The Beatles on the Roof

by Tony Barrell

  Distributors were hefting thousands of bundles of newspapers and magazines for delivery to newsagents’ shops and street vendors. The latest edition of The Times reported that the government was “throwing its full weight” behind university authorities to end the current spate of student agitation. The LSE was still closed, and two of its lecturers were to be investigated for their possible collusion in the recent violent protests there. Edward Short, the secretary of state for education and science, had raised the idea that student grants could be withheld from some of the troublemakers. “It is high time,” he said in Parliament, “that one or two of these thugs are thrown out on their necks.”

  There was another delay to the maiden flight of Concorde, the new supersonic airliner created by Britain and France. It had been supposed to take off in 1968, but its assembly had taken longer than expected. The latest delay was due to overheating of the disc brakes, but it looked as if the plane would finally get off the ground later that year.

  That week’s edition of Melody Maker informed its readers that the guitarist Trevor Burton had left The Move, forcing the group to cancel an American tour due to begin that day. “Musical policy is the reason for the split. Burton wants to play blues and is to join another Birmingham group, the Uglys. The rest of the group prefer to concentrate on more commercial pop music.” Unlikely as it may seem, Hank Marvin, The Shadows’ bespectacled lead guitarist, had been invited to replace Burton, but declined.

  At 8 a.m. sharp, PC Ken Wharfe took his assigned position at Piccadilly Circus. The 19-year-old bearded policeman was on traffic duty at a pedestrian point there, wearing special white cuffs to direct traffic and help pedestrians cross the road. Another policeman took up his position at the junction of Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue. Early commuters were arriving in town by bus, train and tube to start their day’s work. Many wore heavy overcoats, while others wore beige or grey raincoats, because “occasional showers” had been forecast for later in the day.

  The occasional milk float trundled along, its crates of pint bottles rattling. But the streets were a little quieter than on a normal Thursday because there were no Royal Mail vans picking up and delivering letters and parcels. There were no collections today from red pillar boxes, some of which were jammed full of envelopes, and sacks of mail were forming miniature mountains in sorting offices. Postal workers were on strike, and instead of serving customers and sorting and delivering mail, many of them were preparing to take their grievances to the street. They were preparing to march through London, and were sticking crudely printed slogans onto placards: “We demand a fair deal”, “Low pay leads to lack of staff” and “Blame the Post Office – not us!” The big Post Office in Trafalgar Square was normally open 24 hours a day and bustling with activity, but today it was empty, locked and as silent as a grave.

  The strike was a gesture of solidarity with thousands of foreign-based telegraphists – staff who took and relayed messages by telegram, cable and Telex – demanding a higher pay rise than the 7% the government had offered. The telegraphists were also losing overtime pay because of mechanisation and receiving scant compensation. London was just one of 19 British cities with piles of mail going nowhere that day.

  The tailors of Savile Row would soon open for business, their workshops buzzing with industry as craftsmen took sharp shears to exquisite fabrics to make beautiful suits for businessmen, celebrities, aristocrats and royalty. Over at No. 3, work had begun earlier than usual, and Debbie Wellum was already at her desk in reception. “We were all told to come in early, and The Beatles came in early as well. It was bloomin’ freezing cold, and George was in his black furry coat. I think Ringo was the last to arrive, and none of them looked particularly happy.”

  Michael Lindsay-Hogg travelled in to Savile Row from Parliament Hill Road in Hampstead. He and his girlfriend, the actress Jean Marsh, were staying in a ground-floor flat borrowed from one of Jean’s friends, the Liverpudlian actor Norman Rossington, who was away filming. Connoisseurs of trivia may note that this provides a link between The Beatles’ final film and their first, A Hard Day’s Night, in which Norman had played the role of Norm, the group’s road manager.

  The early-morning start at Apple was to ensure that everything was ready for the concert, and there was much to do. Cameras, sound equipment and lighting had to be set up by engineers inside the building, including a hidden camera to film any policemen who came through the front door later that day. The camera was placed inside a tall box in a corner of the reception area; the box was painted white to match the walls, and the camera lens was concealed by a two-way mirror.

