The Beatles on the Roof

by Tony Barrell

  Nevertheless, it’s clear that John, George and Ringo retained a soft spot for the heights of 3 Savile Row. On April 22, 1969, John chose the Apple rooftop as the location for the official ceremony for changing his middle name by deed poll from Winston (his mother had named him after Churchill) to Ono. Also up there on that day was Barbara Bennett of Apple. “I was asked if I’d go up as a witness. So somewhere there’s a document with my signature on it, saying he was now John Ono Lennon.” However, British law prevented him from ditching the Winston, so he ended up with two middle names.

  In 1971, George went up on the same roof with a group of people from the Radha Krishna Temple to publicise the release of a new album of Hindu devotional songs, Govinda, that he had produced for them on the Apple label. And after Ringo bought the Berkshire mansion Tittenhurst Park from John and Yoko in 1973, he had the original spiral staircase from the Apple building – the one that had taken them from the top floor out onto the roof – transported to his new home.

  With The Beatles now disintegrated and pursuing solo careers, it fell to other top-flight rock bands to realise their ideas for ambitious foreign concerts that they’d tossed around early in 1969 before settling for the Apple roof. In October 1971, Pink Floyd travelled to the ancient city of Pompeii, where they were filmed playing live in a Roman amphitheatre. There was no audience, unless you include the cameramen, the band’s roadies and a few local children, so the event was an unconscious fulfilment of Yoko Ono’s “empty seats” concept. There were the inevitable technical problems that attend the actualisation of a grandiose scheme in a foreign land – problems of the kind that The Beatles would have had to overcome. Struggling to muster enough electricity to power their equipment and lights, they eventually solved the problem by running a long cable through the streets from the town hall.

  In September 1978 the Grateful Dead flew to Egypt and performed three concerts by the Great Pyramid of Giza. Some of the band’s equipment became stuck in the desert sand and had to be towed by camels, and electrical gremlins interfered with the recording of the first show. But they played to a committed and appreciative audience of fans – Deadheads – who had travelled from California to see the shows, and who were joined by local Egyptians. And during the final show they were rewarded with a total lunar eclipse.

  By this time serious money was being offered to tempt The Beatles to re-form and play live again. In 1976 the Los Angeles promoter Bill Sargent put up around $50 million for the four of them to play a televised one-off show, which he thought could make $300 million. Paul said he had received a telegram from Sargent, offering the money, and he had framed it and hung it on his wall. He told an interviewer: “People have said to me, ‘Well, you’ll have to do it, won’t you? You can’t go turning down that sort of money.’ But to me, there’s more to it than that. It’s a group that’s broken up, for Christ’s sake; what do they want us to do? Re-form just for money? I think that’s a bit sordid, for what The Beatles were. It’s a bit like puppets, isn’t it? I’d like to think that The Beatles came back together, if they ever did, because they really wanted to – musically. That’s the only reason I’d ever do it. But the thing is that it’s more difficult than meets the eye to get four people together to do that, because even for all that money it would kill me to go on stage and not be very good. I’d hate it. I’d hate it even more to be paid vast amounts just to get up there and for people to come along and say we aren’t as good as we were. I’d rather leave it that we were as good as we were.”

  But the offers continued. The promoter Sid Bernstein, who had staged The Beatles’ earliest American concerts, paid for a major New York press advertisement featuring an open letter to The Beatles, asking them to play one more show. “Let the world smile for one day,” he pleaded. “Let us change the headlines from gloom and hopelessness to music and life and a worldwide message of peace. You four are among the very few who are in a position to make the dream of a better world come together in the hearts of millions in just one day.” And three years later, the general secretary of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, urged them to play a charity concert for South Vietnamese refugees.

  “Look,” said Ringo, “people have been asking us to do this thing for so long and offering God knows how much, but they don’t seem to realise: we didn’t start doing it for the money, and we ain’t going to end it that way.”

  Good sense and decency should have halted the demands for a Beatles reunion in December 1980, when John Lennon was shot dead outside the Dakota building in New York, but Paul, George and Ringo were still offered $100 million to get back together for three concerts.

