There was much excitement at the news of Lennon's posthumous involvement in the reunion. But the Beatles themselves were more ambivalent. An initial recording session scheduled the week before McCartney collected the tapes from Ono was cancelled when Starkey chose to go skiing instead. There followed negotiations over the choice of producer and venue. 'I told them I wasn't too happy with putting them together with the dead John,' George Martin recalled. 'I might have done it if they had asked me, but they didn't ask me.' McCartney believed that Martin had withdrawn from the running by confessing that he was losing his hearing – though that begged the question of why he was being allowed to compile the Anthology albums. Harrison effectively issued an ultimatum: either they hired Jeff Lynne as producer or he wasn't taking part; and Starkey backed him. McCartney was concerned that Lynne would automatically favour Harrison's views over his own, but he reluctantly agreed, and the Beatles gathered at McCartney's Sussex studio on 11 February, for what was originally intended as a week of sessions. In the event, the reunion was extended for a second week, allowing the group to come close to completing one song ('Free as a Bird') and tinker with two others ('Grow Old With Me' and 'Now and Then').
McCartney kept a private diary of the sessions, so he could document this moment of personal history. The initial sessions were said to have been tense, particularly between Harrison and McCartney. 'There have been a lot of bad feelings,' Starkey conceded. 'We've been in and out of favour with each other for the last twenty years. But this project brought us together. Once we get the bullshit behind us, we all end up doing what we do best, which is making music. The crap went out the window, and we had a lot of fun.'
'Free as a Bird' was identified as the most promising of Lennon's songs – not least because it was clearly unfinished, and therefore allowed for creative input from the other Beatles. 'I actually originally heard it as a big, orchestral, Forties Gershwin thing,' McCartney revealed later, 'but it didn't turn out like that. In the end we decided to do it very simply.' While he and Starkey said they felt tearful when they heard Lennon's voice through the studio speakers, Harrison maintained a sense of distance: 'Maybe I'm peculiar, but to me he isn't dead.' But he admitted, 'I miss him in the context of the band, because he wouldn't take any shit, and I think that aspect's missing. In some ways I feel that I'm trying to make up for that aspect of John, because I don't like to take much shit either.' Identifying the source of 'shit' did not require a DNA test. In return, McCartney tried to prevent Harrison from playing his trademark slide guitar on the track. 'I thought, Oh, it's "My Sweet Lord" again,' he admitted, before conceding that Harrison's solo was 'a blinder'. Yet despite their mutual misgivings, the two men were able to pool their strengths rather than their weaknesses, disguising the dirge-like quality of Lennon's performance. Their almost instinctual blend of talents was exemplified by the layers of harmony vocals, which gave the track a distinctively Beatlesque flavour. As Starkey crowed, 'It really sounds like a Beatles track. I think you could say they could have made this in 1967. It was weird for me, and I'm on it! When I was listening to it, it was like a light going on in my head – "It's them!"'
Despite efforts to maintain secrecy, news of the sessions broke in the press within two days and was immediately inflated. The Mail onSunday claimed that the three Beatles had agreed to perform in New York's Central Park with Julian Lennon, earning £20 million apiece; its daily sister paper added to the confusion, asserting that the group would perform 'In Spite of All the Danger', a 1958 composition that was actually the earliest recording exhumed from the archives by George Martin. In expectation that the Beatles would be unable to resist the lure of live performance, festival organisers clamoured for their services. Apple received an offer of £2.5 million for a two-hour Beatles set from the organisers of a concert on the Isle of Wight, while the promoters of Woodstock 94 also lodged a bid. Neither offer was acknowledged, let alone considered.
The Beatles kept their distance from each other after the February sessions. Only in May did they meet again, watching early rushes of the documentary and adjourning to a vegetarian restaurant, where they were spotted again with their wives a month later. June 22, 1994 found the three men back at McCartney's studio, but work on a second Lennon composition, 'Now and Then', ceased almost immediately. 'It was one day – one afternoon, really – messing with it,' Jeff Lynne recalled. 'It was a very sweet song, and I wished we could have finished it.' 'It didn't have a very good title,' McCartney conceded, 'but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it. But George didn't want to do it.' McCartney was left with the consolation that he had been able to hear Lennon's voice through his studio headphones as if it was still 1967. 'It was like he was in the next room.' McCartney beamed. 'Fuck, I'm singing harmony with John! It's like an impossible dream.'
