It's 1963. The year of the Profumo scandal, the Great Train Robbery, the rise of teenage consumerism and sexual emancipation, and Kennedy’s assassination . . . and the birth of Beatlemania, the pop revolution that transformed the slate-grey, post-war years of austerity into a Day-Glo landscape. In the beginning, The Beatles were a band of brothers who really did make Britain twist and shout. This is the unprecedented story of the Beatles’ remarkable journey from Liverpool dance hall favourites to becoming the biggest band in the world in the space of just twelve rollercoaster months. From playing to fewer than twenty people in January in the remote Scottish Highlands to being met by a tsunami of screams from 10,000 fans at London Airport in November. From being bottom-of-the-bill after-thoughts to making royalty blush at a frenzied London Palladium. It was a year lived at breakneck pace. Two number one albums, four number one singles, almost 300 gigs, countless radio and TV sessions and the astonishing transformation of four lives into something less ordinary.

This is the story of the last acrimonious days of the Beatles, a final chapter reconstructing for the first time the seismic events of 1969, the year that saw the band reach new highs of musical creativity and new lows of internal strife. Two years after Flower Power and the hippie idealism of the Summer of Love, the Sixties dream had perished on the vine. By 1969, violence and vindictiveness had replaced the Beatles' own mantra of peace and love, and Vietnam and the Cold War had supplanted hope and optimism. And just as the decade foundered on the altar of a cold, harsh reality, so too did the Beatles. In the midst of this rancour, however, emerged the disharmony of Let It Be and the ragged genius of Abbey Road, their incredible farewell love letter to the world.