What does a band make once it can no longer function as a band? These three essays, placed in this order, cover the last eighteen months of the group and describe a retreat that none of them describes alone. The first concerns the longest track the Beatles  ever released, assembled in June of nineteen sixty-eight from tape loops, orchestral fragments, backwards recordings and a technician's voice repeating a number, with one of the four absent in America and openly against its inclusion. It is a Beatles recording with no Beatles performance inside it — no take, no arrangement that four musicians could execute in a room, nothing that could be reproduced on a stage under any conditions. The essay treats it not as a curiosity or a provocation but as the moment the group discovered that a record no longer required them to play. The second jumps to the thirtieth of January, nineteen sixty-nine, and to forty-two minutes on a rooftop in central London, where four men who had abandoned live performance three years earlier played together in public for the last time, unannounced, in the cold, interrupted by the police on the complaint of a neighbouring business. The essay argues that the looseness of that performance, the flubbed lines and the visible cold, is exactly what makes it the most alive they had sounded in years — a band remembering, for three quarters of an hour, what it was. And the third moves to August of the same year and to a recording built from a three-part vocal harmony tracked three separate times, nine voices from three men, layered over an electric harpsichord, on a chord sequence its author said he arrived at by asking someone to play a Beethoven sonata to him backwards. It required a silence and a patience that no live performance could ever have accommodated. Taken together the three pieces trace a line: from a track that proved the band was unnecessary, through the last time they were a band anyway, to a song in which only the voices remained. The usual account says they came apart over money and management. These three suggest something quieter — that the reasons for four people to stand in a room together had already run out. So if what you loved was never really the four of them playing, what exactly was it?


Jorge Lucio de Campos - The Beatles Theory