The Beatles on the Roof

by Tony Barrell

  Around 12.20, Michael Lindsay-Hogg joined John, Paul, George and Ringo as they were still preparing – or so it initially seemed – to walk out onto the roof and begin the show. George was questioning the point of going up on the roof and playing, and Ringo complained that it was very cold up there. Typically keen, Paul urged the others to do it, assuring them that it would be “fun”, but John – as he had been doing lately – was choosing not to take part in the conversation.

  There was a worrying moment when it looked as if the rooftop would go the way of Tunisia, Greece, Libya, the Grand Canyon, the National Gallery, the House of Commons, Liverpool Cathedral and all the other places they had considered and ultimately rejected. “Suddenly I realised there was a problem,” recalls Michael. “The plan wasn’t secure at all.”

  After an agonising silence, John Lennon suddenly came through as the leader of the group, as he had been from the beginning. “Fuck it. Let’s do it,” he said. With John on side, George and Ringo immediately dropped their objections, and within minutes all four Beatles climbed up the spiral staircase, one by one, to play music together in public for the final time.

  Paul McCartney walked tentatively out of the rooftop door, eyeing the view from the roof, dressed in a dark suit over a striped shirt, much of his face insulated from the cold by his bushy beard. He jumped up and down on the wooden planks, getting a feel for the surface of their new makeshift stage.

  Ringo Starr came out on the roof with his wife, Maureen, who had lent him the orangey-red coat that was giving him some protection from the weather. He parked himself on the drum stool and picked up his sticks. Billy Preston, in a black leather jacket, took up his position behind the electric piano, stage right. George Harrison came out, then John with Yoko. George wore bright green trousers and a shaggy black coat. John, in gold-rimmed glasses, was wearing dark trousers and a dark zip-up top, and was wrapped in the brown fur coat that had been a fixture at recent public appearances. He had been overdressed when he had worn it in the summer of 1968, but today he would benefit from its warmth. All of The Beatles would be glad of their luxuriant, thick hair today.

  Yoko and Maureen each found a place to sit against the chimney on the side of the roof nearest No. 2, which was the building occupied by the wool merchants Wain, Shiell & Son. They were next to two Americans: Ken Mansfield, in an inadequately thin and unlined white raincoat, and Chris O’Dell. There was no warmth coming up the chimney, but it was big enough to give them some shelter from the wind.

  Keith Altham of NME had a playful conversation with John Lennon after mounting the stairs to the roof. “I was shivering like a lunatic in my jacket, and John came up to me and asked if I wanted to borrow his fur coat. And before I could say yes, he said, ‘Tough!’ Typical John.”

  The three guitar-playing Beatles had chopped and changed their stage positions over the years. Usually the audience would see Paul on the left, and in some shows they saw John to the right of him and then George on the far right, but in other shows John and George might switch positions, or George might be to the far left. They might also vary their positions during a single show, as various Beatles shared a microphone for a particular song. Today they assembled in one of their classic formations from the early sixties: Paul, John, George, with Ringo visible at the back in the space between Paul and John, and with the addition of Billy at the back to the far left.

  The first loud noises heard from the roof that day were John, Paul and George tuning their guitars. They had a brief sound check, trying out ‘Get Back’; then they launched into the song again with more conviction. It was the first time the public had ever heard the new number, and they heard it coming directly from a high roof, and as a stream of ricochets from various buildings and different directions.

  Leslie Samuels, with her comprehensive knowledge of The Beatles’ music, realised that she had never heard ‘Get Back’ before. “I was talking to people and I remember saying, ‘Wow! This is new stuff.’”

  Alistair Taylor decided to watch the show from the street, enjoying the atmosphere of the event among the crowd on a corner of Savile Row. Another Apple employee, Jean Nisbet, left her office for the street after the ceiling of her office began to vibrate alarmingly with the music.

