Rooftop: The Beatles’ imperfect epitaph

By Kevin Boyd

First published here, 30 January 2019

50 years ago today, on 30 January 1969, The Beatles, along with temporary fifth member Billy Preston, ascended the last few steps to the hastily-constructed wooden platform that passed for a ‘stage’ on the roof of their Apple Corps headquarters at 3 Saville Row in fashionable Mayfair. Guitars, amps, keyboards and a drum kit were already assembled, facing the empty London skyline in a conventional arrangement, but this was to be far from a conventional performance.

Beatles lore, and indeed, the majority of conventional rock music histories, have for the subsequent half-century taken this to be the Beatles’ ‘final performance’ or their ‘last concert’, but it was in fact neither. The following day’s recording in the basement studio of the same building or the mid-February session that would produce nascent tracks for their final album Abbey Road could each lay claim, in one way or another, to being their ‘final performance’ as a collective unit. As for this being a ‘concert’ – only the most generous definition of that term could accommodate what was about to take place. This was an open-air recording session that, quite by chance, just happened to have the smallest of audiences. But history will record it as the ‘rooftop concert’ and, at this distance, it seems churlish to dispute such a definition.

What is indisputable is that it was a bitterly cold Thursday morning in the middle of a typical London winter and the musicians struggled to keep warm while the crew checked their camera gear and changed reels between songs. At one point, George Harrison is seen ineffectively attempting to warm his freezing fingers on a lit cigarette. Such were the wintry conditions that Ringo Starr chose to wear a striking red raincoat, possibly belonging to his wife Maureen, and John Lennon donned what may or may not have been Yoko’s fur coat. Only Paul McCartney seemed largely oblivious to the temperatures, foregoing any form of winter wear and braving the freezing conditions in nothing more than a dark suit and open-necked shirt.

As the cameras began to roll, The Beatles performed five of the songs they’d written and rehearsed during the previous four weeks for what had started out as a TV special about the making of a new album and would eventually become their final theatrically-released film Let It Be. The songs were all nominally up-tempo and some were performed in multiple versions. They were: Get Back (three takes); Don’t’ Let Me Down (two takes); I’ve Got A Feeling (two takes); One After 909 and Dig A Pony (one take each).

The location was a compromise. The weeks of filming and rehearsing had been punctuated with regular discussions on how the film might end. There was always likely to be a performance of some sort, but as the tensions and personal grievances that characterised the sessions ebbed and flowed, each of the ever-more grandiose ideas for a climax was first adopted with enthusiasm, then allowed to fall by the wayside until they were left with a shortlist of one – they would play their songs on the roof. Even then it was never certain the thing would go ahead until the eleventh hour, with discussions and debate ongoing as late as the day before, by which point it must be assumed the stage was already built and ready to go.

On the day itself, ostensible producer Glyn Johns supervised from the rooftop, while several of the countless wires and cables that littered the makeshift ‘stage’ snaked down a number of floors to the basement studio where George Martin and Alan Parsons committed the results to tape via recording consoles borrowed from EMI’s Abbey Road studios.

Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras captured the events from several perspectives: One camera operator lay on his back on the cramped roof to obtain close-up shots of the musicians; others recorded the reactions of various, occasionally perplexed, passers-by in the streets below; still others prowled the corridors of the Apple HQ capturing the very moment the Police entered the building as a result of complaints from neighbouring businesses.

It took The Beatles a while to feel their way into the performance. The opening take of Get Back is a little laboured and belies the hours of rehearsals and numerous, much more competent, run-throughs they’d had in the preceding days and weeks. Lennon needs help with his own lyrics on more than one occasion – he has a crew member sit uncomfortably at his feet with a clipboard during Dig A Pony and conspicuously flubs the words to Don’t Let Me Down – but by the end they’re having fun and playing up to the cameras. McCartney revels in the sheer absurdity of the whole thing, improvising a line in Get Back – “You’ve been playing on the roofs again… you know your momma doesn’t like it… she’s gonna have you arrested!” – as the less-than-amused Old Bill breathe down his neck.

After 42 minutes it was all over – partly due to Police intervention, partly because they’d captured passable takes of each of the songs in their intended repertoire, but most likely because The Beatles had no intention of hanging around a freezing London rooftop for any longer than was strictly necessary.

A slickly-edited version of the resultant performance formed the climax of Let It Be on its eventual release in May 1970, by which point it was public knowledge that The Beatles were no more. It’s an imperfect epitaph to what were perhaps the perfect pop music phenomena. A little rough around the edges, but infused with a spirit it’s hard to deny, and all the more powerful for its slightly ill-disciplined raggedness.

