Relive the Magic of The Beatles With 25 Rarely Seen Behind-the-Scenes Photos

It’s been 52 years since they broke up, and still, no one has ever done it quite like The Beatles.

There was some kind of special magic in the foursome of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr that no other band has ever been able to replicate. Though they began as teen idols, they eventually became the most influential rock band in history, and their work continues to inspire musicians to this day.

The lads from Liverpool transformed popular music and caused a frenzy in America when they first came over from the UK in the early 1960s, kicking off what we now know as “Beatlemania.” But as their fame grew, so did their creativity, and their experimentation with their sound produced some of the most transcendent rock records ever, like their 1966 masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Though they left behind an enormous legacy that continues to generate obsessive analysis of their work more than a half-century later, The Beatles’ time together was actually relatively short-lived. They performed together for the final time on Jan. 30, 1969, for an unannounced concert on the rooftop of their Apple Corporation headquarters in London. When they officially released their last album, 1970’s Let It Be, the band had already been broken up for a month.

It’s long been part of musical lore that the making of Let It Be was a difficult period for The Beatles. There have been stories of tension and arguing as the album was produced, and assumptions that those disagreements led to the ultimate dissolution of the band. But a new documentary seeks to reconsider that narrative.

That film, The Beatles: Get Back, is currently streaming in three parts on Disney+. To make it, director Peter Jackson (of the Lord of the Rings series) looked back at hours and hours of old footage from the band’s Let It Be studio sessions. The footage had originally been made into a 1970 documentary, also called Let It Be and directed back then by filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Jackson was able to revisit the raw, uncut film, and what he found surprised not only himself but also the surviving members, Paul and Ringo.

“Every negative spin you could ever imagine has been put on this by different [biographers] over the years, and to be truthful, by The Beatles themselves. That’s not what I saw. I saw something completely different,” Jackson told USA Today. “They weren’t breaking up when it was shot.”

Of course, the band did break up shortly after, but what Jackson means is that none of the long-reported misery among the members is actually present in these studio sessions. Instead, Jackson says, the footage depicts the well-oiled machine of a band who still enjoys working together and continues to successfully collaborate creatively, even if their lives were beginning to split in different directions.

To celebrate this opportunity to see the final months of The Beatles in a whole new light, we’re looking back at some less-commonly-seen moments of their legendary career with these rare snapshots of the day-to-day life of four incredible musicians who we’ll never forget.