by Tony Barrell
There was a police post by the Underground station at Piccadilly Circus: a tall, narrow box with a light on top, smaller than a police box, with a telephone inside. PC Ken Wharfe, still on traffic duty, saw the light on the post flashing and answered the call. “I picked up the phone and recognised the sergeant’s voice, and he asked me if I could hear all the noise. I couldn’t – all I could hear was traffic – but he asked me to get my colleague at Shaftesbury Avenue and go and sort it out.”
Ken and his colleague walked up Regent Street. “There was this wave of girls coming out of various streets, running towards Savile Row. I soon realised what it was, because it was just a fantastic sound, ricocheting around the buildings. It was unmistakably the sound of The Beatles, and we knew that The Beatles were based in Savile Row, but I didn’t imagine at that point that they’d be playing on the roof. By the time we got round there, there were quite a few people in the street, and there was almost a party atmosphere.”
“Jimmy was still trying to keep the police at bay,” says Debbie. “But they kept knocking, and through the window I saw this Black Maria driving past, and that worried me a bit. Eventually we had to let the police in.” Black Marias – the popular term for police vans – were vehicles that were often used to transport prisoners to jail or to court. They could also be used to take people into custody after a multiple arrest, which is why the van’s appearance made some people worry that The Beatles were about to be arrested and hauled off to jail.
George Martin was in the building, though he had no official capacity that day, with Glyn Johns in charge of the recording in the basement. Martin, whose traditional upbringing compelled him to respect British men in uniform, became seriously concerned when the officers intervened. “This policeman said if we didn’t let them in, they were going to arrest everyone in the building,” recalls Dave Harries. “George Martin went as white as a sheet, which I thought was hilarious.”
Ray Shayler explains that the purpose of the Black Maria was to transport more police officers to the scene. “It sounds terrible, ‘Black Maria’, but it wasn’t there in case we lifted The Beatles. It had brought officers there because we suddenly had a lot of people and traffic to control. They were just trying to keep the roads open, and also to divide the crowds to make sure there wasn’t a crush and there were no people fainting.”
“The street was blocked: people were shoulder to shoulder,” says Vincent Lankin, who remembers seeing the Black Maria pull up. “Four or five policemen got out of that and started taking control of the traffic.”
“The taxi drivers weren’t happy – they were shouting and hollering,” says Paula Marshall. “The rest of us were having a great time, just listening to the music.” Paula was standing by the steps leading to Apple’s basement studio when she and her friends were asked to “move on” by the police in charge of crowd control. “We just walked across the road, away from it a bit, and stood there. They kept asking us to move on, and we walked round the block and came back.”
“It was like a parade,” says Leslie Samuels, “with all these people lined up on the sidewalks on both sides of the street. Except that it wasn’t a parade – they were trying to have normal Savile Row traffic. Probably, if I hadn’t had the dog with me, I would have gone climbing up buildings. But Brian weighed 50lb and I didn’t think he’d do well on steps or stairs: he’d never used those before, and I didn’t want him to freak out.”
Paula Marshall also decided not to do any climbing that day, but for a different reason: “I was wearing a miniskirt, so I don’t think it would have been a good idea.”
Back at the front door, Debbie and Jimmy had relented and allowed the first officers to enter. “The police came in,” says Debbie, “and they were filmed as they came in. They didn’t look happy: they looked angry and displeased at what was going on, and I felt a bit threatened and very nervous.” Nevertheless, she managed to stall them to allow The Beatles’ performance to continue for a while, saying that Mal Evans would come down to talk to them. There was a further delay as Jimmy went up to the roof to fetch Mal. “Mal decided not to take the lift down, but to walk down the stairs, taking his time,” says Debbie, “and about 10 minutes later he talked to the police. They were saying, ‘You can’t do this,’ and ‘It’s too noisy, we’re getting complaints, and charges will be pressed.’” Mal tried to placate the policemen, explaining that The Beatles were just making a recording, and that it would be finished fairly soon. But the officers had their orders, and were keen to get to the scene of the crime – the roof itself – as quickly as possible.
