Come Together

Recorded over six days at the end of July 1969, ‘Come Together’ is the opening track from Abbey Road and according to John, “‘Come Together’ was an expression that Timothy Leary had come up with for his attempt at being president or whatever he wanted to be, and he asked me to write a campaign song. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t come up with one. But I came up with this, ‘Come Together’, which would’ve been no good to him.”

With its use of the line, “Here comes old Flat-top” that was taken from Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’, it eventually lead to a legal dispute between John and Morris Levy, the publisher of Chuck’s song. Finally settled out of court, it also resulted in John’s 1975 solo album, Rock ‘n’ Roll as he agreed, as part of the settlement, to record three songs owned by Levy. Originally a 1950’s style rocker, it was Paul that suggested they slow it down. “I suggested that we tried it swampy - ‘swampy’ was the word I used - so we did, we took it right down. I laid that bass line down which very much makes the mood. It’s actually a bass line that people now use very often in rap records.”

Although when given double-A side status in America it topped the US charts it could only make no. 4 in Britain. Upon its release the New Musical Express review described it as, “Probably the funkiest thing The Beatles have ever done.”

The clip was created in 2000 by Melon Dezign for the launch of thebeatles.com and the original Beatles 1 album. At the time internet connection speeds for most users was only 56k; high quality video was only available to those in corporate offices with faster connections. Most had to watch the video through small Windows or Quicktime video players - often a slow buffered and pixellated experience. Flash and vector graphics were the only solution to create large size visuals that could be published at a fraction of the file size - the entire ‘Come Together’ video could be scaled up to any size and only took up 8mb. This is the first time that the film has officially been seen in all its glor