  Unlike the privileged invitees, most of those who witnessed the rooftop concert had no prior notice of it, and simply had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time. A 20-year-old art student called Steve Lovering was having lunch round the corner with a friend, Brian Wakefield, who was a student at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly. “I was living in Kensington and studying at the Maidstone School of Art in Kent at the time, in my third year,” says Steve, “and I was in London that day to see a couple of exhibitions and grab some lunch with Brian at the Royal Academy, which had a pretty good refectory in the basement. We were sitting there when suddenly we heard all this noise. It sounded like someone tuning up and doing a sound check, and you could hear the sound really loudly in that refectory. There were people complaining and tutting. But I said, ‘Fuck! I know what this is – I’m going round there!’ Because I knew where the Apple building was.

  “So I rushed out the side entrance of the Academy and ran round the corner – I think I was still holding a bun in my hand, and I was wearing a reefer jacket like the one worn by Paul McCartney on their ‘Long Tall Sally’ EP. My friend Brian wasn’t a fan, so he stayed behind in the refectory. And they kicked off with ‘Get Back’ and it was just amazing. It was obvious that it was The Beatles: they just had that distinctive sound. There weren’t many people there in the street when it all started, but then gradually more and more people stopped, and a crowd started to form.”

  Although the event has gone down in history as “The Beatles’ rooftop concert”, that’s really a misnomer. They were on the roof for two reasons: to record live versions of several songs for their album, and to provide a climactic ending to the film they were making, at the suggestion of Michael Lindsay-Hogg. It’s probably too late now to amend the nomenclature for the annals, but this was really “The Beatles’ rooftop recording session” – hence the multiple attempts they made at ‘Get Back’ and other songs. Mal Evans confirmed this with a description of the event in one of the diary pieces he wrote for The Beatles Book Monthly: “One particular day’s work at the end of January caused quite a stir. To get something a bit different, an open-air sound, we shifted the session from the basement studio to the roof of 3 Savile Row!” It was an unusual recording session, though, in that it had a live audience.

  And The Beatles certainly wanted an audience: they and their director had deliberately chosen the lunchtime period for the performance, because they were likely to draw much bigger crowds around that time than mid-morning or mid-afternoon (by the evening it would have been too dark to play). In fact, it’s clear that Paul, at least, was expecting a much stronger audience reaction to the music. As they finished that version of ‘Get Back’, they were rewarded with some polite clapping. This must have sounded absurd after all the ear-piercing screaming of the Beatlemania years, and Paul was reminded of the muted behaviour of crowds at test match cricket, quipping: “It looks like Ted Dexter has scored another.”*

  John failed to pick up on Paul’s cricket reference, offering instead one of his mock stage announcements: they’d had a request from Martin Luther, he said (either he stuttered in the middle of the name, or the request was from “Martin and Luther”). This was much more likely to be a reference to Martin Luther King than to the German Protestant reformer of the 16th century. Writing off that performance of ‘Get Back’ as a rehearsal, they readied themselves for another shot at the song. John and George went into a gentle rhythmic bounce and tapped their feet, and after a sharp count-in of “One, two, three, four,” The Beatles began the song’s muscular intro once more. John was playing the song’s distinctive lead-guitar part well now, despite the cold. He later told an interviewer that he was allowed the occasional guitar solo when Paul was “fe
eling kind” or guilty for getting so many songs on the A-sides of The Beatles’ singles.

  Soon after the music got underway on the rooftop, Apple’s front door was locked. The staff expected the noise to attract some attention, but they didn’t want to deal with any curious intruders for a good while yet, not until The Beatles had had a chance to play and record a decent quota of songs.

  There was much craning of necks as people gathered in Savile Row, but while their playing was coming over loud and clear, The Beatles themselves weren’t visible from the street. Unwittingly, they had succeeded in turning Beatlemania on its head. Back in their touring heyday, they could be seen on stage, but the shrill screams of teenage girls often made it impossible to hear their music properly. Today, for the people down in the street, the opposite was true: they could be heard but not seen.

