Bella forme: architecture’s urban rock stars

Picture: Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners

I have, on this platform, devoted vast quantities of words to the aura of actual rock stars and the impact of their work, rather than their reputation. Heck, I even named this blog and its predecessor after David Bowie. Almost most of this devotion is the result of the visceral enjoyment of music, as unquantifiable and subjective as that is (Stairway To Heaven might grab you by the balls as equally as it might bore another rigid. Bohemian Rhapsody could well be the most exhilarating six minutes of your life, or it could be the most ridiculous). “I know what I like,” is and should be the philosophical approach to any art form. I bristle at any opinion that takes a superior view of one thing over another. It really doesn’t matter if you enjoy it and someone else doesn’t. Good art is supposed to be divisive. Pop music, photography, sculpture, painting - it’s all the subject to the same individual opinion as architecture. 

35 years ago Prince Charles drew fire for describing a proposed National Gallery extension as a “monstrous carbuncle” at a speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects on its 150th anniversary, providing further evidence of the prince’s then-growing tendency to speak out on pet peeves. It was at the time considered an audacious attack on modern architecture, especially as Charles was largely at the event  to ceremonially doff his titfer to the profession. Instead, he sparked a continuing debate about modernity, leading to inevitable whinges about the legacies that contemporary architects were creating (i.e. anyone veering away from classicism). Notably, Ahrends Burton Koralek’s proposed addition to the National Gallery never materialised.

The reason I bring this up is the death, announced over the weekend, of Richard Rogers - Lord Rogers - part of that triumvirate of rock star architects comprising (Lord) Norman Foster and Renzo Piano who, apart from being great friends and frequent collaborators, made something more out of architecture than simply functional building design. Their work is the creation of monuments to vivid creativity more than merely envisaging rectangular boxes for people to dwell, work in or visit. And yet, collectively and individually, they’ve done more to challenge and enrich contemporary cities than any amount of urban planning. Not always, it must be said, to universal acclaim.

Picture: AEG UK

Of the Rogers/Piano/Foster trio, I’ve probably experienced more of Rogers’ work than any of the others. Indeed just on Saturday night, as his family were processing news of his death, I was at the O2 Arena in Greenwich watching Squeeze and Madness on stage while ruminating on the incredible structure of what, at first glance, looks like a giant tent. 

The Millennium Dome, as it originally was known, was designed by Rogers. It, too, drew the ire of Prince Charles’ aversion to modernism, once calling it a “monstrous blancmange”. Built to celebrate the dawning of the 21st century at a cost of more than £1 billion, it was frequently derided for its cost but also its extravagance as, essentially, a seemingly temporary attraction to celebrate the progress of time by being built in the very place where Greenwich Mean Time was introduced in 1884 (for those who know the area, the Dome/O2 Arena was built on the site of the old Greenwich gas works, at which the father of Squeeze’s Chris Difford worked all his life). But that hasn’t stopped it being one of Europe’s best - and biggest - event venues (and, latterly, a retail centre), which provides a spectacular sight for anyone flying west out of London City Airport, made a memorable appearance in the opening sequence of the Bond film The World Is Not Enough, and several times a week shows up prominently in the EastEnders titles. Some might say Rogers did the job he was brought in for. Even by his standards, however, the Dome was not his most strident creation. 

That probably still falls to the Pompidou Centre in Paris, a building that never failed to fascinate me from the outside as much as its inside when I lived in the City of Light and would frequently walk past it on the way to a nearby shopping district. The building, with its exoskeleton of pipes and what looks like permanent construction scaffolding, was to Paris what punk was to classical music. Paris doesn’t really do modernity (the La Défense financial district was punted north-west of the Périphérique ring road for a reason...). So, in the early 1970s when the process began to design a building in honour of former president Georges Pompidou, the eventual design that Rogers and partner Piano came up with was (and, to some extent, remains) as Marmite as it gets. 

Picture: Amélie Dupont - Architecte: Richard Rogers & Renzo Piano

“Bold” doesn’t even cover the dazzling, colourful and distinctly industrial paean to adventurous thinking, which inevitably drew accusations of consecration from conservative Parisians and snobby critics alike. “Paris has its own monster,” wrote Le Figaro, “just like Loch Ness”. Vindication followed after it opened in 1977, becoming one of the city’s most-visited attractions, drawing seven million people in that year alone - the year of punk, it shouldn’t be forgotten - more than the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre combined (and in marked contrast to the art contained therein). The thing with the Pompidou Centre is that once you get past the avant garde exterior, it serves a practical purpose, providing space for art, music performances and a library. How very liberté, égalité, fraternité. We’re back to rectangular boxes again, but with a clear difference. 

