THE BANALITY OF GENIUS: Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back.

When we meet Lennon in Get Back, he is in a fallow period, which has a dampening effect on his all-round confidence. Although, hang on a minute: can we really say a man is in a creative trough if, just a matter of months ago, he made Dear Prudence, Julia, Happiness Is a Warm Gun? When he is in the midst of creating Don’t Let Me Down? Perhaps it depends on who he’s sitting next to. In January 1969, Lennon seems like he’s drying up, and to an extent is drying up, because his primary creative partner is on a hot streak of epic proportion. McCartney apparently only has to sit at the piano, pick up a guitar or just allow his mind to wander, for songs to come surging through him. Months after Blackbird and Hey Jude, we now get Let It Be, Long and Winding Road, Get Back, Golden Slumbers, Two of Us, Oh! Darling, and more. Perhaps the question is not why Lennon is in a creative slump, but why McCartney isn’t.

Towards the end of the 1960s Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys were in states of disarray, creative outputs stuttering, minds and bodies giving out. Meanwhile, The Beatles increased their rate of production, making a double album in 1968 and two albums in 1969 (about three weeks after the end of these sessions they were back in the studio for what became Abbey Road). The engine of the band throughout this period was the relentlessly fecund McCartney. We ought to sympathise with Lennon. Yes, we can blame his drug-taking, but imagine being in his position: a tired genius whose closest collaborator is hurling down thunderbolt after thunderbolt from the top of a mountain, pausing only to ask, so what have you got?

McCartney’s creative collapse after the Beatles broke up is almost enough to make on believe the nutty “Paul is dead” conspirators of 1969-1970 — he never would again reach the sustained brilliance he was channeling from 1966 to 1969.