  The Beatles were visible to the lucky people who worked on the upper floors of adjoining buildings, who could open their windows and enjoy the performance from the comfort of their offices. Then there were the intrepid people who ventured out on the roofs of Mayfair to obtain a better vantage point. One of these was an 18-year-old trainee chartered accountant called Sidney Ruback, who was working for a company called Auerbach Hope in the part of Regent Street directly behind Savile Row. “I was having sandwiches with my work colleagues in the office, which I think was on the third storey of the building. Suddenly we heard this cacophony, and we went to the window and we could see people playing musical instruments on the roof, but from that distance we couldn’t make out who they were.”

  A plan was hatched among a few young Auerbach Hope employees to get closer to the action. “I’m quite reserved, so it was probably one of the others who suggested it. But we climbed out of the window onto our roof, and we scampered over the roof and went up a fire escape to the roof opposite, which was Savile Row. We used a drainpipe as well; in Let It Be you can see a few of us coming down a drainpipe. We walked along and suddenly found ourselves standing about 10 to 15 feet away from The Beatles.”

  As well as appearing in the film, Sidney has pride of place in a well-known black-and-white photograph of the concert: he can clearly be seen in the left of the picture, standing in his suit and tie next to the large skylight on the neighbouring roof as the band plays. “I can’t believe how much hair I had at that time,” he laughs.

  For the Twickenham and Apple rehearsals, Michael Lindsay-Hogg had used a three-man camera team, but this was now expanded to 11 for the rooftop show. There were several cameras on the roof of No. 3 itself, a few in the street, and another on a roof across the street, shooting at an angle towards the left-hand side of the Apple building. Michael says today that permission was probably obtained to site a camera on this roof, and that he doesn’t remember it being a problem: he believes this wasn’t one of the tailoring businesses.

  Paul Bond, the clapper boy during the Twickenham and Apple sessions, found himself in exactly the right place for the development of his career. “Either Michael Lindsay-Hogg or Tony Richmond said, ‘Listen, Bonders has been with us all this time. We can’t have him just sitting downstairs loading away.’” They gave him a camera and suggested that while the rest of the camera team focused on The Beatles’ performance, he could scuttle about and film people on other roofs, looking out of windows and walking about below.

  “So I was all over the place with my own little camera, filming pretty girls climbing over things in miniskirts and boots, and people climbing out of windows and going up ladders. It was a bit wibbly-wobbly, but nevertheless it was wonderful to get that sort of material. Then I was put down in the street to film all the old colonels walking past, saying, ‘What’s all this noise? What’s all this rock-a-boogie going on?’ That was very funny.” “Bonders” can be spotted in photographs of the event, perching in a camelhair duffel coat behind his camera and shooting at the incidental action away from the main attraction.

  As The Beatles finished that spirited version of ‘Get Back’, John made another mock announcement, saying they’d had a request from “Daisy, Maurice and Tommy”, whoever they might have been, and they played a fragment of another new song: ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, as it was known when it eventually appeared on Abbey Road. As they played, a tape recorder picked up a reporter interviewing a young woman in the street below.

  “Do you know what you’re listening to at the moment here?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t, really,” she replied.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No,” she repeated, before venturing a guess: “Is it The Beatles?”

  “It’s The Beatles, yes.” The interviewer continued with some dull questions about whether she bought their records (sometimes), whether she’d like to see them play live again (yes, very much), and who was her favourite Beatle (Ringo, though she liked them all).

  Michael suggested they move on from ‘Get Back’. George’s nifty little guitar riff brought the band into John’s ‘Don’t Let Me Down’. It sounded magnificent up there on the roof, with impassioned vocals from John, harmony vocals from Paul and George, interlocking guitar and bass, and cool piano fills from Billy Preston. But The Beatles were really starting to feel the cold now. The air temperature was a fairly mild 8˚ or 9˚C down in the street, but significantly colder 50 feet above it, and the 111⁄2 mile per hour west-southwesterly wind was blowing right at the front of the building and into their faces, creating considerable wind chill. It would have felt more like 2˚ or 3˚C to The Beatles and the technicians up there.

