by Tony Barrell
After paying half a million pounds for No. 3 Savile Row, Apple set about redecorating the building to create a headquarters worthy of Britain’s hippest new organisation. Gallons of white paint were used to brighten the gloomy walls and woodwork, as well as the front door and the metal railings outside. This immediately made the premises stand out from the others in the neighbourhood, which followed the tradition of having jet-black railings and sober-coloured doors. Huge rolls of apple-green carpet were brought in to soften the floors. Trendy tables, chairs and chandeliers were custom-made for the offices, with specifications to suit the predilections of the Apple bigwigs.
The Beatles’ business manager, Peter Brown, disliked smoking, but would often find himself in meetings with the band in which they all lit up. To mitigate the problem, he had a special item of furniture made for his vast office on the building’s second storey. “A friend of mine introduced me to this furniture designer, and I commissioned him to make me a desk,” he says. “On the other side of the desk was a shelf below the top, where I put the ashtrays – so they’d have to put their cigarettes on the ashtrays, below my eyeline. I don’t know what ever happened to that desk. My room was also called the boardroom, because at one end there was an enormous octagonal table, which we also had specially made. When we had formal meetings, The Beatles and Neil and me, we did it at that table.”
Nobody thought to do much with the flat roof, though the possibility of a lovely, lush roof garden was discussed. Even in their wildest LSD trips, The Beatles are unlikely to have imagined that in the depths of the following winter, this would be the site of one of their most legendary concerts.
Perhaps it is its long tradition of specialist, fine craftsmanship that sets Savile Row apart, and maybe there is a brittleness and vulnerability born of the street’s location at the eastern edge of Mayfair and dangerously close to the less exalted, scuzzier area of Soho. There’s no doubt that it is one of the most cliquey and conservative streets in Britain. Its name calls to mind a rarefied domain of twill, worsted and Prince of Wales checks – just as the name Harley Street evokes an exclusive world of top-flight private medicine and therapies. Novice cloth-cutters in “the Row” spend years learning the esoteric, centuries-old techniques of suit-making, and the clientele tends to be exclusive, because not every man about town can afford to splash several thousands of pounds on exquisite handcrafted clothing. Royals, aristocrats, senior politicians, high-ranking military men and movie stars all came here to be dressed.
According to The Beatles’ late press officer Derek Taylor, there was some perceptible snootiness from the tailors after The Beatles moved into their exclusive domain. He later wrote: “The Apple business is in Savile Row, a street which believes itself to be awfully important. It lies behind Regent Street, another street which has a high opinion of itself. Both are in the Western End of London, glamourised sometime between the wars by the title ‘West End’, a phrase much affected by the media to suggest a beautiful way of life in which big band leaders and rich society people wined and dined and opined on the really essential things like oysters and champagne and staying up late and keeping things much the way they are, only better and bigger and finer.
“Savile Row didn’t really welcome The Beatles. Many of the shopkeepers there, silly snobbish growly, obsequious people, believed that since they had been selling marvellous suits to marvellous people they had a right to be the only ones there, which is about as daft as you can get, for, as Lewis Carroll said, a cat may look at a king, though few enough choose to.”
Despite what many people think, The Beatles weren’t the first interlopers in Savile Row from the vulgar world of sixties pop music. Further down on the same side of the street, past many of the old bespoke establishments, was Aberbach House, a hotbed of songwriting and music publishing, at No. 17 – the house where the playwright Richard Sheridan had died. The British songsmith David Martin remembers working there in the sixties: “I was in a songwriting partnership with two other writers, Geoff Morrow and Chris Arnold, at Carlin Music, which was a music-publishing company owned by a lovely American guy called Freddy Bienstock. The building in Savile Row was like a songwriters’ workshop. There were lots of songwriters in the building: there was Clive Westlake, who wrote ‘I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten’ for Dusty Springfield; there were a couple of guys called Guy Fletcher and Doug Flett, who wrote hits for The Hollies and Cliff Richard; and then Geoff, Chris and I were in the basement. We had a company with The Shadows called Shadamm Music [the “Shad” representing the band and the “amm” for Arnold, Martin, Morrow], and we were all writing. The office for Cliff Richard and The Shadows was in that building as well, and they used to rehearse there.”
