Chapter 3

Why will people underestimate the Beatles and refuse to take them seriously? They're not four little boys who don't know what they are doing, they're four grown men. If all this business happened to anyone else, no one would take any notice of it. But because it's the Beatles, everything they do is magnified.

Allen Klein, July 1969

The girls who lived on the steps of Apple's office at 3 Savile Row – the Apple Scruffs, as George Harrison immortalised them – were old enough to have fallen for the Beatles in 1963. They no longer screamed when they saw them, as they would have done when they were twelve. Their trademark was a cool demeanour: only newcomers acted like the teenyboppers that the Scruffs had once been.

Their younger sisters accepted the Beatles as a fact of life, but beards and dour faces made the former Fab Four unlikely objects for pubescent ardour. The pre-teens of 1969 had idols with smoother faces: Davy Jones of the Monkees, Andy Fairweather-Low of Amen Corner, Bobby Sherman and Oliver. That summer, the airwaves were dominated by 'Sugar Sugar', a candy confection prepared by producers who predated the Beatles, and credited to a group who existed only as cartoon characters.

Between 1965 and 1967, pop had become a playground for musicians eager to expand their imaginations with psychedelic drugs, Eastern spirituality and an array of 'high art' influences that stretched from T. S. Eliot to Charles Ives. But in 1967, between the Monkees' calculated recreation of Beatlemania and the release of the Sgt Pepper album, pop split into two ideologically divided streams – one aimed at its traditional market, of kids from eight to fifteen, the other targeting precocious teens, students and young adults, who preferred music that was serious and progressive, but still hissed with the spirit of rebellion.

The Beatles were still unchallenged as the most popular musicians in the Western world; via illicit dubs and cross-border radio, they had even reached behind the Iron Curtain. But their appeal was now balanced precariously between the audiences for pop and rock. McCartney songs such as 'Hello Goodbye' and 'Get Back' retained enough naive enthusiasm to attract the pop children, but few pre-pubescent fans could identify with the darker corners of their White Album. Neither could the parents and grandparents who had tapped their feet to 'A Hard Day's Night', but who had been alienated by the symbols of the Beatles' current lifestyle – drugs, police raids, meditation and full-frontal photographs. Even the dependably attractive Paul McCartney had abandoned his British girlfriend and married an American.

Within the culture of rock, which treated its heroes as seriously as any students of literature or art, the Beatles occupied an ambiguous place. They were still the stuff of legends, but they no longer led a generation or formed its taste. Famous for as long as most rock fans could remember, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey seemed to share little with the pilgrims who flocked to vast outdoor festivals such as Woodstock. The Beatles had intended Apple as a bridge between them and their audience, but its failure as an idealistic enterprise – already apparent before the arrival of Allen Klein – merely widened the divide. If rock fans wanted to feel at one with their heroes, they looked elsewhere – to the brazen vulnerability of Janis Joplin, the enigmatic presence of Bob Dylan, the confessional openness of Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the Rolling Stones, who were accepted as the most perceptive guides to the treacherous currents now flooding through the counterculture.

So what were the Beatles in the summer of 1969, except a phenomenon that sold records in suitably phenomenal quantities? It was a question that clearly puzzled and concerned John Lennon. 'He has refused to become the prisoner of his special talent as a musician, ' observed critic Leslie Fiedler, 'venturing into other realms where he has, initially, at least, as little authority as anyone else. ' Yoko Ono encouraged him to explore every possible mode of creative expression, from filming his penis in a state of mild excitement (Self Portrait) to fiddling with the dial of a radio and calling it music ('Radio Play'). He immersed himself in her vision of art as a state of heightened existence that deserved constant documentation. In December 1968 Lennon and Ono had appeared on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall in London, doing and saying nothing while enveloped in a black bag. This was 'bagism', an Ono concept enabling total communication, the couple explained, because it hid the individual and thereby undercut any kind of prejudice (except irrational dislike of people in bags). The event was filmed, and the Lennons' silent act of performance art thereby became a second artwork as part of a documentary; and then a third, as the London Arts Lab filmed the Lennons watching their bagism footage – a process that could have been continued ad infinitum and ad nauseam.

Such solipsistic art could never touch anyone who wasn't already captivated by Lennon's fame. Of the four Beatles, he was in most danger of alienating himself from his public. To his credit, he soon realised that self-centred art wasn't enough. To be worthwhile, art had to reach a global audience and change lives, the way that the Beatles' music had once done. In 1968 Lennon had declared his ambition to 'package peace in a new box'. In 1969 he and Ono opted not to sell peace, or preach it, but to become its human incarnation. They would sing, talk and breathe nothing but peace; they would take their message to the world, and war would inevitably end, 'if you want it', as a poster event would proclaim.

Their honeymoon bed-in was merely the beginning. Now they intended to carry the message of peace to the heart of the US antiwar movement. They embarked with Derek Taylor on a transatlantic liner and, barred from entering the US by Lennon's recent drugs conviction, headed for the Canadian city of Montreal, an hour's drive from the US border. Once again they donned their pyjamas and entertained press representatives from across North America. 'For hours, they would do nothing but interviews about peace, ' recalled Gail Renard, a local teenager who talked her way into the Lennons' suite. 'I asked John, " What do you do when everyone goes home? " He said, " Tiredness and loneliness, my dear. " He was only half-joking. '

Writing about 'Revolution' a year earlier, Lennon couldn't choose between his visceral urge to overthrow the 'system' and his fear of physical injury. Now, he declared, 'We believe violent change doesn't really accomplish anything in the long run, because in the over 2, 000 years we've been going, all the violent revolutions have come to an end, even if they've lasted 50 or 100 years. The few people who've tried to do it our way, unfortunately, have been killed, i. e. Jesus, Gandhi, Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The way we might escape being killed is that we have a sense of humour and that the worst, or the least, we can do is make people laugh. '

By selling peace, Lennon believed he was operating beyond the spectrum of politics. But he soon manoeuvred himself into a political controversy 3, 000 miles away, in Berkeley, California. Community activists and students had proclaimed a three-acre area near the University of California campus as People's Park. It was a symbolic act, reclaiming land that had once held public housing but was now earmarked for college sports facilities. As radical historian Todd Gitlin explained, 'People's Park amounted to the spirits of the New Left and the counterculture in harmonious combination: it was a trace of anarchist heaven on earth. ' University officials failed to appreciate the symbolism, and a bloody contest ensued between activists and police, resulting in the death of one demonstrator and the blinding of another.

