I suggest ALL Beatles fans read this book. It is a great addition to your collection. Well written and interesting.

Arguably lasering in on a single day in the life of The Beatles, as this does, could result in a book that's rather narrow in its focus. But you can't tell the story of the Savile Row rooftop recording session without also explaining its context: the making of the Get Back / Let It Be film and I relished diving into that at this level of detail.

I could have stood for it to have kept going, in fact, but the way these frankly unpromising rehearsals - because as becomes clear, they really were little more than that - were fashioned into an album by Phil Spector is probably a story for another book.

After it reached its conclusion with the end of recording, there were a few things whose inclusion seemed a bit specious and had the air of an attempt to hit a word count, and in the foreword there's a throwaway line about female Beatles fans which is at best narrow-minded and at worst misogynist. In general though I had a great time reading this.

Great book for The Beatles fans. The story before and after the famous rooftop concert and the ways the Beatles innovated music industry, the way we enjoyed music and the way we felt it. Great book.

The Beatles on the Roof focuses on the time leading up to and through the concert on the roof of the Apple building in Savile Row. The book discusses all of the major players in and around the Beatles at the time, along with how the decision to perform this concert came to be.

It is an interesting read even though parts of this story has been told in other books, interviews and documentaries. Out of all the things that Beatles fans have full access to, the Let It Be documentary in full is one of the few things that is still not within reach of fans for easy viewing access. Although there are plenty of clips, this book puts together the entire picture of what was going on during the filming and how this impacted the Beatles going forward as a band. Most Beatles fans would enjoy this book.

This entertaining and engrossing book contextualizes the Beatles' iconic rooftop session. The personal and professional lives of John, Paul, George, and Ringo in 1968 and early 1969 illuminate the situation behind the scenes, and I also enjoyed Barrell's references to other cultural and historical events happening at the time. The recollections of those lucky enough to be witnesses to the unannounced performance (Apple staff, fans, students, workers, and police) were amusing. The book is a quick read, and when it builds up to the cathartic concert -- even though fans know what happened and have likely seen the filmed footage -- it gives readers a tiny hint of the euphoria and awe that those present must have felt at such a unique event.

Oh I just love this book! These are my guys. I grew up adoring all of them and will forever miss George and John. I have often wondered about this day on the roof - thank you.

This was an joyable read. However, at times there were tangents with what appeared to be irrelevant information.

This book reminds me of Ian Macdonald's absolutely blissful "Revolution In the Head", which goes through both The Beatles's music as well as their lives at the time, providing sociological breadth at the same time as delving into what happened.

This book goes into a little more than the actual rooftop session:

<blockquote>Most people call it the “rooftop concert”, so that’s what I usually call it. However, while it certainly took place on a rooftop, it wasn’t really a concert. When you go to a concert, the musicians don’t usually play a public sound check followed by a rehearsal of a song and then a proper version of it. But that’s what The Beatles were doing: they were doing takes of their songs. That’s what you do in a recording session, which is what it was. Except that it was more than that, as well.</blockquote>

The book delves into where The Beatles actually were around the time of running through those tracks, their interpersonal issues, their business, the Apple store, how they were sick and tired of the band but still wanted it all to work, to some extent.

There's a lot of good analysis on how the band carried on just before the actual gig, albeit a bit too much guesswork:

<blockquote>Like McCartney on that first day of filming, the other Beatles didn’t always arrive on time for their rehearsal duties. Though their individual timekeeping was erratic, The Beatles nonetheless became everyday commuters at one of the worst times of the year, the middle of winter. The weather wasn’t the main problem: in fact, January 1969 was an unusually mild month, thanks to a gentle airstream caressing England from the south-west. It was the shortness of the days: the fact that the sun didn’t come up until around 8 a.m., but went down again as early as 4 p.m. At this time of year, many ordinary commuters know the misery of leaving their homes before sunrise and returning to them after sunset, as each day’s window of light is eclipsed by their hours in the workplace. The Beatles would have suffered – more than many office and shop workers, who at least had windows to look out of – from daylight deprivation. The term “seasonal affective disorder” (SAD) had yet to be coined (it wasn’t named in print until 1985) but these short days would likely have had a negative bearing on the musicians’ wellbeing, mood and mental health. SAD is a form of depression, whose symptoms can include lethargy, anxiety and irritability.</blockquote>