It was at No. 17 that Bienstock presided over a myriad of companies representing the lucrative song catalogues of acts such as Elvis Presley, The Animals and various artists on Motown Records. Born in Switzerland, Bienstock had begun his career in the stockroom of the Brill Building, the famous songwriting hub in New York. Later he became a song plugger, before specialising in finding songs for Presley to sing in his movies.
“After Apple moved in to No 3. Savile Row,” said David Martin, “there were The Beatles at one end of the street, and we were further down at No. 17, with all these wonderful tailors in between. We were like bookends. And I often wondered what all these tailors, with all their posh customers, thought about us ragamuffins from the music business coming into Savile Row. If you were a long-established, top-rate tailor making suits for the upper echelons and royalty and Christ knows what else, it must have been strange to see a whole bunch of music people: it was incongruous.”
Early October 1966 was a noisy period for the Row, for this is where the Jimi Hendrix Experience was formed and played together for the first time. The guitarist came to No. 17 to rehearse with the bassist Noel Redding and to audition drummers for his new band. After various candidates were tried out, they settled on Mitch Mitchell. And the cacophony they created here wasn’t just loud electric music. Hendrix’s manager, Chas Chandler, who had booked the rehearsal space, had given the band 30-watt Burns amplifiers, which they hated, and Hendrix and Mitchell tried to wreck them so that Chandler would have to replace them with better gear. The guitarist and the drummer went as far as throwing the amps down the stairs, though even this failed to destroy the resilient equipment.
In July 1968, before The Beatles installed themselves in their new domain, John Lennon had his own art exhibition, You Are Here, at the Robert Fraser Gallery in Duke Street, and on the opening day he released 365 helium-filled white balloons into the sky. Each one had a tag attached, asking the finder to write to John at the gallery’s address. The result was an eye-opener: many people, the sixties equivalent of today’s internet trolls, responded with abusive messages that took swipes at John and Yoko’s relationship and called her a home-wrecker. All this came on top of snide comments in the media that mocked the couple and questioned the merit of Yoko’s outlandish works of art.
Michael Lindsay-Hogg believes the 35-year-old conceptual artist was widely misunderstood in Britain at the time. “Yoko was a very important person in the artistic community of New York in the late fifties and early sixties, and when there were happenings and artists’ soire´es she would be in the centre of that world. But when she turned up in England nobody really knew, at least in the rock’n’roll world, who she was; nobody knew that she was someone of definite credentials. And in some ways, people did not treat her with the respect that she had earned already.”
Apple, meanwhile, was treating too many creative people with too much respect. The business continued to fork out prodigious sums for a wide range of supposedly innovative projects, but was receiving poor returns on its investments. Ringo Starr later described some of the problems: “We’d give one guy 16mm movie equipment and another guy a tent to do a Punch and Judy show on a beach. They’d take the money and say, ‘Well, maybe next week.’ The artists who made records didn’t let us down, but
all the others did.”
The young receptionist at Apple was Debbie Wellum, who remembers having to deal with some peculiar visitors looking for funding from the company – as when the building temporarily became a showcase for some “gonks”: small fluffy toys with quirky faces. “These people came in; they were Europeans, I can’t remember what country they were from, and they were completely off their heads and they came in and stuck gonks all over my wall in reception, and refused to leave until they saw a Beatle. And just at that point, John and Yoko came in. Their office was off reception, and they had a double mirror put in there so they could see who was in reception, though it didn’t really work very well. John spoke to them and said he thought they should take their gonks off his wall. In the end, they took them down and were escorted out of the building.”
