It’s 1970, and I’m probably huddled on the floor by the dining room fireplace, unlit despite the sharp Northern winter, with my portable cassette recorder pressed to my ear. I’m almost ceratinly listening to, and wearing out my tape of The Beatles’ valedictory album, Let it Be, infinitely more engaging than anything the family were watching next door. My earliest memory, from around 1967 or 68, is the album cover of Sergeant Pepper its lavish, deep red interior, like a jewellery box, and my elder brother talking me through the figures enshrined on its cover.
The Christmas TV schedules were Beatle heavy in those days, the band’s forays into cinema regularly featured: the naïve, slice-of-life Hard Day’s Night, the sub Bond tomfoolery of Help, the surreal silliness of Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine; and, of course, sigh, the slow horror of Let it Be, a largely joyless chronicle of dissolution and decay, albeit one partly redeemed by its climactic rooftop concert.
I have a clear memory of my father and brother arguing over the apparent, Godot-esque aimlessness of the filmed recording sessions in Let it Be, my brother claiming that watching these musicians at work, albeit in the death throes of their working relationship, was as interesting as watching any professionals rehearse, or practise, anything. This, together with my sense of how unflinchingly the film had embalmed the sour stench of decay in the Twickenham studio, ensured that, on Boxing Day, I settled down apprehensively to Get Back, Peter Jackson’s newly edited eight hour sample of late Beatles misery. Imagine the advertising: Four times as much gloom! Four times as much aimless rehearsal, and staring into space! How will we cope?
But it was quite a surprise. Yes, it’s clearly a record of a group of people who are coming to the end of a supercharged decade through which they had lived with such intensity and in such unnatural closeness; yes, there’s plenty of friction; yes, there is a general lassitude, and much of the rehearsal time seems to descend into interminable existential discussions about whether they’re staying together, and, more practically, what they’re actually supposed to be doing in the studio, and what the point is supposed to be. John is spectrally pale, emaciated, disaffected, occasionally gurning to camera, Ringo bored and weary, George increasingly fractious and resentful, Paul increasingly frustrated at the resistance to his attempts to take charge. But there’s more than this; the fascination of watching familiar songs taking shape, realising that there was a time when they were no more than a pulse, or a fragment of melody in someone’s imagination, the shared humour, and the extraordinary ability, honed over a dozen years, of knowing one another’s musical thoughts. There’s a noticeable change of mood when Billy Preston, the brilliant pianist who’d worked with them in Hamburg, arrives. His infectious enthusiasm, and apparent ability to transcend the gloom, are as remarkable as his musicianship, and I realised that it was his twinkling contributions to numbers like Get Back, One After 909, and Don’t Let Me Down that really struck the seven year old me.
It is, though, the rooftop concert that is the real revelation. Having hemmed and hawed indefinitely about whether they’d perform anything at all, and if so where- the Houses of Parliament, and a Libyan amphitheatre were amongst early bizarre suggestions, the idea of simply going upstairs seemed relatively unimaginative. George was clearly unimpressed, but by then he was beyond the reach of most collective initiatives. And so, up they went, the Gods’ final ascent to Olympus, on what was, clearly, a very cold, though otherwise unremarkable, January day. For half an hour the cold skies ring with this music; Arrested by something wholly unexpected, passers by in Savile Row turn to look up, as earlier Londoners might have to hear the music of the spheres; office workers leave their desks, clustering in streets beneath, and, intriguingly, clambering over rooftops. It’s not quite the Cavern, but it’s close; the crowd is not hysterical, but fascinated, a fascination deepened by respect, and perhaps a touch of nostalgic melancholy. But bite not your thumb at the great gods of commerce, bureaucracy and industry; they will be avenged, albeit through the comic bathos of the London constabulary, their mills grinding slowly, as they are mobilised to stop the Bacchanalians in mid frenzy. Some are born to fill the air with celestial noises; others are born to stop them; and so these men from Porlock, these Malvolios, edged their way into the story, armed with nothing more than the deathless words of officialdom, “it’s not necessary, this…we’ve had thirty complaints”. Ah, PC Plod- “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” It’s the English civil war again, Cromwellian Roundhead police, complete with drooping chin strap, pitted against Cavalier musicians, hair flowing in the London wind; for a few more minutes the old tension between Apollo and Dionysus was played out on the roof, PC Plod waiting in the wings, hoping the unnecessary noise would just stop and he wouldn’t have to be a footnote in history as the man who arrested the Beatles.
And then it was over. Guitars were slung over shoulders, amps disconnected, and the crowd dispersed, aware they had witnessed something extraordinary, though perhaps unaware quite how extraordinary; the roof was once again no more than a roof, its brief consecration already a memory, and the rest was silence; our revels now are ended, vanished into air, into thin air. What seems remarkable from this distance is just how young they all were, to be walking away with wandering steps and slow, from the greatest thing they would ever know. John Keats died at 26, knowing it as he coughed up arterial blood, and composing his final odes walking in the valley of the shadow of death; his fellow twenty somethings, 28 year old Ringo and John, 26 year old Paul, 25 year old George, would never touch such heights again, but we remain grateful that they did it at all- a cold, grey, January world of PCPlods would be just too hard for us all to bear.
Comments