John Lennon - 1972 - Musician - The Beatles

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The Beatles album John Lennon said was “dreadful” to make: “A really shitty condition”

Thu 9 April 2026 16:30, UK

If you look at the entire career of The Beatles, John Lennon seemed to get a proper foothold in the band again after Sgt Pepper.

They were already fast becoming one of the greatest forces in pop music in the early 1960s, but when Paul McCartney started making plans about a fictionalised version of their band, Lennon was never that keen on taking that much of an experimental leap whenever they made a new record. He was more interested in the songs before anything, but even when they were making their final masterpieces, Lennon felt that there were many pieces that could have been a lot better.

Then again, you have to take Lennon with a grain of salt a lot of the time. He was one to criticise almost every other song that he wrote for The Beatles, and as far as the ones he didn’t like, he was less than diplomatic when calling some of them garbage. But in the case of the Let It Be recording sessions, he did seem to have a small point when looking at those first sessions where they had moved to Twickenham Film Studios.

Say what you will about the Fabs being able to do anything, but putting them in a dank film studio and asking them to hash out a record on the fly was never going to happen. They had already been struggling to find time to work together as a group, so having a bunch of cameras on them and insisting that they put everything into a documentary for their fans was bound to be a nightmare when they finally started to sit down and flesh out the rest of their tunes.

So when looking back on the record only a year later, Lennon had no problem calling the record absolute misery to work on, saying, “We put down a few tracks and no one was really in it. It was a dreadful feeling in Twickenham Studios and being filmed all the time. You can’t make music at eight in the morning. We let Glyn Johns to mix it. It was the first time since the first album that we gave it to somebody else. We were going to let it out in a really shitty condition. I thought it was good to show people what had happened to us.”

But when looking back on the Get Back documentary that came out later, it’s not like every single session was absolutely terrible. The Beatles are their usual charismatic selves when they know that they’re being filmed behind the scenes, but even in their most personal moments, where they didn’t know the cameras were rolling, we got to see a lot about who they always were to each other.

Sure, they would bicker like brothers, but it was never about them making something that sounded terrible. If anything, the band simply weren’t communicating a lot of the time properly, and while Lennon is often blamed for bringing Yoko Ono into the equation, he’s the one who’s usually acting as the mediator whenever you look back on any of the footage that was captured in the film studios.

Lennon might have had a much different perspective once he went through primal therapy and got in touch with his emotions, but a lot of the best moments come when you hear them hashing out tunes that would be on solo albums later, like hearing the first draft of ‘All Things Must Pass’ or hearing Macca trying to add the one decent line that ties up a song like ‘Gimme Some Truth’.

There’s no doubt that Let It Be could have been handled a lot better than what ended up on record, but what we got is at least a good document of what they were trying to do back then. They had all the means of making a great record, but they were all simply on different creative pages than they used to be.