The Abbey Road Sessions
Having just celebrated its 75th anniversary, Abbey Road is the world’s oldest — and most famous — recording studio. And while it never closes, it’s rarely open to the public. So let us take you inside.
By Jack Boulware • Photographs by Anna Schori
Studio One at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios is reminiscent of an enormous airplane hangar. My first thought as I step inside is of the old TV broadcast of the Beatles in this room, singing “All You Need Is Love.” In this same space, composer Sir Edward Elgar christened the studio’s opening in 1931 by conducting an orchestral version of “Pomp and Circumstance.”
Standing in the room is a moment to be savored, as you think of all that it has seen and heard over the years — from Elgar, with his tuxedo and mustache, conducting the melody played at every graduation ceremony, to a roomful of hippies in paisley singing about love. Or, more recently, Kanye West, Iron Maiden, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and soundtrack recordings for the Star Wars and Harry Potter films. If these walls could talk, the stories they would tell.
This is the world’s most famous recording studio, and it sits tucked away in a nondescript mansion in north London’s posh St. John’s Wood neighborhood. Most everyone recognizes the name through the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road, which has the iconic cover photo of the band strolling across the road’s crosswalk.
Beatles trivia runs deep here. Geeks already know that the album was renamed Abbey Road at the last minute (the original title was Everest), that the photo shoot took just 10 minutes, and that Paul McCartney was supposed to be dead because he was depicted in bare feet (that’s only one of many “clues” on the cover). If a fan makes the pilgrimage to the studio, it’s pretty much required that he or she scrawl some Beatles lyrics on the wall in front of the building.
In the Abbey Road timeline, though, Beatles mythology makes up only a small portion. It has a long tradition of recording all types of music, comedy, and theater. The original name, EMI Studios, was officially changed to Abbey Road only after the Beatles’ album became so popular.
The facility remains open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It doesn’t need to advertise, and it’s not open to the public. Just a few months ago, the studio celebrated 75 years of business. This month, the Sundance Channel is debuting a new music television show, Live from Abbey Road, taped on the premises. And because of this upcoming show, David Holley, the studio’s managing director, and Michael Gleason, the show’s producer, have graciously agreed to give me a short tour, a rarity for the studio.
The list of artists who’ve recorded at Abbey Road includes everyone from Glenn Miller and Noel Coward to Shirley Bassey, Peter Sellers, Beyond the Fringe, the Buzzcocks, the Spice Girls, and Radiohead. As with any old nightclub or theater stage, ghosts hang in the air, invisible to the eye but soaked into the structure itself.
I mention to Holley that I’d heard that U2 had recently recorded here. “It’s a policy of the studio going back 75 years that we never tell people who’s here,” he answers with a smile. “Because you end up with funny people standing outside trying to get in. We’re doing four films [right now] — no rock and roll today.”
There is a rumor, however, that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin are in fact here, in another studio, behind the red light. They could just be sipping tea and flipping through magazines, but it doesn’t matter. I’m in the same building with the band I used to play air guitar to in high school.
Holley opens a door and shows me Studio One’s futuristic, glass-walled control room, bristling with knobs and switches and lights — and the staple of every studio, a black leather sofa. This is where engineers mix sound for, say, the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings.
Gleason points over to a beat-up Steinway upright piano and gestures for Holley to show it to me.
“Oh, yes,” exclaims Holley. “This is the piano that ‘Lady Madonna’ was played on.”
I run my fingers over the keys, knowing full well that for hard-core Beatles fans, this moment would be a fantasy come true. The wear and tear from decades of studio recording is evident; the ivories look as if an animal has scratched them to pieces.
“It was [also] used on the U2 sessions,” Holley concedes.
Holley begins to break down the various elements of the complex for me. Because the industry makes fewer classical records these days, Studio One has been repurposed for recording and mixing film soundtracks. Studio Two, where Zeppelin is supposedly hiding today, is the most requested room by rock bands, and it’s where the Beatles made nearly all their records. Studio Three, slightly smaller and the birthplace of most of Pink Floyd’s albums, is also occupied at the moment. The Penthouse Studio was built in 1980 and utilized by punk/new-wave bands like the Buzzcocks and the Cure. It’s now primarily used for digital mixing in films.
Another 17 rooms are dedicated to mixing and mastering records and digital remastering from analog sources. A video department was recently added — and Holley notes with pride that the very first commercially available DVD in the UK was made here at Abbey Road.
Beatles folklore has it that after particularly grueling marathon recording sessions, Abbey Road engineers often left and headed to a nearby pub to decompress. Holley says that’s no longer necessary, and he walks me down a flight of stairs to the in-house restaurant.