“I remember Mal telling them they couldn’t all go up, because the roof was unstable and there were already people up there. Otherwise, we were thinking that if they all went up there, they might have arrested a Beatle each! But Mal took one of them upstairs.”
“We all thought we would probably be arrested up on the roof, but so be it,” says Michael Lindsay-Hogg. “I was more nervous than The Beatles were, because I was an American and I thought I’d be deported or something.”
Alan Parsons later claimed that the frisson of danger represented by the police spurred The Beatles on as they performed. The “slight naughtiness” of playing up here on the roof in Mayfair, he said, “making a lot of noise and disturbing the neighbourhood and local offices and stuff, I think that gave them the necessary adrenaline rush to really enjoy it”.
Some of the citizens walking in and around Savile Row, wondering what all the noise was about, were smoking pipes. It wasn’t unusual back then for men to puff away at a pipe full of tobacco as an alternative to smoking a cigarette or cigar. The prime minister of the day, Harold Wilson, was often seen clutching a pipe – which he was allowed to smoke even during his audiences with the Queen – and several male celebrities were known for using them. Every January the Briar Pipe Trade Association hosted a lunch at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand, where it would present the Pipeman of the Year award (later renamed Pipe Smoker of the Year award) to a notable puffer in the public eye. The latest award had just been presented to the actor Peter Cushing, who had pretended to smoke a pipe while playing Sherlock Holmes in a BBC television adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. In real life, Cushing himself avoided the habit.
Although it was quite obvious that the previous take of ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ had been a success, The Beatles were having another crack at the song. John might not have noticed that George’s rapid, ascending chorus riff had nine notes in it. Towards the end of the song, John slipped in a Bob Dylan line, which he repeated: “Everybody must get stoned”, the chorus from ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’, the song that opened Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde album from two-and-a-half years before. Standing beside her well-behaved dog in the street below, the American student Leslie Samuels noticed and recognised the line, which may have been a payback for Dylan’s ‘4th Time Around’ on the same album. Many people, John Lennon included, suspected this song was Bob’s mocking response to the Dylan-influenced ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ on Rubber Soul.
Getting stoned might not have been the best course of action for people in the Apple building at that point. One apocryphal story claims that there was a mass flushing of lavatories as staffers anticipating the arrival of the police disposed of their stashes of illicit substances. But the officers who attended 3 Savile Row were regular beat officers: they weren’t Nobby Pilcher’s stormtroopers, looking for more rock’n’roll scalps in their war on dope. As Chris O’Dell puts it, “They were the bobbies: they weren’t the narcs that had been busting everybody.”
Ray Shayler confirms that he and his fellow officers weren’t looking for drugs. “We’d gone there as a public-order issue, because there’d been complaints about the noise.”
After ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ reached its climax, John threw in yet another of his musical quotations, this time from ‘A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody’. He had referenced the same song nearly a month before, on their second day of rehearsals at T
wickenham. Although John and Paul had famously bonded in the early days over their shared passion for rock’n’roll, they were also au fait with old-fashioned standards such as this 1919 Irving Berlin tune. Paul has talked about his memory of discussing the 1930 Walter Donaldson song ‘Little White Lies’ with John soon after they met: “That kind of twenties and thirties song was the platform we took off from.”
The Beatles played a little bit of ‘Get Back’ again before deciding to have another full run-through of ‘Don’t Let Me Down’. This was a slightly more ragged performance than their earlier attempt, and this time John omitted part of the first line in the first verse. But there was potentially a new interpretation of the chorus now, with John asking not to be taken down from the roof by the gathering police. The first rooftop version, complete with John’s entertaining gobbledegook line, was ultimately chosen for the Let It Be movie.
