The Beatles’ Official ‘Get Back’ Book Set For August 2021

Set for release on August 31st, 2021 is the The Beatles: Get Back. The book's front cover has popped up on Amazon and is available for pre-order.

The book has author credit going to the Beatles, with John Harris serving as the book's editor; Ethan Russell and the late-Linda McCartney as photographers; Hanif Kureishi penning the introduction; and director Peter Jackson — who is directing the upcoming Beatles doc on the 1969 rehearsals and sessions — supplying the book's foreword. The massive tome, which will coincide with Jackson's film utalizing outtakes from Let It Be, weighs in at 4.6 pounds.

According to the Amazon description of the book:

The Beatles: Get Back tells the story of those sessions through transcripts of the band’s candid conversations. Drawing on over 120 hours of sound recordings, leading music writer John Harris edits the richly captivating text to give us a fly-on-the-wall experience of being there in the studios.

These sessions come vividly to life through hundreds of unpublished, extraordinary images by two photographers who had special access to their sessions — Ethan A. Russell and Linda Eastman (who married Paul McCartney two months later). Also included are many unseen high-resolution film-frames, selected from the 55 hours of restored footage from which Peter Jackson‘s documentary is also drawn.

In the spring of 1970, shortly before the release of the Let It Be album and film, George Harrison shed light on what fans could expect from the project: “The Beatles film is just pure documentary of us working on the album. It was very informative. It's not really nice for me; I can't stand seein' it — but for other people, who don't know what we're really about, who like to go in and see our warts, then it's very good.”

Earlier this year, Ringo Starr promised that unlike the original theatrical release, Peter Jackson's new production — using entirely different footage than the 1970 film — will provide a more well-rounded look at the “Fab Four's” state of the union during that period: “Y'know, when Michael Lindsey-Hogg put his film together, they just stuck to those seconds of argument, y'know? But there was a lot of joy and I think Peter will show that. We sat 'round with his iPad for two hours and he was excited, I was excited, and he was showin' me bits. 'Cause he felt, similar to me, that the other version was a bit down. There was no need for it to be down. Michael Lindsey-Hogg took one point of view, little moments and built the whole thing around that. This one, I think, will be more expressive, and more like we were.”