It’s this combination of the practical and the fanciful that fascinates me about the likes of Rogers. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and Terminal 4 of Madrid’s Barajas Airport are buildings I have spent plenty of time in, sometimes with the freedom to take it all in, at others in a desperate rush to get from check-in to gate. But on no occasion have I ever felt like I was encased in a box. Indeed, without succumbing to hyperbole, these aviation hubs have more than a sense of wonder about them. This is where the jury of the 2007 Pritzker prize, architecture’s most prestigious award,  praised Rogers for his “unique interpretation of the Modern Movement’s fascination with the building as machine,” calling out his transformation of buildings that “had once been elite monuments” like museums “into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city.” 

Cities are where Rogers made his mark, along with Foster and Piano, whom he regarded as brethren, with a shared vision for high-tech architecture that took cues from machinery and technology more than the shaping of stone. All born in the 1930s, they took their influences from the post-war world, in Rogers’ case the ultra-modern house designs of 1950s Los Angeles, which he visited after graduating from Yale (where he first met Foster). Collectively, they transformed  London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and other cities with a similar outlook. “He is my closest friend, practically my brother," Rogers once said of Piano in a Guardian interview, acknowledging - jokingly - how the Italian behind London’s Shard made him one of “the bad boys.” Foster is another, with his stunning designs for the new Wembley Stadium, Apple’s new space-age HQ in California, and the glass dome addition to the Reichstag in Berlin.

You could argue that architecture stopped being sexy in the 1960s and 1970s, just as rock’n’roll was becoming so. Of course, this is a gross generalisation, just as there was as much naff music in those decades as there was era-defining material. What Rogers and his cohorts achieved, as they got to work on urban skylines in the ’80s and ’90s, was the transformation of ‘boxes in the sky’ into something memorable, fascinating even, something to marvel at before entering, and then on leaving, looking back at and marvelling once more.

Today, London’s skyline is still the topic of furious debate, as you peer upstream from Tower Bridge at City Hall and The Shard to your left, ‘The Cheesgrater’, ‘Gherkin’ and ‘Walkie Talkie’ (of which Rogers was not a fan) to your right, even if they controversially obscure Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, one of London’s defining symbols. But one thing you can’t say is that the capital has disappeared “under a welter of ugliness”, as Prince Charles branded modern architecture in a 1984 interview around the same time as his RIBA speech. He also spoke of the “mediocrity of public and commercial buildings, and of housing estates, not to mention the dreariness and heartlessness of so much urban planning”. The irony of Charles’ statement is that these were the very environments that spawned some of rock music’s greatest moments. Transforming them, Rogers - along with Foster and Piano - have injected the sort of progressiveness to architecture that The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Bowie brought to rock. An enduring legacy, in other words.

Banks statement

© Simon Poulter 2021

As a statement of the somewhat bleedin’ obvious, digitisation has changed everything. Want that new album? Amazon will have it on your doorstep by 1pm tomorrow (though there’s no guarantee it won’t have been nicked by 1.30…). Can’t be arsed to go out to the supermarket? Don’t worry, your groceries will come to you! And as for banking, well, you can do all that with your thumb and your iPhone while perched on the sofa. 

Digital technology, the Internet and, specifically, the smartphone, have transformed modern life beyond all recognition, but along with it - and these last couple of years have brought this into sharp focus - have increasingly made our high streets look threadbare, with retail chains disappearing online (or disappearing altogether) to be replaced by the ubiquitous coffee outlets, charity shops and fast food outlets. In many towns, the banks that were once local community fixtures - and in a large number of cases are even listed buildings due to their heritage - have been repurposed into pubs, restaurants and even homes.

Digital commerce has also led to a reduction in cash being used. Before COVID-19, its use in the UK was in decline, according to the Bank of England, which found that only 23% of all payments in 2019 were made using cash, down from close to 60% a decade earlier, as debit cards and digital payments became more commonplace for everyday purchases. Withdrawals from bank machines have dropped to less than £100 million a day, which sounds a lot, but not for a country of 67 million people. The pandemic has seen cash usage fall even further, as people work from home, shop online and continue to hold concerns about handling paper money. On average, people now go to a cash machine less than twice a month, down from three times a month before the pandemic hit, according to the ATM operator Link. All of this reflects the banks’ progressive retreat from our high streets. Five branches have been closing for good every two working days since 2015, and last week it was announced that TSB plans to close another 70 of its locations, leaving just 220 remaining next year, down from 536 only a couple of years ago. 

