The Beatles and Abbey Road are inexorably linked. Not just because Abbey Road is the name of the last album the band recorded together, but also because the Fab Four recorded most of their catalog at the venerable London Studio during a period of eight years.
As a result, the Abbey Road studios are a required stop for rock and roll tourists visiting London. Fans can’t tour the building – it is still a working studio complex – but they can scrawl graffiti on the walls outside and take the obligatory photo on the crosswalk outside, aping the Beatles to the annoyance of area residents.
But Abbey Road (400 pp., $29.95, Pegasus Books) is also the name of a just-released book by British author David Hepworth, who has compiled a comprehensive history of the studio, a tale which stretches over 90 years. Naturally, there is a good deal of Beatles lore included, plus an introduction by Paul McCartney.
However, there is much more in Abbey Road than an additional helping of Beatles minutiae. (Hepworth notes, “There’s more information now – and I’m making a sweeping statement – about the Beatles than there was about Shakespeare when I was in college in the late ‘60s.”)
Hepworth traces the action at Abbey Road from the first recording session (Sir Edward Elgar conducting his Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, aka “Land of Hope and Glory” in 1931) through the “crooners” period and then into the rock and roll era of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Along the way, he explains – though not in an excessively geeky way – how technical advances in studio gear affected the music that was recorded with it.
Hepworth is certainly the right man for the job, an esteemed music scribe who has written for British publications New Musical Express and Sounds, launched the magazines Q and Mojo, and published several volumes, including 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year and Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There: How a Few Skinny Brits with Bad Teeth Rocked America. On the broadcast front, Hepworth has served as a presenter on the BBC music show “The Old Grey Whistle Test” and was part of the broadcast team for coverage of the Wembley Stadium portion of Live Aid in 1985.
Speaking from London, Hepworth says that he was drawn to the Abbey Road project due to his longtime fascination with recording. “I’m really interested in studios,” he explains. “I’m interested in the difference between a record and a song, which I think is a distinction insufficiently recognized. A record is a moment in time. A song is a series of instructions. A record has qualities that a song doesn’t have. A record has atmosphere, drama, it has sensuality.
“You have a relationship with a record,” Hepworth continues. “You’ve listened to the record innumerable times, very often more than the artist who made it. In a strange way, you know it better than the artist who made it, because it was a day’s work to them, and then they moved on to something else. Whereas you’ve internalized this thing. And so whatever your favorite records are, you can close your eyes right now, without the benefit of an iPhone, an iPod, or whatever and play it in your head, because you’ve heard it that many times.”
When Abbey Road opened, the focus was on recording classical music. As the years wore on, the studio’s scope of services expanded to include popular music, though the notoriously stodgy management at Abbey Road sometimes had to be dragged along. Up until the rock and roll era, the job of a recording engineer was to accurately capture the sound of a performance in the studio and reproduce it – so far as the current technology would allow – on a disc. In Britain, that all changed with the arrival of an advance copy of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Hepworth says that the Abbey Road crew was appalled upon first listen, hearing only (intentional) distortion and echo. “The natural assumption of the standard engineer was that that was a mistake. That there was clearly something wrong there. Because they had been raised on the assumption that a record was supposed to be a fidelity to a studio performance, rather than when you get to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and loads of other things that come after it, you’re trying to create something different, something additional for the record. So there was definitely a kind of generational – an aesthetic – schism between the two.”
When the Beatles first arrived at Abbey Road in 1962, they were fortunate to work with producer George Martin, who had achieved recent success with a series of comedy recordings featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller. Unlike his predecessors, Martin was not afraid to use the recording studio to create aural landscapes and alternate realities. In addition to possessing a lively imagination and a willingness to experiment, Martin was well grounded in recording fundamentals.
“They liked the place, because it had a lot of old-school know-how,” Hepworth says. But it’s not like the mop tops had much of a choice. “When the Beatles went in there, how many studios were there in London? Half a dozen, probably. And then four years later, there were hundreds.” Still, the Beatles maintained their loyalty to Abbey Road for years to come, even when any studio in the country (world, actually) would have rolled out the red carpet for them. “They liked the idea that it was a place of work, and it was secure. They had security men outside, so they could get away from fan attention.”
Indeed, when the Beatles became a studio-only band, the Abbey Road environment was key to their continuing commercial success and their maturation as artists.
“When they stopped performing live in ‘66, from then on, the only place the Beatles existed was Abbey Road, really,” Hepworth points out. “It was a workshop, it was a bit of a factory. It was a learning space. And if you went down to the canteen, halfway through the afternoon, you would bump into [violinist] Yehudi Menuhin and [James Bond composer] John Barry and whoever else. And that’s quite a good feeling for people to have.”
As more rock and roll bands trying to obtain a touch of the Beatles magic began to litter the halls of Abbey Road, not all of the young musicians exhibited the same level of discipline as the lads from Liverpool. Many would arrive at the studio and wait for inspiration to strike.
“It was a change in the nature of recording. It was a bit of a playground. And then Pink Floyd came along afterwards and took that idea even further. So Pink Floyd was going in there with no idea what they were going to come out with at all. Whereas most of the time the Beatles at least had a song,” Hepworth says.
As readers who watch the Peter Jackson documentary Get Back will find, the Beatles did not fare well when they opted to rehearse and record their Let It Be album at the Twickenham film studios. The recording sessions progressed in fits and starts, failing to produce much in the way of usable material. “In a very short time, they were learning the perils of freedom,” Hepworth says. Things only got back on track when George Harrison insisted that the band return to the familiar confines of Abbey Road.
“If you go watch someone making a record these days, it’s like watching someone doing your taxes.”
It has been observed that, as time wore on and the band became strictly a studio endeavor, the Beatles seemed to lose their way. Hepworth concurs, opining, “Their best work, I think, was against the clock. When they were taking ages over stuff, which starts with ‘Strawberry Fields’ and so forth, a lot of the time what they were doing was trying something, taking a wrong turn, and then coming back to what they should have done in the first place.”
In the post-Beatle era, Abbey Road continued to function as an in-demand recording studio, birthing classics by (to mention a very few) Paul Simon, David Bowie, Lady Gaga and Adele. The studio also became a favorite of movie composer John Williams, who went to Abbey Road to record the scores for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films.
But now it’s not like the old days, Hepworth reports, citing the changes wrought by digital recording and editing, plus the ability of artists to collaborate remotely. “If you go watch someone making a record these days, it’s like watching someone doing your taxes. They’re basically moving around blocks on a laptop screen. And you can move around blocks for evermore. It’s like the difference between writing and word processing.
“I think there is something in the human heart that craves the idea of being together,” Hepworth continues. “It doesn’t matter what it is. Whether it’s a movie or a play or whatever, we like to do that. And we feel better about ourselves for having done it. It interests me that musicians are drawn, sentimentally, to the idea of going into a studio.”
But even if musicians assemble together in front of studio microphones and record music simultaneously, modern recording technology still affords artists the option to record as many takes as a computer hard drive will hold. Is that necessarily a good thing?
“I think with anything, the less choice you’ve got, the better,” Hepworth says. “Get on with it, you know?”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
