1968 WAS A BUSY YEAR FOR THE BEATLES. They had traveled to India to study Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, launched their own record label, Apple, and spent months at Abbey Road recording their double-album, The Beatles (aka The White Album). But even before that album was released, they were planning what would end up as their post-breakup album and film, Let It Be. That disc was recently reissued by Apple/Capitol/UMe in a Super Deluxe Edition, and the film has been given a reimagining by Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson in the form of The Beatles: Get Back on Disney+.
In Fall 1968, The Beatles announced to fans that they would play three concerts in London in October or November. Paul McCartney reached out to director Michael Lindsay-Hogg to ask his help in turning that event into a television special of some kind. Paul also suggested shooting documentary footage of the group rehearsing for the concert, as a TV teaser to air the week before the concert special.
The director asked producer Denis O’Dell, who ran Apple Films, to book several weeks at Twickenham Film Studios’ voluminous Studio 1. “I thought we needed some physical space. Their Apple Studio in their basement was too small for the number of people we’d need there,” commented Lindsay-Hogg. He asked director of photography (DP) Tony Richmond to shoot the concert special. Richmond had made the jump from camera assistant directly to cinematographer in 1967. “I was 24 years old then—that was unheard of,” he states. He and Lindsay-Hogg had begun filming rock and roll with The Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” promo film, and, just weeks before beginning work with The Beatles, on The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, in which John Lennon also played.
Richmond came to Twickenham with his two camera assistants, Les Parrott and Paul Bond, bumping Parrott up to operator to shoot alongside him for the first time. Richmond also recommended production sound mixer Peter Sutton, with whom he had worked previously. Sutton recorded at Twickenham using a pair of Nagra Model IV recording machines, mixing his stage mics through a standard 4-channel Nagra mixer. Sutton placed three AKG D25 microphones on short stands around the band members, as well as another on a standard J.L. Fisher studio mic boom. The tape machines, running in overlap to produce a continuous single recording, are the source of the famous “Nagra recordings,” heavily bootlegged and the stuff of legend. They often ran when no filming was taking place, leaving many hours of recordings for which there was no picture.
The very first day, the band requested a P.A. system, in order to hear themselves sing over their instruments.
