The Beatles’ and the Stones’ dirty secrets by the woman who kept them all

Look closely at the footage of The Beatles’ swansong performance on the roof of Apple HQ on January 30, 1969, and you’ll notice a shock of blonde hair nodding with alacrity as they launch into Get Back. Chris O’Dell, to whom the hair belonged (and belongs) to, says it wasn’t just the thrill of this epoch-ending moment she was responding to: “It was freezing cold up there. There was a keen wind blowing and you had to keep moving or numbness would have started to set in. That,” she concludes with a chortle, “is my abiding memory of that day.”

It’s just one of many memories that O’Dell has lately been sharing with the wider world. In 2009, her memoir, Miss O’Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved, detailed her adventures and misadventures as PA, tour manager, and all-round ego-massager to rock’s golden gods, from the late 60s through to the early 80s. The New York Times described her as “Nick Carraway to rock’s egotistical Gatsby”, while she earned comparisons to Forrest Gump and Leonard Zelig for her propensity to pop up in the frame as history was being wrought.

She’s one of the voices in Hey Jude’s interminable chorus; she’s the “mystery woman” embracing Keith Richards on the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street; she was sitting in a private jet with John and Yoko when it went into a nosedive and they started chanting Hare Krishnas with more than their usual fervour (not even smoking “some very good hashish” beforehand zonked them out sufficiently to mellow out the peril).

Ask me anything

Explore related questions

> Culture