Today, January 30, it’s been 50 years since The Beatles played on the roof of their Apple office to create a proper ending to their Let It Be movie. It would take close to another year and a half before it, and the album, was released.
The lovely thing is you can see them enjoying themselves, each other and the music. They would never play together in public again.
just fooking great werent they?
Indeed! And this is supposedly at their worst.
Asking any would-be Lewisohns…
Since they presumably didn’t tell anyone they were doing it, and were playing new material, how long did it take for folk down on the street to twig as to who it was?
And in a time before social media, did the news spread quickly, or was it just those within earshot that managed to hear it?
Most people in the area most likely knew The Beatles had an office there and could figure out where the music came from.
The street(s) below got jammed pretty quick, as seen in the film. Think it was during lunch, so a lot of people would have been out and about to get something to eat anyway.
They weren’t the first though…
Just seen this……..
https://www.thebeatles.com/news/new-film-project-announcing-exciting-new-collaboration-between-beatles-and-acclaimed-academy
You beat me to it! This sort of project has been rumoured for awhile. Seems like we are going to get a new documentary plus the original film.
https://www.uncut.co.uk/news/peter-jackson-direct-new-beatles-documentary-109129#EVblxHEeh3QQvFu9.99
There’s also a documentary on the India visit on its way. Starring DONOVAN, obviously.
I was hoping to be first to name the Peter Jackson Beatles film Lord of the Ringos but the BBC have beaten me to it.
I saw Let it Be recently when it popped up on YouTube. It’s actually very dull until the end. Some of the unused clips floating around demonstrate how Bring Your Wife to Work Day affects the chemistry of a band.
The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bilbo
Lords Of The Fringes
Some friends of mine hosted this tribute band – All You Need Is Beatles – to play a ‘rooftop’ gig at their house last Saturday. The original plan had been to play on the roof at the Subscription Rooms in Stroud, the location of The Beatles’ first paid gig outside Merseyside and Hamburg back in 1962, but that idea was nixed on health and safety grounds.
Is there a specific reason why George Harrison is to the side and not in the middle as usual?
It is strange how that classic lineup with George in the middle is so imprinted in our consciousness! My guess is that after nearly 3years of not playing live it really didn’t matter or didn’t occur to them to Get Back to that….sorry….
George and Paul used to harmonise into the same microphone. At this time they weren’t getting on …
I think they could afford another mike and the days of ‘oooh’ing as they shook their moptops was long gone.
I don’t think it was anything to do with being able to afford another mic, but a conscious decision to sing into a single mic, so that there was the mix of voices into that one source.
It’s something that continues today. Only last night I saw Bennett, Wilson, Poole each of whom had their own mic, but on occasion two of them would share one to merge the sound of their voices.
So in the Savile Row rooftop gig, I’d agree with @dai and the suggestion that it was the continuing animosity between the two.
Let us not forget that George’s animosity lingered for many years as manifested in his refusal to join Macca for Live Aid and the closing Let It Be, saying something like He didn’t ask me to sing on the original, so why should I bother singing with him now?
There was a short series of programmes that Joe Boyd recorded for Resonance FM, a good few years back.
In one of them he was talking about vocal harmonies and about the different (and he contended, better) sound you get from voices blending at a shared mic rather than from separate mics mixed together at the desk.
Any update heard on the apparent re-release of the Let It Be film?
Macca says “Yes”, Ringo will probably say “Yes”, I believe there is a softening of thought from Yoko, it may all be down to Olivia
official site says, in final paragraph, yes.
His gig did not have the excitement of the Airplane or the Fabs, but Brazilian superstar, Roberto Carlos, did perform on a rooftop (in Sao Paolo) before either of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=16&v=wdW2Eo7xY5w
Come on Bob! A bevy of very serious, pouting garotas does not a good concert make.
Peter Jackson making the new Let It Be film is pretty exciting IMHO. He’s a Beatles fanatic – when I worked with him all those years ago he had an impressive collection of bootleg LPs (including a couple of duplicates which he gave me and I still have) and he very kindly made cassettes of a few of them (which I still have). Of course this stuff is all over the internet now but this was back in 1989.
