The Beatles on the Roof

by Tony Barrell

  Several of the passers-by that day confirmed that. “Nice to have something that’s free in this country at the moment, isn’t it?” said one of them, a grinning man in a hat, immortalised in the Let It Be film.

  “It would have taken a very brave copper indeed with two or three years’ police experience to detain The Beatles on the roof of their own property,” adds Ken. “In fact, we were effectively trespassing there, because we hadn’t been invited, not properly, so it’s possible that they could have asked us to leave. Of course, they wouldn’t have done that, because it was a really friendly, happy occasion.”

  The police accompanied the group as they retreated inside the building. “John Lennon and George Harrison wouldn’t speak to us, which was fair enough,” says Ray Shayler, “and Paul McCartney apologised. Ringo made a joke of it all: ‘I’ll go quietly – don’t use the handcuffs!’ or something like that.”

  Ringo said later that he was disappointed the police hadn’t been more aggressive, and that the film would have had a much more dramatic conclusion if he had been physically hauled off his drums and clapped in irons.

  Towards the end of the rooftop performance as it appears in Let It Be, a senior police officer with a moustache can be seen outside the door of Apple. This was David Kendrick, one of the station sergeants in Savile Row, who despite his earnest and highly authoritative demeanour was only 24 years old then – younger than all The Beatles at the time, even George, who would soon be 26. In 2017, having been retired from the police force for 18 years, David Kendrick told me: “In 1969 I was a Station Police Sergeant attached to West End Central Police Station. This is now 48 years ago and my recollection of the event of the rooftop performance in Savile Row by The Beatles is somewhat sketchy, to say the least. I do recall that I was the Duty Officer at the time of their ‘practice’ on the roof of premises in Savile Row, and that this caused a total traffic jam in and around the area and the police received many calls to deal with the problem. Acting in my official capacity, I attended the premises with other officers and requested The Beatles to stop playing their music, as it was causing total disruption on the streets below. They did so without any difficulty and the area quickly returned to normality.”

  After their first “gig” for about two-and-a-half years, it would take a while for The Beatles themselves to return to normality, whatever that meant for them. Still charged with adrenaline from the show and enjoying the warmth of their building again, John, Paul and George chatted excitedly to George Martin and Michael Lindsay-Hogg about how the session had gone. John owned up to missing a line on ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, but that could be edited. George Martin, relieved after the police failed to feel his collar, talked about the performance being a “dry run” for another spectacular event, and enthusiastically conjured the idea of a squadron of helicopters flying over London, blasting out Beatles music from speakers attached to their undersides. George Harrison, trying to make a point as some of the others jabbered away, described another fantasy scenario in which all the rock bands in the world stood on the buildings of London, playing the same music. Here was Chris O’Dell’s vision of “The Beatles playing to the whole of London” taken to the nth degree. It sounded for a moment as if they were back in pre-January 10th mode, tossing around ideas for exotic and impossible live shows they might play.

  Michael was pleased that they’d filmed “all the cops”, but lamented the fact that the group had been invisible to hundreds of people down in the street.

  “There won’t be more rooftops,” said George Harrison.

  “No more rooftops,” echoed Paul.

  George didn’t sound too bothered that their repertoire that day hadn’t included any of his own compositions. The Beatles had mostly favoured the new songs that had come together well in rehearsal. It was no great surprise that these included ‘Get Back’ and ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, as these had both been played dozens of times at Twickenham and in the basement of Savile Row. But they had also made at least 40 attempts at George’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ and around 30 attempts at ‘I Me Mine’ without producing gig-ready arrangements. George had been muttering about eventually making an album of his growing stockpile of songs, so he may have been happy to keep the lid on his tunes for the time being. “It was the Lennon-McCartney axis versus the Harrison axis,” says Michael Lindsay-Hogg. “And maybe George thought, ‘I don’t want to do this, so I’ll let them do what they want.’”

