By common consent, unusual at that time, it was agreed that the Get Back/Let It Be project was well past its sell-by date. The Beatles were sick of it and nothing George Martin or Phil Spector could do would ever make those tired old sessions sparkle in the way a Beatles record was supposed to. It would be released only in a strictly limited edition EP as a soundtrack accompanying the film; and the film only released as a one-hour television documentary.

Everyone was pulling in their own direction; and yet somehow they pulled back from the brink. In spite of all the arrogance and egotism, a still small voice spoke separately, in dreams, to John and Paul and George. "Are you really good enough", it said to each in turn, "to write a whole album of decent songs every year - a dozen or more songs, including one or two worthy and memorable hit singles?

"That'll be far more than you have to do at the moment. Maybe you do write that many songs a year, but let's face it, half of them are crap, and their place is taken by the best songs that the others come up with. That's why every album you've made to date, as the Beatles, is so brilliant. Look how successfully everybody's songs balance each other on Revolver, Pepper, Abbey Road, even the sprawling White Album ."

And this actually made sense to the Beatles. Though they could not yet quite think of themselves as the bosom buddies of former years, they turned their attention to bringing together the best of what they had worked on since the Abbey Road sessions. It didn't matter that Paul and George refused to be in the same studio together, and insisted on different producers: they still appreciated that they had good songs in them, which sounded better together than apart.

Paul had recorded his basic tracks in Scotland for the solo album that was now on hold, and set to work on them at Abbey Road with George Martin: none of the other Beatles played on any of the tracks, but that was hardly much different from "Yesterday" or "Blackbird". John, George and Ringo preferred to work together, using Phil Spector to produce their endeavours.

And the end result was an album that really did cling to the renewed promise of Abbey Road, and was completely unlike the leftovers served up in Let It Be. Released just in time for Christmas 1970 the album was called Spectator, and its dark cover featured nothing more than a pair of dark glasses (not unlike the sort favoured by Mr Spector himself). McCartney had conceived the title, which emphasised his own isolation from the others, but John liked the word play conveying Phil's role in the sessions, and took credit for the sleeve design.

The track listing followed the pattern of the group's most successful albums, Revolver and Abbey Road, again allowing George pride of place with the first track on side one. He more than lived up to this responsibility with his magnificent "What Is Life?". McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed" and Lennon's "Remember" completed a confident opening trio, and to follow this, Paul had at last polished up his gently charming "Junk". Courtesy of George a Dylan song, "If Not For You", made its first appearance on a Beatles album, and Ringo's "It Don't Come Easy" was a considerable improvement on his earlier efforts! Side two was a more muted affair: "Two Of Us" finally saw the light of day, alongside John's sweet "Child of Nature", but George's brooding "All Thing Must Pass" and "Isn't it a Pity", and John's bitter "Isolation" gave the side a dark mood. The resentment that still lingered over Paul's more feeble numbers like "Ob-La-Di" and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" caused the others to veto the inclusion of "Come And Get It" as an album closer, so Paul instead came up with an even stronger song in "Every Night".

Altogether it was a gentle album, with occasional echoes of other admired contemporaries, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival or Neil Young. Combining, as ever, John's introspection, George's melancholy muse, Paul's powerful melodies, and Ringo's best song to date, it sustained the remarkable quality of their output, and established that the Beatles were not a spent force; and John Paul George and Ringo saw what everybody else had known all along, that the group was far greater than the sum of its parts.