The Beatles on the Roof

by Tony Barrell

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One: Everybody Had A Hard Year

  Chapter Two: Winter Blues

  Chapter Three: The Basement Tapes

  Chapter Four: Up On The Roof

  Picture Section

  Recommend to a Friend

  Also Available...

  Selected Bibliography

  Copyright

  Preface

  The Beatles’ rooftop performance is often described as a “spontaneous” event: an iconic burst of rock’n’roll that came without warning out of a clear blue (or cloudy grey) sky. It’s a nice story: that one random winter’s day – January 30, 1969 – the greatest band in the land decided on the spur of the moment to entertain London with some songs they’d just thrown together, and grabbed their instruments and tramped up to the very top of their Mayfair headquarters, which just seemed the natural thing to do, plugged in and blasted away.

  It was spontaneous insofar as it only became a definite plan moments before it happened. Indeed, it came very close to not happening at all. But the music that The Beatles played on that day was shaped by a panoply of occurrences and influences, both within the lives of the group and in the wider world. And the concert occurred as the culmination of a long sequence of ideas, conversations and conflicts. Expert technicians and loyal roadies worked like Trojans to make it happen. The Beatles themselves had sweated over those songs for weeks. And behind it all was a story of discord, discontent and discarded dreams, and a year of madness. If The Beatles made it all look easy, well, that was one of the things they were good at.

  Most people call it the “rooftop concert”, so that’s what I usually call it. However, while it certainly took place on a rooftop, it wasn’t really a concert. When you go to a concert, the musicians don’t usually play a public sound check followed by a rehearsal of a song and then a proper version of it. But that’s what The Beatles were doing: they were doing takes of their songs. That’s what you do in a recording session, which is what it was. Except that it was more than that, as well.

  It was an outdoor recording session for an album, and it was filmed, because it was intended as the finale to a television show. So it was like a reality-TV version of a recording session, but transplanted from a comfortable studio to a lofty urban location in the depths of winter. Insanity!

  In a way, it was just The Beatles being The Beatles, pushing the boundaries and making news again. Although they were still in their twenties (John Lennon and Ringo Starr were 28, Paul McCartney was 26 and George Harrison was 25), they had a lifetime of achievements to look back on. They had sold records by the lorryload, pioneered stadium pop concerts in America, been awarded MBEs, recorded a concept album, taken LSD, recorded instruments backwards, performed on the first ever global satellite TV show, started their own record label and swanned off to India to discover the meaning of life. Although they weren’t the first rock band to play on top of a building, the rooftop event was another of those achievements – something else to put in the history books and give them a medal for.

  It was also a “happening”, the kind of arty-but-really-a-bit-silly event that was terribly hip in the sixties. Happenings took many different forms: hippies might dress up as nuns and roll around in maple syrup, or 100 metaphysical poets might walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End while repeating the word “trousers” over and over again, and people would watch and feel somehow enriched by the experience. It was conceptual art. This particular happening was all about The Beatles appearing in public when many people thought they had split up, playing entirely new songs while withstanding the freezing cold, annoying the neighbours and resisting arrest by the boys in blue.

  The rooftop event can be seen as a few other things as well. It was a bonding exercise for the group, a means of reminding each other why they came together in the first place. It was a mystic ritual to renew the spirit of the band after a period of personal disharmony and misfortune. And it was an anti-establishment prank, a wheeze to get the goat of their snooty Mayfair neighbours, especially the tut-tutting Savile Row tailors with their conservative tendencies.

  It was also a kind of self-audition. They hadn’t played live in public for about two-and-a-half years and were beginning to wonder if they could still do it, so here was the big test. In that respect, they showed enormous courage. If they’d failed, they knew the media would have been circling like vultures, dashing off nasty reviews and hatchet jobs with relish: The Beatles are finished; they’ve lost their magic; did they ever have any magic in the first place, really? Have we all been conned? Were they really the Emperor’s New Clothes? It would have been like Magical Mystery Tour all over again, but worse. Fortunately, of course, they passed the self-audition.

  And yet, despite its multifaceted nature, the rooftop performance is so often regarded in shallow, simplistic terms. On big anniversaries, when the year ends in a ‘9’, it gets an article here and there and maybe a short piece on TV, most of them rehashing the same list of facts: it was on a roof, Ringo Starr wore his wife’s coat, people stopped and stared, the police came and shut it down, John Lennon made a joke at the end. The reasons why it happened, and why it happened in the way it did, go largely unexplored.

  Looking back on The Beatles’ career history, it becomes evident that the main story of the rooftop concert begins with the launch of their own company, Apple, in 1968. Most obviously, Apple gave them the actual roof on which they would ultimately perform, because this entire building was the company’s new Mayfair headquarters. Moreover, the year 1968 saw both John Lennon and Paul McCartney establish new and lasting romantic relationships, which they would sing about on that roof. This was also the year in which the band embarked on their Get Back project, originally foreseen as a TV special for The Beatles (it later morphed into the Let It Be film and album), and the high point and culmination of that project was the rooftop session.