Barrell believes the vexations between members, and also Lennon's heroin use, ground songwriting to a halt:

<blockquote>During their discussions in Twickenham, it emerged that there was a problem with the new material – apart from the fact that there wasn’t that much of it. Both George and Paul admitted that many of the songs they had written were slow numbers, echoing John’s complaint about his own songs the day before, when he had suggested they try to write some rockers. One uptempo song that they played that day was new to most of the people around them – the film crew and the sound technicians – although it wasn’t new to the group. ‘One After 909’ was a song begun by John as a teenager back in the late fifties: a juvenile homage to the American tradition of songs about trains, and to skiffle numbers like Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’. The Beatles had recorded it at EMI back in 1963, but it hadn’t been deemed good enough to release. Now they dusted it off, though they had reservations about the words. “I never, sort of, knew what it was about before,” admitted Paul. “So she’s on a train and he, sort of…” “He goes to the station and misses it,” explained John. “But he goes back and finds it was the wrong number,” said Paul. “Wrong location,” said George. “To rhyme with ‘station’, you know,” said John. Paul added that his brother, Mike, had been suggesting for years that The Beatles use the song. “But I said, ‘Well, you know, Mike, you don’t understand about these things, you know.’” George made a case here for meaningless song lyrics. “Most people just don’t give a shit what the words are about, as long as it’s ‘pop of the month’,” he said. And John confessed that “we always thought it wasn’t finished. We couldn’t be bothered finishing it.”</blockquote>

There's also some fun anecdotal views of the world surrounding The Beatles, like this little gem:

<blockquote>The BBC had some interesting TV shows that weekend. Saturday evening brought Happening For Lulu, a variety showcase for the eponymous pop singer, broadcast from the corporation’s Shepherd’s Bush building and entailing a bit of singing, dancing and comedy plus some special guests. The Daily Express, which described Lulu as “that explosive little cracker from the Glasgow backstreets”, warned that each show “will be informal and unscripted, with an audience of teenagers”. The show was also live, so there was no telling what might happen.

The guests that evening included The Jimi Hendrix Experience, performing ‘Voodoo Chile’ and a couple of minutes of ‘Hey Joe’ – at which point Jimi departed from the script. “We’re gonna stop playing this rubbish,” he announced (you could almost hear the distant wailing from his public-relations team), “and dedicate a song to the Cream… I’d like to dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.” They immediately tore into a cover of Cream’s ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’, which ended up crashing the sacred evening news slot and prompted the producers to take the show off air. The following week, the programme was billed simply as Lulu, the Happening no doubt dispensed with for fear of something similar occurring again.</blockquote>

The band wanted to play live, even though they hadn't at that point, for years. Some thoughts around that are interesting:

<blockquote>The Beatles discussed how inspiring the feedback from an audience would be, but George, remembering their previous concerts, was concerned that the audience might consist only of screaming young female Beatlemaniacs. Yoko Ono chipped in with a highly conceptual idea: that The Beatles perform to 20,000 empty seats, which would represent “the invisible, nameless everybody in the world”. Paul ran briefly with Yoko’s idea, suggesting that they play one concert to a real audience, and another to empty seats. Paul raised the possibility of The Beatles playing in the nude, to which George added that it might be better if the audience were naked rather than the performers. When they returned to the subject later that day, Paul was advocating building an artificial set resembling the Colosseum in Rome, and having The Beatles come in together with some real, live lions.</blockquote>

Well, they ended up on a rooftop in London, despite dispatching staff to other continents to scout out locations. Anyway, the breakdowns of their existence with each other turned things fairly sour at some points, thus bringing the bigness to shrink; reticence is the word:

<blockquote>But on this winter’s day in Twickenham, he wasn’t noticeably inspired by his bandmate’s grandiose but well-meaning proposal to improve the lives of thousands of starving Africans. “Don’t they say charity begins at home?” he remarked. “So we will do it at George’s house,” Paul fired back. “Let’s do the show right here,” said Ringo, echoing the old movie cliche´. Picking up from his Biafran suggestion, Paul continued: “Say we were doing it in an airport: you could stop the people from coming and going. They’ve all got planes to catch; like, you get a lot of people all the time going for planes and looking. It would be a scene. Or in a hospital: they can’t get up – except at the finale, when John walks over to the little girl and says, ‘Come, ye,’ and she gets up and walks.”

