According to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, the BBC did not report on the event that night, but several newspapers did report on it the next day, buried somewhere in the back pages. Among them were the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express. Some news reports were picked up by other newspapers around the country.

The Newcastle Journal's report was brief, only two sentences long:

"Police called on the Beatles yesterday after complaints of excessive noise when the group spent half-an-hour on the roof of their Apple Corps Ltd. offices, in Savile Row, London, recording five songs for a new L.P. and making a short film. The Beatles were allowed to continue their session."

The Daily Mirror report was more informative, and yes, they did report on "complaints and grumbles" over the noise the concert made. Here is the article in its entirety, published under the headline "Rooftop Beatles upset the neighbours":

"The Beatles put on a free lunchtime show yesterday. And, appropriately for young men at the top of their particular profession, they staged it on a rooftop. Unhappily, it didn't go down well with the neighbours.

"The roof they chose was the one over their Apple headquarters in Savile-row, London, a thoroughfare where music is not generally regarded as one of the more fashionable occupations.

"Indeed, the famous foursome had hardly sent the first amplified bars echoing down the street before the verdicts were being reached.

"At the woollen merchants next door to Apple, director Stanley Davis said quite bluntly: 'I want this noise stopped. You can't use a telephone, dictate a letter or have your window open.'

"Ringo's drums rolled. Paul McCartney's voice boomed: 'Don't let me down . . .' But Mr. Stephen King, chief account at the Royal Bank of Scotland—right opposite—was not a bit impressed.

"He said: 'I am furious. We were trying to talk to our customers but couldn't hear them. I telephoned the police but apparently they are powerless to do anything.'

"Four policemen did arrive at the Apple building and two of them went in. But the 40-minute session continued, drawing crowds to the street and on to adjoining rooftops.

"An Apple spokesman said later that the Beatles played 'four or five numbers for a film they are making.'

"Now the neighbours are hoping to find a way to ensure that there will be no repeat performance."

While the article is paywalled, the Daily Express ran an article (on page 9 of the 31 Jan 1969 edition) under the headline "Hitting the Roof Over the Beatles". Presumably, the angle of the article was also over the noise complaints.

This was not unintended, but by design. According to the book You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup by Peter Doggett:

"...the police intervened to stop the noise, as everyone had secretly been hoping. 'The Beatles,' [Let It Be film director Michael] Lindsay-Hogg reckoned, 'kind of wanted to go to jail. You know, "Police bust the Beatles", that sort of thing. They were very contentious....The next day there wasn't much talk about [the live show]...other than it had been fun, there was newspaper coverage, and it was better down in the studio because it wasn't as cold as it was on the roof.'"

The technicians who set up the equipment that morning concurred. According to the book The Beatles on the Roof by Tony Barrell:

"[Audio technicians] Dave [Harries] and Keith [Slaughter] unloaded the gear, including several speakers, hauled everything to the roof and began setting it up with the help of Alan Parsons. 'The speakers were on stands and could be swivelled downwards,' says Dave, 'and we positioned them at the front of the roof, facing the street, and we had as many power amps as we could get. We were trying to make it as noisy as possible.'"

In a 2009 interview with the BBC, Dave Harries added a bit more:

"'[We riggged the equipment s]o we could make as much noise as possible,' he reminisced. 'So that it might stop the traffic and stop all the people, and The Beatles could be heard down in the street, we had to get some big speakers from EMI which we took there at about four o’clock on a freezing January morning.'"

In The Beatles Anthology book and TV series, drummer Ringo Starr lamented that the police weren't more reactive:

"I always feel let down about the police. Someone in the neighbourhood called the police, and when they came up I was playing away and I thought, 'Oh great! I hope they drag me off.' I wanted the cops to drag me off — 'Get off those drums!' —because we were being filmed and it would have looked really great, kicking the cymbals and everything. Well, they didn't, of course; they just came bumbling in: 'You've got to turn that sound down.' It could have been fabulous."

