by Tony Barrell
From the roof of No. 1, Malcolm had a clear view across the roof of No. 2 – the building occupied by Wain, Shiell & Son – to The Beatles’ performance area. “It was such an exciting thing to see: I’d seen John Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls-Royce parked in the street sometimes, and I’d see Ringo walking around there, but I’d never seen all The Beatles in person before. I remember seeing a hell of a crowd down below, and people had climbed on the big red postbox on the other side of the road, to see if they could get a better view.” Other daring spectators, captured by Paul Bond with his roving camera, were perched precariously among the chimney pots of Savile Row. Never had the roofscape of Mayfair been as thoroughly explored as it was on that extraordinary day.
Although Apple’s front door was locked for most of the time, the company hadn’t shut up shop for the day, and Debbie the receptionist was still letting in the occasional visitor. “We were still open for business,” she says, “so if someone had an appointment to see Derek Taylor or somebody else, they’d come in, or they might come in with an enquiry.” One friend of The Beatles who was admitted that day was the actor Terence Stamp, who lived in one of the Albany apartments nearby. Having recently split up with the model Jean Shrimpton, Terence was on his way to a new life in India that day; but before travelling to Heathrow Airport he popped in to listen to the music and say hello.
The songwriter David Martin was contracted to Freddy Bienstock’s Carlin Music, based at 17 Savile Row, and was on friendly terms with his musical neighbours at Apple. “I came in by train that day and I was on the way to Savile Row, and as I was walking up Vigo Street I heard this amazing sound, which became louder as I approached Savile Row. My first thought was that somebody was playing a Beatles record really loud: I had no idea they were playing live.
“Curiosity led me to walk up the steps into No. 3, and I went in, but the music was very loud and the receptionist and I couldn’t hear each other speak, so we used a kind of sign language for a while, pointing upstairs. I got in the lift and walked up to the roof, and I crept as unobtrusively as I could and sat down on a wall where there were already about a dozen people sitting, underneath one of the cameras. I think a lot of them were Apple staff. The Beatles were making the most wonderful sound, but it was very relaxed and easy-going: between songs they’d have a chat and make some jokes, and people would talk about the positions of the cameras, and they’d talk about the song they were going to play next. They weren’t under the pressure they would have been under if they were playing a proper concert to thousands of people.”
After ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ The Beatles tackled ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’. Like ‘Get Back’, this is a simple but effective song in the key of A, enhanced by some nice chord variations and guitar riffs. Lyrically, the McCartney section of the song had been inspired by his relationship with Linda Eastman. The location of Paul and Linda’s first encounter – the Bag O’Nails in Kingly Street – was just a matter of yards behind The Beatles as they played the song. Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames had been playing in the club that night.
Linda wasn’t on the roof to watch the concert that day, perhaps preferring a quiet and restful day at Cavendish Avenue as she was about two months pregnant with the first child she would have with Paul. Their daughter Mary would be born seven months later. Also, she had her six-year-old daughter, Heather, to look after.
After they finished ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, John threw in one of his musical teases, singing “Ooh! My Soul” – the title of a Little Richard song that The Beatles used to play. Paul’s screams in ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ perhaps reminded John of Paul’s talent for impersonating the rock’n’roller’s raucous vocals.
John also made a couple of quips, including “Can you hear me, mother?” This was a popular catchphrase flogged to death by the northern comedian Sandy Powell that John would have heard as a boy on radio and television. What he probably didn’t know was that it was Powell’s birthday that day: born just after the beginning of the century, the comedian had just turned 69.
Their hands were feeling the cold badly now, and Ken Mansfield had the perfect solution for warming George’s fretting hand: he lit several cigarettes at once and held the orange burning ends near the guitarist’s fingertips. Michael suggested that The Beatles pop their heads over the edge of the roof, thus confirming their identity to their gathering audience, but – perhaps wisely – they decided not to, and cracked on with ‘One After 909’. This was a rollicking blast from The Beatles’ past that the public had never heard before, and the band played it with gusto.
