(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 19 September 2025 17:00, UK
“I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition.” That’s what John Lennon said as The Beatles finally surrendered to the swarming police and pulled the plug on their rooftop concert – the final time the band would ever play live, and the first time they had in years.
At the time, it was just a witty little joke from the world’s most famous band. But in the years that followed, with their split and fall out, and with the legacy they’d hold, it begins to feel poetic, if you’ll allow me the indulgence of an overanalysis.
The image of the rooftop concert alone is poetic. As the band were crafting Let It Be, the whole point was to make an album quickly and do a gig. By that point, in 1969, they hadn’t performed live in 1966. They’d completely splintered off from the role of a rock band, abandoning the typical cycle of making an album, then touring an album, then making an album and touring an album. Instead, they’d hidden themselves away in the studio to make things differently and get more experimental.
But on Let It Be, they were trying to do the opposite. The aim was to keep things simple and return to good old fashioned rock and roll. That could be shrugged off as a mere musical decision, but let’s over analyse that too.
At this point, The Beatles were crumbling. During the making of the record, George Harrison stormed out and quit one day, John Lennon’s fading interest was clear, Ringo Starr was getting increasingly frustrated with the tension and Paul McCartney seemed to be battling to hold it together. The members were all pulling in opposite directions and as they’d agreed to make this final record, they needed to find a way to make it work.
The way they chose to do that was by regressing. The album sees them returning to their roots, caught in the Get Back documentary as they’re even busy messing around playing old tracks they’d cover when they were the Quarrymen. In the footage, you can watch them try and return to simply being teenage boys having fun again, reviving songs they wrote way back then, like ‘One After 909’ or ‘Maggie Mae’.
Now put it all together. The nerves of performing live after three years away from the public. The purposeful regression to a young version of themselves. A reunion with the band they used to be. Suddenly, the rooftop concert seems to transform too, into something like their EMI audition with four anxious boys playing simple rock and roll.
“I hope we’ve passed the audition,” Lennon jokes but while there was a sense of them desperately trying to revive or restart the band, trying to put water under the bridge and start over even just to make this one final record, that closing remark from the artist feels apt. The occasion did feel like an audition, or at least, only proves that for that period, the band were back to being boys again, even if they couldn’t stay that way.
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