The Beatles’ last public performance is getting a new audience, this time inside the building where it happened.
Apple Corps will open 3 Savile Row as a museum in 2027. The London building housed the Beatles’ company, Apple Corps, and was the place where they recorded the album Let It Be. Visitors will be able to see a recreation of the basement recording studio where the band worked and go up to the rooftop where the Beatles played their surprise 1969 concert.
That rooftop show almost did not happen.
“George didn’t want to do it and Ringo started saying he didn’t really see the point,” Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who filmed the live show, tells BBC News’ Mark Savage.
Then, he said, John Lennon cursed and said, “‘Let’s go do it.’”
Tom Greene, the chief executive of Apple Corps, said fans will be able to go far beyond taking photos outside the building.
“Every single day fans are taking pictures of the outside of 3 Savile Row,but next year they can go in and explore all seven floors of the iconic building, including the rooftop where even the railings remain the same from that famous day in 1969,” he says in a statement.
The concert took place as the Beatles worked on songs for Let It Be amid growing creative and personal tensions in the group. They had a tight deadline to write new material ahead of their first live concert in several years.
As Ben Sisario reported for The New York Times in 2021, the “band’s journey in January 1969 began with intense pressure to put on a high-concept live show and ended with something wonderfully low-concept: an impromptu lunchtime performance on a London rooftop that reminded the world of the band’s majesty, spontaneity and wit.”
The Beatles played for about 40 minutes before noise complaints prompted police to shut down the performance.
Paul McCartney told BBC News he thinks the museum is “a terrific idea,” especially because it gives fans an official Beatles destination in London.
“Tourists come to England and they can go to Abbey Road, but they can’t go inside [and] it snares up the traffic and the drivers get really annoyed,” McCartney says.
Other Beatles museums exist in England, but they are not officially licensed.
Ringo Starr said in a statement that seeing the building again was “like coming home.”
Interest in the band has remained high since the Beatles broke up in 1970. Four new films, each focused on one band member, are in production.
In 2021, 3 Savile Row returned to the spotlight when Peter Jackson produced a three-part documentary about the weeks leading up to the rooftop concert. The films were created from more than 60 hours of unseen footage and nearly 120 hours of previously unheard audio recordings of the Beatles, and show the band recording “Get Back” and “Let It Be.”
The project was an “impossible fan dream” for Jackson, he told the Times.
“I wish I could go in a time machine and sit in the corner of the stage while they were working. Just for one day, just watch them, and I’ll be really quiet and sit there,” he said. “Well, guess what? The time machine’s here now.”
United Kingdom creative industries minister Ian Murray said in a statement, per the Times of London, that the museum will offer something similar.
“It’ll truly allow people to ‘come together’ and experience the band like never before at an iconic venue which holds so much history,” Murray says.
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