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He appears out of nowhere like a beaming bolt of life. A keyboard-battering dynamo of exuberant energy, utterly rejuvenating a band that had been wilting under the glare of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be film cameras. Yes, Lennon was the coolest. Yes, Macca wrote the best songs. And yes, George always had the best coat. But there’s a mysterious, unsung legend on the Beatles‘ final album who rarely gets the kudos he deserves… keys wizard Billy Preston. Until now, that is.
On May 8, Lindsay-Hogg’s original 1970 film is being re-released on Disney+ after being unavailable for 50 years. The film has been meticulously restored by the Peter Jackson team behind Emmy-sweeping 2021 series Get Back, and Jackson sees it as a final instalment of his long-gestating passion project. “I now think of it all as one epic story, finally completed after five decades,” Jackson said in a press statement. “The two projects support and enhance each other: Let It Be is the climax of Get Back, while Get Back provides a vital missing context for Let It Be.”
Lindsay-Hogg notes that the film has an entirely different feel in 2024. “One month before its release, The Beatles officially broke up,” he said in the same statement. “People went to see Let It Be with sadness in their hearts, thinking, ‘I’ll never see The Beatles together again’. It very much darkened the perception of the film. But in fact, there’s a great deal of joy and happiness and creation going on.” And much of that, in the latter half of recording, was down to Billy Preston, a truly unifying, band-saving presence in the film. Here’s what made him Let It Be’s secret hero.
He was a blast from the past
The Beatles first met Preston in 1962 when he was touring keyboardist with Little Richard and Sam Cooke. “During the shows, when they were on, I used to come out in the wings and watch them all the time and we became really close,” he said in an interview around the time. So after George Harrison quit the band mid-session feeling unappreciated by his bandmates, watching Preston play with Ray Charles shortly after his return likely reminded him of the joy of the pre-fame Beatles years and why the band had done all this rocking in the first place. “The next day I called and he said: ‘Come on over and see the fellers…’”
He rejuvenated The Beatles
The shift in atmosphere with Preston’s arrival in the film is palpable. From the sometimes cold, dislocated and irritable band isolated on a soundstage out in Twickenham Film Studios like some kind of rock ’n’ roll polar expedition, they’re instantly reborn as a laugh-a-minute jam band cutting loose on ‘Shake, Rattle And Roll’ and a reggae ‘The Long And Winding Road’ in a cosy rehearsal room at Apple. Lennon even suggested having Preston officially join the band, and the sheer joy in their faces during ‘Lordy Miss Clawdy’ tells the whole story; had Preston not lit a fire under the dissolving Beatles, ‘Let It Be’ might well have been shelved and ‘Abbey Road’ never even begun.
He got in the spirit
When Preston isn’t grooving away at the keyboard in the film, he’s to be seen embracing the band’s experimental leanings in the footage, at one point playing around with a stylophone – kiddies’ novelty by 1972 but cutting-edge bit of kit in 1969.
He made the title track an epiphany
McCartney’s gospel piano was the elegiac backbone of the title track on ‘Let It Be’, but it was only when Preston’s Hammond organ kicks in during a Pentecostal freak-out that the song is lifted from the sublime to the showstopping.
The sublime ‘Get Back’ solo
Preston brought a soulful, energised swing to much of ‘Let It Be’: that’s his electric piano powering ‘Dig A Pony’, ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ and ‘One After 909’. But it’s for his wild, driving work on ‘Get Back’ that his stint with The Beatles is best remembered. His freeform soul riffs and wheels-a-rollin’ solos were deemed so intrinsic to the appeal of the finished song that he became the only person ever to share billing with the band on a Beatles single: ‘Get Back’ was released as “The Beatles with Billy Preston”.
The legendary rooftop concert
He’s hidden behind Paul for much of the footage, but Preston had the privilege of performing at the last ever Beatles show, his organ high in the mix as it kept ‘Get Back’ and ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ cooking and provided lagoon-like vibes to ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, even on a bone-freezing London rooftop in January.
The ‘Abbey Road’ sessions
Lennon’s recruitment drive came to nothing – McCartney argued that it was hard enough getting decisions made with just the four of them – but Billy Preston rejoined the band for some of the ‘Abbey Road’ sessions. He’s the funk in ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ and the drama in ‘Something’. Without the magic and mania in his fingers, one suspects, the late-era Beatles might have sounded more like a disintegration than a crescendo.
‘Let It Be’ launches exclusively on Disney+ on May 8