For many - but not all - online banking has changed the traditional consumer banking experience, and the move to cashless, contactless payments - especially during the pandemic - has made the idea of entering a bank branch to grapple with an inadequate ballpoint pen on a chain and quaint old paying-in slips seem archaic. But that doesn’t mean that cash hasn’t disappeared altogether, and nor does it mean that people have stopped writing cheques. There are still legitimate trades that only take cash (or, at least, prefer it), and just this month I received a cheque from the DVLA for a car tax refund. So where do you go to pay all that in?

© Simon Poulter 2021

Like everywhere else, our local high street has been gradually losing its banks over the last few years. Once it was resident to all the main clearing banks and building societies, but the Barclays and Santander (which, as Abbey National, was where I held my first ever savings account) have gone and in February the Lloyds will join them. For cash, along the half-mile stretch of our high street there are machines outside NatWest, HSBC (when it works - that one has been out of order for three weeks) and Nationwide, plus one inside a Tesco Express and another outside a convenience store at the opposite end.

According to recent research by the Mail On Sunday, the biggest clearing banks have closed down 2,766 branches over the last five years - a decline of 36% - and those that remain are increasingly staff-free, relying on indoor self-service machines for most transactions with a single employee to help out with any questions. Gone are the days of having a conversation - difficult or civil - with your friendly local bank manager. According to the Mail, Barclays and HSBC have been closing staffed counters for their combined 32 million customers in the UK, leading critics to say this is all part of a cost-cutting exercise intended to drive up online operations. All very well, but even in 2021, not everyone is online. Like my 92-year-old mum, who still writes cheques. It’s not just people like her: there are those who aren’t familiar with technology, or have physical impairments, such as blindness, which makes the use of technology near impossible, and welcome the ability to speak to someone face-to-face.

That’s not to say that digital banking isn’t a good thing, for those who can access it. I’d be happy if I never received another paper statement again (and it’s still bizarre that one bank I use still issues paper communications as a default, unless you switch it off). But clearly there are, still, situations which require the ability to speak to an actual human being. Given the time it often takes to wade through multiple levels of menus when you try and call a bank, you can’t fault people for wanting to do their banking old-school, and walk into a bank branch to speak to someone behind inch-deep armoured glass. Research for Consumer Intelligence recently found that, in a poll of 1,027 adults, nearly half preferred a face-to-face service, countering the argument that banks put up that people prefer to do their banking digitally. As with all aspects of the retail economy, COVID-19 has impacted banking, but according to the Financial Conduct Authority, many banks’ opening hours haven’t been restored to pre-pandemic schedules. One in three still shut at 3pm, which has also been cited as part of the effort by banks to push customers online.

I suppose, though, I should consider myself lucky to live near a high street that at least still has some bank branches: increasingly, rural communities aren’t so fortunate. Even worse if you live in the Falkland Islands, where the only cash machine in its capital, Port Stanley, is due to be closed down  in the coming weeks.

Picture: ING

While banking has become increasingly dehumanised in the UK, digital banking hasn’t totally taken over elsewhere. I recently went to Amsterdam to sort out some personal banking issues which had to be resolved in-person (don’t worry - I don’t operate a drug or diamond business on the sly. This is a legacy of having lived in the Netherlands for almost ten years). The Dutch have been one of the most digitally-advanced nationalities on the planet, and seemingly introduced online banking long before anyone elsewhere. But not being Dutch, and no longer living in the country means that when communications break down, and a measure as simple as changing my postal address needed to be finally taken care of (having been prevented by more than a year of pandemic-induced travel restrictions), the only option was to sort it out in person. To their credit, my two banks - ABN AMRO and ING - treated me well, not the least of which being that my appointments were conducted in fluent English (gratefully appreciated, given my atrocious Dutch language skills), with friendly but business-like staff taking care of me. And the bank branches in Amsterdam that I visited were smart, modern, comfortable and attractively designed. Welcoming, even.

