The Beatles on the Roof

by Tony Barrell

  The line in Powell’s monologue that appeared to lend it gravitas (and would give it its popular title, the “Rivers of Blood speech”) was: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.”

  The day after the rant, Powell was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet by the Conservative leader, Edward Heath. Powell was widely criticised for his inflammatory words, which inspired demonstrations by white Britons chanting for the repatriation (and worse) of non-white immigrants – as he must have expected. Porters from Smithfield meat market marched to the Houses of Parliament in their bloodstained overalls, chanting jingoistic songs and carrying placards demanding that Powell be awarded a George Cross. What Powell surely never imagined is that the national conversation he triggered, as we shall see, would inspire the lyrics of The Beatles.

  In May, John and Paul flew to New York to publicise the launch of Apple. They were accompanied by Alexis Mardas, the young Greek inventor dubbed “Magic Alex” who had charmed them with his futuristic ideas and gadgets, and who would head up the electronics division of the new company.

  The idea was that creative people could approach Apple and have their brilliant ideas turned into reality, without all the usual hang-ups of everyday capitalism that the band themselves had endured when they signed to EMI. “We want to help people,” explained Paul, “but without doing it like a charity. We always had to go to the big men on our knees and touch our forelocks and say, ‘Please can we do so-and-so?’ We’re in the happy position of not needing any more money, so for the first time the bosses aren’t in it for the profit. If you come to me and say, ‘I’ve had such-and-such a dream,’ I’ll say to you, ‘Go away and do it.’” Daringly, at a New York press conference on May 14, 1968 – in the middle of the Cold War, with Vietnam still a bloody battleground and the Sorbonne in Paris occupied by anti-establishment students – Paul likened the new business to “a kind of Western communism”. Less than 20 years earlier America had been in the grip of McCarthyism, in which many Americans prominent in the world of entertainment and literature were arrested on charges, often spurious, of being communists.

  “The Beatles at a certain point wanted to be good for the world,” says Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the American director who would conceive and film the rooftop concert. “They’d been told they were good for the world and they wanted to actually be good for the world, if they could. They wanted to offer people the means to realise their dreams and their ambitions, given that they were consistent with what The Beatles thought were good dreams or good ambitions.”

  At a time when moral guardians such as Mary Whitehouse were campaigning vigorously against “filth” in the arts, Apple was also a libertarian enterprise with its own permissive moral code, unsaddled with unhip notions of obscenity. So when both George and John took a liking to the song ‘The King of Fuh’, by an American singer calling himself Brute Force, which repeatedly and outrageously sang the praises of “the Fuh King”, it seemed a perfect choice for the new label.

  Apple was now a powerful magnet for all kinds of artists, musicians, fantasists and fruitcakes who needed money to realise their creative dreams. The Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor summed up the madness of it all in his distinctive, entertaining way: “A time-and-motion man would have lost his reason in those days in Wigmore Street. I had a slim shoebox of a room and such were our promises of a hearing for anyone with something creative to offer; anyone off the street who was frustrated with years of screaming for someone to listen; any singer who could climb a scale; anyone with a piece of coloured paper which he called a painting; any caller with rhyme he believed to be poetry; any Fellini of the 1970s. Such was our published pledge to be a market place for the lowly artist, a gathering of Beautiful People, that by dusk any night there could be a duo of guitarists ‘better than Clapton’, a Mancunian who saw himself as a mingling of ‘Mr. Kite’, ‘John Wesley Harding’, ‘Billy Shears’, ‘The Mighty Quinn’ and ‘Popeye the Sailor Man’ and having thus seen, sought £50,000 to make a film of him acting out the fantasy, California author-to-be with hair like a hedge in Heswell, a sculptress who had never sculpted but who wanted facilities to make a nude out of patent leather and then cover it in oil to induce ‘tactile delight’…”

  As more songwriters’ tapes and artists’ proposals flooded into Apple, the company was drawing up grandiose ideas for a bigger headquarters that could accommodate their expanding ambitions. “The original idea was to buy a whole estate, so we could all go and live on it,” Alistair Taylor recalled later. “There’d be a big dome in the middle, which would be Apple, and then there’d be four corridors leading to four large houses, one for John, one for Paul, one for George and one for Ringo. And around the estate, there would be some other houses, sort of gardeners’ domes, and we’d live in there. One way or another a good time would be had by all. Well, the reality was that they did try and buy an estate, but, with land being what it is, the nearest place we could get was Norwich, and nobody could see us running a record company out of Norwich, crazy though we were.”

