by Tony Barrell
Sunday evening saw footage of Cream themselves, in an Omnibus documentary directed by Tony Palmer that included part of their November 1968 farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall. The programme hailed the now-defunct group as a revolutionary and ground-breaking force in popular music. “What Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker have done,” said the narrator, “is to show the form of most pop music – eight-bar phrases, simple-minded harmonic progressions and nursery-rhyme lyrics – is ultimately unable to cope with the pent-up bitterness and musical aspirations of the young.” They had “almost single-handedly given pop a musical authority which only the deaf cannot acknowledge and only the ignorant cannot hear”.
Bassist and singer Jack Bruce talked so positively about Cream’s working methods that viewers might have wondered why they had called it a day: “The songs that we play are really unimportant: they’re just like jumping-off points for improvisation, and the only things that are set are the beginnings and endings of most of our things. In between, which can go on for ever, is just improvised, and we never know who’s going to take the lead and what’s going to happen next: it just happens depending on the atmosphere and the way we feel.”
Paul and George both watched the documentary (Ringo watched snatches, but was also channel-hopping to Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In on BBC2), and Jack Bruce’s delight in Cream’s musical freedom should have given them pause for thought. Here was a band with a strong musical rapport, which had nevertheless decided to split up. The Beatles, in the meantime, were plodding on despite an obvious lack of rapport of any kind.
On Monday, January 6, any hope that The Beatles might have emerged refreshed from the weekend dissipated quickly. Harrison arrived late, having suffered from insomnia during the night, and tried to interest his bandmates, unsuccessfully, with ‘Hear Me Lord’. Other new material was attempted, including ‘Two Of Us’, ‘Carry That Weight’ and Starr’s ‘Octopus’s Garden’ (the last two of which would eventually appear on their 1969 album, Abbey Road). They thrashed away at ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, tinkering with its rhythm and its lyrics without creating any noticeable improvement. They talked, jammed and noodled aimlessly, and lurched into a series of old songs, including ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’, ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ and even George Formby’s ‘Leaning On A Lamp-Post’.
More constructively, they spent some time actively seeking venue ideas for their anticipated live concert. They downed instruments around midday and went out on a scouting mission; however, they returned to the studio shortly afterwards with nothing decided. “I remember going to scout locations around Twickenham,” says Michael Lindsay-Hogg. “I don’t know whose idea that was, but if you take it that George and Ringo were slightly less enthusiastic about the idea of Tunisia, it might have been George who said, ‘If we’re going to do this, why don’t we get in the car and find somewhere to do it around here?’ A few of us got in a car and drove around, but it was a particularly unpromising place to play a big rock’n’roll concert.”
Denis O’Dell, head of Apple Films, had suggested another amphitheatre, this time in Tripoli, Libya, where he had enjoyed a performance by an Italian opera company years before. “Denis was around because he’d worked on a couple of their earlier movies,” says Michael, “and he would toss bits of meat into the cage, which were always tasty but not always practical, because he wasn’t there on a day-to-day basis. He’d chat a bit and then go off again. I think the amphitheatre that we’d all talked about was the one in Tunisia, not Libya.”
The Beatles discussed how inspiring the feedback from an audience would be, but George, remembering their previous concerts, was concerned that the audience might consist only of screaming young female Beatlemaniacs. Yoko Ono chipped in with a highly conceptual idea: that The Beatles perform to 20,000 empty seats, which would represent “the invisible, nameless everybody in the world”. Paul ran briefly with Yoko’s idea, suggesting that they play one concert to a real audience, and another to empty seats.
Their efforts to decide on a concert venue seemed to be going the same way as the rehearsals. Just as they would switch capriciously from one song to another, lacking the discipline to stick to their new numbers and work constructively on them, so they would also hop from one concert idea to another, never considering any of them in any depth before moving on.
And just as there were moments of tomfoolery during the music rehearsals, jokes would occasionally be thrown into conversations about possible gigs. That afternoon, Ringo suggested they play on a riverboat, as they did on the Mersey back in the early days. Paul raised the possibility of The Beatles playing in the nude, to which George added that it might be better if the audience were naked rather than the performers. When they returned to the subject later that day, Paul was advocating building an artificial set resembling the Colosseum in Rome, and having The Beatles come in together with some real, live lions.
“Ideas were flying round at a terrific rate in those days,” recalls Michael Lindsay-Hogg, “and they had all these ambitions and things they wanted to do. But at the same time, they were like people who’d been married a long time but didn’t want to stay together. There was a lot of activity in the air, and because they were The Beatles, like a kind of musical royalty, the big ideas seemed possible.”
The most infamous scene on that Monday – and it was a scene – occurred in a long discussion during a rehearsal of ‘Two Of Us’, when Paul was talking about the musical suggestions he was making to other members of the band. The scene is there for all to see in the Let It Be film. Perhaps unwisely, Paul brought up the 1968 ‘Hey Jude’ recording sessions to illustrate his point, recalling how he had vetoed a lead-guitar part that George had initially wanted to play between vocal phrases.