Even if we accept that banking is adapting - or reacting - to the digital revolution, not every bank is retreating to the virtual world completely. In Italy, the Ligurian regional bank Banca Carige is introducing what it calls “NextGenBranches” that are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but run entirely by computers. Each branch features plush-looking workstations at which customers can plonk themselves down and conduct all their banking, from opening new accounts to applying for credit cards and loans, and even getting mortgage advice via a video links to a human adviser. Scanners, printers, card readers and other tech enables other types of bank interaction. From a customer point of view, this is all about convenience and modernity, but you can’t help feeling that it’s another nail in the coffin of the banking sector being a career choice,

Auriga, the company behind the Banca Carige concept, is even talking about rolling out these desks in other locations, such as supermarkets. In the UK, too, banks are also looking at setting up banking facilities in other retail settings. Fintech business OneBanks has developed a pop-up ‘kiosk’ that can be installed almost anywhere instantly, requiring a single staff member to supervise its use, but it also uses a combination of a smartphone and a traditional bank card to work. Three OneBanks kiosks have been installed so far in Co-op branches in Scotland, in towns without any traditional banking outlets, and the company plan to install another 150 within the next three years. And, despite dwindling numbers of high street post offices, some of the major banks are believed to be evaluating installing mini branches inside postal centres, probably in lieu of them closing main branches in town centres.

Perhaps we can be reassured that local banks aren’t going to completely disappear for good as digitisation continues, but there’s no ignoring the fact that banking is dwindling. On top of the elderly and digitally disenfranchised, there are still the very real needs of small businesses to be taken into account, enabling them to pay in cash takings safely, which often can’t be facilitated by hole-in-the-wall machines which have cash limits and security risks, although banks are considering the introduction of new machines that can handle larger sums. That said, machines can go wrong and, despite the banks’ best intentions, can and do get hacked. Perhaps George Banks, the constipated financier father in Mary Poppins, was onto something when he encouraged his son Michael to bring his tuppence into the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, where it “will compound”.

Getting back to when they really were Fab

At risk of appearing late to the party, I’ve finally found the time to consume all eight hours or so of Peter Jackson’s sumptuous Beatlesfest, Get Back. You’ve surely heard about it by now: the first part appeared on Disney+ last Thursday, with parts 2 and 3 released progressively over subsequent days, and given its collective length it’s been quite a challenge to find so much time to indulge it. 

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m not trying to confect an image of a busy urban sophisticate with little room for frivolities like a mammoth documentary about a pop band, but you find anyone with so many spare hours with which to sit exhaustively through as much 52-year-old footage of musicians sitting around smoking and strumming. 

That last statement, however, fundamentally misses the point of Jackson’s incredible project. It also brushes aside the justifiable deification of the four musicians themselves, but I’ll get to that later. Because Get Back transcends any experience or expectation you may have of a music documentary. It is more than a biopic, more than a concert film, more than a retrospective. It is, perhaps inadvertently, a near-forensic examination of a band, but conducted through the narrowest of apertures - just 29 days in January 1969. 

To this end, it is no more than a blood sample drawn over the course of one month in the entire lifetime of The Beatles, so it shouldn’t be construed as an attempt to tell their story in its entirety. It's like carbon dating an oak tree by a tiny sample of one of its rings. But in capturing even a brief window of time in The Beatles' history, Get Back depicts the state of a band that would, officially, split up just 15 months after Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot the original footage, 56 hours of which have been distilled by Jackson down to the eight.

From one angle, it depicts the mundanity of life in a band (there are plenty of shots of Ringo Starr watching on while John Lennon and Paul McCartney finesse a new song, reflecting the famous Charlie Watts quote about life as the Rolling Stones’ drummer comprising of five years’ work and 20 years spent hanging around). From another angle, Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras capture the dynamics between the quartet. There is the still-symbiotic relationship between Lennon and McCartney, with one scene depicting them discussing leadership of the group, the seemingly unspoken hierarchy that relegated the younger George Harrison to a lesser writing role, and the older Starr to, at times, merely making up the numbers (which isn't true, but there goes another well established Beatle trope).