As an apology for having sabotaged the session, Harrison invited his colleagues to his home the following day, accompanied by a film crew. They briefly debated re-recording 'Let It Be' (one Beatle vetoed that idea) before settling, just as they had in 1969, for the safety of reviving less controversial material. While cameras rolled, the three-man Beatles flirted with their pre-fame repertoire – vintage rock 'n' roll standards, primitive Lennon/McCartney originals and even their debut single, 'Love Me Do'. Through it all Starkey kept perfect time with a broad smile on his face, as if he'd just arrived home after an epic voyage; McCartney whooped and vamped like a schoolboy on a sugar rush; and Harrison did his best to suggest that although his body was present, his spirit was on a much higher plane. In the garden a more self-conscious McCartney and Harrison swapped songs on their ukuleles, before calling time on their first fully documented reunion performance since 1970. Then they resumed their habit of non-communication – to the extent that when McCartney suffered a car accident in November 1994 he received anxious phone calls from Starkey and Ono, but not from Harrison.
If the youngest Beatle was preoccupied by the lawsuit against his former manager, Starkey faced the tragedy of the death of his first wife, Maureen Cox, from cancer on 30 December. 'They always loved each other,' a friend recalled. Starkey joined their children and Cox's second husband at her bedside as she died. McCartney was so touched that he penned the poignant 'Little Willow' for her bereaved children. Another former Beatle wife, Cynthia Lennon, returned to the media in happier circumstances.
This German record label faxed us at home, wanting to know about Julian's career. It's not the first time that's happened, but I'm his mother, not his manager, so why do they come to me? My partner faxed them back, saying jokingly that 'Julian isn't available but his mother is.' Then they got straight back in touch: 'We're really interested. Can she sing?'
She could, though that didn't make her revival of the 1968 Apple Records hit 'Those Were the Days' anything more than a novelty.
One year after their first reunion the Beatles had completed just one of the three songs they had planned to record. In early February 1995 they returned to McCartney's studio to work on Lennon's 'Real Love'. Harrison complained that the tape was 'this bad copy, and it had this tambourine that was out of time and real loud'. Lynne was forced to spend days cleaning, editing and improving the track before the Beatles could begin work. Bizarrely, none of them realised that a far superior performance of the song had already been released in the 1988 documentary film Imagine: John Lennon. 'I don't like it as much as "Free as a Bird",' McCartney admitted later. But he refused to criticise Lennon and was affronted when Harrison did. 'He was saying to me, "I sort of felt John was going off a little bit towards the end of his writing [career],"' McCartney noted. 'I personally found that a little presumptuous.'
Further sessions were held in March and May, but they ended in failure, with Harrison observing, 'It's just like being back in the Beatles.' That was not intended as a compliment. After years of sparring, Harrison and McCartney had attempted to write together, sketching out a song with the unpromising title 'All For Love'. When the two men launched into a vehement argument, an e
ngineer stepped in to support McCartney, who told him to keep out of it. 'He's still a Beatle, you know,' he said, pointing at Harrison. 'George had some business problems,' McCartney said later, 'and it didn't do a lot for his moods over the last couple of years. He's not been that easy to get on with.'
The three Beatles found it easier to socialise together than to work. 'When Ringo said, "I've done my bit," and left me and George to do it,' McCartney remembered, 'we had a little bit more tension.' Yet when Apple's in-house photographer Tommy Hanley took some spontaneous photos of the trio in March 1995 they looked relaxed and playful.
