Get It Be (or, Rashomon on Savile Row)

My friend Peter Millhouse was an RAF fighter pilot. In the mid-Sixties he left the service to work in film and TV in Swinging London, as it was only half-jokingly called, cutting a dashing figure around the King’s Road. In early 1969 he was working for Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director of Let It Be, and claims to have been on the Apple rooftop for the Beatles’ famous, impromptu final concert.

Was he really there? I don’t know. For that matter, did he really claim that, or do I just remember it that way because I like to say that he claimed it? Like the man says, print the legend.

And legends are very much the topic at hand, both in the sense of “someone very famous and admired, usually because of their ability in a particular area,” as the Cambridge Dictionary tells us, and of “a very old story or set of stories from ancient times, not always true.”

By the time this blog goes to press, we might have hit the saturation point on think-pieces about Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary opus The Beatles: Get Back. But since everyone and their estranged stepbrother has felt qualified to weigh in, you can be damn sure I’m going to do so, lifelong Beatles fanatic that I am. (“Fanatic? That’s an understatement!” my wife is yelling from our bedroom. Yes, she can psychically tell what I am typing even from the other end of the…