Let It Be

The album that closes the canon is the album that was begun first. Most of Let It Be was recorded between 2 and 31 January 1969 as part of the 'Get Back' project — a return-to-roots attempt to make a live-feel LP filmed for a TV special. Twickenham Film Studios served as a freezing rehearsal hangar for the first ten days; sessions then moved to the Beatles' newly-built Apple Studio in the basement of 3 Savile Row. The famous rooftop concert on 30 January 1969 was the last time the four Beatles played publicly. Phil Spector was brought in by Lennon and Harrison in March 1970 to overdub strings, brass, harp and choir — to McCartney's lasting fury.

The Twickenham sessions were attempts to rehearse new material for a planned live show; they produced no usable masters and almost no morale. The Apple basement sessions, with Glyn Johns engineering and Billy Preston playing electric piano, produced most of the released album. Spector's post-production at EMI in March/April 1970 added the orchestral and choral overdubs that have divided opinion ever since — McCartney's lawsuit against the other three the following December cited the Spector mix of The Long and Winding Road as a contractual betrayal.

Get Back closed the rooftop set with Lennon's famous 'I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition.' Let It Be was inspired by McCartney's dream of his late mother Mary visiting in a time of trouble. Two of Us is a McCartney song about Linda that feels — and was sung — like a valediction to his songwriting partnership. I Me Mine, recorded on 3 January 1970, was the last new song the band ever cut as a group (Lennon was in Denmark and absent from the session). Across the Universe, originally cut in February 1968, was rescued for Spector's strings-and-choir treatment.

Released 8 May 1970, a month after McCartney announced his departure. UK number one for three weeks. Reviews ranged from dismissive (the NME called it 'a sad and tatty end to a great career') to defensive (Lennon, in 1971, said it was 'the shittiest load of badly-recorded shit'). McCartney's 2003 Let It Be… Naked stripped Spector's overdubs back off, providing for the first time the LP as the band had originally intended it.

Let It Be is the awkward postscript that was meant to be the warm centrepiece. Its rooftop concert remains one of pop's most-screened sequences. The album's release in May 1970 ended the public phase of the band; the lawsuit between McCartney and the other three would last until 1975 and end with Apple Corps still standing, the Beatles partnership finally dissolved.