Last week Red Bull joined fresh new artists, including Eliza Doolittle, Roll Deep, Diane Birch (pictured), Justin Nozuka and Chiddy Bang, for the EMI New Music Sessions at London’s iconic Abbey Road Studios.
The artists took to special stages set up in the very room – Studio 2 – where the legendary Beatles recorded some of the world’s best-known songs. And what with the band’s drummer Ringo Starr turning 70 just yesterday, we thought we’d celebrate one of the Fab Four’s finest moments at Abbey Road – and reveal a few other records by other artists that you might not realise were recorded there…
Channelling spirits
Jazz musician and bandleader Glenn Miller disappeared in December 1944 on his way across the English Channel to entertain US troops stationed in France, and he and his aeroplane were never found, leading to a number of conspiracy theories. But just two months before he was abducted by aliens, Miller put together his last record, at Abbey Road. After his death, this remained unreleased until the copyright expired in the ’90s. (The songs were recorded with Dinah Shore, an advocate of women’s pro golf who remains an icon of the ladies’ game and has the Kraft Nabisco course at Mission Hills, California – a favourite of women’s golfers like Alexis Thompson – named after her.) Incidentally, Miller’s In the Mood was sampled by the Beatles at the end of All You Need is Love, which got them in trouble because it was still in copyright.
No more worries for a week or two
Cliff Richard and his backing band – the Shadows, also a highly successful guitar group in their own right – recorded many of their biggest hits at Abbey Road, perhaps the best known of which was Summer Holiday. This was the theme from the 1963 musical film of the same name, starring Cliff as a London bus mechanic who borrows one of the corporation’s iconic red double-deckers and drives across Europe in it, singing and dancing quite a lot when not behind the wheel. For those not aware of Cliff’s subsequent story, he later sported bad hair throughout the 1970s and ’80s, as well as developing a bad habit for releasing terrible songs at Christmas time, singing at the Wimbledon tennis championships in rain breaks and remaining a committed bachelor, something suggested earlier in his number one hit song Bachelor Boy, which was also recorded at Abbey Road and features in Summer Holiday.
Sing along here. Go on, you know you want to…
Something, something, something, Dark Side…
Pink Floyd brought a slightly different kind of music from Cliff and the Shads to London NW8 when they recorded The Piper at the Gates of Dawn at Abbey Road in 1967, and the band continued to record at the studios, also cutting arguably their best-known album, The Dark Side of the Moon, there in 1972–73. Continuing the studios’ pioneering tradition, the prog rock album was recorded using advanced multi-track technology and synthesisers under the expert gaze of Abbey Road engineer Alan Parsons (who also worked on many classic Beatles albums – see below). The Dark Side of the Moon stayed in the charts for 741 weeks (that’s nearly 15 years) – longer than any other album in history – and has now sold more than 45 million copies.
An Oasis in the middle of London
Rock band Oasis never made any secret of the Beatles’ influence on their music, and their lives in general – frontman Liam Gallagher has a son named Lennon – but it took them until 1996 and their third studio album, Be Here Now, to record at Abbey Road. There are many parallels with the Beatles’ own later work there – unrest and conflict within the group, disruptive drug use and a sense that the band had got too big for their own good off the back of previous success – "bigger than, dare I say it, fucking God”, as Noel Gallagher once commented, echoing Lennon’s one-time suggestion that the Fab Four were “bigger than Jesus”. Eventually, media attention made Oasis relocate to a quieter studio setting outside London to complete Be Here Now, which duly became the fastest-selling UK album ever on release, with nearly half a million shifted in the first week alone, with D’You Know What I Mean? a massive hit. The band, however, failed to include a single hit from Be Here Now on their Stop the Clocks greatest hits compilation in 2008.
The Bends causes sickness
Another band with a crisis of confidence, who were this time rescued by a recording at Abbey Road, were Radiohead. Struggling to cope with the success of 1993 debut Pablo Honey, Thom Yorke and co experimented with new sounds without much progress and increasing intra-band tension, with their record label anxiously waiting for their follow-up. After a short tour recharged the batteries and confidence grew, producer John Leckie got Radiohead back in the studio, with the final recordings taking place at Abbey Road. The finished work, The Bends, was released in 1995, spawning five hit singles and eventually going triple platinum.
The End
It wasn’t the last album they released, but it was the last one they made, and Abbey Road is widely-regarded as one of the Beatles’ best. After the destructive and drawn-out process that became the final Let It Be album of 1970, ’69’s Abbey Road only happened because the band agreed to let longtime producer, friend and collaborator George Martin do things his way. Aside from the classic songs like Something and You Never Give Me Your Money, just the album cover photograph made the ‘zebra crossing’ by the studios an icon of London in its own right. Even the VW Beetle in the picture is now apparently in a German museum – back then it was owned by a local resident who regularly had to replace its 'LMW 281F' numberplate, stolen by fans as a souvenir and subject to conspiracy theories about 28-year-old Paul McCartney’s supposed death (‘LMW’ stood for ‘Linda McCartney Widow’, and he would have been ’28 IF’ he’d lived… get it?). It was actually only in the photo because the owner was on holiday and not around to move it. The last track listed on the Abbey Road album is called The End. But this record was just the start of a legacy…
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