Just two weeks after The Beatles moved into their plush new HQ, they had to admit defeat with their Apple Boutique in Baker Street, which was haemmorhaging money. After helping themselves to a few choice items, they gave away the rest of the stock to all comers – each customer being limited to one item – before closing its doors. Apple Tailoring also closed shortly afterwards. Paul explained that clothing retail just wasn’t the right business for them: “Apple is mainly concerned with fun, not frocks. We want to devote our energies to records, films and our electronics adventures.”
The fact that Paul had mentioned “films” increased speculation that, four years after Help!, The Beatles might be thinking about appearing in another full-length movie. The film-maker Jean-Luc Godard visited Apple one day for a meeting with Denis O’Dell, head of Apple Films, who suggested the Frenchman direct a documentary about the everyday lives of The Beatles. Godard agreed to do some conceptual development, and an outline contract was even drawn up with the Paramount film company. Denis suggested a title, which was meaningless but nonetheless appealed to him: One Plus One. But George Harrison, the most private and pragmatic Beatle, disliked the idea of making the film, so the project was scrapped.
On Thursday, August 22, as The Beatles devoted their energies to the song ‘Back In The USSR’ for the White Album at Abbey Road, the atmosphere in the studio thickened in the vicinity of the drum kit. Ringo – usually addressed as Ritchie by his bandmates – was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his own playing, as well as feeling under-appreciated by and distanced from the others. He left the group and walked out – becoming the first member ever to leave The Beatles of his own volition – and took his family for a two-week break in Sardinia. People at the studio were sworn to secrecy, so the media didn’t get a whiff of the story.
The remaining Beatles soldiered on without him, recording the song with all three taking turns on the drums. While on holiday, Ringo relaxed on the comedian Peter Sellers’ yacht, where he ordered fish and chips; the chips arrived, but instead of the fish there was squid, which he’d never tried before. After a conversation with the vessel’s captain about octopuses, and their habit of collecting stones and other objects from the seabed to make underwater “gardens”, Ringo was inspired to begin writing the song ‘Octopus’s Garden’.
When their new single ‘Hey Jude’ was released on August 30, The Beatles had become – unbeknown to most of the world – a trio. But their flattering “please come home” message to Ringo had the desired effect, and the drummer returned on Tuesday, September 3, to find his kit swathed in bright flowers. They spent the afternoon and evening of the following day at Twickenham Film Studios, where they made promotional films for ‘Hey Jude’ and its B-side, ‘Revolution’, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Born to an American actress and an English baronet, Sir Michael had worked in Irish television before landing a job as director on the British TV pop show Ready Steady Go! in the mid-sixties. He went on to become a “video” pioneer, making promotional films for The Rolling Stones as well as The Beatles, and had previously worked with the Fab Four in 1966, directing their promos for the single ‘Paperback Writer’ and its flipside, ‘Rain’.
For the new promos, ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Revolution’ were given a conventional presentation, with the group playing together on stage, backed by a 36-piece orchestra and watched by an audience of 300 extras, who joined in with the joyful “la-la-la-lah” coda to ‘Hey Jude’. There were no psychedelic costumes, as there had been for their ‘Hello, Goodbye’ promo the previous year, and no surrealistic larking about, as there had been for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. Despite being asked to do 12 takes and having to work into the early hours of the next morning, The Beatles found the experience enjoyable, and Michael watched with interest as they relaxed between takes and casually performed snatches of other songs. The broadcaster David Frost arrived to film an introduction for his television show, in which he called them “the greatest tea-room orchestra in the world” and declared that this was “their first live appearance for goodness knows how long” – although, in fact, only their vocals were performed live. Cliff Richard also got in on the act, filming an introduction for his own TV show.
As ‘Hey Jude’ rocketed up the singles charts, Paul talked to Melody Maker about the promos. “We decided to do clips this time, instead of zany films and that sort of thing,” he said. “We all really enjoyed doing it.” The Beatles watched the final edits of the films with Denis O’Dell, at which point an idea was tossed around and approved by everybody: wouldn’t it be great if they made another film of some kind? Not just another promo, but something longer.