If the Beatles' reunion was a surprise, McCartney's decision to record with Yoko Ono beggared belief. She and her son visited England in March 1995 and taped an experimental soundscape entitled 'Hiroshima Sky Is Always Blue' with the entire McCartney clan. This was her sonic territory, not his, but like his collaboration with poet Allen Ginsberg around the same time it allowed McCartney to restate his credentials as the Beatles' true champion of the avant-garde. A few weeks later he unveiled an anarchic US radio show entitled Oobu Joobu in honour of Alfred Jarry's absurdist 1896 drama Ubu Roi. 'The most refreshing thing about Paul is that he's completely and utterly unpredictable,' said his producer Eddy Pumer. 'There are no rules, no formats, no restrictions. There were no scripts; it was entirely improvised.' Lennon and Ono would have been proud of it; Harrison derisive. Indeed, Harrison's major creative decisions of the summer were negative. He was said to have rejected the idea of issuing a ten-video boxed set of the full-length Anthology because the number was 'karmically wrong'. He also vetoed the inclusion of the McCartney-inspired sound experiment 'Carnival of Light' from 1967 on any of the Anthology releases, repeating his oft-heard claim, 'Avant-garde is French for bullshit.'
There were now two priorities for Apple: selling the TV rights to the Anthology documentary around the world and securing the approval of Ono and the three Beatles for a final cut. Ono complained that, in the rough edit, 'there was so much Paul and very little John. They said, "No, no, equal time." So I got an engineer to time it and it was one to four. Then the Apple people said, "Oh, really? We didn't notice that." I only found out because I used a stopwatch to check.'
The man with the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that the Beatles were happy with the Anthology was, still, Neil Aspinall. 'He's been in the Beatles since 1961,' said the documentary's producer Bob Smeaton. 'He was in the Beatles when the Beatles weren't the Beatles any more. Every day Neil lives the Beatles. He's hard. He shouts a lot. He's very abrasive. We've had tremendous rows. He wants to get it right.' Derek Taylor, now re-installed as Apple's press agent, said that Aspinall 'has these voices in his head, and their whims and fantasies are constantly with him. When he rings around, it has to be done with some method and subtlety. He doesn't want Paul ringing George, and saying, "Neil has been doing this or that." He wants them all in the loop.' As Aspinall himself noted, 'The point about this place is that everybody knows where the buck stops.' For his services, his company Standby Films received between £400,000 and £500,000 per year.
Ono, Harrison and McCartney assumed responsibility for their own decisions. McCartney, said one observer, could be 'an imperious employer, making it uncomfortably plain to his key staff that he has bought them 24 hours a day'. 'He'll never admit that he's wrong,' one insider said. 'You can't criticise anything he's done; you just have to go along with it, and hope it works.' By comparison, Ono was happy to delegate much of the work involved in the Lennon Estate, freeing her to resume her art career. Harrison maintained the smallest staff of the three, centring his business interests around a handful of trusted aides. 'He's charming to the people who work for him,' one revealed. 'He'll bring you a cup of tea, and talk to you rather than shout at you.'
The most mysterious of the four support networks was Starkey's. It revolved around the secretive Hilary Gerrard, plus an unshakeably loyal secretary who could dispatch unwelcome enquiries with the rigour of Miss Jean Brodie, and fiendishly expensive lawyers in London and Los Angeles. The most vulnerable of the quartet to commercial vagaries, Starkey was always open to offers that the others would have rejected with contempt – TV advertisements for cars, for instance, or a Pizza Hut commercial in which he joked about 'getting the boys back together' and ended up with three of the Monkees instead.
The financial potential of the Anthology project had been demonstrated by the 1994 release of Live at the BBC, a collection of early- 1960s radio performances by the group. It sold 100,000 copies in America on its day of release, and immediately topped the British charts, demonstrating the continued potency of the Beatles' name and ensuring keen bidding for the television rights to the Anthology. In May 1995 the US TV network ABC announced that it would screen the five-hour history of the Beatles over two nights in November, and would also be granted the world premiere of their first new recording since 1970. In Britain the ITV network offered more than £5 million for a six-part version of the same material. There was only one stipulation: ITV would not be allowed to seek sponsorship from anyone involved in selling alcohol, tobacco or meat, by order of the Beatles.
