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On the lunchtime of Thursday, January 30th, 1969, three men in business suits sat in their offices on Savile Row in central London and started hearing music coming through the ceiling. The building at number three was the headquarters of Apple Corps, the multimedia company founded by The Beatles a year earlier. On the flat roof of that building, four stories above the pavement, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were playing a forty-two-minute set in the cold January wind. None of the four of them had performed live in front of an audience in two years and seven months. Within the hour, the Metropolitan Police had been called by complaining tenants on Savile Row, two officers had climbed to the roof, and the band had finished a final take of "Get Back" with John Lennon at the microphone saying, "I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition." It was the last time The Beatles ever performed live together in public. They would break up officially the following year.
The rooftop concert was not the plan. The plan, mapped out in autumn 1968, had been a televised return-to-roots live album. After the studio fragmentation of the so-called *White Album* — recorded over five months in 1968 with the four Beatles working largely as solo artists in separate rooms at EMI's Abbey Road Studios — Paul McCartney pushed for a new project that would bring the band back to live ensemble playing. The idea was to rehearse a set of brand-new songs, with no overdubs and no studio polish, and then perform them as a single concert that would be filmed for television and released as a live record. The working title was *Get Back*. The director hired to film the rehearsals and the concert was Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had worked with the band on promotional films including the *Hey Jude* music film. The recording engineer was Glyn Johns, who had become Lindsay-Hogg's preferred collaborator after working on the Stones' *Beggars Banquet* sessions earlier in 1968.
Rehearsals began at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, January 2nd, 1969, on Stage One at Twickenham Film Studios in southwest London. The choice of venue was practical — Twickenham was where the band had filmed sequences for *A Hard Day's Night* and *Help!* — and disastrous. A film soundstage in early January is freezing cold, the acoustic is dead, the lighting is harsh white film lighting designed for cameras rather than musicians, and the entire space is engineered for crew workflow rather than for a band. Lindsay-Hogg's cameras and sound recordists were rolling almost continuously, capturing roughly sixty hours of 16mm film and ninety-six hours of multitrack audio over the following weeks. The Beatles, used to working at Abbey Road in their own private studio space, found themselves rehearsing in front of a film crew at 10 a.m. while still half-asleep.
The musical material that came out of those rehearsals included most of what would later appear on the *Let It Be* and *Abbey Road* albums and several songs that ended up on the four members' early solo records. McCartney brought "Get Back," "Let It Be," "The Long and Winding Road," "Two of Us," and "I've Got a Feeling." Lennon brought "Don't Let Me Down," "Dig a Pony," and "Across the Universe" in revised form. Harrison, by then writing as prolifically as Lennon and McCartney, brought "I Me Mine," "For You Blue," and earlier versions of "All Things Must Pass" and "Isn't It a Pity," neither of which the band would record together. He also pitched, repeatedly, "Something" — which would not be released until *Abbey Road* later that year. The rehearsal tapes from Twickenham contain dozens of half-finished songs, oldies-jam covers of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, and improvised takes that have since been bootlegged for decades.
The personality fractures opened on the second week. On January 6th, Paul McCartney was filmed by Lindsay-Hogg's cameras lecturing George Harrison about how to play a guitar part on "Two of Us." Harrison's reply, captured on tape — "I'll play whatever you want me to play, or I won't play at all if you don't want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I'll do it" — would become the most-quoted line of the entire film footage. On Friday, January 10th, after a lunchtime argument with Lennon over whether to go ahead with a planned live show in a Roman amphitheater in North Africa, Harrison walked out of the rehearsal and quit the band. He drove home to his house in Esher and spent the weekend writing the song that became "Wah-Wah." A Beatles meeting at Lennon's home in Weybridge on Monday, January 13th, with a follow-up at Ringo Starr's the next week, walked Harrison back. He returned on three conditions: the live concert idea was dropped, Twickenham was abandoned, and they would record in their own basement studio at Apple's Savile Row offices.
The Apple basement was not a studio. It was raw space being fitted out by Magic Alex Mardas, a Greek-born Apple employee whose claims to electronics expertise had impressed Lennon. Mardas had promised the band a 72-track studio with self-cleaning consoles. What he had built was unusable. EMI sent George Martin and engineer Glyn Johns over with two four-track recorders from Abbey Road, and the sessions resumed in the basement on January 21st using temporary equipment hung from the ceiling on cables. The atmosphere immediately shifted. The basement was warm. The cameras were further away. Without the soundstage lighting and the 10 a.m. start, the band started playing.
On Wednesday, January 22nd, 1969, the American keyboardist Billy Preston walked into the Apple basement. Preston was 22, had played organ for Little Richard's road band, and Harrison had known him since The Beatles' Hamburg residencies in 1962. Harrison brought him in partly because Preston was a friend who happened to be in London playing with Ray Charles, and partly — by Lennon's later account — because the presence of an outsider forced the four Beatles to behave like professionals around him. Preston joined the rehearsals on Fender Rhodes electric piano and stayed for the rest of the sessions. McCartney later said Preston's contribution defused the personal tension more than any single Beatle did; "Get Back," when finally released as a single in April 1969, was credited "The Beatles with Billy Preston" — the only such co-credit in the band's history.