“I always hear myself annoying you,” Paul told George. “Look, I’m not trying to get you. I’m just saying, ‘Look, lads – the band – shall we do it like this?’”
“Look,” replied George, “I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it takes to please you, I’ll do it.”
George was evidently having more fun with his side project, the Apple musical he was writing with Derek Taylor. The Beatles’ press officer had officially announced the project to the media that day, and he and George were said to be working on it in the evenings at Apple and at Kinfauns. The main stage setting for the drama would be a recreation of Derek’s press office on the third storey of 3 Savile Row, with his desk as the centrepiece.The Beatles Book Monthly reported: “Since his office is reputed to have in it some of the prettiest and most mini-skirted (should that be LEAST?) birds in London, the setting sounds just right for a good-looking good-sounding musical!”
As Tuesday dawned and The Beatles awoke and readied themselves for another gruelling day in Twickenham, an impressive assortment of other VIPs prepared to assemble at Marlborough House, the grand brick mansion on the Mall in London. This was the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, involving the heads of state of 24 nations. Over the course of the next week, British premier Harold Wilson would rub shoulders with leaders such as Indira Gandhi of India, Pierre Trudeau of Canada and Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus and discuss international issues of the day. Topics debated inside the conference chamber included the problem of Rhodesia – whose majority black population were governed by Ian Smith’s government of exclusively white ministers – and immigration from Commonwealth countries into Britain. One subject that came up in various meetings outside the chamber was the Biafran crisis.
Enormous numbers of people were dying in this bitter conflict in West Africa. According to the Red Cross, at one point between 8,000 and 10,000 people were starving to death every day as a result of the Nigerian Civil War. In 1967, following a series of clashes between the different peoples of Nigeria, the eastern region had seceded from the country, forming the independent state of Biafra. The Nigerian government sent troops to recapture the territory, which was particularly rich in o
il. Fighting continued for many months, and the Nigerian Navy enforced a blockade, preventing Biafra from receiving food, medical supplies and weapons. The word Biafra was now synonymous with shocking images of starving children, and the subject would enter The Beatles’ conversation that day.
That morning at Twickenham found Paul back on the piano, trying out some new songs: ‘The Long And Winding Road’, which lacked a complete lyric at that stage; ‘Golden Slumbers’, a lullaby; and ‘Carry That Weight’, which seemed to anticipate the legacy the group would always bear. The last two songs would eventually appear on Abbey Road, and it’s interesting that on that Tuesday, Paul played ‘Carry That Weight’ immediately after ‘Golden Slumbers’, prefiguring the medley construction of the closing section of that album. Paul had been playing other pieces during the sessions that were also destined to become Abbey Road tracks: ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, ‘Oh! Darling’ and ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’.
The elusive new “rocker” The Beatles had been craving had its genesis on that Tuesday. Paul was periodically tinkering with a pounding bass riff, and he started tentatively singing some words over it. These were the sketchy beginnings of ‘Get Back’, which would eventually have the honour of being the final live song played in public by all four Beatles.
The idea of playing live to the public again featured prominently in their discussions that day. Paul was keen that they should play a live show, but, cognisant that his bandmates, especially George, were less enthusiastic about the plan, he decided to address one of their potential concerns: what if they played a gig and it went badly? What if their performance was under par, for example? Paul’s solution was simple: if the footage isn’t up to scratch, he said, they could simply discard it.
On this fourth day of rehearsals, Paul could no longer contain his frustrations at the lack of collective drive behind the new project. He even dared to diagnose the malaise within the group. “We’ve been very negative since Mr Epstein passed away,” he pointed out. “We haven’t been positive. That’s why all of us in turn have been sick of the group, you know: there’s nothing positive in it; it is a bit of a drag. It’s like when you’re growing up and then your daddy goes away at a certain point, and then you stand on your own feet. Daddy has gone away now, you know…” The cure, he decided, was a bit of old-fashioned discipline – a commodity that had been lacking since their manager’s death in 1967. But this time it was down to the group themselves to apply the discipline from within. “Mr Epstein, he said, sort of, ‘Get suits on,’ and we did. And so we were always fighting that discipline a bit. But now it’s silly to fight that discipline if it’s our own. It’s self-imposed these days, so we do as little as possible. But I think we need a bit more if we’re going to get on with it.”
George was griping that day about the whole idea of a live concert, arguing that he would prefer that they recorded their new batch of songs in a studio, as they usually did. That way, they could work carefully on the recordings, perfecting them until they were happy with the results. If they played the songs live, he said, they would “come out like a compromise”. George’s attitude cut right across the grain of the project, which was supposed to be a departure from the old studio complexity and a return to unadorned live ensemble playing.
Paul strongly disagreed that the songs would be a compromise: his argument was that they were still a fine band and could do an excellent job: “I really think we’re very good. And we can get it together if we think that we want to do these songs – great, we can just do it great, you know.”