A protest march was scheduled for 30 May, and two days earlier the cream of California's psychedelic rock bands staged a fund-raising concert, firmly aligning the musical community with those who wanted to preserve People's Park for the people. Activists approached Lennon for a gesture of support. Instead, he preached his new philosophy of non-violent disobedience. 'I don't believe there is any cause worth getting shot for, ' he told the Berkeley dissidents. 'You can do better by moving on to another city or moving to Canada. Go anywhere – then they've got nothing to attack and nobody to point their finger at. ' Then he lapsed into hippie cliché s: 'You can make it, man; we can make it, together, ' and so on. It was not what the Berkeley protestors had expected: rather than fighting the system, Lennon preferred to ignore it and give it free rein. In the eyes of Village Voice columnist Robert Christgau, Lennon was 'firming up his newfound status as a pompous shit'. Abbie Hoffman, one of the leaders of the anarchic protest movement the Yippies, accused Lennon of propounding 'an establishment form of pacifism'. He believed that the Beatle and his wife, whom he racistly dubbed 'Oko Nono', were in the pay of the American government. 'Lennon wrote to the [US] State Department, ' Hoffman complained, 'and said, " I will do a good service here, I will speak to the young people, I will tell them not to be violent, I will tell them not to shout, 'Kill the pigs. '" ' His postscript exposed the widening gulf between Lennon and his more politically aware fans: 'I ain't gonna buy his records any more. I'm not interested. He doesn't say anything to me any more. '

Anyone offended by Lennon's pacifism would have been equally bewildered by George Harrison's philosophy. The focus of his life wasn't with the Beatles, or at home, where his wife Pattie found him increasingly withdrawn, not depressed but simply elsewhere. Although he was prepared to support pet projects at Apple – Billy Preston's gospel tunes, or a spiritual chant by the London members of the Radha Krishna Temple – his imagination was directed high above this material world. On this spiritual level such petty concerns as war and peace were irrelevant. Through meditation, he declared, you should 'be able to conjure up that peace in the middle of Vietnam. . . There is no problem if each individual doesn't have any problems. . . The problems are created more, sometimes, by people going around trying to fix up the government, or trying to do something. ' These, then, were the political role models on offer to the increasingly radicalised generation who had grown up with the Beatles: one hero who declared it was better to flee than fight oppression, and another who believed that oppression was merely an illusion.

No wonder Beatles fans were confused about what the group stood for, and where they were heading. The pop newspaper Disc asked its readers, who had recently voted the Beatles the world's best group, how they really saw them. Some interpreted Lennon's peace crusade in the spirit that he intended, referring to him as a 'saint', but one drew a vivid distinction between the Beatles as men and as musicians. 'If Lennon raped a 10-year-old girl, ' he commented, 'it would make no difference to the next single. '

In any case, the next single was a deliberate blurring of music and message: a simplistic chant recorded in the Lennons' Montreal hotel room entitled 'Give Peace a Chance'. The US magazine Billboard announced that it would be a Beatles release, an understandable error given that their last single had been exclusively about Lennon and his wife. But instead Lennon chose to issue it under the pseudonym of the Plastic Ono Band, an open-ended entity which offered a refuge from the restrictive dimensions of the Beatles. ^*8 For the moment, he chose to maintain the fantasy that he was still collaborating actively with Paul McCartney, whose name duly appeared on the record as co-writer. 'Give Peace a Chance' matched the sales of recent Beatles releases, and achieved its intended purpose as an anthem during a major anti-war rally in Washington DC.

While Lennon transformed his music into a vehicle for social commentary, Harrison had more profound ambitions. 'The first thing in my life is music, ' he insisted that summer, 'but now I just want to sing songs that give me some benefit. I've come to understand that music should be employed really for the benefit of God-perception, like chanting, that sort of thing. ' His work with the Radha Krishna Temple solidified his image as a disciple of one of God's oriental incarnations, and carried the holy refrain of the 'Hare Krishna Mantra' into the Top 20. The temple's shaven-headed disciples became regular visitors to the Apple office. 'Paul didn't relate to the Krishnas, ' Derek Taylor recalled. 'You'd hear them coming down the street, chanting and ringing their bells, and when the bells stopped outside, you'd think, Oh no, the fucking Krishnas are coming upstairs. They could be as disruptive as anyone. '

The four Beatles had not attempted to make music together since early May, but their cottage

industry at Savile Row continued merrily without them. Apple proudly announced that they would shortly be issuing an album from the ill-tempered January 1969 sessions, entitled Get Back. Its cover photograph would echo their first LP, Please PleaseMe, but with the bearded Beatles replacing their more conservative predecessors. The photograph would demonstrate how much had changed in those six years and provide a symbolic farewell if the Beatles were unable to work together again. But the Get Back album didn't appear, despite frequent promises. Instead, the raw tapes leaked onto the new underground market for unauthorised bootleg records. Several American radio stations aired the recordings, and this illicit distribution of the Beatles' music was widely interpreted as a triumph of the people over the greed of big business.

Paul McCartney had remained uncharacteristically quiet after Allen Klein's appointment. But he was clearly in elegiac mood. 'Paul called me, ' Neil Aspinall recalled, 'saying, " You should collect as much of the [film] material that's out there, get it together before it disappears. " So I started to do that, got in touch with the TV stations around the world, checked what we had in our own library, the promo clips. I got newsreel footage in, lots and lots of stuff. ' The Beatles had never been sentimental about where they'd been: in 1965, for instance, they had refused to help the owners of Liverpool's Cavern Club, where they had performed nearly 300 times, to keep the venue alive. But now they could envisage a future in which they would no longer be Beatles. As Aspinall's archive expanded, all four of the group authorised him to compile a documentary film about their career.

Their relationship with the film industry remained uneasy. The success of their first two features, A Hard Day's Night and Help! , was tainted by their embarrassment at their gauche appearance on screen. Lennon's experience in the satirical comedy How I Won the War proved equally unsatisfying. Their misgivings weren't merely artistic: Brian Epstein had signed a contract committing the group to make a third film with United Artists, and lawyers were uncertain that the YellowSubmarine animation had fulfilled the deal. Rather than risk a costly court case, the Beatles continued to search for an appropriate vehicle for their talents. They had recently attempted to obtain the rights to J. R. R. Tolkien's mythic trilogy of fantasy novels The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien's lawyers refused to let their property fall into such unruly hands, and the project was abandoned. So attention was focused on the documentary footage that the Beatles had shot in January. By July director Michael Lindsay-Hogg had prepared a rough cut that ran for some 210 minutes, barely shorter than Gone With the Wind. Allen Klein invited the Beatles to a screening, after which he proposed that the project – entitled Get Back at this stage, like the accompanying album – should be aimed at the cinema, not television. ^*9 The four musicians were asked for their comments, and McCartney, Harrison and Starkey each complained that too much screen time was devoted to Lennon and Ono. Rather than confront Lennon directly, Klein cunningly asked Lindsay-Hogg to concentrate on the Beatles and their music, rather than the surrounding milieu. If Ono's role thereby became less prominent, that was merely an unfortunate side effect of a purely artistic decision.

