The BBC’s “Top of the Pops” was the viewing destination for British rock fans in the mid-1960s. The Beatles appeared frequently, but only in pre-recorded performances and film clips. That changed on June 16, 1966, when the band appeared live and covered “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.” Apart from a June 1967 guest performance of “All You Need Is Love” as part of the international Our World event, it was the Beatles’ last live television appearance.
«The mania made it quite difficult to move. And for convenience we decided that we were not going to go to the television studios to promote our albums so much, because it was too complicated. We thought about making our own little movies and putting them on television,” George Harrison explained in Anthology.
The idea, Harrison continued, was that the group could use the clips in both the United States and the United Kingdom to push their new songs. “We thought, ‘We can’t go everywhere. We will stop touring and send these films to promote the album. “It was too much trouble to go and fight our way through all the hordes of screaming people to play the last single.”
Even though the Beatles were recording “Revolver,” Top of the Pops creator Johnnie Stewart convinced manager Brian Epstein to have the band appear in person. “On Monday, ‘Top of the Pops’ producer Johnnie Stewart wrote me a letter saying that, although he had scheduled a clip from a Beatles film, there was unprecedented demand for them to appear live on the show. Would they reconsider his decision not to do it? “I told the boys on Tuesday night and they said yes,” Epstein said in an NME article titled “The Beatles in the 11th Hour Yes to Live ‘Top Pops’ TV.”
Between rehearsals, publicity photos and the performance, the Beatles spent almost six hours in the BBC’s Studio 2 in Shepherd’s Bush. But, despite the importance of the event to the show’s producers and fans, no video of the performance exists. In 2003, the BBC admitted that thousands of 1960s performances of Top of the Pops had been missed. Including the Beatles’ only live appearance.
«We have one of the largest sound and film archives in the world. But yeah, some of it is not all there. There are several reasons, but in the 60s, tapes were also expensive and bulky to store. And programs were often simply copied, while only extracts or fragments of the programs were retained,” a BBC Archives spokeswoman told The Herald. And a piece of popular music history simply disappeared.
