not flinch as Lennon ran through the tune on an acoustic guitar as he scanned his partner’s handwritten lyrics. The last verse was incomplete so McCartney did what he always did with Lennon. He helped him finish it.
His only reservation concerned the words in parenthesis – an unnecessary provocation that he felt could inevitably resurrect the ‘We’re bigger than Jesus’ furore of three years earlier. Not to mention the line that, to press the point home, added: ‘They’re gonna crucify me.’
With no little sense of irony, McCartney brought up the subject of the chorus: ‘I said “Jesus Christ, you’re kidding, aren’t you? Someone really is going to get upset about it.” He said, “Yeah, but let’s do it.” I was a little worried for him because of the lyric but he was going through a lot of terrible things. He came around to my house, wanting to do it really quick. He said, “Let’s just you and me run over to the studio.” I said, “Oh, alright, I’ll play drums, I’ll play bass.” John played guitar. So we did it and stood back to see if the other guys would hate us for it, which I’m not sure about. They probably never forgave us. John was on heat, so to speak. He needed to record it so we just ran in and did it.’
A quick call ahead to Abbey Road ensured two other members of the studio team would be on hand to record the song, a candid piece of journalese about Lennon’s life over the past few weeks. George Martin and Geoff Emerick agreed to man the engineering boards alongside John Kurlander as second engineer.
Kurlander told me: ‘It was a strange session in the sense it was only John and Paul. At that point we didn’t know if it was an album track or what. But there was a lot of urgency about the whole thing. They were in Studio Three instead of Studio Two, which was where The Beatles generally recorded. But what I do remember about it was just the sheer sense of fun we all had. John was in a great mood and that always helped. Plus, it really was just the two of them, no wives and no distractions. It was great.’
Over eleven takes, Lennon and McCartney hammered the song into shape. Paul handled the drums, bass and piano parts while John looked after the lead guitar. McCartney also underpinned Lennon’s vocal with some lovely high harmonies to provide a call-and-response feel to the track. There was none of the forced laughter and awkward silences that punctuated the ‘Get Back’ sessions from January. For five hours, all the old antagonisms were pushed to one side. On one take, Lennon shouted up to the drum kit, ‘Go a little faster, Ringo,’ which brought the jokey reply, ‘Okay, George.’
Listening to the playbacks later, Lennon was delighted with the outcome. He said, ‘It’s like an old-time ballad. It’s the story of Yoko and I getting married, going to Paris, going to Amsterdam, all that. It’s “Johnny B. Paperback Writer”. The story came out that only Paul and I were on the record, but I wouldn’t have bothered publicising that. It doesn’t mean anything. It just so happened that there were only two of us there – George was abroad and Ringo was on the film and he couldn’t come that night. Because of that, it was a choice of either remixing or doing a new song – and you always go for doing a new one instead of fiddling about with an old one. It turned out well.’
George Martin, though, was perceptive enough to know he had just glimpsed the future. ‘It was hardly a Beatle track – yet it was a Beatle track,’ he said. ‘It was a kind of thin end of the wedge. John had already mentally left the group and I think that was just the beginning of it all.’ McCartney was equally pleased but for different reasons. As well as completing a funky track, which would be The Beatles’ next single, he felt he had reconnected with Lennon on a more personal level. He said, ‘It always amazed me how even though it was just the two of us how it sounded like The Beatles.’ Was there, he wondered silently, still hope for the band?
Any resentment Harrison and Starr may have felt over being excluded from ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’ was clearly not an issue. Two nights later, all four of them were back at Abbey Road for the first full band sessions in weeks, to polish Harrison’s ‘Old Brown Shoe’, which would become the B-side of ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’. Some minor work was also done on a backing track for ‘Something’, making it a Harrison-focused session, perhaps a guilty concession on the parts of Lennon and McCartney.
Enough common ground was found to agree a timetable for five more sessions for the rest of the month. Nothing too formal or rigid, more like a gentle push forward into a fragile and uncertain future. Some songs, such as Lennon’s searing proto-blues, ‘I Want You’, and McCartney’s Fifties pastiche, ‘Oh! Darling’, were, over the next twelve days or so, dusted off as the band breathed new life into that rarest of things: a track written by Starr with a little help from Harrison.
Whether by accident or design, ‘Octopus’s Garden’ continued the nautical whimsy of ‘Yellow Submarine’, the 1966 Revolver track that had cemented the drummer’s role as the Beatle most beloved by small children. Further work was also done on ‘Let It Be’.
George Martin would undoubtedly have been aware of the work going down in Studio Two and Studi
o Three but diplomatically stayed away. He still carried the bruises from his brusque demotion during the ‘Get Back’ sessions. Besides, it was manners to wait until you were asked. In truth, though, the band needed him now more than ever.
The White Album sessions had been tense, but at least there was an endgame. With ‘Get Back’, they had drifted listlessly from one unfinished track to the next. The finish line never seemed close. Now here they were, all four back in their allotted slots but still lacking the schoolmasterly discipline Martin brought.
In his absence, The Beatles largely produced themselves with a hive of EMI staffers acting as worker bees in the background. Prominent among them were John Kurlander and Jeff Jarrett who mainly filled the engineering roles. Both men would become instrumental in the band’s final recordings throughout 1969 but for now they had to adhere to the rules of ‘speak when you’re spoken to’.
Jarrett had worked at EMI Studios for a couple of years, helping out in particular with Pink Floyd, then a progressive young band from Cambridge. On 18 April, the day of the first run through for ‘Octopus’s Garden’, he was assigned his first Beatles sessions and sought some advice from George Martin.
‘I was really thrown in at the deep end,’ Jarrett told Beatles author Mark Lewisohn. ‘George informed me that he wouldn’t be available. I can’t remember word for word what he said to me but it was something like “There will be one Beatle there, fine. Two Beatles, great. Three Beatles, fantastic. But the minute the four of them are there, that is when the inexplicable charismatic thing happens, the special magic no one has been able to explain. It will be very friendly between you but you will be aware of this inexplicable presence.”
‘Sure enough, that’s the exact way it happened. I’ve never felt it in any other circumstances. It was the special chemistry of the four of them which nobody since has ever had.’
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On 10 April, ATV officially launched its bid for control of Northern Songs, firing the starting gun on three weeks of tempestuous and factional in-fighting that, perhaps more than anything, pulled The Beatles ever closer to destruction. At its heart lay the simmering business tensions between Lennon and McCartney that were finally brought to the boil by Klein’s Machiavellian manoeuvres.