Klein's primary purpose remained 'to make for each one of [the Beatles] in cash, after tax, as much money as everyone felt that they ought to have and should have'. Slowly he began to exert pressure on EMI boss Sir Joseph Lockwood, pointing out that the Beatles had effectively fulfilled the terms of their 1967 contract and might choose to express themselves in other fields if their deal were not improved. Lockwood replied that the Beatles had known what they were signing in 1967 – 'They had a year to consider it. They knew their rights' – and that 'They have done jolly well. ' He was prepared to negotiate a revised contract that would benefit both parties. But he believed that the Beatles themselves were perfectly satisfied with the existing deal: the objections, he suggested, emanated from Klein not his clients.

Both Klein and the Beatles understood that Lockwood would never agree to improve the terms of the contract if the group was no longer active. Partly to prove that they still existed, partly out of habit, all four Beatles agreed to return to the familiar surroundings of Abbey Road Studios on 2 July 1969. The previous day McCartney taped a lead vocal for 'You Never Give Me Your Money', perhaps feeling it would be easier to express his ambivalent feelings towards the group if none of the others was present. Meanwhile, Lennon, Ono and their two children (Lennon's son, Ono's daughter) were holidaying in Scotland. Lennon was at the wheel as they headed to the airport: never a confident or competent driver, he ran their car off the road. The family escaped with comparatively minor injuries, but Lennon and Ono were kept in hospital under observation. So it was a three-man Beatles who regrouped at Abbey Road, with George Martin once more at the controls, and made significant progress towards a new album. The most telling contribution came from Harrison. 'Just to be singing, " It's a lovely day today, " and all that, it's a waste of energy, ' he declared that summer, but his beautiful song 'Here Comes the Sun' proved him wrong. Engineers noted the lack of tension among the three musicians, and waited anxiously to see how the atmosphere might change when Lennon and Ono returned.

Business remained a potentially divisive subject, no matter how many Beatles were present. The future of Northern Songs was still uncertain, and Lennon and McCartney heightened the stakes by promising to take their publishing interests elsewhere if the company fell into the hands of Sir Lew Grade's ATV corporation. By mid-May neither the Beatles nor ATV controlled the majority of shares, and stalemate was reached. Both sides claimed victory, but neither could clinch it.

The relationship between the Beatles, their former management company NEMS and the banking consortium Triumph Investments was equally taxing. EMI maintained its neutrality by holding back the royalties earned by the Beatles' records – a grievous blow at a time when Apple was struggling to achieve financial stability. In late June the dispute escalated when Clive Epstein and NEMS issued a writ against the Beatles, Klein, Neil Aspinall and anyone else with an interest in the group's film company Subafilms. The focus was the income generated by the Yellow Submarine animation: should the money be going to NEMS or directly to the Beatles?

Legal arguments now shadowed the Beatles' earnings from records, songwriting and films. Klein's urgent priority was to solve the dispute over NEMS, and thereby release their EMI royalties from captivity. A prolonged series of meetings with Triumph banker Leonard Richenberg produced a peace agreement, officially announced to the press on 9 July. 'The situation has been resolved to the satisfaction of both sides, ' the press release said with the gravitas appropriate for a treaty between warring nations. 'New arrangements have been made which will give the Beatles the independence they desire. ' Under the terms of the deal, NEMS dropped all its claims to represent the Beatles. In return, the Beatles agreed to sell their 10 per cent interest in NEMS to Triumph. NEMS was offered compensation of around £ 750, 000 for the earnings it might have gained as the group's managers up until 1972, while the company was also promised 5 per cent of the Beatles' record royalties from 1972 until 1976. ^*10 There were two immediate benefits for the Beatles: first, EMI released the £ 1. 3 million it had been safeguarding during the dispute; second, the Beatles acquired the NEMS shareholding in Northern Songs, which seemed to give them a decisive edge in the battle with ATV.

Inevitably, perhaps, this settlement was not reached without sniping behind the Beatles' lines. The final agreement had to be signed by all four of the group, and the documents were duly sent to Paul McCartney via his lawyers. He signed without argument, while Klein obtained the other three signatures on a separate copy of the agreement. On 7 or 8 July Klein was visiting John Lennon, who had just returned from Scotland, when he was called by one of Apple's lawyers. Klein alleged that McCartney threatened to pull out of the deal unless Klein agreed not to take any payment for negotiating the agreement over the previous five months. Klein couldn't believe what he was hearing, so he checked with McCartney's lawyer, who confirmed the news. It was a gesture of almost adolescent defiance but very little potency. Klein hurried to Abbey Road, where the other three Beatles were working. In front of Harrison and Starkey he told McCartney what his lawyer had said. McCartney was cornered: he could either refuse to pay Klein, scupper the deal and probably sabotage any chance of the Beatles completing their album, or he could back down. He chose the politer option, telling Klein that what he'd heard was 'ridiculous', and phoning his lawyer to authorise the exchange of contracts. 'So far as I am concerned, ' Lennon said later, 'Paul did accept Klein as the Beatles' manager, though he may not have liked him. '

It was perhaps just as well that Lennon was not a witness to this scene. He returned to the fray on 9 July and, for a few seconds, it appeared that he had come alone; but then Yoko Ono hobbled into the studio, followed by four porters from Harrods department store, wheeling in a bed. Ono was still suffering severe whiplash after the car crash in Scotland, but Lennon insisted that she should attend the sessions. 'Jaws dropping, we all watched as it was brought into the studio and carefully positioned by the stairs, ' engineer Geoff Emerick recalled. 'More [porters] appeared with sheets and pillows and sombrely made the bed up. Then, without saying a word, Yoko climbed in, carefully arranging the covers around her. ' And there she remained for the next few days, as if she was staging some magnificently comic piece of performance art, a third bed-in, perhaps, for the benefit of a very carefully selected audience. As McCartney noted, it was 'not the ideal way for making records'.

