Source: The Conversation – UK – By Holly Tessler, Senior Lecturer, Music Industries; Programme Leader, MA Beatles, Heritage and Culture, University of Liverpool
The Cavern Club in Liverpool, the nightclub birthplace of the Beatles, promotes itself as “the place where it all began”. On May 11, Apple, the Beatles’ management company, announced its re-acquisition of 3 Savile Row, London, the building they might usefully conceive of as “the place where it all ended”.
In the Beatleverse, 3 Savile Row is perhaps most associated with the Beatles’ iconic yet bittersweet rooftop performance. Iconic because this improvised concert was first captured for posterity in their 1970 film (and album) Let It Be. It was then digitally zhuzhed up for Peter Jackson’s epic retelling, Get Back, in 2021. Bittersweet because that performance on a chilly January day in 1969 was the last time the world ever saw the magic of John, Paul, George and Ringo gigging together. Or in the words of the promotional trailer for Let It Be: “rehearsing, recording, rapping, relaxing, philosophising … creating.”
The Savile Row building was the Beatles’ third London office. They moved there after outgrowing 94 Baker Street, which had previously housed the Apple Boutique in 1967, and following a short-lived stay at 95 Wigmore Street in early 1968.
Purchased for a snip at £500,000 in June of that year, 3 Savile Row became general HQ for all things Beatles. It had a recording studio in the basement, offices for each of the Fab Four and, of course, an impromptu gig space on the roof. Beatles fans, immortalised in George Harrison’s song Apple Scruffs (1970), would gather round the front entrance, hoping for a glimpse, a quick chat or a hug from their favourite Beatle. Yet few would ever have the opportunity to cross that elusive threshold. Until now.
Apple’s new venture heralds seven floors of unseen material from Apple Corps extensive archives, rotating exhibitions, a fan store and the recreation of the original studio where Let it Be was recorded.
It will also give fans the opportunity to tread in the band’s footsteps as they relive the iconic rooftop concert on exactly the spot where it happened. In other words, it promises the rarest of Beatles finds: a genuinely new experience.
The Fab Four in the flesh
As we are so accustomed to seeing in Liverpool, Beatles fans the world over demonstrate a ceaseless fascination with the band’s origin story. In part, this is because no book, film or theatrical production can so tangibly communicate the extraordinary ordinariness of the Beatles’ lives as being there can do: seeing for yourself the sheer magnitude of the improbability of four young Liverpudlians’ journey from two up-two down terraced houses in south Liverpool to the 20th century’s most successful pop group.
In the same way as standing in the front room of the McCartney family home in Forthlin Road, at the gates of Strawberry Field or in the middle of the roundabout in Penny Lane, there is little doubt that clambering onto the roof of 3 Savile Row, gazing across the London skyline and standing in the very steps of John, Paul, George and Ringo will foster in Beatles people a kind of indescribable wonder: making the imagined real and the real imagined.
With the re-acquisition of 3 Savile Road back into the Beatles’ property portfolio, Apple has made a genius move. The museum will connect the flesh and blood, bricks and mortar world of the 1960s Beatles to the social media and big screen worlds of the post-60s Beatles. And theirs is undeniably a big story to tell. It took Peter Jackson nearly eight hours of documentary time. Sam Mendes requires four feature-length films. And coming soon to a rooftop near you: the chance to experience all the Beatle magic for yourself.
Holly Tessler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. Beatles museum to open on seven-storey site (and rooftop) of band’s last gig – https://theconversation.com/beatles-museum-to-open-on-seven-storey-site-and-rooftop-of-bands-last-gig-282756