Here Comes The Sun – Beatles still light up dark days - Susan Dalgety

So Hogmanay is cancelled. Even first footing is discouraged in case we spread the dreaded Omicron variant along with our New Year cheer.

Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison in The Beatles: Get Back

How to pass the short days and long nights between Christmas and 1 January? My good friend Frank, who is finally celebrating his family Christmas today because of the virus, recommends tuning into Get Back, the new Beatles documentary. All eight hours of it.

The film is fly-on-the wall footage of the Fab Four writing and recording their final album, Let it Be. It’s reality television decades before the concept was first aired.

“It’s fascinating to watch songs like Get Back just emerge as they are jamming,” Frank told me. “And the chemistry between John and Paul is quite something, they play songs they wrote together before they were famous, and the magic was obvious even then.”

Frank was one of the lucky few who saw The Beatles live on 29 April 1964 in the ABC cinema on Edinburgh’s Lothian Road.

“The Saturday night before the tickets went on sale on the Monday morning, I left my brother’s wedding reception early, and with my pal Jackie Verth, headed to Lothian Road to queue,” he recalls.

“However, in the early hours of Sunday morning, the ABC management must have decided there was enough people in the queue, so opened the box office early and we secured our tickets.”

Frank says he didn’t hear much Beatles magic at the gig. “All I remember is the sound of young girls screaming,” he laughs. “But the important thing for me is that I was there. I saw The Beatles live.”

Most of us were not lucky or old enough to see The Beatles live, so the Get Back documentary is the next best thing.

But in these dark days, it is a song from Abbey Road that will cheer us up. Here Comes the Sun – written by George Harrison, not Lennon and McCartney – is The Beatles’ most streamed song.

Its promise of a new dawn after a long, cold, lonely winter is the perfect soundtrack for this week. Little darlings, the ice will slowly melt, smiles will return to our faces, it’s going to be all right. The sun is coming.

Beatles in Edinburghhttps://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/lost-edinburgh-beatles-abc-153851