Perhaps in an unconscious attempt at revenge, McCartney subjected Lennon and the other Beatles to several days of hard labour, trying to transform his novelty song 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' into a possible single – 'which it could never have been', as Lennon said bitterly. Somehow the group managed to rise above their petty squabbling for the next four weeks, regaining their collective identity to the extent that Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were able to devote almost twelve hours to recording the most choirboy-perfect harmonies of their entire career, on Lennon's composition 'Because'. But this show of unity disguised the fact that the group's two main creative forces now had completely different agendas. While McCartney retained his almost freakishly inspired command of melody, Lennon was only interested in music that was an unvarnished expression of emotion. At its most extreme, this gulf was demonstrated by the weightless trickery of 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer', from McCartney, and Lennon's relentlessly direct love song 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)'. Both men, meanwhile, chose to underestimate the flowering talents of George Harrison, whose best work – such as his two contributions to this album, 'Something' and 'Here Comes the Sun' – combined the most attractive qualities of his elder colleagues. The Beatles had always been a blend of talents, but now the fusion could only hold if the four men were prepared to restrain any creative impulses that didn't fit the mould. For Lennon, this degree of compromise was no longer bearable.

Fortunately he was able to submerge his passion for the avant-garde long enough for this final album, entitled Abbey Road, to be completed. The name was a description rather than an expression of love for a studio complex that the Beatles felt they had long since outgrown; it also enabled them to shoot a cover picture quickly and comfortably. On the morning of 8 August 1969 they marched back and forth across the zebra crossing outside the studio to create one of the most famous album sleeves in history. Lennon became increasingly impatient as a crowd of onlookers gathered: 'I was muttering, " Hurry up", you know, " Keep in step, " ' he admitted afterwards.

It had become increasingly difficult for the Beatles to keep in step for longer than it took to click a camera shutter. At Apple aides such as Tony Bramwell experienced the daily fluctuations of power.

People like myself and Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans would constantly be getting calls from one of the Beatles, asking us to do something but not tell the others. Paul would want us to book him a recording session at Morgan Studios, but not let John know, while John and Yoko had their own reign of terror. John got completely negative about everyone else's projects. He would only be interested in himself and Yoko. One week Paul would be in the office, the next it would be John and Yoko ruling the roost. It was difficult for those of us who'd grown up being faithful to them, and who suddenly found ourselves having to play them off against each other, behind each other's backs.

For Lennon, Apple no longer offered even the illusion of freedom. 'The problem is that two years ago our accountants made us sign 80 per cent of all our royalties to Apple, ' he explained. 'We can't touch any of it, and it's a ridiculous situation. All the money comes into this little building and it never gets out. If I could get my money out of the company, I'd split away and start doing my own projects independently. I'd have much more freedom and we'd all be happier. I still feel part of Apple and the Beatles, and there's no animosity, but they tend to ignore Yoko and me. ' In fact, Lennon and Ono were difficult to ignore at Apple. 'They tended to be very demanding, ' recalled Derek Taylor, 'but I was used to being demanding myself, so that didn't worry me. But Yoko did tend to come into my office and expect a thousand different things to be done immediately, which presented something of a challenge. '

Money was uppermost in Lennon's mind in August 1969, as he faced a bill for three months' building work on Tittenhurst Park, the Ascot mansion he had bought in May. (In fact, the property had been purchased by Maclen Ltd, which handled Lennon and McCartney's songwriting income, opening up another financial problem for the future. ) The grounds, which had been open to the public for decades, were expansive; the house was a perfect example of rock star grandiosity. The Lennons proudly invited the other Beatles to visit, on 22 August 1969. Photographer Monty Fresco documented the occasion in a series of shots that comprised the group's final photo session. Inevitably, Ono found her way into the frame more often than not. Perhaps sensing this was a historic occasion, Pattie Boyd took some silent-film footage of the four musicians as they would never be seen again.

Now there was no reason for the Beatles to meet except business. While they completed work on Abbey Road, Allen Klein continued to negotiate a takeover of Northern Songs. The block of shareholders known as the Consortium, who had refused to choose between the Beatles and ATV, remained an enticing target for Klein, who learned in late summer that they might finally be prepared to sell. He invited John Eastman to fly to London so that McCartney's interests would be fully represented. The relationship between the two men had recently descended into open enmity. 'Dear John, ' Klein wrote to Eastman on 2 September, 'I am on a diet, so please stop putting words in my mouth. Your misuse and abuse of the truth is almost without parallel. ' Eastman arrived on 15 September, and a day or two later all four Beatles endured a turgid discussion about voting rights and share options, which broadened into a desultory fight between Lennon and Harrison about the latter's right to equal exposure on any future Beatles record. Though nobody realised it at the time, this was an epochal moment: it was the last occasion on which Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey would be together in the same room. A saga that had begun in passionate commitment to rock 'n' roll music ended in a life-draining argument about the consequences of that passion.

On 19 September, Klein, Eastman and the Beatles (except Harrison) met again at Apple. To assure the Consortium that the Beatles' camp was speaking with one voice, a series of photographs was taken by Linda McCartney, showing the Beatles and Klein apparently signing a document together. Klein stood at the centre of the shots, with McCartney playful, coy and sheepish alongside the man who had outflanked his in-laws.

The mood changed abruptly as they turned their attention to business. Heading the agenda was the question of who should sit on the board of Northern Songs when it fell into the hands of the Beatles. According to Klein, John Eastman threw the meeting into confusion when he 'insisted that Paul should have as many votes as the other three Beatles put together. Mr Starkey looked incredulously at John Eastman and said, " I cannot believe what you are saying. Do you mean that Paul should have as many votes as all of us? " [McCartney] then looked at John Eastman and said, " John, that can't be right, why should I have as many votes as all of them? " ' Eastman's reply – 'If we become unhappy, we should want to be able to vote with the other side' – didn't satisfy Lennon or Starkey, who told him, 'Look, the more and more we talk, it seems like you're trying to split us, not keep us together. '

The argument was soon rendered irrelevant by the discovery that the Consortium had thrown in its shares with ATV: the battle for Northern Songs was lost. ^*11 And at least two of the people at that meeting knew that another fight was nearly over: the struggle to preserve the Beatles. On 13

