Beatles on the Roof

January, 1969. Strains of guitar echo through the streets surrounding London’s Savile Row. Crowds gather at ground level and above, people climb onto roofs and postboxes to get an optimal view of the Beatle’s Apple Corps headquarters. For the first time in more than two years, The Beatles were playing live in public, debuting future hits like ‘Get Back’ and ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, it would be their last live performance as a band.Forensic in its close detail The Beatles On The Roof is Tony Barrell’s essential account of this history-making moment. Barrell’s narrative deftly situates the ‘Roof Concert’ in its context: outlining the firebrand politics of 1968 when peace erupted into global protest, to the collision of music promotion with cinéma-vérité and with it, a nascent form of reality TV.Most crucially, the book maps the reinventions and relationships between the Fab Four. It documents a group teetering on the edge of great change, oscillating between creative genius and destruction, animosity and hard-worn affection. Uncovering new truths and debunking old myths about the event, The Beatles on the Roof stands as the definitive book on a performance that changed music history forever.