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torahboy

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    The Beatles

    in GF - General Forum

    Posted

    On 14/12/2021 at 03:44, Sugar Ape said:

    He did an interview in The Times the other day. 
     

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ray-dagg-i-was-the-19-year-old-police-officer-who-silenced-the-beatles-mmxl9f2s7
     

    Ray Dagg: I was the 19-year-old police officer who silenced the Beatles. 

     

    Ray Dagg is not a name associated with iconic cultural moments, but it ought to be. As a Metropolitan police constable he ended the Beatles’ final live performance, on a London roof.

     

    Now he is the unlikely star of a new wave of Beatlemania, powered by the release of a documentary of the band working on Let It Be, their last studio album to be released.

     

    Dagg’s walk-on role on the roof at 3 Savile Row, as a polite but exasperated 19-year-old police officer trying to restore tranquillity to a London street known more for its tailoring than its tunes, has turned him into a cult figure. He has been inundated with friend requests on Facebook, interviewers from Brazil want to speak to him and an American Reddit member painted him in watercolour.

     

    “It was just work, and it’s blown up into all this,” Dagg, 72, said. “It’s ridiculous, I just don’t understand it.”

     

    Speaking publicly for the first time since the concert on January 30, 1969, Dagg said that he had no regrets at being responsible for shutting down the Beatles’ last gig but admitted that his threats to arrest the band and their manager for playing music too loudly was a “bluff”.

     

    The gig was the Beatles’ first public performance since August 1966 in San Francisco — at the tail end of Beatlemania, when fans could see their heroes but not hear them over the screaming.

     

    The band played songs from their as-yet-unreleased record including Get Back, I’ve Got A Feeling, One After 909 and Dig A Pony. It is broadcast for the first time in full for 40 minutes at the end of Get Back, Peter Jackson’s eight-hour Disney+ documentary series, which is based on more than 60 hours of footage recorded by Michael Lindsay-Hogg for his 1970 documentary, Let It Be.

     

    Responding to complaints from neighbours about the noise, Dagg convinced the Beatles’ road manager, Mal Evans, to stop the gig. How does it feel to be known as the man who forced the Beatles to pull the plug for the last time?

     

    “Well, at that time, I didn’t know that they would never play together again,” he said. “At least there’s something on a film somewhere that will for ever show that PC Ray Dagg shut down the Beatles.

     

    “If that’s my lasting image of life, if that’s what people remember me for, that’s not bad. Thousands, millions of people don’t get remembered at all.”

     

    After clocking on at West End Central police station in Savile Row at lunchtime, Dagg was sent to stop the gig that had caused gridlock in the West End. He entered the building, headquarters of the Beatles’ Apple record label, with a colleague, PC Ray Shayler.

     

    Lindsay-Hogg’s team hid a camera behind a two-way mirror in the lobby of the building to film the consequences of the disturbance but Dagg insisted that he was not fooled by the ruse — especially when he saw a microphone hidden in a flowerpot. “I thought there’s something going on here,” he said. “I said to Shayler that we had both better be on our best behaviour because we’re being filmed.”

     

    The police constables were stalled by Apple staff as the band continued to play and it took almost ten minutes for Evans to meet the officers in the lobby. Dagg said that the noise was causing a breach of the peace.

     

    “I’m not going to be difficult about this,” he told Evans. “All right, so you’ve got to record but this isn’t necessary is it? We’ve had 30 complaints at West End Central within minutes. It’s got to go down, otherwise there will be some arrests. I’m not threatening you, I’m telling you what’s going to happen.”
     

    Dagg now says that while the “phone was going bonkers” at the station, “I don’t know where I got 30 from. I probably made it up.”

     

    Evans returned ten minutes later and took the officers to the roof. Paul McCartney, 26 at the time, turned around, saw the constables behind him and whooped as he broke into a gleeful grin.

     

    Dagg had an animated discussion with the band manager that is inaudible over the sound of the band. However, he revealed that out of microphone range he was more forthright after being messed about for half an hour.

     

    The PC threatened to have Evans and the band arrested for highway obstruction and obstructing a police officer executing his duties. It appeared to have the desired effect: Evans unplugged George Harrison’s guitar amplifier during Get Back and the gig ended.

     

    Dagg admitted that his threats to cart the world’s most famous band to jail were a “bluff”.

     

    “Obstruction of police in the execution of their duty and highway obstruction are powers of arrest by the police but they are not applicable on private premises,” he said. “The gamble was that they didn’t know that. Probably because I was so young and stupid I was running a bluff on it.” He did not recall speaking to any members of the band, but said: “It was 52 years ago.”

     

    Though his life was back to “normal” the next day, Dagg had to revisit the incident about eight months later, when his commander told him that they had to go and watch a preview of Let It Be, as the makers had asked for the force’s permission to retain the shots of Dagg. 
     