September Lennon and Ono attended a rock 'n' roll festival in Toronto with a hastily assembled group of musicians answering to the name of the Plastic Ono Band. George Harrison was among those invited to take part, but he told Lennon that he didn't have any interest in performing Yoko Ono's avant-garde music. There was a strict hierarchy among the musicians, as guitarist Eric Clapton discovered: 'It was raining, and we were standing around waiting for the luggage when a huge limo rolled up, and John and Yoko jumped into it and drove away, leaving the rest of us standing in the rain without a clue as to what to do next. Well, that's nice, I thought. ' The Plastic Ono Band was booked to appear alongside many of Lennon's 1950s heroes, and to control his nervousness he inhaled a vast quantity of cocaine. The combination of nerves and stimulant took its toll, as the event's compè re Kim Fowley recalled: 'John threw up. And he started to cry. He said, " I'm terrified. Imagine if the Beatles were the only band you've ever been in, and it's the first time you are going to step on stage with people who aren't the Beatles. " ' As bass guitarist Klaus Voormann noted, " John stood in the dressing room, which was admittedly rather tatty, saying, " What am I doing here? I could have gone to Brighton. " '

Wearing the white suit that had become his public uniform, Lennon eventually led the Plastic Ono Band on stage for an ill-rehearsed but charismatic set of rock 'n' roll standards and his own recent compositions – notably 'Cold Turkey', a graphic account of heroin addiction that he had offered to the other Beatles as a potential single. Then he turned the stage over to Ono, who delivered two lengthy fusions of rock and performance art, culminating in a series of guttural shrieks, superseded by the relentless howl of guitar feedback. 'People were surprised when I suddenly used to start screaming during our concerts, ' Ono said. 'But they didn't realise I had vocal training. ' Press reports suggested that her uncompromising performance was greeted with howls of derision, but she demurred: 'I was completely wrapped up in the music. I did not feel any of that hostility, even though I'm sure it was there. '

Performing rock 'n' roll without the Beatles was a profoundly symbolic action. All that remained was the deed itself. On the flight to Toronto, between bouts of unamplified rehearsal, Lennon told Clapton and Voormann that he intended to quit the Beatles, and would be forming another band, if they were interested. Allen Klein was the next to be informed. He didn't attempt to change Lennon's mind; he simply said that contractual negotiations with EMI had reached a delicate stage and might be endangered if the record company learned that the Beatles could no longer work together.

Klein can scarcely have been surprised. He knew that Starkey and Harrison had walked away from the group in the past, and he was aware of the tensions aroused at Apple by the conflicting demands of the Beatles and the Lennons. He may have hoped – indeed, assumed – that Lennon was merely voicing a passing fantasy, and that once he was safely back on British soil he would resume his place as the group's fiercest internal critic. Securing the Beatles as his clients, Klein knew, would mean nothing if they disintegrated as soon as he assumed control.

The meeting on 19 September confirmed to Klein that the problem was not Lennon's commitment to the group, but the increasingly obvious split between McCartney and the rest. For once it was Starkey rather than Lennon who most vehemently opposed Eastman's proposals. The overriding impression left by Eastman's arguments was that McCartney should always be able to match the voting power of the other three, even if – as he was perennially in 1969 – he was in a minority of one. Starkey was outraged, rejecting each of Eastman's arguments in turn. 'Eastman is representing him, ' he said, pointing at McCartney. You' – he indicated Klein – 'represent us. '

The following day, 20 September 1969, the same parties regrouped at Apple. They were there to authorise and sign the new recording deal that Klein had secured from Capitol Records, the North American arm of EMI, which was responsible for 75 per cent of the group's global record sales. Although John Eastman had originally wanted to stall the negotiations, going so far (according to Klein) as to tell Capitol that Klein did not represent McCartney in the talks, he had finally agreed to the deal. So too had McCartney, who could not fail to be impressed by the unprecedented terms of the agreement, which saw the Beatles awarded a higher royalty rate (25 per cent of the wholesale price) than any other recording act. The rate would rise again in 1972, as long as the last two Beatles-related albums issued at that point had each sold more than 500, 000 copies in the USA, a clause that would become a subject for debate three years later. Derek Taylor summarised the negotiations: 'Klein takes EMI and Capitol to the cleaners and to hell and back and it is Stanley Gortikov, a senior executive at Capitol, who says a lot later that year that, OK, Capitol paid up, but did Klein have to be so hard about it? ' Klein noted, 'I did Capitol a great favour. I delivered them product. These boys want to work, but you have to motivate them. They won't work when they're being screwed by a record company. But when somebody gets rid of the bullshit, and they're getting a fair deal, they'll work. ' But would they work together?

In his official chronicle of this meeting, delivered to the London High Court in 1971, Klein testified, 'Everyone was in a very cheerful frame of mind and regarded this as a good deal, and a great occasion in the life of The Beatles. ' Lennon, McCartney and Starkey duly appended their name to the contract; Harrison, who had just discovered that his mother was suffering from terminal cancer, signed later.

But Klein's account omitted the crucial fact that before the contract was signed John Lennon had left the Beatles. There was a long, circular conversation: as McCartney lamented later, 'We started talking about the future of the group, not knowing that there wasn't to be any future to this group. ' It was a throwback to the dead-end discussions of January 1969: Lennon virtually silent, McCartney self-consciously enthusiastic, aware that the more optimism he displayed, the more he opened himself up to his former partner's contempt. There was sullen agreement from Lennon and Starkey that the Beatles should continue, but neither of them could muster a vision of how that might work. It was then that McCartney – not for the first time – unveiled his concept of how they could function in the decade ahead: they should return to their roots and turn up in small clubs unannounced, maybe billed under some pseudonym such as Rikki and the Redstreaks. They could reconnect with their audience, and themselves, and rediscover the commitment that had so clearly been missing from their relationship since the death of Brian Epstein.

