How McCartney saved Mal Evans from arrest after Beatles final concert

By editorial board on December 5, 2021

Diaries of band’s road manager, Mal Evans, revealing chaos at gig to feature in major biography. The police famously tried to shut down the Beatles’s rooftop concert on 30 January 1969.


Kenneth Womack, one of the world’s foremost Beatles scholars, told the Observer: “It turns out that Mal was actually arrested that day but managed to get out of it only when Paul went into PR mode and changed the copper’s mind after the show.”
Now a further backstage drama has emerged with the revelation that Paul McCartney afterwards used his charm to stop a police officer from arresting their road manager and confidant, Mal Evans. (Excerpt from TheGuardian)

It is among behind-the-scenes revelations in Evans’s previously unpublished diaries, manuscripts and photographs to which Womack has been given unprecedented access for a major biography.

The material reveals what really happened at the rooftop concert, which is the big climax of Peter Jackson’s new Get Back docuseries.

“The police demand that they turn down the sound or stop the concert. They tell Mal they intend to arrest the Beatles. At that point, Mal turns off George Harrison’s amplifier. Of course, George is very unhappy with that and barks at Mal. As Jackson’s Get Back documentary shows, the Beatles performed a brief, stilted version of Get Back, and then the concert was essentially over.”

Evans wrote in his diary: “I felt that this would have been a silly thing to let happen and, making an effort to keep the peace, I switched off the power, starting with George’s amplifier, just as they were about to break into a new number. Then George got a right cob on. I put the amp back on. They played that last number and finished.

He added: “On the way up to the roof, they arrested me, with one of the policemen putting me in his book. Paul, being the public relations man that he is, apologised to the police and got me off the hook.”

“Mal is showing them in their unguarded moments,” he said. “You have to be a genius to write A Day in the Life [considered one of the best Lennon-McCartney collaborations], but they’re real people. It’s a real story with highs and lows and fantastic moments of success and heartbreaking moments.”

Womack’s biography of Evans will be published in 2023, followed by a fully illustrated offering from the family’s archives in 2024.

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