“We’ve pulled the pub to us!” he exclaims. “This is where people tend to decompress, a bit too much for my liking at times! Artists will come and have a drink, [and] orchestra players …
“It’s one of my favorite rooms,” he adds. “You see all sorts of people in the same place whom you don’t see together [normally].”
Holley remembers one particular day at the studio when the unlikeliest group of clients was wandering in and out of the cafeteria: British rock band Starsailor, teenybopper boy band McFly, Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, and operatic tenor Plácido Domingo. “That was one of the most bizarre days,” he recalls.
Technology has advanced so much, though, that it’s now common for musicians to never leave their house to create a high-quality recording. So, then, why is a studio still necessary?
“There are different ways you can make things,” Holley explains. “If you want a performance-based record, then you need a space that sounds good, [and] we’ve got a few of those.
“I actually think, whatever business you’re in, that it’s that walking-down-a-corridor moment — where you work with someone,” he emphasizes. “Something comes out of a cup of coffee around a machine. When you work together, two brains are more than twice the value of one brain. I think coming together to work in a community, and coming to a place where there are traditions of working together, with people who are used to doing that, I think you get far more than just working on your own.”
The tradition of collaboration at Abbey Road extends back to 1931, when EMI transformed a 16-room mansion into the world’s first custom-built recording studio. In addition to Elgar, prominent composers and musicians like Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Noel Coward, Artur Schnabel, Fred Astaire, and Fats Waller made recordings here in EMI’s early years.
During World War II, the studio remained open for BBC radio broadcasts and hosted wartime entertainers like Gracie Fields and George Formby. In 1944, Glenn Miller made several recordings with Dinah Shore, which ended up being his last-ever sessions: He died in an accident a few weeks later.
Technical advances were absorbed by Abbey Road throughout the 1940s and ’50s, including the long-playing record, four-track equipment, new magnetic tape, and noise limiters. Pop music and comedy were replacing classical sessions. Comedians like The Goon Show’s Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan were now scheduling studio time alongside pop stars like Eddie Calvert, Ruby Murray, and Sir Cliff Richard, whose 1958 single “Move It” is considered England’s first-ever rock-and-roll record.
It’s also worth noting that Richard’s first hit came from Abbey Road — especially considering that the studio wasn’t exactly a rock-and-roll environment. At the time, it was among the most strict and buttoned-down of all the London studios, with a precise apprenticeship structure and a rigid dress code. Balance engineers wore white shirts and neckties and sat in the control room. The maintenance engineers wore white lab coats and were the only ones allowed to set up microphones and other equipment. The “brown coats” were janitorial staff. Plus, because of a strong musicians’ union, normal recording hours were fixed: 10 a.m. to one p.m., lunch break, 2:30 to 5:30 p.m., and then seven to 10 p.m. Musicians would enter the studio on time, engineers would quickly set up the equipment, and within 10 minutes the session had started.
By the early 1960s, Abbey Road was regularly producing hit records for everyone from Shirley Bassey to Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Manfred Mann, and the Hollies, including Cilla Black’s version of “Alfie” with Burt Bacharach. The Beatles made their first record, “Love Me Do,” at the studio in 1962, and for the next seven years, they would make nearly all their records at Abbey Road.
The studio changed forever in 1966, though, when the Beatles vowed to stop touring live because the screaming fans kept drowning out their instruments onstage. The band planned to make only records, with the idea they would tour an album rather than tour live.
Without the pressure of creating music that had to be performed, the Beatles became increasingly excited about using the resources of Abbey Road. Technology was pushed to the limits. Band members and producer George Martin scrounged up all sorts of odd instruments, challenging the Abbey Road staff to cut and splice pieces of music on top of and inside of each other. Often, Beatles sessions would use all three studios simultaneously, with engineers dashing back and forth to synch up the primitive four-track recording machines.
According to the memoir of Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, one of the highlights was a recording session in Studio One for the Sgt. Pepper album song “A Day in the Life.” With the basic song finished, it still needed some strings to fill in a 24-bar portion — one long, loud ascending chord. The Beatles commissioned a 40-piece orchestra to come in, and, as an afterthought, they decided to make the session into a “happening.”
As the orchestra members arrived, in their evening tuxedos, they were handed either a funny hat, a clown nose, or gorilla paws. Wine was flowing, and celebrities like Donovan and the Rolling Stones were hanging about. Emerick recalled studio managers Robert E. Beckett and Edward H. Fowler, two proper men in their 60s, standing at the rear of the room in pinstripe suits and starched white shirts, watching classically trained musicians attempt to play their parts while surrounded by balloons and drunken hippies — and sadly shaking their heads. Emerick thought to himself, This really is a passing of the torch.