By the morning of Thursday, January 30th, after eight days of basement recordings, the question of how to end the project — the original concept had called for a live concert as the project's payoff — was unresolved. Proposals had ranged from chartering a cruise ship and playing in international waters, to a Tunisian amphitheater, to a London hospital. Lindsay-Hogg's preferred plan was the amphitheater. The Beatles, by all accounts, did not want to leave London. The compromise was the building they were already in. At lunchtime on the 30th, the four of them, with Preston, climbed to the roof of 3 Savile Row with their instruments. Lindsay-Hogg had cameras on the roof, on the rooftops opposite, and at street level catching pedestrian reactions. The set, in order, was: "Get Back" (twice, false start then full take), "Don't Let Me Down" (twice), "I've Got a Feeling," "One After 909," "Dig a Pony," and "Get Back" once more. The total running time was approximately 42 minutes.
The Metropolitan Police arrived after about 30 minutes of music, summoned by complaints from a wool merchant on Savile Row and an executive at the bank next door who said the band was disturbing his tenants. Two officers in helmets climbed the stairs and asked an Apple employee to switch off the amplifiers. Lindsay-Hogg's cameras filmed the conversation. The band finished "Get Back" with the police standing behind the cameras. Lennon delivered the "passed the audition" line, the equipment was unplugged, and the four men walked back down the stairs. They never played live in public again together.
The audio and film of the rooftop concert and the Twickenham and Savile Row rehearsals went into vaults. Glyn Johns assembled a *Get Back* album in early 1969, which the band rejected; he tried again in 1970, which they also rejected. Phil Spector, brought in by Lennon, took the master tapes in March 1970 and added orchestral and choral overdubs to "The Long and Winding Road" and "Across the Universe" — McCartney was furious about the changes and used them as one of his stated reasons for filing the dissolution lawsuit that ended the band. The Spector version was released as *Let It Be* in May 1970, alongside Lindsay-Hogg's 80-minute documentary film of the same name. The original *Get Back* concept disappeared until 2003, when McCartney commissioned a stripped-down remix album titled *Let It Be... Naked*. In November 2021, director Peter Jackson released *The Beatles: Get Back*, an eight-hour documentary built from the original sixty hours of Lindsay-Hogg's footage, restored and recut. The rooftop concert, one camera angle of which had been the climax of Lindsay-Hogg's 1970 film, was finally shown nearly complete and uncut, fifty-two years after the policemen had asked them to stop.
The Apple basement equipment that Glyn Johns and George Martin improvised in late January 1969 became, by accident, one of the most-bootlegged recording setups in rock history. Johns ran two Studer four-track recorders linked together, taped the inputs from a small portable mixer, and ran microphone cables loose across the basement floor. There was no isolation between instruments — the drums bled into the vocal mics, the bass leaked into the guitar amps. McCartney, who had wanted a no-overdubs live-sound record, got exactly that. The tapes captured the band laughing, arguing, lighting cigarettes, ordering tea, and improvising fragments that were never released — at one point Lennon and McCartney sang "Two of Us" through clenched teeth as a joke, and on another reel they ran through a fifteen-minute medley of 1950s rock-and-roll covers including Buddy Holly's "Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues" and Chuck Berry's "Maybellene." The Twickenham reels capture an extended argument about whether John Lennon's then-partner Yoko Ono should be in the recording space; she was present every day for the entire month, sitting on a folding chair beside Lennon's amp, and the argument never resolved.
The actual songs released as the *Let It Be* album in May 1970 were a chronologically scrambled subset of the month's work. The title track was first played by McCartney at Twickenham on January 3rd, the morning of the second day of rehearsals, on an upright piano. He had written it the previous autumn at his farm in Scotland, drawing on a dream in which his mother Mary, who had died of cancer in 1956 when he was 14, appeared and told him "let it be." Eight takes of the song were recorded across the month, two at Twickenham and six in the basement. The released master was a basement take from January 31st, the day after the rooftop concert. McCartney's vocal was overdubbed and double-tracked at Abbey Road in late April 1969 and again in early 1970 by Spector. "The Long and Winding Road," similarly, was recorded in a single basement take on January 31st with McCartney on piano and his original lead vocal — the version that ended up on the released album was that single take with the orchestral and choral overdubs that Spector added in March 1970 over McCartney's objections, a layering that McCartney's lawyers cited specifically in the December 1970 dissolution suit.
The rooftop, in the end, contained the project's only real concert. Five songs across the 42 minutes were performed by the four Beatles plus Billy Preston in front of an actual audience: the Apple staff and Lindsay-Hogg's crew on the roof itself, plus the office workers and pedestrians on Savile Row and the windows opposite who could hear the music but not see the band. Anonymous vox-pop street interviews from Lindsay-Hogg's footage, included in both the 1970 and the 2021 documentaries, ran the full range from "wonderful" to "this should be stopped immediately." A bowler-hatted businessman, captured on camera, remarked to Lindsay-Hogg's interviewer that he liked the music but wished the band would have applied for a permit. The Beatles never applied for a permit. They had simply walked up to their own roof on a Thursday lunchtime and played.