He had an interesting story about how the bootlegs came to be – he said a terminally ill EMI/Apple employee was given the job of cataloguing a bunch of unlabelled or inadequately labelled tapes. Said employee was set up at home with a tape machine by his bedside. Some dirty rotten scoundrel either copied the tapes, or paid the unwell person for copies, and voila…
Don’t know if there’s any truth in that – others may know more. There’s a few Fabs fans still here aren’t there – aren’t there…
In the early 80s a chap called John Barrett was working at Abbey Road and was seriously ill and undergoing chemotherapy – he wanted something to occupy him (presumably at home) and it was suggested he could go through and catalogue the Beatles archive tapes. This fed into the Lewisohn book, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions published in 1988.
“Fed into…” – you mean this was the source for the Lewishon book?
Yes – I’ve just gone back and checked, and the Preface says ‘This book really began in the early 80s when…’ etc.
Apparently, Lewisohn and Brian Southall were doing a talk in Liverpool in 1982 and they took John and his new catalogue along to answer any ‘tricky questions’. The audience were ‘so enthralled…..that they asked if a book could be published’. John Barrett died in 1984.
I wouldn’t like to defame the chap by suggesting he was the source of botlegs, but it’s an interesting theory. Of course some stuff was bootlegged earler than the 80s anyway.
This is from Wikipedia…
EMI had planned to release an album of alternate takes and previously unreleased songs by the Beatles in 1985 called Sessions, but the Beatles objected after it had been compiled; by the end of the year, bootleg copies were widely available.During the cataloguing and review of the EMI archives in the early 1980s in preparation for the Sessions album and a multimedia show given at Abbey Road Studios, it is suspected that high quality copies of some of the material were surreptitiously made.This may have been the source for the Ultra Rare Trax CD series from Swingin’ Pig that started appearing in 1988, which provided takes never previously bootlegged in clarity that rivalled official releases.
The late 1980s also saw the emergence of Yellow Dog, a label specialising in Beatles studio outtakes, who released the CD series Unsurpassed Masters in quality similar to Ultra Rare Trax; Yellow Dog, like Swingin’ Pig’s parent company Perfect Beat, was registered in Luxembourg, which had the most liberal copyright laws among EU countries.Yellow Dog released Unsurpassed Demos in 1991, featuring 22 songs from the 1968 Kinfauns (Esher) demos, only some of which had been previously made public during the radio series The Lost Lennon Tapes that debuted in 1988.
Get Back/Don’t Let Me Down by The Beatles with Billy Preston was released in April. Neither were from the rooftop recordings and both were composits of two seperate takes, naughty considering the intention was to capture The Beatles ‘live’ in single takes. Nevertheless, it’s a cracking single and the versions of each song are the best of any that’s ever been released, shining like sparkling gold coins. In fact, Don’t Let Me Down is quite probably The Beatles best B side.
I would argue Don’t Let Me Down is better than the A side
Better than ‘You know my name, look up the number’?
The version of DLMD on Let It Be…Naked is a composite of the two rooftop session takes. Rain gets my vote as the best B side, but it is a cracking single isn’t it?
Rain gets my vote as best song.
I think I put I Am The Walrus second with Rain third. But today is Friday.
So many great ones. Would put a few before DLMD, apart from the ones mentioned This Boy, Yes It is, I’m Down
There is a moment on Don’t Let Me Down when Lennon sings “It’s a love that lasts forever…” that just makes the hairs on my neck stand up. There’s just something about the raw feeling of it. One of their best songs full stop IMO.
And I love that Keith Urban /John Mayer version too.
I like the less-revered, the less-analysed, Beatles and so, breaking the habit of a lifetime, I’ll be up for the full monty of “Let It Be” next year … original film, new film and, presumably, box set.
It would be wonderful if either or both films were granted a cinema release.
It stands to reason that on the same day – on a rooftop nearby – Dirk, Nasty, Stig and Barry were equally making a racket of their own.
Apparently, having access to everything committed to tape at Twickenham Studios, Mark Lewisohn listened to all of it last month on each recording’s exact 50th Anniversary.
Can’t say he doesn’t give the subject his fullest attention!
He should have been finishing that second book, the slacker!