  More than 50 miles south, on the Sussex coast, a very different kind of performance was taking place at an even loftier location. From a distance, it looked as if a succession of old women were being forcibly flung off Beachy Head, Britain’s highest chalk sea cliff. The women were being launched by a peculiar machine and were plummeting 500 feet and landing violently on the rocks below, where there was a pile of bodies forming. Concerned policemen rushed to investigate and found a BBC production team filming on location for the forthcoming series Q5, featuring the comedian Spike Milligan. Spike had conceived a sketch featuring the finals of the Grandmother-Hurling Championship, and the “bodies” chucked off the cliff were dummies, dressed in old-fashioned grandma-style clothing.

  Vincent Lankin was walking down Regent Street in London that lunchtime with his grandmother. It was the day before his eighth birthday, and as a special treat he was skipping school and being taken to the Golden Egg – one of a chain of colourful restaurants serving delicious pancakes and other comfort food on oval plates. Vincent and his grandmother had travelled into town from Stamford Hill in north London, using the recently opened Victoria Line of the Underground. “In those days,” says Vincent, “to go to the West End was a big treat, and you dressed accordingly. Everybody else around you was smartly dressed too. I wore a shirt and trousers and a tie, with a jumper and a duffel coat, because it was cold. She was a typical Jewish grandmother – she’d say, ‘Do your coat up!’

  “As we were making our way on Regent Street, we saw a crowd spilling out of a side street, and then we could hear the music. I could hear the bass before I heard anything else. We walked down Burlington Street into Savile Row, and I remember hearing them sing ‘Don’t Let Me Down’.”

  John Lennon fluffed one of the verses to the song, smiling as he forgot the lyrics and sang gibberish instead. But nobody outside The Beatles’ circle was any the wiser, because this was the first time they had heard ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, the vocals weren’t crystal-clear, and anyway, John had sung plenty of nonsense before about walruses, cornflakes and multicoloured mirrors on hobnail boots. The title of ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ had already appeared as a line in ‘Hey Jude’ a few months before – an example of the cross-pollination and slightly incestuous lyric-borrowing that occurred within The Beatles’ oeuvre, another example being the line “See how they run” in both John’s ‘I Am The Walrus’ and Paul’s ‘Lady Madonna’. And the opening melody of the chorus to ‘Don’t Let Me
Down’, with its high note (A) descending one tone (F#) and then another tone (E) before rising back up a tone again (F#), finds an echo in the start of the chorus to ‘Give Peace A Chance’, composed by John later that year (though that song is in the key of C).

  “We still didn’t know who it was up there on the roof,” says Vincent. “My grandmother must have asked someone there who it was, and someone said, ‘It’s The Beatles.’ I was surprised because I hadn’t heard about The Beatles for a while: I’d thought it was all over for them, or they’d been hibernating or something. More people were drifting towards the music now and it was getting crowded, but it was all very friendly. I used to go to the market in Petticoat Lane, so I wasn’t afraid of crowds. I noticed the traffic had come to a standstill, and I remember seeing a nice white E-Type Jaguar in front of me and commenting on it to my grandmother.”

  Alan Bennett was an 18-year-old apprentice coat-maker working for the distinguished tailoring business of Huntsman, which had been in the street for 50 years and whose shop was eight doors away from The Beatles, at 11 Savile Row. But Alan worked in the fifth-storey tailors’ workshop behind the Row, whose address was Heddon Street, off Regent Street. “Our building went from Savile Row right through to Heddon Street. I heard them start up the music, and I could tell it was coming from the Apple building, so I went to see what was happening. I got up on the roof at the Heddon Street end, and went over another couple of roofs. I think I ended up about four or five buildings away from The Beatles.” One older Huntsman employee who enjoyed the music was the salesman Brian Lishak, who raced up to the roof of the company’s building in Savile Row.

  Two doors from Apple in the other direction from Huntsman was the tailoring firm of Hawkes at No. 1 Savile Row, where 22-year-old Malcolm Plewes was working as a cutter on the ground floor. “Most of the cutters were in their fifties, and I was one of the youngest. We heard the commotion, and word soon got round that it was The Beatles. We knew that they had offices there, anyway. I dropped my shears and went up in the lift, and a couple of the other youngsters made their way up too.”