Michael Lindsay-Hogg didn’t approve of the idea that they play a concert here in Twickenham: not only was it a cop-out and far less cinematically exciting than, say, a performance in an African amphitheatre, but also they were The Beatles and should be setting their sights higher. “Well, one of the things that’s wrong about doing the show here is that it’s too easy,” he said. Recalling their recent scouting expedition, he continued: “Like when we are in the car, looking for locations and glorified boutiques, I think that’s wrong. But just doing it in the backyard – I mean, it’s literal: it’s almost your backyard, Twickenham – there’s no balls to the show at all. I mean, there’s no balls in any of us, I’m included, and that’s why I think we are being soft about it. You are The Beatles, you aren’t four jerks; you know what I mean.”
The problem, Paul then pointed out, was that they didn’t want to go abroad (meaning that one or two members of the group had vetoed that idea). George confirmed that he didn’t view the prospect of an overseas gig as an exciting adventure. “You know it’s going to be the same thing as here,” he said. “It’s going to be a bit nicer place to be in, but it’s going to be even more complicated trying to plug in on all the mikes and tapes and all that crap.”
Michael returned to his vision for the big concert, in an attempt to enthuse the performers in his production. “Think of the helicopter shot over the amphitheatre, with the water, with the lights,” he urged, reminding them that it would be lit by torches and attended by “2,000 Arabs… Visually, it’s fantastic.”
As the director’s words once again fell on stony ground, Paul started thinking aloud about how they might bring something new, a gimmick of some kind, to the concert. He recalled a show they had played years before in Wimbledon, which had been different not only because it was put on just for their fan club, but also because they played “in a cage”. The show he was talking about had taken place at the Wimbledon Palais on December 14, 1963. Fearing that their stage might be damaged by rabid Beatlemaniacs, the management of the Palais had erected a metal barrier to keep the audience back.
It was at this point during the sessions, three weeks and two days before they took the West End of London by surprise, that Paul tabled the proposition of playing an illicit or “naughty” concert. One location that came to his mind was at the heart of the British Establishment: the Houses of Parliament in London. “Could you get it for us,” he asked Michael, “the Houses of Parliament?” He continued: “We should do the show in a place where we’re not allowed to do it. Like, we should trespass. Go in, set up, and get moved, and that should be the show. Get forcibly ejected… still trying to play your numbers and the police lifting you… you have to take a bit of violence.”
“I think that’s too dangerous,” countered Michael. “I mean, that’s an interesting thought if you’re going to get beaten up.” Perhaps imagining the medical treatment the group might need after being roughed up, the director then made another concert-venue suggestion: what about playing in a hospital? The idea was ignored for the time being, but may have registered with Paul, who would explore the idea minutes later.
In the meantime, John picked up on Paul’s forbidden-venue idea with two possible locations, evidently not serious. One was Manila, capital of the Philippines, where The Beatles had been treated roughly in July 1966 after they unwittingly made a diplomatic faux pas by failing to attend a lunch in their honour hosted by Imelda Marcos, wife of the president. The other was Memphis, Tennessee.
They had played Memphis in August 1966 during their final tour of the USA, and had found the atmosphere tense and nasty. Devout Christians in many states were furious about John’s notorious comparison of The Beatles to Jesus Christ. During a conversation earlier in the year with his friend Maureen Cleave, a British journalist, he had casually predicted: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now.” The interview had been published without a fuss in the London Evening Standard in March but after it was reprinted in the US teenage magazine Datebook that August, the protests, threats and record-burnings began.
Memphis is such a God-fearing place, there is said to be “a church on every corner”. Robed Ku Klux Klan members patrolled outside the city’s Mid-South Coliseum, where The Beatles were booked to perform. And at an early point in the evening show, as they played George’s ‘If
I Needed Someone’, somebody threw a firecracker on stage, which exploded. As their press officer Tony Barrow recalled, “… everybody, all of us at the side of the stage, including the three Beatles on stage, all looked immediately at John Lennon. We would not at that moment have been surprised to see that guy go down.”
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral came up as a suggestion at this point as well – probably from Ringo, whose thinking seemed to be rooted in the city of his birth. Construction of this striking conical building had only been completed two years before, and a rock concert would surely have outraged the city’s many Catholics. Paul then mentioned an orphanage, and George went into a lighthearted reverie about playing song requests, with each number played in honour of a specific person: “Each song is aimed at somebody – ‘This one is for Enoch Powell.’ ‘I’d like to dedicate this one to Harold Wilson, the Singing Nun*, and General Washington. It’s called…’” At which point John appended a typically comical title, presumably picturing Britain’s aforementioned tobacco-puffing prime minister: “Up Yer Pipe.”
Michael turned to the joker to see if he could extract some more sensible opinions from him. Where did John think they ought to play? “I’m warming up to the idea of an asylum,” he replied.
Undeterred, Paul began thinking out loud about a performance that would be more than a concert; an ambitious event that would have a strong altruistic element to it. “We should send planes to Biafra and rescue all the people, and then play at the airport as they come in. Do a show for them – Biafrans.”