Lennon's response was curt and abusive: 'I think you're daft. ' Then, while McCartney looked on aghast, he smiled and said, 'Look, I might as well tell you. I wasn't going to say anything until after we'd signed the Capitol deal, but I'm leaving the group. ' In McCartney's recollection, 'Our

jaws – me, Ringo, George and Linda, because she happened to be nearby – dropped. ' But Harrison wasn't there, and in later years Starkey couldn't remember any sense of shock, only relief. McCartney stuttered something like, 'What do you mean? ' and Lennon hammered in the final nail: 'I've had enough. I want a divorce, like my divorce from Cynthia. It's given me a great feeling of freedom. ' And then the three ex-Beatles signed their Capitol Records contract under the pretence of total unity, 'in a bit of a daze, ' McCartney remembered, 'not quite knowing why we'd done it', though that was obvious: the deal ensured that whether they worked together or alone, they would earn much more from their record sales. 'I was reluctant to enter into the Capitol deal since it had been negotiated by Klein, ' McCartney testified in 1971. He could not bring himself to admit that his enemy had secured such a lucrative agreement. For McCartney, money was no longer a priority. 'I would have liked the Beatles never to have broken up, ' he admitted later. 'But the really hurtful thing to me was that John was really not going to tell us. '

As far as Starkey was concerned, it didn't matter whether Lennon had spoken or not: 'You could see it coming, but we all held it off for a while. ' Elsewhere, he remembered that when Lennon made his announcement, 'We all said yes, because it was ending – and you can't keep it together, anyway, if this is what the attitude is. ' The decision made so little impression on Harrison that he couldn't remember hearing about it; clearly it paled in his memory alongside the diagnosis of his mother's cancer. 'Everybody had tried to leave, so it was nothing new, ' he said later. 'Everybody was leaving for years. The Beatles had started out being something that gave us a vehicle to be able to do so much when we were younger, but it had now got to a point where it was stifling us. There was too much restriction. It had to self-destruct, and I wasn't feeling bad about anybody wanting to leave, because I wanted out myself. ' Starkey concurred: 'It was a relief once we finally said we could split up. I just wandered off home, I believe, and I don't know what happened after that. ' He saw Lennon's decision as a moment of integrity: 'As anyone will tell you, if we had wanted we could have just carried on and made fortunes, but that was not our game. '

To celebrate, Lennon, Ono and Klein adjourned to a West End restaurant, the Peppermill. There Lennon took a decisive step into the future, appointing Klein manager of his Bag Productions company for the next three years. Perhaps the most important part of the deal for Lennon was that ABKCO would instantly transfer £ 20, 000 to his account, enabling him to pay off the builders working at Tittenhurst Park. Over the next few days Lennon recorded his second Plastic Ono Band single, 'Cold Turkey', and its B-side, Ono's 'Don't Worry Kyoko', which he later described as the 'best fucking rock 'n' roll record ever made'. He also sat down with his friend Barry Miles for a lengthy interview that was syndicated across the underground press, ostensibly to promote Abbey Road. Even with Miles, he was careful to avoid any mention of his departure from the Beatles, although in retrospect there were hints: 'I don't write for the Beatles. I write for myself. ' How had his relationship with Ono affected the group? 'You'll have to ask them. ' More telling was his account of how his life had changed over the past two years: 'I'm more myself than I was then, because I've got the security of Yoko. That's what's done it. It's like having a " mother" and everything. ' Friends had noticed that he had been calling Yoko mother since the summer; it was both an acute psychological summary of their relationship and a colloquialism familiar in the north of England. And, of course, for Lennon 'mother' meant not only protector and carer; it meant the carefree spirit who had abandoned him as a small child and then reappeared in his teens, sparking a confused medley of emotions that ran from primal love to forbidden lust. 'It all came back to me like I was back to age 16, ' Lennon said, not realising exactly what he was revealing. 'All the rest of it had been wiped out. It was like going through psychiatry, really. ' And the interview closed with a line that would have meant so much if its readership had known what had just happened: 'It's like starting my whole life again. '

The same realisation struck Richard Starkey. He was perfectly capable of rationalising the split: 'The break-up came because everyone had ideas of what he wanted to do, whereas everyone used to have ideas of what we would do, as a group. We weren't really fulfilling John's musical ambitions or Paul's or George's or my own, in the end, because it was separate. ' Understanding why the Beatles could no longer function was one thing, dealing with the emotional consequences quite another. 'I sat in the garden for a while wondering what the hell to do with my life, ' he admitted later. 'After you've said it's over and go home, you think, Oh God – that's it, then. Now what do you do? It was quite a dramatic period for me – or traumatic, really. '

Rather than finding solace in alcohol, as he would in later years, Starkey invented something to do. His solution echoed Lennon's: he would return to mother – not by marrying a dominant woman, but by recording songs that his own mother loved, a throwback to the days of crooners and big bands. Aware that his voice was an acquired taste, he enlisted the help of George Martin, who commissioned a set of arrangements from talents old and new. The sessions, which began in October 1969, were engineered by Geoff Emerick, who had always felt distant from Starkey and now found him more difficult than ever. 'Ringo was just uptight all the time, or perhaps it was just an act to keep me at a distance. The problem was that I never knew if I was talking to the actual person underneath the veneer or not. ' For Starkey perhaps more than the other Beatles, the gulf between his lovable public image and his authentic self would grow increasingly difficult to bridge. Some fundamental sense of insecurity had always shone through his Beatle persona, where it appeared as self-deprecation, and boosted his appeal with fans. Now he had no obvious role, no reliable showcase for the musical talent of which he was so proud. But neither had he been seen to develop as a personality since 1963, in the way that his colleagues had. Their maturity was expressed through their songwriting; Starkey said little and wrote less^*12, so he remained a mystery to his audience, who chose to believe in his simple decency.

Like Starkey, McCartney was now forced to face himself, as an individual, beyond the safety of the Beatles and without the self-assurance he had always gained from Lennon's love and approval. In later years he would admit that the shock of Lennon's announcement had first numbed him, and then left him fearful and uncertain. He was the one Beatle who had a guaranteed future as a soloist: critics had been applauding his innate talents as a songwriter ever since they became aware that Lennon and McCartney worked as two separate entities. But success only seemed meaningful for McCartney in the context of Lennon: most of his actions in the months ahead seemed to be designed to demonstrate his independence, and to demonstrate it to Lennon most of all.

By contrast, Harrison was already so removed from the Beatles that he was barely touched by the split. He went through the motions of promoting the Abbey Road album in October 1969, though his technique was unorthodox. 'To me, listening to Abbey Road is like listening to somebody else, ' he announced. 'It doesn't feel like the Beatles. ' Nor did he feel like one of the Beatles: he was already assembling songs for a solo album, thrilled to have escaped the restrictive gaze of his elder colleagues.

