The final album released by The Beatles, Let It Be, is a dual-edged sword for fans of the group. It is one of their strongest efforts, combining a range of different songs that all burst with magnetic energy. ‘Across The Universe’, ‘I Me Mine’, ‘Get Back’ and ‘Long and Winding Road’ stand out among the band’s best. But it was also fraught with tension. The recording of the album is famously stricken with interpersonal issues between the group, and even the mastering of the record was a problem for Paul McCartney.

Let It Be was, of course, a huge commercial success. It was a Beatles record, after all. However, the project wasn’t an immediate hit with the critics who, at the time of release, viewed the record as being ‘too clean’ and its over-produced nature, owing in no small part to Phil Spector’s mastering, shaved away some of the Fab Four’s charm.

Released a month after the band officially announced their breakup, in truth, the writing of their disbandment had been on the wall for a long while. The four horses of the band had threatened to quarter their success for years, but as the new decade approached, their creative differences would snap the whips at their behinds and send the quartet charging off in different directions artistically. It’s a notion best typified in the album’s title track, ‘Let it Be’.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney may have started out as brothers-in-arms on the songwriting battlefield, but what started out as two men taking up separate flanks of the same front line soon became an army folding in on itself. Lennon’s desperation for authentic rock and roll met the music hall whimsy of McCartney head-on. As McCartney delivered Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Lennon would respond with The White Album. For every piece of “granny shit”, as Lennon would label Macca’s more fanciful frolics, McCartney would lambast Lennon’s experimental ‘Revolution 9’. By the end of the band, they were writing for different audiences and, quite possibly, for their future careers rather than The Beatles. It meant that a few songs were stuck in the respective craws of the bandmates.

‘Let It Be’ has gone on to establish itself as one of their most well-known numbers. The song famously came to Paul McCartney after a dream in which he’d seen his deceased mother, but Lennon was completely scathing of it, later explaining to writer David Sheff: “That’s Paul. What can you say? Nothing to do with the Beatles. It could’ve been Wings. I don’t know what he’s thinking when he writes ‘Let It Be.’”

Lennon then discussed how he thought Macca was attempting to replicate the commercial successes that Simon and Garfunkel had enjoyed with ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ rather than fulfil some creative urge. He added: “I think it was inspired by [Simon and Garfunkel’s] ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters (sic).’ That’s my feeling, although I have nothing to go on. I know he wanted to write a ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’.”

This may seem like a general comment, but, for Lennon, this was certainly an insult to McCartney as an artist. Lennon believed that music should come directly from the pits of the writer’s soul, that it should be as sweetly foul-smelling as an upturned gut and, in being so, operate as the most truthful exploration of the artist’s expression. To try and write not only a commercial hit but one that likened itself to another artist was a step too far.

In a long-lost interview recorded shortly after The Beatles had finished recording the album with Village Voice writer Howard Smith—which didn’t surface until 2013—Lennon didn’t hold back, revealing: “We were going through hell. We often do. It’s torture every time we produce anything. The Beatles haven’t got any magic you haven’t got. We suffer like hell anytime we make anything, and we got each other to contend with. Imagine working with The Beatles, it’s tough.”

The bespectacled Beatle went on to discuss how the tensions had grown within the band to a point in which the fun had now been lost, and positive memories of the recording process remained few and far between. He added: “There’s just tension. It’s tense every time the red light goes on.” The singer also described the LP as a “strange album”.

Adding: “We never really finished it. We didn’t really want to do it. Paul was hustling for us to do it. It’s The Beatles with their suits off.”

Fans may have thought that The Beatles decided to call it a day too early, but with hindsight, they had drifted apart on both a personal and musical level. If they all wanted to feel fulfilled, then they had no choice but to go their own separate ways.