Paul was edging into biblical territory here, daring to suggest that the group – and John in particular – replicate one of the Miracles of Jesus, as when the Son of God raised Lazarus from the dead. Though this is likely to have been tongue-in-cheek, a casual jest to keep the desperately needed ideas for a live show rolling along, there were echoes here of John’s troublesome “Jesus” remark. Later, after they tinkered with a few half-hearted numbers, Paul addressed his frustrations with the attitudes of his old friends. “I don’t see why any of you, if you’re not interested, got yourselves into this,” he said. “What’s it for? It can’t be for the money. Why are you here? I’m here because I want to do a show, but I really don’t feel a lot of support.” Paul went on to deliver a petulant ultimatum. “There’s only two choices,” he said. “We’re going to do it or we’re not going to do it. And I want a decision. Because I’m not interested in spending my fucking days farting around here while everyone makes up their minds whether they want to do it or not. If everyone else wants to do it, great, but I don’t have to be here.” If the experience of this project ended up like that of the White Album, he said, maybe it should be their last venture together. “There’s no point in hanging on.”</blockquote>

It's interesting to read of how Enoch Powell's xenophobia inspired The Beatles to write "Get Back":

<blockquote>It was at this point that ‘Get Back’ began to develop as a song. As he often did when working up a composition, Paul sang snatches of gibberish while they played; some of the words and phrases that emerged would be discarded and some would remain in the finished number. He riffed about Pakistanis, Arizona, California grass, Puerto Ricans and Mohicans, and introduced two characters, Joe and Theresa. Paul sang about somebody with an uncertain sexual identity, who thought she was a woman but was really “another man”, and other lines were present that are now preserved in the finished song. The chorus was now fixed as “Get back to where you once belonged”. Paul laughed and commented on the lack of meaning in the lyrics, though he was only following the long-established Beatles tradition of writing vaguely plausible words that scanned with the music. George commented that it wouldn’t matter if he used any “rubbish” for the text of the song, as The Band had done on their track ‘Caledonia Mission’, with its watchman, garden gate, magistrate and hexagram. But for a while, one of the lyrical themes of ‘Get Back’ would be a satire on racist attitudes to immigration. Sticking to the lyrical theme of ‘Get Back’, Paul began to improvise another song about Enoch Powell and his arguments for repatriation. The lyric had Powell telling immigrants to “get back to your Commonwealth homes”, and Ted Heath (leader of the Opposition, who had sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet the previous April) telling Powell: “Enoch, you’d better go home.” Harold Wilson came into the song at this point, saying something barely intelligible. The song’s chorus was simply the word “Commonwealth” called out by Paul, who was audibly amused when John responded with the word “Yes?” in a high voice with a distinctly proletarian accent – a quick-witted interpretation of the word “common”. Paul continued the number by name-checking various Commonwealth countries, including Pakistan, India, Australia and New Zealand, though one decidedly non-Commonwealth destination stood out: Tucson, a populous city in southern Arizona.</blockquote>

Then, on the rooftop:

<blockquote>After an agonising silence, John Lennon suddenly came through as the leader of the group, as he had been from the beginning. “Fuck it. Let’s do it,” he said. With John on side, George and Ringo immediately dropped their objections, and within minutes all four Beatles climbed up the spiral staircase, one by one, to play music together in public for the final time.</blockquote>

Notably, the London police constabulary didn't care about it all:

<blockquote>Tom Brown wondered about the legality of what The Beatles were doing: the police did not seem to be intervening, but surely they couldn’t get away with creating such a major disturbance in the middle of London. So he and Mike came down from the roof and walked towards West End Central to make some enquiries. “We went round to the police station and we just asked the obvious question – were they going to stop it? The guy behind the desk said no, they were happy for The Beatles to have their fun. Apart from the fact that it had brought that part of London to a standstill, it wasn’t doing any harm. At least that’s the way he saw it. It was something different, in the spirit of the time. So at that point they were happy to let them play.”</blockquote>

Altogether, the author's love for the band and the subject matter is apparent, and what is needed to write this book, or so merely I strongly feel. It's a good one.

