The Beatles are celebrating the anniversary of their performance on the roof of their Apple Corps headquarters in London, with a slate of special releases. For the first time, the complete audio for the band’s legendary rooftop concert has been mixed in stereo and Dolby Atmos. The music was shared on streaming services on January 28, 2022. Listen to many of the performances below.
A special one-day exhibition, exclusively in participating IMAX theaters, of The Beatles: Get Back–The Rooftop Concert, will be shown on screens on January 30, the anniversary of the 1969 performance. The 60-minute feature will be presented with a Q-and-A with filmmaker Peter Jackson, and exclusive mini-posters. Tickets are available here.
“I’m thrilled that the rooftop concert from ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ is going to be experienced in IMAX, on that huge screen,” said Jackson in the Jan. 5 announcement. “It’s The Beatles’ last concert, and it’s the absolute perfect way to see and hear it.”
A global theatrical engagement of the hour-long feature will then run on February 11-13.
Watch a teaser clip
On Jan. 27, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame announced a groundbreaking featured exhibit, The Beatles: Get Back to Let It Be, set to open on March 18, 2022 and run through March 2023. An immersive complement to Jackson’s “Get Back” docuseries, “the multimedia exhibit will welcome fans to step into The Beatles’ January 1969 rehearsals, sessions, and witness the band’s final rooftop performance, surrounded by large-scale projections and superior sound. The scene is thrillingly set with original instruments, clothing, handwritten lyrics, and other unique items, including several on loan directly from Beatles principals.”
Listen to the first number, “Get Back” (Take 1)
Listen to “One After 909” from the rooftop concert
The band previously announced that Jackson’s complete eight-hour docu-series, which has been streaming on Disney+ since late November, will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on Feb. 8.
The Beatles’ rooftop concert was the culmination of the work that the band did throughout January 1969. And at 3 Savile Row in London, they performed what will turn out to be their final public concert. They could easily have filled any stadium—any space at all, really—in the world, but there they are, the four of them in the flesh, playing for free for the benefit of anyone in the neighborhood who cares to stop and listen.
Watch a portion of “I’ve Got a Feeling,” up on the roof
Listen to “I’ve Got a Feeling” (Take 2)
Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg rolled film. With the cold wind blowing and a handful of spectators (including Yoko Ono) gathered, the four musicians, along with Billy Preston, dressed for the weather, took to their instruments, facing the front of the building, and began to play.
Watch them perform “Don’t Let Me Down” on the rooftop
Watch a portion of their performance of “Get Back” from the roof
Related: The Beatles final gig… Up on the roof
Listen to the final number, “Get Back” (Take 3)
3 Comments so far
Jump into a conversationell, I was hoping they would release a DVD/Blu-Ray package. But I was also hoping for an expanded version, possibly including some additional footage and/or audio recordings as part of it. Based on this review, it appears to be just a re-pop of the Disney+ show. Oh well, one can dream…..:)
I would love a cd of the concert even though they only played a handful of songs. It was probably as long of a concert as the one from the Hollywood Bowl but you can actually hear them play!
For all the BS that went on in rehearsals and getting ready for this event, the performance is pretty thrilling, just as it was when their voices would come together on a song in the rehearsal studio, when you couldn’t imagine how they were ever going to get there at the rate they were going. I realize that this was all about what would become the “Let It Be” album, but t’s a shame that they didn’t see fit to throw a couple of songs from their back catalogue into the rooftop performance, as there’s so many that they never had the opportunity to ever perform live, and as Jaws said, when they did perform songs way back when, you could never hear them anyway, and neither could they. It would have been fun, and an extra thrill for all of us fans, taking away nothing from the new material.