Another milestone for Abbey Road was the 1973 Pink Floyd concept album Dark Side of the Moon. At the time, the band was at a crossroads. They were moderately successful, but their singular brand of hippie experimental psychedelia was old news. Their new album needed to change course, or they were finished.
Taking a cue from the Beatles, Pink Floyd pushed the studio’s boundaries to the limit, raiding the Abbey Road sound-effects library and splicing tape loops around the control room. They programmed keyboard sequences and experimented with ambient sounds of chiming clocks, clanging coins, and cash registers. No rock record had ever sounded like that before.
The album took seven months to complete. In the final days, chief songwriter Roger Waters decided to layer some human speaking voices in and out of the record, to give it some texture. He gathered a handful of people hanging around the building to ask them questions about topics like death and insanity. Among the group were Pink Floyd roadies, Abbey Road staff members, and Paul McCartney, who happened to be recording with his band Wings.
An older, “brown coat” Irish gentleman named Gerry O’Driscoll, an Abbey Road doorman at the time, proved to be one of the session’s stars. His voice was immortalized on the record: “I’ve always been mad. I know I’ve been mad like most of us have. Very hard to explain why you were mad, even if you’re not mad.”
Since its release, Dark Side has been on the charts for more than 28 years, spending an incredible 591 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 — a feat equaled by no other record in history. It’s estimated that one in every 14 Americans under the age of 50 has owned a copy of this album.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Abbey Road branched out into the recording of film scores while keeping a hand in the emerging Britpop scene. Bands such as Radiohead, Gomez, Blur, and Manic Street Preachers all used the studio. When the Spice Girls held sessions in Studio Three, fans and media from all over the world camped outside Abbey Road’s entrance. And the Beatles’ legacy came full circle in late 2006, when Sir George Martin and his son Giles raided the group’s Abbey Road archives to create the revolutionary mash-up album Love.
Outside David Holley’s office window, tourists are taking photos of one another on the famous crosswalk. Holley and Michael Gleason sip cups of tea as they explain the origins of their new TV show, Live from Abbey Road. With the cancellation of the UK’s long-running Top of the Pops, and with MTV rarely airing music videos, there’s not much actual music television anymore. This show is designed to fill the void.
Other than the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” broadcast and a few other programs over the years, Abbey Road has rarely opened its doors to a television or film crew. This upcoming series will be revolutionary for a few reasons.
Each segment features three artists performing live in Abbey Road. There is no live audience and no host or presenter. The focus is solely on the music. Performers range from Dr. John and Wynton Marsalis to Norah Jones, Snow Patrol, Gnarls Barkley, Muse, the Kooks, and Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice.
“You get an actual raw performance,” says show producer Gleason, a Texas-born investor and a former director of MGM Studios. “You feel like they’re performing for you. The building is the host of the show. Dave Matthews came in — he loved being in that room. Jay Kay from Jamiroquai, he just went on and on about how he loved the vibe of the room. Because it’s a cool place. There are other recording studios around, but the magic is here. It’s just got that special sense.”
“In the studio, you see the masks slip a little bit,” adds Holley. “You get to see them relaxed; you get to see them playing rather than performing. You get to see a little closer. Simplicity really works. Because you’ve got time to really let it breathe and to enjoy it.”
The show’s segments are beautifully shot in high-definition video with several cameras, and some pieces are reminiscent of photo essays, with close-ups on a drum hi-hat, or fingers on a keyboard. It’s almost as if the show is set up to prove a point — that songs don’t have to be created to climb the charts or to sell sneakers. Music should be appreciated for what it is. Live from Abbey Road is for the purists, an MTV Unplugged that has grown up.
“Each of the artists performs in different ways,” says Holley. “It’s lit differently, shot differently. Massive Attack looks iconic, almost like something from the Newport Jazz Festival in the ’60s. Then you’ve got the Killers, which is much more intimate. You’ve got Corinne Bailey Rae; she’s like a ’40s movie star. It’s so interesting. It doesn’t feel like the same show each month.”
Holley later reflects, “Seventy-five years ago, you literally went to the one microphone, and you stood exactly where you were told — the artist was very much secondary to the technical engineers. You performed when we told you to. Now, it’s all twisted the other way — and anybody can make anything.”
The very nature of the music industry has changed the way Abbey Road does business. More people are creating music, and more people are consuming it in a variety of ways — from iPods to ringtones and interactive websites.
“[Today] the process is speeding up,” Holley continues. “People are like magpies; they take what they need — digital, analog, locations, working at home, using different people for different tracks, and then using different people to mix different tracks. I think the palette is wider. What we’re trying to [do] is offer a place where people can come together to try things.”