The Beatles: Let It Be...Naked

IN THE permanently recycled world of Fabs folklore, Let It Be is always viewed as a missed opportunity. Planned to be a back-to-basics album and film, it was originally designed to enable the listener to hear and see the group "as nature intended", and the rehearsals at Twickenham film studios were to lead to a climactic concert appearance, possibly at London's Roundhouse, in a Tunisian amphitheatre, or as Lennon caustically suggested, at "a lunatic asylum". The tension within the band, of course, consigned the recording — all within the month of January 1969, bar an 'I Me Mine' or two — to being a desperately unhappy time for all parties involved.