The Beatles Play the Rooftop: Savile Row, 1969
1969 · music
Shortly after midday on 30 January 1969, four musicians and a keyboard player carried their equipment up a narrow staircase onto the roof of an office building at 3 Savile Row in central London and began to play. The Beatles had not performed in public for two and a half years. There was no announcement and no audience except the people who worked in the building, the film crew and, within minutes, a growing crowd in the street below looking up and trying to work out where the sound was coming from.
They played for about forty two minutes in the cold January air, with Billy Preston on electric piano, running through several takes of Get Back, Don't Let Me Down, I've Got a Feeling and other songs from the sessions they had been struggling with for weeks. Office workers climbed onto neighbouring roofs. Traffic stopped in the street. Police officers arrived after complaints about the noise and were shown politely into the building, and the band played on until they asked for the power to be turned off.
The sessions had been difficult and the group was close to breaking up. The rooftop was a way out of a project that had stalled, a live performance with no ticket and no stage, filmed for what became the documentary Let It Be. It turned out to be the last time the four of them played together in public.
The recordings were released on the album Let It Be in 1970, weeks after the band announced it was over. Half a century later the full footage was restored and shown in the documentary series Get Back, and the last words of the last song, thanking the audience on behalf of the group, have become the accidental ending of the most influential band in popular music.