More from Florence + the Machine, who I’m suddenly really into, overnight. One from her first album, which for some reason didn’t make a bleep on my radar when it came out. I’ve just listened to it and it’s just as good as the new one, except maybe a little more restrained. Lungs is a tiny bit more conventional sounding – she’s holding back her instinct for drama. On Ceremonials it’s everything and the kitchen sink, here it’s still near genteel. I don’t want to use the adjective ‘witchy’, but it suits. Florence is a little bit morbid, fixated on drowning and fortune telling, if she didn’t have red hair they’d call her a goth. Her music is simmering with private passions and obsessions, and I admire that. Honesty of vision is priceless. And doesn’t she just look like a way hotter Virginia Woolf?
It’s hard to believe The Beatles’ rooftop concert wasn’t just a staged scene in a movie. In a way it was that, of course. It was a publicity move by a band in the process of being documented by a film crew. They meant it as a grand finale for what would become the Let It Be documentary. They probably didn’t fully realize it would be the grand finale of their career as a band. In hindsight it’s a sad goodbye of a performance, because we know they would never play in public again. But they didn’t know that, and by all accounts were having a grand old time until the coppers came and shut them down. Let It Be didn’t end up being the movie they thought it would. Filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg caught the boys at a not flattering angle. In 1969 The Beatles were just about through with each other, and the in-fighting and squabbling captured on film was not lovable. The album didn’t become what anyone expected either. No attempts at polishing by Phil Spector could disguise its essential raggedness. The most outstanding songs were for all purposes basically solo contributions, the rest a mix of throwaway jams and stuff dug up from years old notebooks. Paul McCartney for one, deplored Spector’s production job. The swelling strings that were added to quiet tracks like Long and Winding Road were just too pretty, unnecessary, overkill. McCartney didn’t rest until he’d managed a release of Let It Be in a ‘Naked’, Spector-less production a few years ago. His point is a good one, but we’re used to the prettified version we’ve been listening to all this time, and we like it. Let It Be wasn’t really the end – they went on to write, record and release Abbey Road more or less amiably in the period between the filmed sessions and final release in 1970. But the rooftop concert went down as a signing-off point before they went their own separate ways. It plays just like a movie, from the grey London skies to the chap with the pipe climbing a fire escape to watch, and all the well dressed gents and mod birdies craning their necks down below.
Lady Garfunkel's Song of the Day 