  As traffic began moving again and a hush gradually descended on Savile Row, people drifted away to resume their lives, and the employees of companies in nearby buildings closed their windows and got back to work. The adventurous people on rooftops made their way carefully back over the tops of buildings, including the trainee chartered accountant Sidney Ruback, who found his way back to the offices of Auerbach Hope in Regent Street, returning through the window he had come out of about 40 minutes earlier. “It wasn’t quite as exciting going back as it had been coming.”

  David Martin came down from the Apple roof and wandered down the road to his office at No. 17. One of the reasons he was going in today was to hear a special recording of a song he had written with his musical partners Jeff Morrow and Chris Arnold. “We’d just had four songs recorded by Elvis, and I was going to hear one of them, ‘Let’s Be Friends’. That ended up becoming the title track of one of his albums. So I had a double treat that day: seeing The Beatles on the roof, and hearing Elvis sing one of our songs.”

  “I stayed in Savile Row until all the crowds dispersed,” says Leslie Samuels, “because I was just enjoying being there, breathing the same air as The Beatles, which is pretty cool. Then I think I took Brian back on a bus, went down Knightsbridge, and we had a run in Hyde Park before going home.” Later she would write a letter to The Beatles Book Monthly, saying: “You asked for reports of the live Beatles concert from those lucky enough to attend it. As this concert never occurred, no comments are able to be shared.

  “But late in January, I happened to be in Savile Row just as the roof-top telly-recording was taking place. I was unable to see the Beatles, but, oh, what I heard was fantastic. (For all the times from ’64–’66 when the situation was see, not hear, it was quite a switch!)”

  Mal Evans and Kevin Harrington unplugged and disconnected The Beatles’ equipment and carried it all back down into the basement, making several trips in the lift and unscrewing the skylight again so that Paul’s bass cabinet and Billy’s electric piano could be lifted through it.

  Steve Lovering took the tube back to his home in Kensington, still shivering with the cold despite his reefer coat. Vicki Wickham, Cathy McGowan and Rosemary Simon came down from the roof of the bank and walked over the road to chat to their friends at Apple.

  Malcolm Plewes went down in the lift to the ground floor of Hawkes, picked up his shears and continued his work. Of the older tailors there, he says, “One or two of them thought it was all good fun, but the majority thought it was ‘bloody ridiculous’.” Alan Bennett ambled back over the rooftops until he reached the top of Huntsman’s workshops in Heddon Street*, then returned to the fifth storey to resume his tailoring work. The older tailors, he recalls, “weren’t as interested in the music as the youngsters. They didn’t like it disrupting trade in the street.”

  The people who had complained about The Beatles’ “noise”, like Stanley Davis of Wain, Shiell & Son, returned to work with the smug satisfaction that peace and quiet had returned to their precious domain. Derek Taylor would get his revenge on them, writing: “When The Beatles gave their wonderful rooftop concert and, however briefly, gave West London a shining hour [sic] of absolutely unique excitement, in 1969, it was the stiffnecked shits of Savile Row who called in the law and had the music stopped.”

  “The Beatles wanted to play their music and put it out there,” says Michael Lindsay-Hogg. “And then, of course, there were the stuffy Blue Meanies next door who wanted to close the thing down. ‘This is absolutely outrageous!’ ‘How dare the
y!’ It was very much the sixties: it was the bowler-hatted men versus the long-hairs. It was the vaguely upper class versus the rebellious working-class youth.”

  Ken Wharfe returned to West End Central and logged himself in a book at the back of the station. “As I was signing in, this sergeant, the man who had made the call at the police post earlier, came and said to me, ‘You got that music turned down, then.’ I suppose he was in his late forties.

  “I said, ‘Hey, Sarge, it was amazing. It was The Beatles on the roof down at the Apple building.’

  “And he said, ‘Let me tell you something, lad. When I came to London, I was dating a girl in Holborn. Every Wednesday afternoon, duties permitting, we used to go and have afternoon tea at the Waldorf Hotel in the Aldwych and listen to music from a proper band. Any group of musicians that is forced to play on the roof of their office has got no future.’”