As the number ended, John sang a variation on a line from ‘Danny Boy’ that Beatles scholars still argue about: “Oh Danny boy”, followed by either “the Odes of Pan are calling” or “the Isles of Ken are calling” or something similar.
Dating from the late fifties, ‘One After 909’ is a very early product of John Lennon’s lifelong obsession with the number nine, which would later result in titles such as ‘Revolution 9’, the sound collage on the White Album, and ‘#9 Dream’, first released on his 1974 album Walls And Bridges. He had noticed the recurrence of nines in his life, and considered it his lucky number. He was born on the ninth day of October (and once stated incorrectly in an interview that October is the ninth month of the year), and after he was born he lived briefly at 9 Newcastle Road, Liverpool – the home of his mother, Julia. At the age of 11 he painted a picture of men playing football, with the number nine appearing prominently on the shirt of the player in the foreground (the picture later became part of the artwork of his Walls And Bridges album). Brian Epstein first saw The Beatles play at the Cavern on November 9, 1961, and The Beatles signed their first EMI recording contract on May 9, 1962. After The Beatles’ break-up, John would become absorbed in a book on numerology that explained how to convert names into numbers via the Hebrew alphabet, and learned that “John” has a mystic value of nine, as do “Paul” and “Ringo”.
Tipped off in Fleet Street that something unusual was happening in Savile Row, the Daily Express dispatched a reporter and a photographer – Tom Brown and Mike Stroud, respectively – to find out exactly what. They hailed a taxi, but the journey became frustratingly slow and, finding themselves in motionless traffic in Regent Street, they hopped out of the cab and ran as fast as possible towards the noise they heard. Tom had caught the news last year that The Beatles had spent half a million on a building here, so he had his suspicions. They arrived at the south end of Savile Row to see throngs of people staring up at the roof of No. 3 as the music continued. Tom knocked on Apple’s front door, but when they were refused admittance they decided to gain access to one of the buildings on the opposite side of the road, where they asked permission, went up in a lift and emerged on another roof, which gave them a fine view.
Tom later described the experience: “We knew right away who it was – it couldn’t have been anyone else. The whole place was littered with cables, microphones and amps. There were sound engineers, hangers-on and quite a few girls, including The Beatles’ wives and girlfriends. There was not much musical appreciation, because the sound was just being carried away on the wind. The other thing, of course, is we now know that those were new songs that no one had heard before. So they were in no way recognisable. But you could certainly tell it was The Beatles. I think the surprising thing was seeing all four of them there at all. There had been numerous reports in the papers of bust-ups and suggestions that they had already split up. So it was a big thing to actually see them all together and performing…”
Tom Brown wondered about the legality of what The Beatles were doing: the police did not seem to be intervening, but surely they couldn’t get away with creating such a major disturbance in the middle of London. So he and Mike came down from the roof and walked towards West End Central to make some enquiries. “We went round to the police station and we just asked the obvious question – were they going to stop it? The guy behind the desk said no, they were happy for The Beatles to have th
eir fun. Apart from the fact that it had brought that part of London to a standstill, it wasn’t doing any harm. At least that’s the way he saw it. It was something different, in the spirit of the time. So at that point they were happy to let them play.”