Not for the first time it now suited both Apple and EMI/Capitol to abandon all their outstanding litigation. Lawyers worked feverishly to secure a final and binding agreement – for eternity, it was hoped – before the unveiling of the Anthology. They succeeded, but only just: all the interested parties, including the three Beatles and Yoko Ono, only put their names to an epic heads of agreement document the size of a telephone directory on 17 November, two days before the first Anthology show was premiered. The deal halted all the global disputes about the Beatles' royalties, ensured a sizeable (£2 million was the figure quoted) payment to each Beatle, and secured a substantially larger sum for Apple's corporate coffers.
There was a strict embargo on 'Free as a Bird', chosen as the long-awaited Beatles reunion single. It was broken only once – by George Harrison, who attended the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix in Melbourne a week before the release date, and played the song to commemorate the victory by his friend Damon Hill. Everyone else had to wait until 19 November, when 48 million Americans witnessed the first two-hour segment of Anthology, and endured a nervous 60-second countdown before 'Free as a Bird' was given its premiere. As the final chords died away, the BBC was allowed to broadcast the song for the first time in Britain, at 4 a.m. Later that morning the world's media assembled at London's Savoy Hotel, expecting to see the three Beatles. Instead, they were greeted by the familiar but less glamorous faces of George Martin, Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall and Jeff Lynne. Asked where the Beatles were, Taylor replied urbanely, 'They are all at home, everywhere else but here.'
The Beatle industry proceeded apace: the TV programmes (with sharply decreasing viewing figures for each episode), the single (poorly received by critics but avidly devoured by fans) and the first of three double-CD sets offering previously unheard recordings. What did it all amount to? 'Free as a Bird' evoked a poignant wave of nostalgia, especially when Harrison and McCartney's voices soared behind Lennon's, but ultimately it was nothing more than a sophisticated pastiche of what the Beatles had been, attractively finished with the thinnest of veneers. The Anthology TV series was equally comforting, but skilfully evaded the issues that had divided the group, from the sacking of Pete Best in 1962 to the agonising corrosion of 1969. A celebration of the Beatles rather than a truthful self-portrait, it struck exactly the right note of nostalgia, without endangering the group's delicate internal framework. Ironically, it was the least controversial of the Beatles' offerings – a collection of early music entitled Anthology 1 – that cut the deepest. Its artwork, an apparently haphazard collage of Beatles imagery prepared by their old friend Klaus Voormann, utilised a familiar 1962 portrait of the group, but with Best's likeness torn away to reveal a picture of Starkey beneath. The gesture was both witty and cruel, although Best finally did receive adequate compensation for his role in the fairy tale and his performances on the albu
m, negotiating a payout rumoured to be around £1 million.
'Me and George Harrison are talking about the next album being called Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel,' McCartney joked as this first package was released. 'And George Martin reckons if we put anything out after this, it'll have to be issued with a government health warning.' Industry pundits noted that EMI/Capitol seemed to be staking their financial health on the power of the Beatles to rescue them after a meagre year. Capitol believed that co-operation with Apple was vital; in return, the group was expected to deliver a succession of lucrative archive projects, including a collection of the demo recordings they had taped after their return from India in 1968 and an enhanced revamp of the Let It Be album and film. Although 'Free as a Bird' and Anthology 1 did not sell in quite the spectacular fashion that the company had anticipated, they did ease the Beatles' return to the airwaves. For several years their songs had won poor approval ratings on US oldies stations, but now they could be broadcast without listeners reaching for the dial.
The surge of publicity and excitement survived into the spring, when Anthology 2 topped the British charts. While its predecessor had focused on the group's early career, this set concentrated on what was arguably the Beatles' most fertile period, from 1965 to 1967. But many aficionados were dubious about the artificially created rarities assembled by George Martin from a variety of out-takes and rough mixes. Issued at the same time was the second reunion single, 'Real Love'. Fans relished the snippets of reunion footage that were featured in the video, but there was a widespread feeling that the track lacked even the confected magic of 'Free as a Bird', and it was not playlisted by the BBC's pop network, Radio 1. This decision was queried in Parliament by publicity-hungry politicians, but there was no surge of popular outrage.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 39