<blockquote>After The Beatles finished their second go at ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, they rounded off the performance with the song they had started it with: ‘Get Back’. Despite the deal that had been made with the police, an officer made a remark that caused some confusion and prompted Mal Evans to turn off the Fender Twin amplifiers that John and George were using. Ringo cried “Don’t touch that!” and George turned his amplifier back on and Mal revived John’s, and they were able to finish the song, with Paul tossing in a spoken section about the song’s Loretta character “playing on the roofs again” to the displeasure of her mother, who would have her arrested. As the song ended, there was a final “Yay!” of enthusiasm from Maureen Starkey, eliciting a “Thanks, Mo” from Paul. John lifted the Epiphone Casino off his body, turned to the microphone and inspired peals of knowing laughter for the immortal lines: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”</blockquote>

Thank you to the publisher Omnibus Press who provided an advance reader copy via NetGalley.

This book focuses on the iconic performance of The Beatles on the rooftop of their company Apple Corp at 3 Savile Row in London. This took place on January 30, 1969 and wound up being the very last time The Beatles performed together in public. It also was the finale concert ending the "Let it Be" movie which documented their breakup, although it was originally intended to be a television special about them making a new album. Many people think that "Let it Be" is The Beatles' final album, but that was actually "Abbey Road". It's just that both the filming and recordings from the "Let it Be" sessions were so depressing that they sat on the shelf for awhile before "layer of sound" record producer Phil Spector was engaged to make the raw recordings sound more appealing. In the end, The Beatles went back to their stalwart producer George Martin to make "Abbey Road"...a record made "like we used to."

As I always say when I review yet another book about The Beatles, I am a decades long Beatles fan and have quite an extensive Beatles library. My challenge when reading a new offering is to find out something new...another pearl or kernel of truth about them. I did find a few here, to my delight, but I won't divulge everything to spoil it for others...save this: the bright orange raincoat RIngo is wearing during the rooftop concert actually belonged to his then wife Maureen!

There is commentary from various people who were in the area that day to experience this happening such as a tailor apprentice (Savile Row is famous for their pricey tailoring shops), a young business man who climbed along a pipe and across rooftops to closely witness the concert, and the policemen who responded to the noise and traffic complaints. There are many other accounts documented in the book, including from workers inside the Apple building who struggled themselves to be allowed to go up there. There were serious concerns about too much weight on the roof between the people and musical equipment.

If this book were not in digital format, I would sit it cozily beside my other Beatles tomes in my treasured bookcases. To steal a line from the witty John Lennon as this concert came to a close, "This book passed the audition!"

3..5/5.0 stars
This book relates events surrounding the Beatles playing on the roof at Apple headquarters in London at 3 Savile Row on a frosty lunchtime afternoon on January 30th, 1969. It became such an important event, in hindsight as it turned out because it would be the Beatles final live performance/recording session filmed as a group. Sadly, for many reasons they did break up afterward, as it turned out. Their playing that day, which drew crowds and stopped traffic, caused a major fuss with many people calling the police to complain about the noise and crowds of listeners. Eventually, the local police were sent out to do something when traffic became a gridlock situation.

This would likely be enjoyed by those who are Beatles fans, biography readers, music fans, history fans, non-fiction fans, etc. It's not overly long at 224 pages. A section of photos at the end adds interest.

An advance digital copy was provided by NetGalley and author Tony Barrell for my honest review.

Omnibus Press
Published on Oct 26,2017

"The Beatles on the Roof" is a book about the Beatles, but particularly focused on the last years of the band, 1968 through January 30, 1969, when they had their infamous concert on the roof of the Apple building. This concert was in reality a live recording session for the movie Let It Be and the eventual album. They had spent a year writing separately and talking about a final concert - after not having played live for years- and talked about holding it in Tunisia, in Gibraltar, or any number of exotic locations.

This book gives the Beatles fan an in-depth look at that year -sometimes with more detail than you thought you'd get -- interspersing their struggles to work together with current events both in Britain and around the world. It details the Apple Records empire and the purchase of the iconic property on Savile Row and ultimately winds up with the concert on the roof, the difficulty in getting the instruments up there, the concern about a roof never signed to carry that much weight, the nervousness the band had after so long without touring, and the surprise that the city had when people realized what was going on because it was a surprise to just about everyone.

An intense book that, instead of chronicling the entire history of the Beatles, focuses like a laser on one moment and what led up to it. Thanks to the publisher for providing a copy for review.