None of this alerted the public to the possibility that the Beatles had disbanded. 'I was at Apple, ' recalled journalist Ray Connolly, a close friend of the group during this period, 'and Derek Taylor came in and said, " Well, that's it, we're all fucked. " But he wouldn't say why. It was only later that I discovered that was the day when John announced he was leaving. Then a few weeks later I was in Toronto with John, and he pulled me aside and said, " Ray, I want to tell you something. I've left the Beatles. But you mustn't tell anyone. I'll let you know when it's OK to tell people. " Every so often I'd ask John and he'd say, " No, not yet. " ' Harrison could still talk blithely about a future record on which 'we're going to get an equal rights thing, so we all have as much on the album'. Allen Klein authorised the release of a single, combining two songs from Abbey Road: Lennon's 'Come Together' (the subject of an immediate claim for copyright infringement by the publishers of Chuck Berry's 'You Can't Catch Me') and Harrison's 'Something'. There was a promotional film for the latter track, which featured footage of all the Beatles with their wives – but individually, never as a group. Lennon and Ono maintained their fiendish work schedule: they released a Wedding Album, an extravagantly packaged box set in which the record was one of the less intriguing items; 'Cold Turkey' carried the subject of withdrawal from heroin into the Top 30 for the first time; they prepared a live album of their Toronto performance; and they screened their experimental films in London, including the infamous Self Portrait of Lennon's penis.

Perhaps sensing that there was something awry, a pair of American DJs let their minds free-associate and decided that the answer was simple: Paul McCartney was dead, and had been replaced by a lookalike in 1966. The 'news' broke in mid-October, boosting sales of the Beatles' back catalogue and encouraging idle minds to scan the group's recordings for clues. Music was played backwards; photographs examined for evidence of the imposter; album covers interpreted. There were obvious flaws in the theory. If McCartney's death was a secret, why were the Beatles offering clues in their songs? And how had they managed to find a doppelgä nger who could write 'Hey Jude' and 'Blackbird'? But the story tapped into the global sense of distrust that had greeted the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At their most extreme the JFK conspiracy theories asked US citizens to accept that their president had been replaced in a coup d'é tat. The notion that one of the Beatles was a fake offered a safer route to that satisfying frisson of paranoia.

What's ironic is that the Beatles were indeed conspiring to keep a secret from their fans; the theorists had simply identified the wrong target. Yet the clues were there, all the same: the conspirators could not restrain their tongues. Starkey distanced himself from his friends: 'I'm sorry, but I'm just not like them'; 'I don't particularly dig what John and Yoko are doing'; 'We are four completely different people. We have all stopped doing things together. ' McCartney was unearthed at his Scottish farm by a reporter from the US magazine Life. The magazine trumpeted the fact that McCartney was alive, but missed the barely concealed subtext: 'The Beatle thing is over. It has been exploded, partly by what we have done, and partly by other people. We are individuals – all different. John married Yoko, I married Linda. We didn't marry the same girl. ' It was an intriguing way to describe the break-up, deflecting his disagreements with Lennon onto their choice of partners.

Inevitably, Lennon was the least restrained of the four. In a radio interview he referred to 'the Beatles, so-called'. Under the headline BEATLES ON THE BRINK OF SPLITTING, the New Musical Express reported his observations in detail: 'Paul and I both have differences of opinion on how things should be run. But instead of it being a private argument about how an LP should be done, or a certain track, it's now a large argument about the organisation of Apple itself. ' There was no mention of wives, and Lennon added gracefully, 'I don't really want to discuss Paul without him here. ' He concluded, 'The Beatles split up? It just depends how much we all want to record together. I don't know if I want to record together again. I go off and on it, I really do. '

For McCartney, and maybe Harrison and Starkey as well, this signified hope. 'For about three or four months, ' he recalled years later, 'George, Ringo and I rang each other to ask, " Well, is this it, then? " It wasn't that the record company had dumped us. It was just a case of: we might get back together again. Nobody quite knew if it was one of John's little flings, and that maybe he was going to feel the pinch in a week's time and say, " I was only kidding. " I think John did kind of leave the door open. He'd said, " I'm pretty much leaving the group, but. . . " ' McCartney testified in 1971, 'I think all of us (except possibly John) expected we would come together again one day. ' Yet it's hard to imagine him reading some of Lennon's other comments in late 1969 without a stab of pain – for example, 'The Beatles can go on appealing to a wide audience as long as they make nice albums like Abbey Road, which have nice little folk songs like " Maxwell's Silver Hammer" for the grannies to dig. '

Of course, the Beatles were still locked together as the reluctant controllers of 'the Beatles Group of Companies' under the supervision of Allen Klein. Although they had failed to secure control of Northern Songs, there remained the dilemma of what to do with their substantial shareholding. Klein negotiated for ATV to buy the Beatles out, only for negotiations to be disrupted when ATV received a letter from John Eastman claiming that Klein did not represent McCartney in any way. This surprised Klein, to say the least, as he had been negotiating regularly with McCartney about exactly that subject. There was a crisis meeting at Klein's apartment in Mayfair at which McCartney spoke to Eastman by telephone, scolded him for contacting ATV, and told him that he supported what Klein was doing. McCartney said that Eastman's final words were, 'Well, I don't understand it. You're all crazy. ' Klein then recalled that McCartney phoned ATV chief Sir Lew Grade and told him, 'Allen Klein is coming over and he speaks for me. ' The deal was concluded, and Klein registered it as a decisive victory in his battle of wills with the Eastmans.

On the same day that ATV bought the Beatles' shareholding, Klein held another screening of the Get Back film. He invited the entire group and their wives, but Lennon and Ono did not attend. The movie now ran around 100 minutes, about half its original length, and McCartney, Harrison and Starkey agreed that it was fit to release. Klein claimed credit for suggesting that it should be retitled Let It Be, enabling the McCartney-penned song of that title to be issued as a single at the same time, alongside a soundtrack album. ^*13 At dinner Klein told the three Beatles about another proposal, which Lennon had already approved: Apple Records should invite the American record producer Phil Spector to join its staff. The group had met Spector on several occasions in 1963 and 1964, and Harrison in particular was an admirer of his work. 'They were all enthusiastic, '

Klein recalled.

Apparently random events filled the landscape of the Beatles' new world. While McCartney and Starkey struggled to imagine how they might survive outside the group, Lennon ran fearlessly into the future. He outraged many right-thinking British citizens by returning the MBE medal he had been awarded in 1965, complaining about the government's inaction in the face of famine and civil war in Nigeria, and, as if to annoy anyone who wasn't already ruffled, adding a sly comment about the fact that 'Cold Turkey' was now sliding down the Top 30. His action spurred one gesture of solidarity, as Nigerian boxer Dick Tiger also returned his MBE, and a flurry of protests from those who felt that Lennon was insulting both the Queen and the decaying British Commonwealth. The next day Lennon prepared fresh edits of two songs he'd recorded earlier, 'What's the New Mary Jane' and 'You Know My Name', and announced that they would be rush-released as a Plastic Ono Band single. Just as quickly, the project was cancelled, with Apple explaining, 'It was mutually decided by the Beatles that it sounded more like the Beatles themselves than the Plastic Ono Band' – not least because both songs were indeed Beatles recordings. McCartney's reaction to Lennon's attempted theft can easily be imagined.

