On 30 January on the roof of 3 Savile Row, the London HQ of their company Apple, the four – joined by the US keyboard player Billy Preston – performed five songs: Get Back , Dig a Pony and One After 909.
Neither the band nor the people watching on the rooftop and down below are aware that this will be their last ever live performance.
Among other things, the resulting footage – used in the original 1970 documentary Let It Be, and now recut by Jackson – proves that the Beatles could still tease out the prejudices of age and class.
When I ask Paul McCartney about these scenes, he mentions a sequence from the first Beatles film, 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night.
But you’ve got to remember, as we always did, there’s the people who work for that guy.
By and large, the array of people with positive opinions of the rooftop performance outnumbered the detractors, proving that the Beatles had an almost universal appeal – from female twentysomethings to a passing cab driver and the trilby-hatted man who offers the opinion that the Beatles are “real good people”.
As McCartney has pointed out in the past, the early run of singles – Love Me Do, Please Please Me, From Me to You, She Loves You – had deliberately used personal pronouns, to maximise their popular resonance.
The starting point for the rehearsals and recording sessions that would produce the album and film titled Let It Be was a plan to globally televise their first performance in front of a crowd since 1966.
Among the ideas they considered was a show at a Roman amphitheatre in Libya, staged in front of some kind of microcosm of humanity.
Could they stage an event that somehow represented their global appeal? In the summer of 1967, they had pulled off something like that, playing All You Need Is Love to a worldwide TV audience of at least 400 million, thanks to the new technology of satellite broadcasting.
This time, though, George Harrison’s antipathy to returning to the stage, which led to his temporary walkout, meant that any ambitious plans soon proved to be non-starters.
As well as new CD and vinyl editions of Let It Be, Jackson’s series is accompanied by a Get Back book which, like the films, tells a much more nuanced and complicated story than the received idea of the sessions as a time of unending strife.
We met a hip-hop aficionado who talked about learning of the Beatles through other artists sampling their music, and a man whose 24-year-old daughter had just completed a cover of Eight Days a Week and put it online.
The best example of this were the Thayer family from Somerset, whom we later met outside Abbey Road studios, restaging the famous cover of the album of the same name.