  It seems artificial and unsatisfying to tell this story as if it occurred in a vacuum. It very much belongs to the closing years of the sixties, when the naive, blissed-out dreams of flower-power summers had already lost their lustre. This was a time when young people were marching for a whole range of causes: standing up for civil rights, women’s rights and nuclear disarmament, and opposing the Vietnam War and other policies of old-fashioned, draconian governments. The Beatles, especially John Lennon, were committed to many of those causes, and Apple itself was a kind of pressure group as well as a business enterprise, seeking to find a new, more inclusive and creative form of capitalism for the world to follow.

  Meanwhile, as the youth of the day were striving to invent a better global future, the British police were routinely busting famous musicians for possession of trifling quantities of drugs, and inviting their friends from the gutter press to come and enjoy the fun. In 1968, everybody had a hard year.

  The rooftop concert, as an early piece of reality TV, emerged from a period when musicians were finding new ways to engage with the media of film and television. Elvis Presley used TV to stage a remarkable “live” comeback, while The Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane were toying with cinéma vérité and collaborating with the radical Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Luc Godard.

  Understanding the rooftop concert also requires an appreciation of The Beatles’ late-sixties musical stance, the end result of the strange destiny they had created for themselves. Their story is one of a band that continually escaped from an undesirable situation, only to find themselves caught in a trap from which they needed to escape again. Initially they escaped working-class conventionality and anonymity to become the darlings of Britain and the world; but that brought the relentless grind of Beatlemania, wher
ein they lost much of their privacy and travelled the globe playing music that was drowned out by the screams of young women for whom the music was secondary to the band’s physical appeal. The Beatles escaped from Beatlemania via the radical decision of calling a halt to playing live altogether, and retreated into the studio to make elaborately textured, beautifully handcrafted music that they had no intention of performing live.

  By 1969 they had decided that that was a trap as well. Now, disenchanted with the technical complexity of their recent music, they wanted to get back to basics, play like a straightforward rock’n’roll outfit again, in the spirit of rootsy American groups like The Band. But when The Beatles reconvened in January 1969 for the Get Back project, their old Fab Four camaraderie disintegrating horribly, they discovered that just playing rock’n’roll together was yet another trap. Eventually, their escape from that one would be the dissolution of the group.

  This is what makes the Let It Be film a tough watch. The Beatles, who once appeared capable of bottling happiness with their music, were now bottling misery. But the shining moment in that movie, like the pearl produced by the grit in the oyster, is the rooftop performance.

  For my book I’ve spoken to several people who were around The Beatles in 1968, and several more who were present on that chilly January day in Savile Row, some of them working with the group but many of them passers-by who were there through good fortune and happy coincidence. I’ve taken to calling these witnesses “Savile Row celebrities”, partly because they seem to like it, and because I think they are, or should be, celebrities of a kind. Because this was 1969, most of these people are of a reasonably advanced age now, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the sharpness of their memories.

  This story does have a personal dimension for me. I was a small boy in short trousers when I heard that The Beatles had played an unannounced concert in London, and I was inconsolable. Why couldn’t they have given me, one of their biggest fans, some warning that they were doing it? It would surely have been worth skipping primary school to go to London for. Ever since then, I’ve wished I had been there that day, and I’ve developed a fascination for the event that won’t go away.

  I wrote the first draft of this preface while standing on a cold and sunny day in Savile Row, across the road from the smart Georgian brick building where The Beatles surprised the world all those years ago. If you’re ever in this sacred street on one of the anniversaries of January 30, 1969, perhaps we’ll get to meet. It’s where I go every year to capture the “vibes” of the rooftop performance that I missed all those years ago. If you cock an ear in a certain direction and use your imagination, they’re still there to be heard and enjoyed.

  Tony Barrell, Savile Row, 2017

  Acknowledgements

  During my research I was lucky enough to speak to Deborah Scarfe (née Wellum), who was the receptionist at Apple Corps from 1968. She gave me a wonderful interview, with her memory of so many events apparently undimmed by time. I was very sad to hear that Deborah passed away recently. This book is dedicated to her.

  I’m very grateful to the many other people I interviewed who were in London back in January 1969. I have put the memories of these witnesses to the test, and they all passed the audition. Special thanks are due to Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Peter Brown, Vicki Wickham, Paul Bond, Barbara O’Donnell, Dave Harries, Kevin Harrington, Ray Shayler, Ken Wharfe, Chris O’Dell, Steve Lovering, David Martin, Andy Taylor, Leslie Healy, Paula Marshall, Vince Lankin, Sidney Ruback, Malcolm Plewes, Alan Bennett and Keith Altham.

  I’m also grateful to my editor, Chris Charlesworth, and to everybody who helped with the research, notably the former Bow Street Policeman Dave Allen, the staff of the British Library, and various other experts; to the devoted Beatles fan Caroline Lennon for some inspiring conversations on rooftop anniversaries in Savile Row; and to Carrie Kania and Robin Morgan for all their help, encouragement and enthusiasm.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Everybody Had A Hard Year

  When John Lennon sang from the rooftop that “Everybody had a hard year”, the sentiment resonated with a lot of people. The year 1968 was fresh in the memory as a period of upheaval and unrest, of strikes, protests, violence and youth rebellion. This was the year when the Vietnam War intensified, students and workers fought with police in the barricaded streets of Paris, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, and the USA elected one of its worst-ever presidents.