  While his wife Cynthia was holidaying in Greece in May 1968, John Lennon invited Yoko Ono to his home in Kenwood, Surrey, where the Beatle and the artist made some avant-garde recordings and then made love for the first time. Cynthia returned home late one afternoon, venturing into the morning room: “When I opened the door a scene that took my breath and voice away confronted me. Dirty breakfast dishes were cluttering the table, the curtains were closed and the room was dimly lit. Facing me was John, sitting relaxed in his dressing gown. With her back to me and equally relaxed and at home, was Yoko. The only response I received was ‘Oh, hi,’ from both parties. They looked so right together.”

  John later remembered how he had fallen for Yoko, and how she had even become like a drug for him: “I had never known love like this before, and it hit me so hard that I had to halt my marriage to Cynthia. My marriage to Cynthia was not unhappy, but it was just a normal marital state where nothing happened and which we continued to sustain. You sustain it until you meet someone who suddenly sets you alight. With Yoko I really knew love for the first time. Our attraction for each other was a mental one… I just realised that she knew everything I knew and more, probably, and that it was coming out of a woman’s head. It just bowled me over. It was like finding gold or something. As she was talking to me, I would get high, and the discussions would get to such a level that I would be going higher and higher.”

  John and Yoko were first seen out in public on May 22, though the event was missed by the paparazzi, who were not yet clued in about the Beatle’s extramarital relationship. Yoko tagged along when John and George attended the opening of a second Apple clothing shop. This was Apple Tailoring (Civil and Theatrical) at 161 New King’s Road, run by the Australian designer John Crittle, and a more sober establishment than the Apple Boutique. “The Beatles’ dress sense is quietening down now, like everyone else,” said Crittle. “They all went mad last year, but now they’re all coming back to a normal way of life. We won’t get teenyboppers here, because prices will be too high for them. We’re pushing velvet jackets and the Regency look, although The Beatles put forward plenty of suggestions. They have pretty far-ahead ideas, actually. We’re catering mainly for pop groups, personalities and turned-on swingers.”

  John Lennon wasn’t really dressed for the part of a celebrity cutting the ribbon on a tailoring business that day. He wore a thick brown fur coat that he was clearly fond of, because he is seen wearing it in many photographs from that period. He’s sporting the same coat in a photograph taken with a few fans outside Paul’s house in Cavendish Avenue, and in some of the shots taken in July during The Beatles’ Mad Day Out – a tour of London for publicity purposes, in which the band was accompanied by a series of photographers. And he’s wearing it again in photographs taken with Eric Clapton and members of The Who and The Rolling Stones in December 1968. This would also be the coat that kept him reasona
bly warm for the duration of the rooftop concert. Commentators often trot out the line that this was Yoko’s coat and he borrowed it for the performance, but there is plenty of photographic evidence to suggest otherwise.

  John and Yoko’s first official appearance together came on June 15, when they contributed a joint work of art to the National Sculpture Exhibition at Coventry Cathedral. The piece consisted of a circular white garden bench over two white flowerpots, placed on a symbolic east-west axis, in which two acorns were to be planted to celebrate their love and promote world peace. However, church authorities decreed that because John and Yoko weren’t married the acorns should not be planted on consecrated ground, so they were planted in ordinary ground nearby instead.