  With all the fuss over The Beatles playing live again, people would have been forgiven for not knowing that January 30 was a significant day in other respects. They were reminded when they saw a crowd gathering and laying wreaths by the equestrian statue of Charles I on a traffic island at Charing Cross. It was the anniversary of the king’s execution in 1649 during the dark days of the English Civil War, and various historical groups, including the Royal Stuart Society, were honouring his memory. More wreaths were laid and prayers offered at the Banqueting House in Whitehall, where Charles had been beheaded around 2 p.m. on that day 320 years before.

  That Thursday in 1969 was also the 21st anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and people gathered to pray at the spot in New Delhi, near the River Jumna, where the Indian independence leader had been cremated. That evening there was a service at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, given by the Archbishop of Canterbury and attended by Lord Mountbatten and the wife of the prime minister, Mary Wilson, to honour the anniversary. Gandhi was praised for his deeply spiritual life, and Mountbatten ended his eulogy with the words: “May his creed of love and non-violence pervade the peoples of this planet.” The Times reported that “It was a night of colour and music. Indian singers clad in scarlet, purple and green sang – accompanied by a sitar player – before the service and as the congregation dispersed.”

  Gandhi’s death was commemorated again that evening by the inaugural meeting of a new organisation, the London School of Non-Violence, at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square. Organised by Satish Kumar, a follower of the Mahatma, the school’s purpose was to study the works of thinkers such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and “to examine systematically in depth the strategy, technique and potential of non-violence as a political force, and to do this in realistic terms”. After its successful opening night, the school would continue to hold lively weekly meetings.

  From Trafalgar Square it was a short walk to the Marquee, the rock club based in Wardour Street, and that evening an obscure group called Feathers was appearing on its stage. This was a rather esoteric multimedia trio, two young men and a young woman who combined folk music with tape recordings and mime performances. They comprised John “Hutch” Hutchinson, Hermione Farthingale, and a singer and guitarist who to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees had changed his name from David Jones to David Bowie. In the early seventies he would become a superstar, a pioneer of glam rock, and in 1975 top the US charts with a song co-written with John Lennon. Back in 1969, he was about to experience his first brush with fame. A few days after his Marquee gig, he recorded a demo of a song he was particularly proud of, inspired by the latest Apollo missions and given a title punned on the recent film 2001: A Space Odyssey. ‘Space Oddity’, which employed the sound of a Stylophone – just like the one John Lennon had been fiddling with during the rehearsals in the Apple basement – would make the UK Top 10 singles chart later that year.

  Militant students were on the march again in London that evening. Dozens of policemen attended the scene as hundreds of young protesters marched to the LSE carrying banners and flaming torches, calling for the college to be reopened. One gave a speech to the crowd, sending a message to the education minister who had called them “thugs” and suggested they be “thrown out on their necks”. “We have come here to show Mr Edward Short we are not just a minority. We are challenging the very foundations of society. Mr Short is afraid our ideas will spread beyond the students of the LSE. Students are fed up with being kicked around by the Labour government.”

  The following evening, Billy Preston watched television with his friend George Harrison at Apple. They switched to BBC2, turned the sound up and enjoyed the show that Billy had recorded recently at the Talk Of The Town.

  Nobody knew that The Beatles had just made their final public performance. Indeed, there were many people, Apple staffers included, who imagined that they would play live again in the not-too-distant future – on a proper stage, with a paying audience who could see as well as hear them. As George had said, there would be “no more rooftops”. If they pulled a similar stunt again, the police would have been down on them like a ton of bricks within minutes. And nobody was really expecting a gig in the Grand Canyon, the Sahara Desert or a Tunisian amphitheatre. But large, conventional venues such as the Royal Albert Hall and the Roundhouse still looked feasible.

  Leslie Samuels had ended her letter to The Beatles Book Monthly: “If there are any personal reasons why John, Paul, George and Ringo don’t want to give a live concert, I, for one, would love to know them. I know many fans are waiting, patiently, for a chance to enjoy the Beatles’ efforts à la 1969.”