  Nevertheless it was a good year for experimental cinema, controversial theatre, alternative religion and audacious space travel. It was also the year when both John Lennon and Paul McCartney began their most intense romantic relationships, which they would celebrate in song on the most famous roof in pop music.

  But life had also been tough in Beatle Land. At the start of 1968 they had to recover from the critical mauling given to their fantasy coach-ride extravaganza Magical Mystery Tour, shown to a bemused audience of Christmas TV viewers, and did so with a kind of cleansing ritual that saw them studying Transcendental Meditation at the feet of an Indian guru, and by attempting to redefine the rules of business with a benevolent new company, Apple Corps, that all but promised to turn the whole world into Beatles. After a prodigious gush of songwriting in India, they threw themselves into recording with such vigour that they finished up with a double album.

  While they gave it the unifying title of The Beatles, they became more fragmented than ever before while making it, with individual members often tinkering with their own songs in different studios. It seemed that the logical thing to do after the White Album, as it became known, would have been to separate there and then, and begin four exciting solo careers. But no, now they had their own business to run, and they were obliged to pull together and make it work – at least for a while.

  John suddenly fell so hard for the artist Yoko Ono that he not only had to leave his cosy family life with Cynthia and little Julian, but he also became almost subsumed by his new relationship, for which he had to withstand mockery from critics and members of the public who had never seen a Japanese conceptual artist before, and a degree of scepticism from the other Beatles. Consolation came after Paul converted the sorrow of John’s estranged wife and five-year-old child into one of his most infectious songs, altering ‘Hey Jules’ to ‘Hey Jude’ along the way, and it became the biggest-selling single The Beatles would release. And the early days of Apple, at least, were happy ones.

  Apple had begun as an accountant’s wheeze to reduce the group’s tax burden by giving them something to do with their wealth, but it quickly blossomed into one of the most generous, idealistic enterprises ever seen. The company wanted to give aspiring musicians and songwriters a leg-up and a helping hand, rewarding talent with recording contracts and a crack at the big time.

  On its simplest level, Apple was a talent-scouting enterprise – a cooler version of the contemporary television show Opportunity Knocks, which turned the spotlight on unknown singers, musclemen and performing dogs. In March 1968 the music paper Disc & Music Echo teamed up with the company to launch a nationwide hunt for the next pop sensation, announcing: “Apple, the company set up by The Beatles to discover, sign and promote new pop talent, are rightly aware that all over Britain there are hundreds of unheard-of groups who, with the right handling, could be every bit as big as today’s top pop names.”

  Disc was asking readers to find the talent themselves, and to vote for the top beat combo in their local area. Apple would then count all the votes, send talent scouts across the country to see the readers’ most favoured bands, and then finally name “the group they have signed to a recording contract and the full promotional facilities of the Apple organisation”. Six “lucky readers” who voted for the winning group would then win prizes, including a voucher for £25 to spend on far-out clothes from the Apple Boutique in Baker Street.

  On April 20, Apple splashed out on advertisements in British newspapers, showing a photo
graph of company staffer Alistair Taylor as a one-man band, strumming a guitar and with a bass drum on his back, beneath the headline “This man has talent…”. The advert asked for people to record themselves singing their songs and send a tape to Apple’s Baker Street address. This is what the singer in the picture had done, it playfully pretended, and now he was rich. “This man now owns a Bentley!” it claimed.

  On its most profound level, Apple was a bold attempt to bring the radicalism and experimentalism of modern music, art, cinema and theatre into the stuffy world of business. John and Paul, in particular, saw it as no less than a utopian new model for enterprise, in which unfettered creativity took precedence over profit. It wouldn’t be just a record company: it would make films, electronic gadgets, clothing, furniture, books and whatever else it wanted to; there was even talk of it having its own schools for children. Not long after it expanded into premises in Wigmore Street in the West End of London that year, the Apple concept had grown so rapidly that it was looking for a larger headquarters.

  On the same day that the Apple press advert appeared, a British politician struck a very different tone, sending out a message of intolerance and fear that appeared to legitimise xenophobia in the United Kingdom. The 55-year-old Conservative politician Enoch Powell, then shadow defence secretary, gave a long speech in which he criticised proposed race-relations legislation and warned about the long-term effects of immigration in Britain. He was troubled by the influx of Asian men and women from Kenya who had failed to acquire citizenship status from the former British colony after its independence. Thousands of them had been denied work permits as the Kenyan government pursued a policy of Africanisation, but they were entitled to British passports.

  Speaking to a roomful of fellow Conservatives in Birmingham, Powell warned: “In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three-and-a-half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants.” His own forecast for the year 2000 was that the Commonwealth immigrants would number “in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.”