The reason for the lack of reaction by the police? Some of them were fans. Officer Ken Wharfe recalled : "We openly encouraged it [the concert] to continue."

Officer Ray Shayler concurred: "‘I wouldn’t say I was a fan...but we had a few Beatles records and LPs at home; I liked their music. But when I got on the roof, I had a job to do and I thought, “Well, we’ve got to try and stop this.”'" Once up there, he asked Beatles' road manager Mal Evans how much longer it would be. When Evans said they had one more song to play, Shayler let them do so before putting an end to it.

Interestingly, despite the police being located just down the block (at 27 Savile Row, while the performance was on the roof of 3 Savile Row), Wharfe recalled to author Barrell that it wasn't the concert itself that attracted his attention. It was the traffic jam it caused outside:

"'I picked up the phone and recognised the sergeant’s voice, and he asked me if I could hear all the noise. I couldn’t – all I could hear was traffic – but he asked me to get my colleague at Shaftesbury Avenue and go and sort it out.'

"Ken and his colleague walked up Regent Street. 'There was this wave of girls coming out of various streets, running towards Savile Row. I soon realised what it was, because it was just a fantastic sound, ricocheting around the buildings. It was unmistakably the sound of The Beatles, and we knew that The Beatles were based in Savile Row, but I didn’t imagine at that point that they’d be playing on the roof. By the time we got round there, there were quite a few people in the street, and there was almost a party atmosphere.'"

Watching the Let It Be film, and listening to the leaked audio from the camera crew's equipment, though, at the street-level, the performance wasn't very clear. The interviewer in the film has to tell several of the passers-by that it's the Beatles who are performing. One exchange recorded for the film goes like this:

INTERVIEWER: "Do you know what you’re listening to at the moment here?"

WOMAN: "No, I don’t, really."

INTERVIEWER: "You don’t know?"

WOMAN: "No. Is it the Beatles?"

INTERVIEWER: "It's the Beatles, yes."

Chris O'Dell, a staffer at the Beatles' company Apple who was there that day, concurred that only in the very immediate area could the sound be heard. According to Barrell's book:

"In the days leading up to the performance, Chris O’Dell had had a fantastic vision of the impending event. She imagined that The Beatles would blast their music out across the whole of London. The sound would flood out into the West End and then spread north, south, east and west, reaching the ears of thousands upon thousands of people. In reality, the music could be heard clearly within a localised area, quickly losing its clarity and volume beyond that. Word had spread around parts of Mayfair and Soho that it was The Beatles making all the racket...."

The reporter and photographer for the Daily Express recounted much the same thing to Barrell, that it was the traffic and congregating fans that caused most of the commotion, while the performance itself was barely audible:

"Tipped off in Fleet Street that something unusual was happening in Savile Row, the Daily Express dispatched a reporter and a photographer – Tom Brown and Mike Stroud, respectively – to find out exactly what. They hailed a taxi, but the journey became frustratingly slow and, finding themselves in motionless traffic in Regent Street, they hopped out of the cab and ran as fast as possible towards the noise they heard....They arrived at the south end of Savile Row to see throngs of people staring up at the roof of No. 3 as the music continued. Tom knocked on Apple’s front door, but when they were refused admittance they decided to gain access to one of the buildings on the opposite side of the road, where they asked permission, went up in a lift and emerged on another roof, which gave them a fine view.

"Tom later described the experience: 'We knew right away who it was – it couldn’t have been anyone else. The whole place was littered with cables, microphones and amps. There were sound engineers, hangers-on and quite a few girls, including The Beatles’ wives and girlfriends. There was not much musical appreciation, because the sound was just being carried away on the wind. The other thing, of course, is we now know that those were new songs that no one had heard before. So they were in no way recognisable. But you could certainly tell it was The Beatles....[I]t was a big thing to actually see them all together and performing....”

(continued...)