  There was a beautiful, professionally made cushion flower arrangement on a table in reception, and a microphone was hidden inside to record any interesting conversations that might occur. Debbie herself was wired for sound as well: “They stuffed a microphone up my skirt,” she laughs, “and concealed it in my top. I suppose they put it up my skirt to conceal the wiring.”

  As usual, there were Apple Scruffs loitering outside the building. These extreme Beatles devotees formed an exclusive club, which had its own magazine, and followed their idols from place to place – from Apple to Abbey Road, Trident Studios or Cavendish Avenue. “I built up quite a relationship with the Scruffs when I was there,” says Debbie. “They were lovely girls and they were very respectful, but they were always at the office before the first person arrived, and always at the office when everybody left – except for if The Beatles were recording, and then they’d be at the studios. And they would almost tell us where The Beatles were.”

  The Scruffs were quick to realise that something unusual was happening at No. 3 Savile Row – they had seen delivery vehicles and people coming and going – and that there was more activity than usual. It wasn’t just the Scruffs: other devoted fans were wise to it all as well. “There were a few of us who knew something was happening,” recalls Paula Marshall. “There had been stuff coming out of a van and going in.” Paula was 16 and worked as an office junior at an advertising agency in the West End, but that Thursday she had skipped work, coming in by tube from her home in Walthamstow in the East End and making a beeline for Savile Row.

  Paula had been a fan since 1962, when she heard ‘Love Me Do’ while returning from a week-long school trip to Colomendy in the North Wales countryside. “I remember thinking, ‘I like that,’ and that was the beginning of the whole thing for me. The first record I bought was ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ in 1963. I bought it at Woolworth’s for six shillings and eightpence and walked out with it in a bag, feeling very proud.”

  The Beatles would be using many microphones on the Apple roof that day – not just for the vocals, but also over the drums and to pick up the sound of their amplifiers. The engineer Glyn Johns saw how gusty it was and became concerned that the microphones would be battered by the wind and pick up a lot of unwanted noise, spoiling the recordings of the songs. He decided that the mikes should be covered by a special gauzy fabric that would filter out the air turbulence from the music, and instructed the most junior member of the team, 20-year-old Alan Parsons, to go and purchase some. “Glyn asked me to go out and buy some ladies’ stockings to drape over the mikes,” Alan later recalled. He dutifully trooped off to Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street, where the staff raised a few eyebrows and asked him what size of stockings he required. “I said, ‘It really doesn’t matter.’ So they thought I was either going to rob a bank, I think, or I was a cross-dresser!”

  As it happened, it was actually a very good day to rob a bank. At 12.00 noon sharp, hundreds of clerks working in London’s banks simultaneously withdrew their labour and walked out of their workplaces, leaving many banking branches understaffed. The bankers were aggrieved at the decision of the Labour government to block their latest pay rise. Many of them were earning around £1,000 or £2,000 a year, and male clerks had been due to receive a 7% increase, while women had been in line for an 11% raise, but the salary hikes had been referred to the Prices & Incomes Bo
ard. Many branches insisted that they would soldier on with a “skeleton staff “, and senior banking staff took over the counters that day. Some of the clerks went to lobby their MPs at the House of Commons, while others went home or amused themselves in London.

  Disgruntled men and women from the Post Office, wrapped up in long coats and carrying their placards, marched through the streets towards Hyde Park, with police officers accompanying them to maintain order. About 10,000 massed in Hyde Park and cheered as Tom Jackson, the generously moustached leader of the Union of Post Office Workers, criticised the government’s ill treatment of overseas telegraph workers and discussed the possibility of extending the strike. The rally was orderly but noisy: there was chanting and singing, and some demonstrators played instruments such as guitars, banjos, drums and bagpipes.