  Nowadays, in addition to walking across that zebra crossing in St John’s Wood, tourists come to Savile Row to see the building where The Beatles surprised the world with their final live session. But they arrive in lower numbers, because when you stand in that street it’s impossible even to see where The Beatles stood, let alone stand in their places. It used to be possible to go up on that roof, and I did that on June 22, 1998, by simply asking somebody at the Council of Mortgage Lenders, who were occupying the building at the time. “Fine, no problem,” they said, and I stayed up there for about 20 minutes, wandering around in a quasi-religious daze. The views are fantastic.

  The following year, The Bootleg Beatles were allowed to go up there and perform a 30th-anniversary tribute concert. It happened to be a Saturday, so it was a good day for attracting crowds of Beatles fans. Steve Lovering went along, three decades after he had witnessed the original event, and as a rooftop VIP he was invited up to the top of the building to watch the band. “I remember going up in the lift with Mark Ellen, the music writer. It’s a really small lift, and we were in there with a lady with very large breasts, and we looked at each other and giggled like 12-year-olds.”

  On the 40th anniversary, a Friday in 2009, The Bootleg Beatles were denied permission to recreate the performance for a second time, with the police and officials of Westminster Council muttering about “health and safety” concerns, a sure sign that they couldn’t think of any other grounds to avoid a small amount of extra work. However, honouring the spirit of the original event, two members of the group defied the ban and mounted the roof to play ‘One After 909’ and ‘Get Back’ on acoustic guitars. Other rooftop recreations went ahead in the USA that day, as the tribute band Anthology played on the roof of Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and The WannaBeatles blasted out the songs on top of Rippy’s nightclub in downtown Nashville, Tennessee.

  Later that anniversary year, on a Wednesday in July, Paul McCartney himself played a surprise high-rise mini-concert with his band atop the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City, where he was appearing on the Late Show With David Letterman. He played ‘Get Back’ along with two songs from the White Album – ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Back In The USSR’ – and highlights from his post-Beatles career, including ‘Band On The Run’ and ‘Let Me Roll It’, as crowds gathered and screamed behind metal barriers in the street below and people stared out of their Midtown Manhattan offices. This time round, Paul had obtained official permission and the police were as cool as the NYPD can be.

  Inspired by the example that The Beatles set, many other groups have taken to playing on a roof over the years. In March 1987 U2 filmed a performance video of their song ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ from the roof of a liquor store in downtown Los Angeles, manifestly without permission since the LAPD showed up and stopped the show, albeit not before the Irish quartet had played ‘Streets’ four times in an eight-song set. Later that same year Echo & The Bunnymen did the same thing atop the HMV Records store in the eastern section of London’s Oxford Street, performing ‘Twist And Shout’ in a clear nod to The Beatles, whose Sgt. Pepper-era image adorned the front of the building that day. In 2012 Blur filmed videos for the song ‘Under The Westway’ and ‘The Puritan’ from a rooftop in Notting Hill Gate that wasn’t quite under the Westway but within shouting distance.

&nbs
p; Since 2009, it has become more difficult to gain access to the roof of 3 Savile Row as an individual, let alone take a band up there and plug in. In 2014 the building was opened as a children’s clothing shop by the American retailer Abercrombie & Fitch, and when I made a subsequent request to revisit the roof, it was met with a baffling refusal. “Thanks for reaching out,” emailed a corporate communications operative. “Unfortunately, this is not something we are able to approve due to various barriers. Thanks for understanding.”

  The Beatles’ rooftop concert has inspired paintings, cartoons and sculptures. One of the most impressive works is a model of the building with a recreation of the concert on top, painstakingly assembled by the Yorkshireman Bob Bartey and his friend Dave Loboda. In 2013, while Dave made a model of the building, Bob spent much of his spare time fashioning the models of John, Paul, George and Ringo with their instruments, though he had never tried modelling before. “I bought some old figures and just remoulded them, and a lot of it is made of junk, really,” he says. “The drum kit is made out of wine bottle tops and keyrings and stuff like that.” People on YouTube have seen images of the model, and Bob took it to the International Beatleweek Festival one year. “I think at that point I’d just got Yoko and Maureen on it, sat by the chimney stack. But I’ve got a few other people on there now. I added figures when I received comments from people. Michael Lindsay-Hogg actually saw it and noticed he wasn’t on it! And it’s still ongoing.”

