The Beatles on the Roof by Tony Barrell

Author:Tony Barrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2017-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Up On The Roof

Dawn broke almost imperceptibly over the West End of London on Thursday, January 30, 1969. The overlapping clouds, in varying shades of grey, were so thick that they allowed only a glimmer of sunlight to penetrate. Every so often, as the clouds shifted like airborne tectonic plates, a patch of greyish-blue sky became visible, only to be obscured minutes later.

It was dry, and not terribly cold; late December had been much worse, with Arctic winds, blizzards and deep snow drifts causing disruption in much of Britain. The month of January had been relatively mild, though the wind was brisk today, blowing at more than 11 miles per hour, creating a significant wind-chill factor. Most of the people in the streets early that morning were wrapped up in coats, scarves and gloves as the west-southwesterly wind whipped up Piccadilly, Pall Mall and Shaftesbury Avenue, and gusts funnelled into narrower thoroughfares including Duke Street, St James’s Square, Wardour Street and Savile Row, blowing sweet wrappers, cigarette butts and the other litter of the previous evening around.

The gloom was punctuated by the headlights of a few early-morning vehicles on the roads, orange lights on top of taxis and lights in the windows of offices being cleaned ready for the influx of staff. Electric light spilled from sleepy Mayfair hotels, the Ritz on Piccadilly, Brown’s on Albemarle Street and Claridge’s on the corner of Brook and Davies Streets, and the lights were on in West End Central, the main police station in Savile Row, near the junction with Burlington Street, as uniformed officers went about their business.

The police would intervene in The Beatles’ rooftop concert much earlier than most people imagine. In fact, they came close to scuppering it before it had begun. Up in the Chiltern Hills, to the north-west of London, Dave Harries and another technical engineer, Keith Slaughter, were leaving Dave’s home in the market town of Chesham and driving to Savile Row. The previous day they had paid a visit to the studios at EMI in Abbey Road, collecting the best amplification equipment they could find for the open-air show and loading it into a vehicle from the EMI carpool, and now they were motoring towards the capital through the early-morning gloom.

“It was really early, about four o’clock in the morning,” remembers Dave, “and we looked really dodgy, because we had ropes and speakers and amps in the back, and we were all dressed up in big coats with hats and scarves. And suddenly the police pulled us over. We must have looked like burglars, I suppose. They said, ‘Where are you going?’ But the concert was all hush-hush, and we weren’t supposed to say anything about it. We said we were sorry, but we couldn’t tell them where we were going. We told them it was a film shoot and that we were working for EMI Records. And fortunately, it wasn’t Keith’s car, it was an EMI pool car, so Keith said, ‘If you check the ownership of this vehicle, you’ll find it’s an EMI pool car.

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