  They were becoming pacifist artists and campaigners at a time when the world seemed an especially violent place. On April 4, the civil-rights leader Martin Luther King had been shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had been working on plans for a Poor People’s March on Washington, DC. On June 10, the presidential hopeful Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. Two days before that, the artist Andy Warhol had been shot and injured by the radical feminist Valerie Solanis at his Manhattan studio, The Factory. The Vietnam War was still raging, and the American death toll alone would exceed 14,000 by the end of the year.

  By the summer of 1968 The Beatles had begun recording the White Album. On June 20, John used all three studios at EMI in Abbey Road to begin assembling his experimental sound collage ‘Revolution 9’, while Paul McCartney flew to Los Angeles, where he would address a sales conference held by Capitol Records, The Beatles’ American label. Not far away from that record-company bash, Elvis Presley was embarking on a series of performances in Hollywood that would become part of his ‘Comeback Special’, to be broadcast on American television towards the end of the year. One night after Elvis had been rehearsing, the show’s director, Steve Binder, found the singer chatting with other musicians and jamming in his dressing room, playing old blues and rock’n’roll numbers for the sheer fun of it. Binder was excited to see music being made in such a relaxed setting, and was inspired to include a similar informal jam session in the TV special, which was recorded at NBC’s Burbank Studios.

  After their hectic and debilitating tours of 1966, The Beatles had called a halt to live performances. This wasn’t surprising: they’d received death threats for playing the Budokan martial-arts venue in Japan, were roughed up after causing a major diplomatic incident in the Philippines and were in fear of their lives in America’s Bible Belt after religious zealots took John’s fairly innocent remarks about Christianity out of context. They had cleverly fortified the decision not to tour again by immersing themselves in the studio, where they had much more time to create elaborate multi-track recordings that would have been impossible for the four of them to replicate live even if people wanted them to.

  But the group’s refusal to play any live concerts was leaving a vacuum that was being filled by all kinds of speculation about the group returning to the stage. The latest edition of Melody Maker had a front-page story claiming there was an “exciting prospect” that they would soon play Moscow. It was all based on the flimsy story that the impresario Vic Lewis was negotiating with the Soviet authorities with the aim of putting on Russian gigs by a variety of Western acts, which included Donovan, Nina Simone and Andy Williams. Lewis, who had worked with Brian Epstein and was now running the late Beatles manager’s NEMS Enterprises, said: “I’d also like to set up a trip by The Beatles. I haven’t said anything to them yet, but it could be the sort of offer the boys would be keen to accept. I feel they might regard it as something of a challenge.”

  Lewis added that he didn’t believe they would tour Britain again. “They can’t be expected to play the type of music they have put on records like Sgt. Pepper – with their use of electronic effects – on stage.” Puzzlingly, he didn’t explain why that wouldn’t be a problem in the Russian capital.

  Turning its attention from the East Anglian backwaters of Norwich to London, Apple found a gem of a building that was up for sale in the prestigious Mayfair district, and paid £500,000 for it. Years later, Paul McCartney remembered Neil Aspinall, The Beatles’ former road manager and then manager of Apple Corps, making the discovery: “I had asked Neil to look for a great London building. And he found it, 3 Savile Row – Lady Hamilton’s London residence, which Nelson bought for her. I thought, if nothing else, that’s a good London building.”

  It was a certainly a handsome thing – a five-storey Georgian brick mansion with plenty of room to accommodate the dreams and schemes of The Beatles’ exciting new enterprise. And the tale that Admiral Nelson, hero of the Napoleonic Wars, had purchased the building as a residence for his famous lover, Emma, Lady Hamilton, came as a bonus. The mention of Hamilton may have held extra fascination because she had been born in humble circumstances in a place The Beatles knew well: the Wirral, in Merseyside.

  The alleged Hamilton connection with the Apple building has since been cited many times since 1968. However, it doesn’t stand up to research. For one thing, the home that Nelson and Lady Hamilton shared in Merton, Surrey, has often been described as the only house that Nelson ever owned. For another, historians have dismissed his connection with No. 3 Savile Row. Asked about the story, Kate Williams, author of England’s Mistress: The Infamous Life Of Emma Hamilton, replied: “I’m afraid it’s not true,” adding that many British buildings carry the suspect cachet of having been bought by Nelson for his mistress.