In the days leading up to the performance, Chris O’Dell had had a fantastic vision of the impending event. She imagined that The Beatles would blast their music out across the whole of London. The sound would flood out into the West End and then spread north, south, east and west, reaching the ears of thousands upon thousands of people. In reality, the music could be heard clearly within a localised area, quickly losing its clarity and volume beyond that. Word had spread around parts of Mayfair and Soho that it was The Beatles making all the racket, but by no means did everybody receive that message: there were countless people passing by in the vicinity who heard the noise and were mystified by it, only learning hours later what it was all about. A prime example is Andy Taylor, who was 17 years old and working in the postroom of an advertising agency in Holborn, east London. “There was another man who worked there as a messenger, called Eddie; he was a lovely little man, and I don’t want to be unkind, but he was a bit simple-minded and lived in a bit of a fantasy world. He’d come in and say things like ‘I’ve just seen a tiger in Oxford Street!’ And people would say, ‘Oh… all right,’ to humour him. On that day in January 1969, he came back from delivering something and said, ‘The Beatles are on the roof!’ And of course, we all thought he meant there was an infestation of beetles, and we thought he was talking about our roof. Anyway, about 15 minutes later I had to deliver some artwork to somewhere in Glasshouse Street, by Piccadilly Circus, so I took a cab, and as I got nearer to my destination I realised I could hear something. I could hear it was music, and it was quite loud, but it was a very muddy sound, and it didn’t click with what Eddie had said about The Beatles on the roof.
“We accept it now because we know it happened, but you have to remember that back then, nobody would ever dream that The Beatles would suddenly be playing on the roof of a building in London – it was such a weird concept. It was unheard of then for a rock band to be playing in the street in London in the middle of the day. So I delivered the artwork and went back to the agency, and it was only much later, when I saw the news, that I realised what I’d missed. If only I’d known it was The Beatles, I’m pretty sure I could have walked to Savile Row and gone into one of the buildings nearby and said, ‘I’ve come to deliver some artwork,’ and gone up on the roof and watched the show.”
There was two-way traffic in Savile Row back then, and now it was at a standstill in both directions. It was only necessary for a single vehicle to stop, as the driver and passengers rubbernecked out the window to take in what was happening, for a serious tailback to be created. And tailbacks led to tailbacks: the blocking of Savile Row and other smaller streets began to cause problems in the major thoroughfares, such as Regent Street, which in turn affected Oxford Street. Ford Escorts and Vauxhall Victors were nose-to-tail with Minis and Singer Gazelles, and many of them were tooting their horns as motorcycles and bicycles tried to weave around them. The Beatles had attracted crowds and brought the traffic to a halt in this part of London before – especially around the London Pavilion, at Piccadilly Circus, which had hosted the world premieres of their films, A Hard Day’s Night in 1964, Help! the following year and Yellow Submarine in 1968, with the group in attendance and besieged by fans each time.
On that clamorous Thursday, as a chorus of car horns mingled with the music, there was some timely advice in the latest edition of Practical Householder, available for two shillings from newsagents’ shelves across London, on “Dealing with Noise from Next Door”. The magazine lamented that “Undoubtedly some people enjoy making a noise and so make more noise than their neighbours like,” explained that noise “can travel not only in air, but in and through solid material, such as wood, bricks, and metal”, and recommended that “if you have a noisy neighbour and if all attempts to reach a friendly arrangement fail, you can consider taking legal action”.
The smiles on their faces showed that The Beatles were certainly enjoying the act of making a noise that day, and their music was certainly penetrating through many hard surfaces, including walls, ceilings and doors. But their next-door neighbour skipped the part about “a friendly arrangement” and went straight for the legal action. Stanley Davis, who worked at the wool merchants Wain, Shiell & Son at 2 Savile Row, called West End Central to complain about the noise. “It’s disgraceful. I want this bloody noise stopped!” he fumed, saying it had seriously inconvenienced his switchboard operators, who couldn’t hear anyone properly.
He was just one of a series of grousers, which included someone at the Royal Bank of Scotland across the road – ironic, given that this was the same institution on whose roof Vicki Wickham, Cathy McGowan and Rosemary Simon were enjoying the concert.
The mounting complaints, together with the worsening traffic chaos, caused the police in Savile Row to drop the laissez-faire attitude that Tom Brown had noticed, and the station sergeants there began sending out orders. One of the police constables attached to the station was 25-year-old Ray Shayler, who was just about to go out on patrol. “We could hear the noise from the other end of Savile Row. Another officer was assigned to the incident, whose beat included Savile Row, but he had only just joined – it was his first month. I had the adjacent beat and I had nearly three years’ service, so I said to him, ‘Do you want me to go as well?’ and he said yes.”