  Barbara Bennett, who worked at Apple as secretary to Neil Aspinall, left 3 Savile Row to lunch that day with her best friend, the company’s telephonist Laurie McCaffrey, who was well known at Apple for her sonorous voice, Liverpudlian accent and astonishing efficiency. They walked to Piccadilly Circus and to one of their favourite lunchtime haunts, Billy’s Baked Potato. This was part of a small chain run by the famous boxer Billy Walker and his entrepreneurial brother George, which offered honest-to-goodness, school-dinnerish food at very reasonable prices. “You had to queue there, because it was so popular,” says Barbara. “As well as baked potatoes, you could have things like bananas and custard.”

  There was a sense of expectation among the few fans gathered in Savile Row. “We knew it wouldn’t be long before something happened,” says Paula Marshall, “because The Beatles’ roadies were there. We knew them and they knew us; it was like a little family.”

  The group’s “chief roadies” during their touring days, in charge of transporting all their equipment and setting it up on stage, were Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall. After The Beatles stopped playing live concerts, both remained in the band’s employ, and they had now gravitated to jobs at Apple – Mal as the group’s personal assistant, and Neil as the company’s managing director. Helping Mal these days was Kevin Harrington, who had originally come into The Beatles’ orbit as Brian Epstein’s office boy, but had also moved over to Apple.

  That day, Neil Aspinall was absent: he had suddenly come down with tonsillitis, and was in hospital having the offending tonsils removed. “Neil and I were the best of friends; he was a wonderful man,” says Peter Brown. “He asked me to be his best man at his wedding. He and I just got on so well together. He did the artistic side and I did all the administrative side, but we just liked each other. And when they decided to play on the rooftop and he suddenly got sick, I was very concerned.”

  It was down to Mal and Kevin to set up all the group’s instruments that day. Their task was to carry all the guitars, drums, amplifiers, microphones and Billy Preston’s electric piano all the way up from the basement to the top floor, and then up to the roof. The space inside the lift was extremely limited, so they made several journeys with the equipment. On reaching the top floor, they had to carry the gear out of the lift and up a spiral staircase to the roof. The largest items were Paul’s bass speaker cabinet and Billy’s piano. The piano, a Fender Rhodes Seventy-Three Silver Sparkle Top Suitcase model, could be easily divided into two parts – the keyboard section simply lifted out of the cabinet – but it was still a substantial and very heavy piece of equipment.

  “The piano and the bass cabinet were huge,” recalls Kevin, “and I couldn’t get the cabinet round the turn at the top of the stairs. It just wouldn’t go. I told Mal, and he suggested we take it through the skylight instead. So he unscrewed the frame of the skylight – he made quick, short work of it – and we were able to force it through there. We got Billy’s piano through there as well. What The Beatles wanted, The Beatles got!”

  Kevin says he wasn’t selective about the instruments he hauled to the roof. “I didn’t know which songs they were going to play, and as far as I remember, I just took all the stuff I could from the basement studio.” John would be playing his beloved Epiphone Casino hollow-bodied guitar, George had his custom-made Rosewood Telecaster and Paul would play a classic Ho¨fner violin bass. This still had the 1966 setlist taped to its body, and the “Bassman” sticker that he had slapped on during the rehearsals. Ringo would play his new Hollywood maple-finish drum kit. Everything went up except an acoustic piano, which would have been too big and heavy to shift manually. “There’s no way you could have carried that up there. You would have had to use a big crane or a helicopter to do that,” says Kevin. Some of the gear laid out on the roof would not be used, such as John’s lap steel guitar and a Hohner electric piano.

  They would surprise a great many people that day. “The roof show was supposed to be a complete surprise: we thought that would be part of the fun,” says Michael Lindsay-Hogg. But there were a select few people, apart from the employees of Apple, who knew the concert was going to happen, because they had been invited. Tony Richmond, the director of photography for the TV special, had invited his fiance´e, Linda DeVetta, who had been the make-up artist on Godard’s Sympathy For The Devil, and on Michael’s promo film for the Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. Michael had invited his girlfriend, Jean Marsh*. He had also tipped off his friend Vicki Wickham, who had been the producer of Ready Steady Go! when he had worked on the show. Vicki was now writing for the music papers, and would soon leave London to run the New York office of Track Records, the label set up by the managers of The Who.