But for the time being it was back to the studio, as The Beatles continued to immerse themselves in the White Album. On September 6, Eric Clapton arrived at Abbey Road to lay down lead guitar on George’s song ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. He had initially refused George’s request, saying: “Nobody plays on a Beatles record.” Of course, the guitarist was forgetting a host of people, including the string quartet on ‘Yesterday’, the Indian musicians on ‘Within You Without You’, and the orchestra on ‘A Day In The Life’, not to mention their producer George Martin, who played piano on several Beatles tracks.
That Friday and Saturday, The Doors and Jefferson Airplane played at the Roundhouse, the former train-engine shed in Chalk Farm, north London, that had been revitalised as a music venue. When Doors singer Jim Morrison saw the building for the first time, he said: “This is going to be fun. This is the place for us.” It turned out to be the only London venue his band would ever play.
The Beatles still had another month of studio work to do on the White Album, and this certainly wasn’t their most convivial recording experience. Individual members of the group spent many hours on their own compositions, and at times John and Paul would be recording different songs in separate rooms. Tensions were ramped up by John’s insistence that Yoko attend many of the sessions. Nevertheless, Paul maintained an optimistic view of the group’s future, and was already conceiving their next project. He was excited enough to spill some details to the music papers. “We will be doing a live TV show later in the year,” he announced. “I don’t know about a concert, but it might lead to that. I love the idea of playing again, and I know the others feel the same way.” It had been two full years since their final concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, and Paul still had the setlist taped to the Ho¨fner violin bass he had played there. “The idea of singing live is much more appealing now,” he said. “We are beginning to miss it.”
On September 21, when the jazz giant Ray Charles performed at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank, George Harrison and his friend Eric Clapton were in the audience. Before Ray came on stage, the keyboard player from his band entertained the crowd with some organ-playing and singing. He broke into ‘Agent Double O Soul’, the Edwin Starr song about a funky James Bond-style spy, performing some leg-shaking, arm-shaking dance moves in the instrumental sections. George recognised him: “I thought, ‘That guy looks familiar,’ but he seemed bigger than I remembered. After a while, Ray came on and the band played for a few songs and then he reintroduced… Billy Preston!” T
he announcement confirmed that this was indeed an old friend of The Beatles.
Billy had met them during their nightclub performances in Hamburg in 1962. The Beatles would open for the rock’n’roll star Little Richard, whose band included Billy on organ. Billy would enjoy standing in the wings and watching The Beatles perform; one night, George even suggested he join them on organ, but Billy refused, fearing it would upset Little Richard if The Beatles borrowed a member of his band. Now, reacquainted seven years later with the Texan-born musician’s mastery of the keyboard, George filed the memory of the concert away for later reflection.
In the meantime, the London waxwork attraction Madame Tussaud’s updated its figures of The Beatles to reflect their latest hairstyles and taste in clothing. It was the fifth time in four years that technicians had given their effigies a makeover. A few days later, the curtain rose on an exciting new production at the Shaftesbury Theatre in the West End of London. This was Hair, a musical about hippies, free love and the Vietnam War. The show had opened earlier in the year on Broadway in New York, and was already notorious for its onstage nudity.
The morning after Hair opened, ‘Hey Jude’ hit number one in Britain, where it would linger for the next nine weeks. Nevertheless, there were still financial worries at Apple, which was widely perceived as a business that couldn’t survive for very much longer. The technical engineer Dave Harries, who worked for EMI and had helped The Beatles with many of their recordings, was asked if he wanted to leave EMI and become an Apple employee. Interviewed by George Harrison, he asked if Apple could double his EMI salary of £2,000 per annum. When George asked him why he wanted so much money – £4,000 a year – Dave replied that he thought the move would be risky, because EMI would probably continue forever, whereas Apple might not. He didn’t get the job.