“Get Back”

By Kevin Boyd

First published on the Fatea website, August 2016

Think about Liverpool for anything more than a few seconds and there’s a good chance you’ll conjure up images of its most famous sons, The Beatles. The story of their rise from barely competent skiffle outfit, through residencies in Hamburg dives, lunchtimes at The Cavern and eventual international stardom on an unprecedented scale has been told time and again. There’s a great lost Beatles documentary that you’ll struggle to find since Apple Corps commandeered the band’s ‘official’ history. It sets out the prevailing critical attitude through bleak shots of Liverpool tenements; stoic close-ups of what could only be working class faces; gritty images of dockers loading and unloading their cargo. The visual tropes of social realism, overlaid with a grim narration:

“Nothing much ever came from Liverpool but soccer teams and British comedians… In 1956 there was little to suggest that out of this provincial seaport would come four young men and a musical revolution that would captivate and change the world…”

It’s an attractive thought and it’s tempting to believe the most popular cultural phenomena of the century sprung fully formed from nowhere. It feeds our seemingly endless need for creation myths and neatly packaged narratives. The first half of Get Back, the new feature-length documentary that explores the enduring history of popular music in post-war Liverpool, goes some way towards, if not exactly exploding the myth, then at least placing The Beatles’ initial success within a broader context of music making within the city.

Mersey Beat founder Bill Harry features heavily, as do various Quarrymen and The Swinging Blue Jeans’ Ray Ennis, but though the cast of characters is often familiar and their stories equally well known, by broadening the context within which they are told to include examinations, albeit brief in some cases, of early pop idol Billy Fury and of the 1950s folk, jazz and country scenes they shed a little new light on a familiar narrative. Archive clips and plenty of photographs help flesh out these accounts and with less familiar interviewees like DJ and professional scouser Billy Butler, The Hillsiders’ Kenny Johnson, The Spinners’ Tony Davis and his wife Beryl there’s the sense that the film is tapping slightly less well-worn seam than one might expect.

It’s not just The Beatles who feature: Harry recalls a conversation with Cavern DJ Bob Wooler where they identified 250 groups in the city at one stage and several of them are name-checked in Get Back. A number of influencial clubs and coffee houses are also given their due: The Cavern in Mathew Street of course but also The Jacaranda, Casbah and other perhaps less celebrated, but no less influencial venues that played crucial roles in nurturing the nascent talents of the day.

Around half the film’s 94-minute running time is taken up telling this part of the city’s story but it’s time well spent. There may be little that’s truly revelatory but by broadening the perspective and speaking to a wider variety of people, the first part of Get Back breathes modest but welcome new life into a familiar story.

By the mid-70s the city may have possessed an all-conquering football team but any residue of the 60s optimism that had been a by-product of the Mersey Beat boom had largely faded. The exception may have been The Real Thing, a quartet of Liverpudlian singers with the look and sound of a Philedelphia soul outfit who enjoyed success, albeit relatively fleetingly, on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite his, by the second half of the decade the idea of a renaissance of musical creativity in the city seemed about as improbable as a slump in the fortunes of their famous scarlet-clad footballing heroes.

The punk movement may have provided the perfect template for teenage rebellion, if not necessarily musical virtuosity, within many a British provincial town in the late-70s, but it had only a modest musical impact on Meresyside, as the second half of Get Back goes on to explore. Mathew Street again proved the melting pot for what developed through the late-70s and early-80s into a more artistically inclined and musically diverse cultural movement which adapted the DIY principles of punk into a broader musical aesthetic. The now legendary club Eric’s and the influential record shop Probe, each within gobbing distance of the original Cavern Club, helped nurture a new generation of musicians who cared little for the achievements of their 60s predecessors.

Several of the main protagonists from this period are interviewed, including Bunnymen Will Sergeant and Ian McCulloch, Pete Wylie and OMD’s Andy McCluskey. The overriding sense is of individuality, with each band adopting very different approaches, evidenced by the diversity of music they managed to produce. Again, photographs and archive clips help bring the story to life, with some incredible live footage of Echo and the Bunnymen in their pomp as the standout example. Whilst there’s a definite pride in their scouse roots, there’s much less of a sense of a coherent ‘scene’ amongst the key players, perhaps due to the range of musical approaches they adopted.

The chronology continues via a revealing cross-generational anecdote from Big In Japan’s Jayne Casey and onto Frankie, represented by Brian Nash and clips from their notorious early S&M influenced video for Relax, filmed on location at Liverpool’s State club. The success of the Cream club nights, from their beginnings in inauspicious surroundings to the later international dominance of the Creamfields festival franchise, is symbolic of the ascendancy of the UK House scene and there are interviews with Cream founder James Barton and other key figures. Terrace culture and the early-90s indie/dance crossover period are epitomised by The Farm who achieved considerable success despite facing early record industry indifference and looking ‘like a bunch of plumbers’! Elsewhere, The La’s bassist and Cast frontman John Power receives a substantial cameo.

The final act of Get Back takes in a number of the city’s more recent acts including The Zutons, Wombats, The Coral and others. It feels a bit like a race through this latter part of the story and it might have been interesting to have dwelled a bit more on some of these. In fact, the whole second half of the film might have benefited from being twice the length as there are certainly more fascinating stories to be told but it nevertheless manages to cram in an enormous amount of detail into the time available.

So, ‘nothing much ever came from Liverpool but soccer teams and British comedians’, right? Get Back proves otherwise.