In this mix we see Yoko Ono, rarely not at Lennon’s side, and studio visits from Linda (Eastman, as was) and a delightful cameo from her daughter Heather. Maureen Starkey and Pattie Boyd, then wives of Ringo and George, also make appearances. They provide, somewhat, glimpses of normality, of domestic maturity in stark contrast to the screaming adulation that met the formerly fresh-faced Mop Tops with their cherubic smiles, bum freezer suits and polite bowing after each number. Now, they’d become shaggy-haired men in the second half of their 20s (Lennon was 29 at the time), with kids and a collective business interest, Just seven years separate these two images.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In case you’ve missed the memo, or have been self-isolating to hermit-level media avoidance, the premise of Get Back is that it depicts the band supposedly writing, rehearsing and recording what was meant to be their eleventh studio album, while - perhaps not explicitly - opening themselves up to the possibility of live performance again. It opens on 2 January 1969 with the band assembling at Twickenham Film Studios where, on a chilly, cavernous 7,500 square-foot sound stage (the same space where they had earlier made Help! and A Hard Day’s Night) they sit in a semi-circle and attempt composition in a ‘live‘ setting. But the atmosphere appears febrile, not helped by the cold of the studio, with Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras and microphones picking up every comment, every sideways glance, with unrestricted access.

To some extent, the exercise was envisaged as a tentative return to the live performances they’d given up at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966. That had left them jaded, but the net result was that concentrating on work as a studio band alone focused The Beatles on what is now considered their most creative, free-wheeling phase, which led to the critical high of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the childishly enjoyable Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, their retreat to India, the supposed ‘grown-up’ step of forming Apple Corps, and then the eclectic brilliance of The Beatles, better known as ‘the White Album’.

As Get Back captures, Twickenham proved to be unfulfilling, even if there is oodles of output (and embryonic snippets of songs that would eventually find their way into solo repertoires, such such as Lennon’s Jealous Guy and Harrison’s All Things Must Pass). However, Twickenham established the principle of returning to a more stripped-back rock sound, with a simpler set-up in the film studio - Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sat in a semi-circle, Starr completing the arrangement, with guitars plugged into amps. No embellishments. But, as transpires, there’s an uneasy vibe, which culminates in Harrison standing up and declaring “I’m leaving the band,” and walking out muttering “I’ll see you in the clubs.”. The remaining Beatles respond by going for lunch. “We may as well get in Clapton,” jokes Lennon uneasily as they return to work, unwittingly and ironically referencing the-then hottest British guitarist who would eventually fall in love with, and marry, Harrison’s wife Boyd. 

Productivity shifts up a gear when they leave south-west London and reconvene in Mayfair, in the basement studio of 3 Savile Row, their ‘corporate’ headquarters. Harrison returns (Savile Row was his condition for doing so, along with the inspired addition of augmenting their sound with keyboard player Billy Preston, who not only relieves any residual internecine tension, but adds soul to the music, giving it a looser feel).

That, then, is ultimately what Get Back is about: the music. Before our very eyes, we get a unique insight into the gestation of what would much later become the Let It Be album. We see and hear McCartney inadvertently strum the opening chords to the song Get Back on his iconic Hofner Violin bass, and he and Paul spar gently over various attempts to arrive at the line “Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner…”. But what’s even more remarkable is that we are ultimately watching something of a failure. Even after the work at Savile Row had ended, the album ended up on the back burner, and here might lie the source of the popular belief that it was a process beset by acrimony.

Much myth and falsehood has been generated about The Beatles’ demise. Even now, Fabologists debate the sequence of events and who said what to whom during the denouement. There is, though, little-to-no traces of true discord in Get Back. If anything, it depicts the dull normality of life in a band making records. No wild and crazy drug and booze-fuelled sessions - just endless cigarettes, and copious trays of tea and toast. Band members turn up for work in the morning, break for lunch, go home in the evening. They chat, they joke, they play endless arrangements of their songs, adopting Goon-like funny voices (Peter Sellers makes an awkward appearance in the Twickenham scenes) and lark about with much the same banter you find in any office. There are tedious repeat attempts at playing songs, with arrangements being tweaked and phrasing adjusted, interspersed with impromptu jams of rock’n’roll standards like Twenty Flight Rock and the ribald Liverpudlian folk song Maggie Mae. Even when looks are cast at each other, the body language suggests nothing more sinister than the mild irritation of disagreeing with a colleague over how a PowerPoint presentation might be structured.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In fact, amid the clouds of cigarette smoke, the Fabs looked like they were having fun. Towards the end we see the infamous rooftop concert, staged at 3 Savile Row in lieu of an earlier plan to perform the new songs at an open -air show on Primrose Hill. The performance is, notoriously, interrupted by fun-free PCs Ray Dagg and Ray Shayler (other christian names were available in the 1960s to Met officers…) from West End Central nick to shut down what a couple of local numptys had branded a breach of the peace. It marks the end of The Beatles as a performing entity, but you can see in that footage of them, carefree and taking them back to Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller and Liverpool’s Cavern almost a decade before.

