Is there any ‘lost’ classic rock still worth hearing?

Next week, the original version of Michael Lindsey-Hogg’s behind-the-scenes Beatles film ‘Let It Be’ is released, while an app is turning John Lennon’s music into psychedelic mixes. Mark Beaumont wonders if there’s a limit to the resurfaced dregs and curios of great bands

Is the back catalogue of The Beatles really as infinite as a recent series of releases and projects suggests? (PA)

Good news for fans of unnecessary, sanitised recaps – next week, Disney Plus release the original Michael Lindsey-Hogg version of the Let It Be film. This legendary fly-on-the-wall movie filmed in 1969, following The Beatles making what would eventually become their final album, has been unavailable for over 50 years and is undoubtedly a precious historical rock artefact. But coming so hard on the heels of Peter Jackson’s epic eight-hour Get Back series that trawled every frame of interest out of the raw footage, fractious warts and all, it’s inevitably going to feel like the best bits montage of a celeb reality show with all the juicy stuff taken out by an overprotective PR.

In other Beatles news, having rummaged one final song from the attic with last year’s wonderful “Now and Then”, the John Lennon estate has partnered with a “consciousness-expanding” phone app to release immersive psychedelic “meditation mixes” of his 1973 album Mind Games. And rumour abounds that Paul McCartney’s Archive Collection series, collecting virtually every scrap of studio material from his most celebrated records, may soon be venturing into late-Seventies Wings albums that nobody was even all that bothered about at the time. Meanwhile, Pink Floyd are releasing a boxset of their 1977 album Animals with no additional material – but now mixed in Dolby Atmos! The clamour, if no longer the tape hiss, is deafening.

Or is that the sound of classic rock’s barrel, having been scraped clean through the bottom, being artfully repainted and repurposed as artisan garden furniture for one last desperate flogging off? It certainly seems as though we’ve reached the point where there’s nothing of note left in the tank of rock history. Where every vault has been ransacked, every tomb desecrated, every idol drained dry.