  Vicki left her home in the middle of New Cavendish Street to come to Savile Row that lunchtime and see The Beatles’ performance, and she brought two friends with her: Cathy McGowan, the famous presenter of Ready Steady Go!, and Rosemary Simon. “Rosemary was my personal assistant at the time, and she was much younger than me,” says Vicki. “She came from a very posh family. She was a wonderfully efficient worker, and the other thing that was great about her was that she had a car, which was very useful! She later married Paul Samwell-Smith of The Yardbirds and became a lawyer.”

  As Vicki, Cathy and Rosemary walked down Savile Row from Conduit Street around midday, there were few signs that anything special was about to happen. Having been admitted to No. 3, they went up in the lift and climbed to the roof. “And there was Michael, a great friend of all of us, standing there with a cigar in the freezing cold. He said we could stand at the side of the roof, against the wall, if we wanted to, but that we might get a better view of the concert if we went up to another roof on the opposite side of the road.”

  Directly opposite Apple HQ in those days was the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the trio entered the building and were somehow allowed to take the lift to the roof, where they found they had an excellent view of the roof of No. 3 across the road. “I can’t remember what we sat on, but we sat down on something.”

  A 19-year-old American called Leslie Samuels was living in London at the time, studying journalism at the London College of Printing, at Elephant and Castle. As president of the New York chapter of the Beatles USA fan club, she had contacts at Apple, and had been alerted to the possibility of a special event that day. “I was living off Rutland Gate at the time, near Hyde Park, so it was really easy to hop on the bus to Piccadilly and walk from there to Savile Row. I was walking my dog, Brian, who was a big bearded collie.”

  Leslie had already accumulated an enviable collection of Beatle experiences. Not only had she seen the group play Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Boston and Shea Stadium as a 16-year-old in 1966, but she had also met three of The Beatles when she came to England the following year. She visited Paul and George at their respective homes – Paul let her hold his two small kittens – and wrote about the experiences for Teen Datebook magazine. “When I met John, I was thinking, oh God, I hope he’s not ugly to me. But he wasn’t – he was very thoughtful. It was the summer of love and flowers, and I brought a little bouquet of flowers for him – which is what I did when I met Paul and George as well. We were talking by hi
s front door in Weybridge, where he had just taken possession of his famous psychedelic Rolls-Royce, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s in the garage. Do you want to see it?’ And he opened the door to his garage, and said I could go and sit inside it if I wanted. So I did.”

  As Leslie arrived at Savile Row, wearing a red leather coat that protected her from the cold wind, she saw some familiar faces. “There were half a dozen Apple Scruffs there, who I recognised because they were often there. I wasn’t as committed to just hanging around the building like that; I couldn’t do that, because I had a life and I was going to college.”

  Staff at New Musical Express had advance notice of The Beatles’ performance as well, only because Mavis Smith, who worked in Apple’s press office, was married to NME writer Alan Smith. “Word went out that The Beatles were doing it,” says Keith Altham, who was also writing for NME, “and we were asked if we wanted to go along and catch a bit of it. So about three of us hopped out of the office and went along.” It was a short trip west from the paper’s offices in Long Acre, Covent Garden, to Savile Row.

  Many Apple staff members were disappointed to hear that they weren’t allowed to go up on the roof to hear The Beatles play. Although it had been reinforced from above and below, there were still concerns about how many people it would support, and only “essential staff” were allowed up there. Tony Richmond found 21-year-old Chris O’Dell moping in her top-floor office because she wouldn’t see the show, and suggested she go up with him as his “assistant”. She grabbed her coat and tagged along.

  The Beatles were using one of the small Apple offices as a makeshift dressing room, discussing the songs they should play and in what order they could play them. The stage fright they had discussed recently was very much in evidence. Ken Mansfield, head of the Apple label in the USA, walked into the office and “saw before me a young group of rockers going over their set and showing signs of nervousness and pre-stage jitters just like any other band”.