In a sustained attempt to cover the cracks that were becoming increasingly visible in their personal and musical relationships, they reconvened for Abbey Road . The album was dominated by a glorious song cycle on side 2, in which such fragmentary compositions as ‘Mean Mr. Mustard’, ‘Polythene Pam’, ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’ and ‘Golden Slumbers’/'Carry That Weight’ gelled into a convincing whole. The accompanying single coupled Lennon’s ‘Come Together’ with Harrison’s ‘Something’. The latter song gave Harrison the kudos he deserved, and rightly became the second most covered Beatles song ever, after ‘Yesterday’. The single only reached number 4 in the UK, the group’s lowest chart position since ‘Love Me Do’ in 1962. Such considerations were small compared to the fate of their other songs. The group could only watch helplessly as a wary Dick James surreptitiously sold Northern Songs to ATV. The catalogue continued to change hands over the following years and not even the combined financial force of McCartney and Yoko Ono could eventually wrest it from superstar speculator Michael Jackson.
With various solo projects on the horizon, the Beatles stumbled through 1970, their disunity betrayed to the world in the depressing film Let It Be, which shows Harrison and Lennon clearly unhappy about McCartney’s attitude towards the band. The subsequent album, finally pieced together by producer Phil Spector, was a controversial and bitty affair, initially housed in a cardboard box containing a lavish paperback book, which increased the retail price to a prohibitive level. Musically, the work revealed the Beatles looking back to better days. It included the sparse ‘Two Of Us’ and the primitive ‘The One After 909′, a song they used to play as the Quarrymen, and an orchestrated ‘Long And Winding Road’, which provided their final US number 1, although McCartney pointedly preferred the non-orchestrated version in the film. There was also the aptly titled last official single, ‘Let It Be’, which entered the UK charts at number 2, only to drop to number 3 the following week. For many it was the final, sad anti-climax before the inevitable, yet still unexpected, split. The acrimonious dissolution of the Beatles, like that of no other group before or since, symbolized the end of an era that they had dominated and helped to create.
It is inconceivable that any group in the future can shape and influence a generation in the same way as these four individuals. More than 30 years on, the quality of the songs is such that none show signs of sounding either lyrically or musically dated. Since the break-up of the band, there have been some important releases for Beatles fans. In 1988 the two Past Masters volumes collected together all the Beatles tracks not available on the CD releases of their original albums. The first volume has 18 tracks from 1962-65; the second, 15 from the subsequent years. Live At The BBC collected together 56 tracks played live by the Beatles for various shows on the BBC Light Programme in the infancy of their career. Most of the songs are cover versions of 50s R&B standards, including nine by Chuck Berry. The first volume of Anthology, released in November 1995, collected 52 previously unreleased out-takes and demo versions recorded between 1958 and 1964, plus eight spoken tracks taken from interviews. The album was accompanied by an excellent six-part television series that told the complete story of the band, made with the help of the three remaining Beatles, and by the single release of ‘Free As A Bird’, the first song recorded by the band since their break-up. This consisted of a 1977 track sung by Lennon into a tape recorder, and backed vocally and instrumentally in 1995 by the other three Beatles and produced by Jeff Lynne. It narrowly failed to reach number 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, as did the slightly inferior ‘Real Love’ in March 1996. The reaction to Anthology 2 was ecstatic. While it was expected that older journalists would write favourably about their generation, it was encouraging to see younger writers offering some fresh views. David Quantick of the New Musical Express offered one of the best comments in recent years: ‘The Beatles only made – they could only make – music that referred to the future. And that is the difference between them and every other pop group or singer ever since’. Anthology 3 could not improve upon the previous collection but there were gems to be found. The acoustic ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ from Harrison is stunning. ‘Because’, never an outstanding track when it appeared on Abbey Road, is given a stripped a cappella treatment. The McCartney demo of ‘Come And Get It’ for Badfinger begs the question of why the Beatles chose not to release this classic pop song themselves. In the course of history the Rolling Stones and countless other major groups are loved, but the Beatles are universally and unconditionally adored.
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