“I could hear the music clearly as I went down the road,” says Ray. “My wife was a bit of a Beatles fan at the time, so I recognised the sort of music it was. There was quite a crowd in the street by this time.” Ray approached Apple’s big white front door, where he became the vanguard of a multi-pronged police operation, conducted from West End Central, to shut down the noise and ease the congestion in Savile Row.
When the police began knocking at the door, the receptionist Debbie Wellum alerted Jimmy Clark, the company’s doorman. “Jimmy was actually more than a doorman: he was meant to be my minder, because of the weird people we had coming in to Apple. There had been a couple of occasions when things got a bit hairy and he had to escort people out of the building. I had a special number to phone him on, and if I called it he knew he’d have to come down. So Jimmy came down and he opened the door, told the police to go away, then closed the door and locked it again. But the police carried on beating on the door.”
In the meantime, The Beatles were still playing. After they brought ‘One After 909’ to an end, there was a discussion between the basement and the roof about which song they should play next, and they settled on ‘Dig A Pony’, but John was uncertain of the lyrics. Having already fluffed a line in ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, he didn’t want to let everyone down again. He remembered that he had some lyrics scribbled down on paper in the studio, so he asked Mal Evans to fetch them. When the words arrived on a clipboard, that didn’t entirely solve the problem: John wouldn’t be able to read them as he played unless they were propped on a music stand, or something similar. “I’m not too sure if there was a music stand in the basement, but anyway it would have taken five minutes to go all the way down to get it,” says Kevin Harrington. Kevin offered to hold the lyrics up for John, but couldn’t find a good place to stand. “If I’d stood there to John’s right I would’ve been in the way of Ringo, and if I’d stood to John’s left I would’ve been in the way of George. So I decided to get down on my knees in front of John with the lyrics. That worked, though I think my knees were hurting a bit by the end.”
John, Paul and George started to play the opening riff of the number, but Ringo was holding a cigarette and called “Hold it!” Once he was ready, they started the song again. After the lumbering riff, the song settled into a breezy 3/4 time, which was a time signature that came very naturally to John Lennon, who had used it previously in songs including ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ and ‘Norwegian Wood
’, and would employ it again later on ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’. John later said of the cryptic lyrics: “I was just having fun with words. It was literally a nonsense song. You just take words and you stick them together, and you see if they have any meaning. Some of them do and some of them don’t.” He may not have counted the number of notes he sang unaccompanied at the beginning of each verse of the song: his favourite number, nine.
Shortly after John sang the “road hog” line, and as he sang the word “penetrate”, there was some entertaining body language from George, who descended briefly to the roof onto his left knee in front of him while still playing his guitar. This looked like a humorous gesture, as if he were either mocking Kevin’s pseudo-reverential act of kneeling, or sending up the classic rock custom of trading a riff with another guitarist, or both. John responded by lifting his guitar neck and leaning back to strike another parodic rock-star pose. Just over a minute later, after a whoop from Paul and a high “ohhh” from John, George played one of his gorgeous, fluid solos, the notes gliding over John’s minor and flattened-seventh chords.
“It was fabulous to see them playing and giggling amongst themselves,” says Vicki Wickham. “The Beatles were in great spirits. All the animosity between them, which we all knew about, seemed to have gone. And we were laughing about John’s fur coat, which looked too small for him.”
“Thanks, brothers,” said John after the number ended, adding that his hands were so cold that he was having difficulty playing the guitar chords. There was a pause as Alan Parsons changed recording tapes, which The Beatles and Billy Preston idly filled with an unremarkable instrumental version of ‘God Save The Queen’ in the key of G, as if to acknowledge the presence in the building of Her Majesty’s police, though it was unlikely that they were aware of them yet.