  “When they did the concert on the roof, it opened up possibilities,” Derek Taylor later explained. “There was talk all through the back end of 1968 about doing ad-hoc concerts, so after they’d done the concert on the roof everything was up in the air again. ‘They may perform again,’ we said – because it did go well.”

  As we now know, events conspired to destroy that dream. Allen Klein took over Apple and drove a wedge between Paul and the other Beatles, and the following year brought their official dissolution. Miraculously, they did manage to record an impressive final album, Abbey Road, which featured many of the songs they had tinkered with at Twickenham and Apple that trying January, along with some fine additions – among them ‘Come Together’ and ‘Because’ from John. The shining gems, though, came from George: his ballad ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes The Sun’, the latter written in Eric Clapton’s sunny garden.

  When it came to creating a cover for the album, something of the same spirit that had created the rooftop concert was pervading their default recording studio in north London. After plans for a shoot in an exotic location came to nought, they ended up on their own doorstep again, strolling across the zebra crossing outside the building, somehow creating a masterpiece out of apathy and improvisation. It was “Let’s do the show right here” all over again. Several million people have since followed in their footsteps on that sacred strip of road, causing taxi drivers to rage and curse as their journey through St John’s Wood is delayed over and over again. Many of them use exactly the same earthy language as the cabbies used in Savile Row back in 1969.

  If The Beatles’ album releases had followed the chronology of their recordings, Abbey Road would have been their final album. But they still had all those Get Back recordings in the can, including the rooftop concert, and after various mixes of the songs were rejected, Klein chose the producer Phil Spector to make an album out of them.

  The Beatles’ TV special never saw the light of day – at least in the form originally intended. The footage from the Get Back project was pushed to the back of a cupboard for a while, until Apple beancounters decided that a movie would be a better bet for recouping the expenses of the project. The film Let It Be was a much bleaker animal than the TV special would have been, says Michael Lindsay-Hogg. “If it had been allowed to be a television special,” he says, “Let It Be would not have had the kind of longueurs that inevitably come from musicians who are slightly tired of
being in their own company.”

  Plans to broadcast The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus on the BBC were halted by the Stones themselves, who were unhappy with their performance, having played in a state of exhaustion in the wee hours of the morning. It had been their final public performance with Brian Jones, who would be asked to leave the band in June 1969 and would die in July. Cynics claimed that the Stones had scrapped the broadcast because they had been upstaged by The Who. The show was finally released on video in 1996.

  Billy Preston was signed to Apple as an artist in his own right, releasing the album That’s The Way God Planned It, produced by his friend George Harrison. Derek Taylor’s sleevenotes declared, somehow without upsetting too many Christians, that Billy “sings and plays like the son of God”. Chris O’Dell gave Billy a more permanent place to live in London. “I found him an apartment in a building called the White House. I remember saying at the time that I’d put the first black man in the White House!”

  One potentially entertaining project from that period didn’t make it out of the blocks: there would be no musical written by George Harrison and Derek Taylor about everyday life at Apple. If they had finished it, the work would have been a history piece, as the atmosphere at No. 3 changed considerably when Allen Klein arrived and dismissed many of the staff. One day, the receptionist Debbie Wellum reached the end of her tether and walked out of the building for the last time. “It was so unpleasant and people were so unhappy that they were walking out in droves. And one afternoon something awful happened – and I don’t even remember what it was – and I thought, ‘Well, that’s it, I’m off,’ and I walked out and I never went back. I went out to the Virgin Islands and spent six months there.”

  On the whole, The Beatles’ memories of the Get Back experience were unhappy. John was characteristically acerbic about the early stages of the project, saying: “It was just such a very, very dreadful feeling being there in Twickenham Studios at eight o’clock in the morning with some old geezer pointing a camera up your nose expecting you to make good music with coloured lights flashing on and off in your face all the time.”