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THE BOBBY WHO UNPLUGGED THE BE ATLES
As new documentary series Get Back is released, the copper tasked with shutting down the famous 1969 rooftop concert tells his tale
As PC673 ‘C’ of London’s West End Central police station, Ray Shayler was a 25-year-old constable when the call came in around lunchtime that there was a disturbance up the road at 3 Savile Row.
The police station was located just 150 yards away and, as everyone knew, number 3 was Apple Corps, the headquarters of The Beatles. Sitting at his desk, writing up a report, Ray could clearly hear music emanating from the building’s rooftop. ‘And I thought to myself, that’s loud,’ he says. The call to attend came through to a young colleague fresh out of training school so Ray offered to help.
‘He looked a bit worried about it and, to be fair, a young lad on his own with not much experience would have had rings run around him by those sorts of people,’ says Ray. ‘So because I’d been at the job for three years and had more experience, I offered to go with him.’
Little did Ray know that the seemingly innocuous police call-out on 30 January, 1969, was to shadow him for the rest of his life. The disturbance in question was the now legendary Beatles rooftop concert – the last time that John Lennon, Paul Mccartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were to perform in public together after a staggeringly successful career. And Ray Shayler was one of the two officers with the unenviable task of shutting it down.
The entire 42-minute performance, complete with constabulary intervention, features in The Beatles: Get Back – this week’s highly anticipated three-part documentary series, directed and produced by Sir Peter Jackson, who made The Lord Of The Rings films. It covers the making of The Beatles’ 1970 album, Let It Be, and draws from the 60 hours of footage shot by British-american director Michael Lindsay-hogg, for the 1970 documentary of the same name.
For decades, fans tended to avoid the film, as it depicted the tensions between four men who had tasted unimaginable fame and went on to split in April 1970. But with Peter Jackson’s forthcoming Disney+ ‘documentary about a documentary’, viewers are in for a more upbeat take on the relationship between the Fab Four. ‘We were having fun, which never showed,’ said Ringo recently.
Certainly, the band was having fun performing on the roof that January afternoon – the first time they had performed together in three years since their emotionally draining 1966 US tour.
The original plan had been to film
The Beatles working on new material and then to show them performing it live. But when more elaborate plans for the proposed concert were shelved (the suggestion of performing on a cruise ship to Libya was shut down by Ringo and George, who had no intention of ‘being stuck with a bloody big boatload of people for two weeks’), Michael Lindsay-hogg came up with the idea of them setting up their gear on the roof of the Apple building instead.
It was an inspired idea, except that, as soon as The Beatles started playing, traffic in and around Savile Row came to a standstill. As PC Ray Shayler and his fellow officer walked down the street, they could see scores of people gathering to listen to the music and although the biggest band in the world was giving an unannounced live performance, the
station had received a number of complaints from the other businesses on Savile Row, among them the tailors of Wain, Shiell & Son, according to author Tony Barrell’s book on the concert, The Beatles On The Roof.
Initially, says Ray, the people at Apple refused access to the two policemen. ‘But once I’d explained we’d had a lot of complaints from the other businesses on the street, they let us in.’ Once inside, Ray spoke to the band’s road manager, Mal Evans, who took them up to the rooftop. ‘And there were The Beatles,’ says Ray, ‘performing on the roof.’
On that bitterly cold day – John donned girlfriend Yoko Ono’s fur coat, while Ringo had on wife Maureen’s red mac – it was, admits Ray, ‘an interesting moment’, seeing The Beatles singing live. ‘I wouldn’t say I was a fan – I didn’t like The Beatles much when they went a bit Hare Krishna,’ he adds, ‘but we had a few Beatles records and LPS at home; I liked their music. But when I got on the roof, I had a job to do and I thought, “Well, we’ve got to try and stop this.”’
The Beatles – whose set included Get Back, Don’t Let Me Down, One After 909 and Dig A Pony – ‘sort of looked at us’, says Ray, ‘and carried on with what they were doing. I told Mal that, much as I appreciated what they were doing, it couldn’t happen any more as it was amounting to a breach of the peace. I asked how long it was going on for. He said, “One more record”, so I said, “You might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. Get on with that one and then it stops.” It was a discussion; it never got heated.’
Ray and his colleague were joined by the station’s two duty officers and several more were outside the building to control the crowds – among them a young policeman, Ken