The Beatles’ Abbey Road album Photograph: Pictorial Press/Alamy All down the line, people have liked my songs.” There’s a nettled rejoinder from George: “That’s a matter of taste. “I thought until this album that George’s songs weren’t that good,” he says, which is a pretty double-edged compliment since the earlier compositions he’s implicitly disparaging include Taxman and While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Then Paul – sounding, shall we say, relaxed – responds to the news that George now has equal standing as a composer with John and himself by muttering something mildly provocative. He also proposes a new formula for assembling their next album: four songs apiece from Paul, George and himself, and two from Ringo – “If he wants them.” John refers to “the Lennon-and-McCartney myth”, clearly indicating that the authorship of their songs, hitherto presented to the public as a sacrosanct partnership, should at last be individually credited. Lewisohn turns the tape back on, and we hear John suggesting that each of them should bring in songs as candidates for the single. Doesn’t that rewrite pretty much everything we thought we knew?” And you think that John is the one who wanted to break them up but, when you hear this, he isn’t. But no – they’re discussing the next album.

“The books have always told us that they knew Abbey Road was their last album and they wanted to go out on an artistic high. What they talk about is the plan to make another album – and perhaps a single for release in time for Christmas, a commercial strategy going back to the earliest days of Beatlemania. Challenging conventional wisdom … Fab Four writer-historian Mark Lewisohn

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