Down in the street, the aspiring journalist Leslie Samuels had been scribbling some lines from the songs she had heard in a small notebook. “I still have a tiny, faded, shrivelled-up piece of paper from it,” she says, “and I think I can read ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, then ‘Dig Pony’, and then ‘Don’t Let Me Down’.”
Barbara Bennett returned to Savile Row after her lunch with Laurie McCaffrey at Billy’s Baked Potato. “We came back and there was all this kerfuffle in the street, and we couldn’t get through the crowds. It was a bowler-hatted time, and there were lots of really ‘straight’ men who were very angry about the sound from the roof. The Savile Row mob didn’t like The Beatles being in the street in the first place: it was their little domain.”
Barbara and Laurie stood on the pavement for a few minutes, enjoying the music, until they were able to find a path back to Apple’s front door. “And when I got back in, I said to Peter Brown, ‘Can I go up on the roof?’ And Peter said no, I couldn’t do that, and that I had to sort the police out. The police were going berserk, saying they’d had so many complaints. So I said to them, ‘Would you like to go on the roof and have a look, and enjoy it?’ So they did, and they were quite affable.”
Mal’s earlier advice that only one policeman should ascend to the roof had been forgotten now. Chris O’Dell, still ensconced by the chimney, watched as a number of policemen were escorted onto the roof by Jimmy, the doorman. One of them, she later learned, had commented on the noise nuisance with one of the most ridiculous lines of the day: “Do you know that this is louder than a transistor radio?”
When the police ascended the stairs and came on to the roof, Paul Bond was perched on the structure housing the door through which they arrived. “Most of the time I was shooting off the roof, but when the police arrived it became apparent that there was more fun to be had. I was directly above them as they came out, and I got an overhead shot of their helmets. They looked quite embarrassed to be there.”
Peter Brown eventually became directly involved in the discussions with the constabulary. “The police came up to the roof,” he recalls, “and they were telling Mal, ‘You’re not supposed to be doing this. You can’t do this.’ He sent them over to me. And they said, ‘You can’t do this,’ and I said, ‘Why can’t we do it?’ ‘Well, you just can’t do this.’ And I said, ‘I don’t see why we can’t do it,’ and they said, ‘Well, does your landlord know?’ And I said, ‘We are our own landlords. We own the place. So why can’t we do this on the roof of our own property?’ And they didn’t have any answer to this.”
Although they knew The Beatles had been enormously successful throughout most of the sixties, it probably came as a shock to the bobbies on the beat to realise quite how wealthy they were. At a time when many people rented their homes while others bought houses for four-figure sums with a mortgage, the Apple organisation hadn’t needed a loan of any kind to snap up this half-a-million-pound Georgian mansion in a prime Mayfair location.
Taking in this information, Ray Shayler and his colleague from West End Central were wondering about the legalities of proceeding with arrests if they had to – if The Beatles and their associates simply ignored the complaints and the presence of the police and continued their performance indefinitely. “We were scratching on the subject,” says Ray. “We were thinking that it was a breach of the peace, because while the property may be private, the effect was public. And that’s how we worked it out – that’s how we were going to deal with it if we needed to. But obviously, it’s best to negotiate rather than have to do that. Policing was often a difficult situation and you had to work out how you dealt with it.”
There was a consensus among The Beatles, Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Glyn Johns that the group should play one more song, so that they had a little more footage and music in the can for the album and the television special. Ray Shayler remembers that Mal Evans told him and his fellow officers that they had to record one more track, assuring them that the performance would then be finished and the noise would stop. “And so I said, ‘If you do that, that’s fine. But if you try and play beyond that, then we’ll have to take action.’ I told him that they might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and play one more number.”