    His commander told him that was pleased with how the officer conducted himself — and that the film-makers wanted to pay him £3,000, about double his annual salary at the time. However, Dagg was told that he could not accept the cash as a serving police officer, and that it would go to a police widows and orphans fund.

     

    “If I knew now what I knew then I’d have resigned, taken the money and rejoined the police,” Dagg said.

     

    After the film’s release, some cinemagoers in Dagg’s West End patch recognised him and asked for autographs, while some of his colleagues gave him “a load of stick in the canteen” and nicknamed him “superstar”. The attention soon died down and only resumed when Get Back was released last month.

     

    Dagg’s father, also Ray, was a Metropolitan Police officer who was the first in Britain to use mechanical photofits to help identify criminals; his mother, Daphne, was a fashion model who died last year at the age of 97. He was born in Chelsea, and after leaving Emanuel grammar school in Battersea, southwest London, aged 16, decided to follow his father into the force.

     

    He got a plum posting to West End Central, which is now defunct, after joining a police cricket team as a left-arm fast bowler and befriending the inspector who decided placements. “Everybody wanted to go to Mayfair and Soho, it was really glamorous in those days,” Dagg said.

     

    Dagg, who has never owned a Beatles record and preferred Simon and Garfunkel, left the Met about six years after the rooftop concert and joined the sauce maker HP to pursue a career in sales. He went on to work at the telecoms giant Marconi and the home appliance producer Morphy Richards. Dagg never had children and lives in rural Warwickshire with his second wife, Linda, 60, who works at Canon, the Japanese technology company.

     

    If they had not stopped playing when they did, would Dagg have arrested the Beatles? “I think now, at 72 years of age, I can say I wouldn’t. At 19, I was pretty gung-ho and I think I probably might have, and taken the flak afterwards for wrongful arrest,” Dagg said. “But it would have stopped it, that’s the main thing. I’d have been praised for stopping it but then bollocked for using the wrong powers of arrest.”
     

     

    F4A885C4-C2FF-49B9-8723-E4F1CB30D03C.jpeg

    This Dagg guy and his buddy were pure Steve Bell caricatures. Yet the most typically aggressive looking policeman was the sergeant who turned up. With a face like thunder, he looked like he would be the most officious and arrogant of the trio. As it turned out he was a perfect gentleman - polite and pleasant with the Apple staff, asking permission to move through the building without even a hint of irritation. The difference between knowing what your job is and actually knowing how to do it. Probably a wife beater at home, though.

    The Beatles

    in GF - General Forum

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Barrington Womble said:

    Yeah, even all that made me laugh. And you've got the Beatles looking like they do, giving us an idea of what 1969 looked like (I was born in 70), but the reality of that part of the world made it look like half the world dresses like Mr Mainwaring! It was just all brilliant. Lindsey Hogg gets some shit, but what he filmed gave us this amazing 8 hours that wasn't just watching them play and write music. The camera positions for the rooftop (including the hidden one) and the flower pot secret mic are genuine highlights of the whole thing. 

    Spot on about Lndsey Hogg: made a really exhaustive, well shot document, but was just a shit editor. He'd captured a pulsating, insightful and mostly joyous process and, incredibly, reduced it to the sombre, practically lifeless experience that was 'Let It Be'. Yet he should be credited with catching the images and we should thank him for that.

    Someone's having a real laugh - sperm of gollum to Utd.

    in FF - Football Forum

    Posted

    4 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

    The thing is Woodward hasn't been measured by the trophies. He's been measured by commercial success and he's achieved that while things have gone wrong on the pitch and they've spent time out of the CL. We're happy with Woodward, but so are the glazers. I can't imagine the new CEO will be measured in any other way either. 

     

    I find it interesting though that Woodward clearly had no appetite to sack OGS. I assume that's because the glazers don't want him appointing anyone else and give the responsibility to the new guy. Which is why I assume they say they're looking for an interim manager, not a permanent one. 

     

     

     

     

    Sam-Allardyce-640x400.jpg

    That is the creepiest yet most hilarious image of the Chippy's Champ I've seen.

    Car bomb at the women’s hospital

    in GF - General Forum

    Posted

    20 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

     I don't even know what's going on in that video 

    Where is the mosque in Kenny?

    The dumb, inbred twats will now have to condemn the Chrstian places of worship as dens of radical teaching, grooming gangs and un-English idolatry - which wouldn't be far from the truth.

    Other Football 2021/22

    in FF - Football Forum

    Posted

    6 minutes ago, Scott_M said:

    “Death by a thousand passes”.

     

    Great metaphor. 
     

    If we took them to the guillotine, City definitely let them bleed out with a thousand paper cuts. 

    We murdered United - City were just shagging the corpse.

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