A clear sign that the times had changed came with the December 1969 publication of the final edition of The Beatles Book, which had appeared every month since 1963 with the group's increasingly distant approval. 'The Beatles have lost interest, ' publisher Sean O'Mahony complained to the Guardian. 'They won't co-operate, let us have new pictures, or give interviews. ' In his last editorial he attacked the group for their willingness to encourage young people to take drugs. 'I didn't think that the pop world had done young people any favours, ' he recalled later. 'It was fine for them: they were rich, and had someone to pick them up if they fell over. But their fans didn't have the same support network if things went wrong. '

With the timing that would become his trademark, US promoter Sid Bernstein chose this moment to offer the Beatles another substantial payday, if only they would come to their senses and perform together: $1 million for an appearance at a Dutch festival in August 1970. Lennon had similar plans of his own. Fired by his recent appearance in Toronto, he proposed a much more ambitious project: a peace festival in the city that would not only involve the Beatles but Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, the Who and virtually every other artist whose name came to Lennon's mind. The idea was doomed from the start, as Lennon was insistent that (a) the artists should be paid and (b) it should be a free festival. This equation proved impossible to solve, and after much hype in the underground press Lennon and his fellow organisers acrimoniously parted company. Stranger still was the idea, also given credence by Apple, that Lennon might sit on the board of a United States peace festival – to be staged not by hippies and peaceniks, but by the United States government. Even Lennon realised that this might endanger his image, and the proposal disintegrated in the wake of heightened protests against America's involvement in the Vietnam War.

'When we're not working, we get pretty depressed, ' Lennon admitted, and his activities had taken on a frantic quality – demonstrations, films, records, every aspect of his life translated into performance art. Surprisingly, Harrison echoed his work rate, having signed up with the touring

band of US rock-soul duo Delaney and Bonnie alongside Eric Clapton. On 6 December the musicians appeared in Liverpool, where Harrison allowed himself a rare moment in the spotlight. Unknown to him, Clapton had developed a passionate attachment to Pattie Boyd, who attended the Liverpool show with her younger sister Paula. According to Clapton, Harrison took him aside afterwards 'and suggested that I should spend the night with Pattie so that he could sleep with Paula. . . but at the last moment he lost his nerve and nothing happened. The end result was not the one George wanted, as I ended up spending the night with Paula instead. ' Clapton began to live with Paula Boyd while continuing to court her sister.

Harrison also found time in Liverpool to tell a journalist, 'I'd like to do the Beatles thing, but more like Delaney and Bonnie with us augmented with a few more singers and a few trumpets, saxes, organ and all that. ' The closest that his dream came to fruition was nine days later, when Lennon, Ono and the Plastic Ono Band were joined by the entire Delaney and Bonnie troupe, including Harrison, for a 30-minute charity performance in London. The impromptu 'supergroup', as the pop papers named it, played extended versions of the songs from Lennon/Ono's latest single, hitting almost supernatural peaks of what Lennon regarded as the music of the future, but confusing as many fans as it delighted.

It was easy to imagine that Starkey might have appeared alongside Lennon and Harrison that night, but McCartney would never have been invited. He continued to isolate himself from his colleagues and from Klein, despite being happy to benefit from the contracts that Klein had renegotiated. He secretly began work on a solo album, instructing his confidants at Apple that Lennon should not be told. That month he phoned Klein early one New York morning, and (so Klein alleged) 'said something about my not giving interviews to newspapers, and leaving his in-laws alone'. Meanwhile, Lennon was describing Klein's impact on Apple as 'really marvellous. . . He's swept out all the rubbish and the dead wood, and stopped it being a rest house for all the world's hippies. Klein's very good. '

Derek Taylor had the unfortunate task of interpreting the Beatles' actions for the outside world. As 1969 came to a close, the Apple press officer was invited to speculate about the year ahead. He clearly knew nothing about McCartney's recording activity, as he said that the musician was 'the only one who doesn't seem to have an outlet for whatever he gets together'. He hoped that McCartney would return from his winter holiday prepared to spur the reluctant Beatles back to work. 'We can expect a Beatle meeting to be called in January, ' he said. But Taylor revealed that the Beatles might now be a more elastic concept than in the past. 'Yoko's really one of them, ' he claimed. 'Without Yoko, there wouldn't be the Beatles. [Lennon] and Yoko are 50 per cent of each other, so if John's a Beatle, that makes her a Beatle too. '

One of Taylor's predictions was proved right, although not in the fashion he might have anticipated. On the afternoon of 3 January 1970 the Beatles gathered in the familiar setting of Studio Two, Abbey Road Studios. This was not a quartet, however, or even quintet, but the three-man group that had worked together so successfully in July. John Lennon was absent, undergoing hypnosis treatment in Denmark in an effort to quit smoking, cropping his hair and telling the press that all his future record royalties would be donated to the peace movement. (Allen Klein's 10 per cent share of Bag Productions was suddenly looking less attractive. ) Without Lennon, the Beatles recorded Harrison's 'I Me Mine'. The song was featured in the Let It Be film, and Klein was anxious that it should appear on the soundtrack album. The following day the trio applied various overdubs to McCartney's 'Let It Be', and Linda McCartney was persuaded to flesh out the background harmonies with her naive, untutored voice. Eighteen months after Lennon had first invited Ono to participate in a Beatles session, McCartney had finally secured his hollow revenge.

Once again the luckless Glyn Johns was asked to assemble an appropriate album; once again the four Beatles turned it down. Let It Be was now scheduled for cinema release in May, and Klein was desperate to seize the commercial opportunity that the film represented by issuing a new record. He had already asked Apple Records' US head, Allan Steckler, to compile an album for the American market entitled HeyJude, which the Beatles condoned as it represented a way of earning money without any effort. Klein must have been tempted to overrule his infuriatingly indecisive clients and authorise his own version of the Let It Be soundtrack. But even he could not have imagined that the Beatles' record company could release a new album by the group without their unanimous consent. As it turned out, his imagination was about to be stretched to its limit – and so was Paul McCartney's patience.