If there were cracks, Get Back doesn’t really depict them. But something was up. Glyn Johns was given the task of assembling the album from the combined Twickenham/Savile Row sessions, but things started unravelling. The album was abandoned (although the single Get Back was released in April 1969). Four weeks after the rooftop concert the band reconvened at Abbey Road, to make the record that would take that studio’s name. In the orthodox chronology, Abbey Road became the final album to be recorded by The Beatles, but the product of their work in January 1969 would eventually be released in May 1970, nominally one month after McCartney had declared himself out of the band. To boot, the tapes Johns had worked on had been handed over to Phil Spector to ‘re-produce’, adding elements that McCartney would eventually strip out with the Let It Be…Naked album released in 2003. Some - me especially - will maintain that it’s the better album as a result.

There is, though, probably more to The Beatles’ end story than Jackson’s epic captures. John Lennon, for example, had brought in the New York businessmen Allen Klein to manage the band’s affairs, against McCartney’s knowledge. Klein gets no attention in Get Back, which leads to some suspicion of Apple Corps’ creative control over the project. Then again, Get Back is not about the break-up of The Beatles. either. Ultimately, it’s a snapshot (albeit a gargantuan one) of 29 days in January 1966 when the Fabs got together and produced music of a richness and longevity that can be enjoyed almost as new today. We get to appreciate, through raw, unedited scenes, unencumbered by voiceovers or cutaway interviews, just what John, Paul, George and Ringo brought individually to the band, arguably dispelling some of the convenient, cartoon-like tropes that we’ve conditioned into accepting down the years. That Lennon was the caustic rocker, that McCartney was the benign, anointed one, that Harrison was the ‘Quiet One’ with the uncanny gift for song, and that Starr was that drummer’s cliche, the class clown who sat at the back and didn’t get involved. 

Get Back shows them all in a much more engaging light: Lennon was cool and surprisingly warmer than we’d expected (his interaction with the young Heather McCartney is delightful, as is Ringo’s). McCartney was and is blessed with a unique ear for melody that comes out with The Long And Winding Road and his improvised Get Back riff. You see how Harrison contributed far more than the few songs that made it onto the albums, but you also see a somewhat diffident soul. Starr was (and could still be) a remarkably exquisite drummer, capable of fills and improvisation equally as good as the more lauded tub thumpers of the rock era.

“We only think we know The Beatles,” director Peter Jackson recently told Uncut magazine while discussing the project. “We’ve seen A Hard Day’s Night and Help! We’ve seen them perform on stage in The Cavern [Club] and Shea Stadium. We’ve seen interviews or press conferences. When you think about it, those are all performance situations.” Get Back, he says, presents things differently. “When they don’t know they’re being filmed you are getting a 100 percent pure look at the real guys, which doesn’t really exist on film, particularly, anywhere else.”

Pictures: Twitter/@TheBeatles

Ultimately, Get Back is a masterclass in music making. The Beatles are or were musical deities, and over the 29 days Jackson has condensed into his film, even the most seasoned fan will come to appreciate their music even more. I won’t, though, leave it just there. Because the other thing about Get Back is that it shines a light on the accelerated timeline that The Beatles’ career ran on. When they walked into Twickenham Film Studios on the second day of January in 1969 it was less than seven years since Love Me Do. Seven years. Don’t know about you, but I wasn’t all that different in 2014 to how I am now. But in October 1962, The Beatles’ music, their haircuts, their suits, everything was in stark contrast to the beards, long hair and maturity of the men seen approaching their 30s in 1969. 

Paul McCartney and his daughter Mary at the London premiere of Get Back
Picture: Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Disney 

Stretch their timeline to its full extent, and just ten years, more or less, separates their formation in August 1960 and McCartney’s announcement in April 1970. Ten years in which they evolved from chirpy beat poppers into prototypical rock stars, a transition that, arguably, enveloped the most remarkable library of popular music that the genre has ever experienced.

51 years on, we’re getting to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, what a band of brothers The Beatles were. You could argue “So what?”. Five times more years have elapsed since they split up as they were together. But the influence The Beatles have still today is almost immeasurable. Some misanthropes will still dismiss them as purveyors of children’s songs, but in the grand scheme of things, their body of work remains beyond comparison with anything past, present and, probably, future. Get Back is not the key to understanding that bold statement, but over eight utterly engrossing, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck hours, it goes a long way to reinforcing it.

The Beatles: Get Back is streaming now on Disney+