  Flora Fraser, author of Beloved Emma: The Life Of Emma, Lady Hamilton, is also sceptical: “This house was owned by William Wellesley-Pole, sometime Master of the Mint during the time Nelson and Emma were romantically involved, prior to the admiral’s death in 1805. Wellesley-Pole did not live in the house but rented it out. It is possible that Nelson leased it for a short time for Emma during the months following her husband, Sir William’s death in 1803 and prior to his own death at Trafalgar. But I am not sure when.”

  So the house was never bought for Lady Hamilton. There remains the possibility that it was leased or rented for her, but it’s extremely unlikely. After it was built around 1753, it appears to have been continuously occupied by other people; there isn’t any room in the building’s history for her to fit in, even as a humble tenant. She and Nelson are known to have lived – separately – in a series of other Mayfair locations, but not here. The Hamilton story about No. 3 may well have been invented one day by somebody involved in the sale of the property, and there is a likely candidate.

  Basil Dighton bought the house in 1913. He was an apparently respectable antiques dealer, and one of his clients was a businessman called Adolph Shrager. By 1923, Shrager had paid Dighton £84,887 (about $400,000) for some antique furniture, which Dighton claimed had come from Royston Hall. But Schrager soon discovered he’d been sold fakes. The case went to court, where an antiques expert was highly critical of the furniture. There was no such place as Royston Hall, and of the Chippendale lamp stands Shrager had bought, the expert said: “The legs were obviously new, and the stem had probably been made from a child’s four-post bed. The price of £450 was ridiculous. As second-hand furniture they would be worth £8/10s.” A Queen Anne cabinet, costing £850, “was not Queen Anne, but was recently made up in a factory”. Bizarrely, Shrager didn’t win the case, because it was deemed that the recently manufactured pieces included some old elements, so Dighton was justified in selling them as antiques. But if he was prepared to lie about “Royston Hall” and a stack of fake antiques, he might have initiated the fib about Hamilton living here.

  By the thirties, 3 Savile Row had become a gentlemen’s club, the Albany, which hosted snooker tournaments, served gourmet food and attracted many of the famous faces of the day. The club thrived into the fifties, when a travel guide claimed: “Anybody from Tyrone Power to Gracie Fields to Bob Hope might be at the next table.” In 1955 the Albany Club was purchased by Jack Hylton, who had enjoyed a successfu
l career as a bandleader but was now a big-time impresario, with a huge roster of singers and comedians, and production credits on many London theatre shows. Shortly after buying it, he turned the place into his spacious offices, Hylton House, and started presenting television variety shows from the building – though not from the rooftop, sadly. Jack Hylton died in January 1965, and three years later his estate sold the building to The Beatles.

  Regardless of the house’s history, the name “Savile Row” would have appealed to The Beatles on a subconscious level. Not only did it have the same rhythm as the name of their beloved recording studio, Abbey Road, and a similar sound, but it would also have reminded them of the Saville Theatre, which Brian Epstein had leased from 1965 for rock shows as well as stage plays. Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Cream had all played the Saville, and The Beatles had used it to make their promo film for the single ‘Hello, Goodbye’.

  And they were more familiar with the district of Mayfair than many people imagined. For several weeks in late 1963 they had actually lived here, sharing a three-bedroom apartment on the fifth storey of 57 Green Street. Brian Epstein had taken them to the hairdresser Leonard of Mayfair, in Upper Grosvenor Street, as part of his plan to smarten up the group’s image. They had recorded sessions for radio shows in Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street, and socialised with Smokey Robinson in 1964 at the White Elephant club in Curzon Street – where Epstein liked to indulge his gambling habit. They had also come to Curzon Street in July 1963 to pose for photographs at the Washington Hotel, including a prophetic shot of the quartet standing on the roof of the building, among the chimney pots, with Mayfair spread out beneath them.