  Bob was 14 years old and at school on the day The Beatles played the rooftop, and he has been fascinated with the event ever since. “I still think it was a great gig – one of The Beatles’ best performances,” he says. He is one of many thousands of fans who wish they had been in Savile Row around lunchtime on January 30, 1969.

  For every teenager who has ever been told to “turn that bloody noise down”, the rooftop concert stands as a glorious, rebellious event – the bedroom blast writ large. For an infinitesimal moment in human history, the wheels of industry ground to a halt and the power and glory of rock’n’roll burst through the barricades into the dismal grind of everyday life. And the people who were there – the fans, the shoppers, the film-makers and technicians, and even some of the tailors and policemen – will always feel special. “That was one of the greatest and most exciting days of my life,” recalled Alan Parsons. “To see The Beatles playing together and getting an instant feedback from the people around them, five cameras on the roof, cameras across the road, in the road, it was just unbelievable.”

  Peter Brown, The Beatles’ business manager, told me he didn’t give interviews very often, but that he was intrigued that I was devoting a book to the rooftop performance. “It was a rather strange thing that we did, wasn’t it?” he said.

  It certainly was. Mighty strange, and pretty marvellous as well.

  * In 1971 Marsh would co-create and star in the enormously popular, award-winning period TV series Upstairs, Downstairs, about the lives of the servants and masters in a grand house in Belgravia.

  * By 1969, 33-year-old Ted Dexter was actually a fading star on the cricket scene, but he was still remembered for his dynamic captaincy of the England and Sussex teams in the early sixties.

  * A few years later, Heddon Street entered the rock history books in its own right when it became the location for a David Bowie photoshoot for his breakthrough album, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.

  Picture Section

  Savile Row c.1960. Wool merchants Wain, Shiell & Son (No. 2, with the long flagpole) complained bitterly to the police when The Beatles played on the roof next door in 1969. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

  Paul meets his future wife Linda Eastman for the second time, at the press launch for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, on 19 May, 1967. (John Downing/Getty Images)

  The debonair Peter Brown helped The Beatles put Apple together, and dealt with the police on the famous rooftop. (Mirrorpix)

  George and Pattie Harrison at the opening of the Apple Boutique in Baker Street, December 1967. (Terry O’Neill/Iconic Images)

  John Lennon attended the opening party with his wife Cynthia. (Terry O’Neill/Iconic Images)

  Friends including Cilla Black arrived to toast the new venture. (Terry O’Neill/Iconic Images)

  John and Paul arrive in New York in May 1968 to publicise the launch of Apple. With them are Mal Evans (centre) and the Greek electronics wizard Magic Alex (left). (Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)

  John and Paul return to London after the publicity bash. (Stroud/Express/Getty Images)

  Lennon and McCartney with their publicist Derek Taylor (right) and business manager Peter Brown (behind desk). (Jane Bown/Observer/TopFoto)

  John with Yoko Ono, 1968. The brown fur coat would later keep him warm during the rooftop concert. (Mirrorpix)

  Six months before the rooftop concert, the Apple Boutique closes down and gives its stock away to lucky shoppers. (left: Bob Aylott/Keystone/Getty Images) (right: C.Maher/Express/Getty Images)

  George at Apple Corps in 1968. The youngest Beatle’s brief departure from the group in January 1969 was a key factor in the events that led to the rooftop concert. (Baron Wolman/Iconic Images)

  George, Ringo, Yoko, John and Paul (left to right) listen to a playback in Apple’s basement studio in Savile Row, where they resumed the ‘Get Back’ project in late January 1969. (Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy)

  Billy Preston and Lulu, on Lulu’s BBC TV show broadcast on 25 January, 1969. Billy would play electric piano on the roof with The Beatles five days later. (Michael Putland/Getty Images)

  The Beatles play the rooftop at lunchtime on Thursday, 30 January, 1969. Towering over them here is the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. (Camera Press/RBO)

  Paul McCartney plays a high-rise gig in New York City in 2009, 40 years after the rooftop concert. (Ray Tamarra/Getty Images)

  The Beatles’ rooftop gig has inspired many artworks, including this model by Bob Bartey and Dave Loboda.

  Crafted using a variety of household objects, it is still a work in progress. (both photographs: Bob Bartey/Dave Loboda)

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