Ken Wharfe and his colleague from Piccadilly knocked at the front door and were admitted to the building, where they found several officers already in attendance. “We chatted among ourselves: should we stay or should we go?” says Ken. “But we said that we were never going to see the likes of this again, so we stayed. Had this been an incident involving a burglary or a disturbance, the first guys on the scene would have been the ones to call everybody else off and say, ‘We’ll deal with this.’ But the fact is that nobody was going to call anybody off, because this was a unique occasion. I was 19, and most of the cops were in roughly the same age group, so it would have been very much in their musical psyche to be fans of The Beatles.”
The conscientious Debbie Wellum managed to escape briefly from her duties at reception to see The Beatles play. “A girl called Carol Padden, who worked for Derek Taylor, came down to see what was going on. She’s a bit nosy like that. She’s a lovely lady. And she said, ‘Have you been up there yet?’ I said no, and she said, ‘Well, go up and have a quick look.’ She took my place in reception, and I went up but I could hardly get through the door. So I just had a quick peek and stayed for about five minutes, and I went back down again.”
Down in Savile Row, the art student Steve Lovering was managing to enjoy the music and have a pleasant conversation as well. “I was chatting to a really nice girl, a Scottish girl who was standing next to me. She was a brunette, and she looked a bit like Sandie Shaw. I suggested we go for a drink later, but she had to catch a train. I never saw her again.”
After The Beatles finished their second go at ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, they rounded off the performance with the song they had started it with: ‘Get Back’. Despite the deal that had been made with the police, an officer made a remark that caused some confusion and prompted Mal Evans to turn off the Fender Twin amplifiers that John and George were using. Ringo cried “Don’t touch that!” and George turned his amplifier back on and Mal revived John’s, and they were able to finish the song, with Paul tossing in a spoken section about the song’s Loretta character “playing on the roofs again” to the displeasure of her mother, who would have her arrested. As the song ended, there was a final “Yay!” of enthusiasm from Maureen Starkey, eliciting a “Thanks, Mo” from Paul. John lifted the Epiphone Casino off his body, turned to the microphone and inspired peals of knowing laughter for the immortal lines: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”
People laughed because the quip was pure John Lennon, and because it was a ridiculous thing for a member of the world’s most famous and successful rock group to say. But the significance of the line went deeper. Unbeknown to the public, The Beatles had been especially nervous and anxious before the performance, and some of those heebie-jeebies were caused by genuine fears that they had lost their live mojo after such a long spell
away from the stage. One of their possible motivations for playing the rooftop, though it may have been subconscious and wasn’t necessarily unanimous, was to satisfy their curiosity about one issue: could they still do it? Could they still cut it? Did they still have that Beatles magic? Or, to put a more positive, McCartneyesque spin on it, they knew they could still do it but they simply wanted to prove to everybody that they could still do it. It was, therefore, a kind of self-audition.
There was an element of irony in the audition quip as well, which even John Lennon might not have realised. It concerned the building on which they had played, and the fact that it had previously belonged to Jack Hylton. The Beatles appear not to have been aware that the impresario had been one of the directors of Decca, a record label with unhappy memories for the band. Seeking a recording contract, they had driven down from Liverpool to Decca’s studios in West Hampstead to audition on the freezing-cold morning of New Year’s Day in 1962. They recorded 15 songs, including the early Lennon-McCartney songs ‘Hello Little Girl’ and ‘Love Of The Loved’, alongside covers of ‘Till There Was You’ and ‘The Sheik Of Araby’. Notoriously, Decca’s A&R men had rejected them, with their manager being told: “Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr Epstein.”
The rooftop concert was also a peculiar test for the forces of law and order. Looking back after nearly 50 years, Ken Wharfe believes that the Metropolitan Police behaved admirably in an extremely unusual situation. “I’ve always thought it was an excellent PR exercise on behalf of the police that we didn’t arrest anybody. We saw the event for what it was: a piece of free public entertainment, where nobody got hurt. In a world of growing unrest, as it was, here was a free event for the passing lunchtime Londoners of Mayfair, and people went away with a smile on their faces.”
