My name is Mary.
Abbey Road Studios has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
Every time I walk through these corridors, it feels magical.
I don't remember the first time I came here.
This is me in Studio Two. A photograph taken by my mom who was a photographer,
and was in a band with my dad.
I want to tell the story of some of the iconic recordings
made here over the last nine decades.
From classical to pop to film scores.
One of the reasons I wanted to do this documentary,
was I remember seeing a picture of Mom leading Jet across the zebra crossing.
-Oh, yeah! -Do you remember that?
Yeah! Absolutely, yeah.
What happened was we lived close by, as you know.
And we had this little pony called Jet.
And she just loved horses so much that
when we were coming over here to do something, she just brought Jet.
And so, there's a picture of her-- him doing the level crossing.
And he came into the studio. I don't think he disgraced himself.
'Cause you came back here with Wings?
Do you remember making a decision thinking,
"I could go anywhere, but I'm actually gonna do this next phase
in my musical career in the same studio"?
Yeah.
I mean, in London we had used other studios besides Abbey Road.
But we always liked this the best.
So that when I was looking to record with Wings, I thought,
"Well, this is the best studio. I know it. I know a lot of the people here."
A lot of them were still here. A lot of them still are.
It's just a great studio.
You know, all the microphones work.
I mean, that sounds silly to say,
but you can go to some studios where they don't.
So, it was great. It was great to come back home.
When you drive through the little gates by the zebra crossing,
never gets old.
And every time I drive by, I look at the graffiti and think,
"It's magic going across that zebra crossing. Magic happened here."
It's history. You can feel it seeping from the walls.
Somewhere now, some kid, somewhere,
his dream will be to walk in here and just do a tune in here.
And you can't let that dream die. Ever. You can't.
It's a very spiritual thing.
Yeah, no, it's amazing. Um…
Hopefully, it'll be here for millions of years.
It's a national treasure, innit? You know what I mean?
The first time I'd been here,
I just felt a sense of accomplishment in reaching something
which I'd sort of fantasized in my bedroom about as a child.
I think about Abbey Road as being
a kind of mother of the music that's been performed there.
She has preserved it for us.
She has embraced it with her personal acoustic.
And so, it's a gift to us.
You know, we use it. We think we hire it.
It's something more spiritual than that.
The 12th of November, 1931,
Sir Edward Elgar is about to formally open a unique recording studio.
The esteemed composer is a supporter of the novel recording medium.
And prepares to cut his composition directly to disc…
-You all ready? -…with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Right.
Three years ago, the Gramophone Company
purchased number 3 Abbey Road of St. John's Wood, London, at auction.
A detached residence of nine bedrooms, five reception rooms,
servant's quarters, and a large garden at the rear
have been converted into the largest and best-equipped studios in the world.
A disc of wax.
The mother disc from which thousands of copies will be produced
to be enjoyed across the globe.
When I arrived,
the company was losing half a million a year.
You know, there's no money in the classical record business.
And I started searching for who we've got in the business
that knew anything about pop music.
I was singing from the days I was at school.
So I would've been 14, 15.
And I made my first record at Abbey Road when I was 17.
And we were given an audition by Norrie Paramor,
who was a producer with EMI.
And that's when we first played him the song called "Move It."
That's when we got really excited that we were actually going to be in a studio.
And it turned out to be Abbey Road.
And, in fact, Studio Two became our home for many, many years.
Abbey Road gave rock and roll its life, I think.
Because it was on the forefront of one of the biggest musical changes.
I believe, historically,
rock and roll was the biggest, fastest, and most long-term change.
In 1950,
British record sales totaled a mere three-and-a-half million pounds.
By 1960, this figure had risen to £15 million.
Easily the biggest company is Electric and Musical Industries, EMI,
which sells just under half of all the records.
EMI's labels include Parlophone, HMV, Capitol.
EMI is the world's largest record company.
Its chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, keeps a realistic eye on the competition.
Well, it's a free-for-all. The competition's absolutely terrific.
And anyone who thinks that, um, this is an easy business should come and have a try.
I started in the recording business in November 1950.
I'd studied at the Guildhall School of Music,
and I had an invitation to go to EMI Studios for an interview.
Um, surprisingly, for me,
they put me in the position of power at Parlophone,
and Joe Lockwood said to me,
"Well, now you're the youngest label head we've ever had. You better do well."
So I went, and I started looking for something.
I started looking for something like a Cliff Richard.
The Beatles had already been signed by Decca, made a record, and not released.
And Brian Epstein came to see 'em as a last resort.
I mean, really as a last resort. He'd been to see everyone else.
And my dad just liked Brian. Brian was a very likable man.
And said, "Maybe you can bring them down."
Yeah, so we came into here, and, um, George Martin arrived.
Came down, "Okay, chaps. What are we gonna do?" You know?
He didn't think they were that good.
But he liked spending time with them.
He also was looking at them, thinking,
"Okay, which one's Cliff, and who are the Shadows?"
And I listened to them performing.
And the songs they offered me weren't very good.
"Love Me Do" was the best I could find.
George was incredible.
We could never say anything else but, "George was incredible."
And we were buskers. I mean, no one can write or read music. We're just buskers.
We got a minor hit with "Love Me Do."
And then, later, we brought in "Please Please Me."
What are you doing?
Just… It's murder. I can't do it.
-Can't keep it up. I just go… I'm truly…
I haven't got one.
And George Martin wasn't very impressed.
And he said, uh, "Could we do it faster?"
And we all go, "No."
Or we didn't.
No. We thought, "No," but we went, "Yeah."
Doing take seven.
And we weren't that impressed,
but he said, "That'll be your first number-one hit."
And he was right.
Once we had a success with "Please Please Me,"
they seemed to blossom as songwriters.
"From Me To You" followed, and "She Loves You," and so on.
And each one was a great song.
And I realized very early on that we needed an album pretty damn quick.
It was in February of '63 that we-- we made the album.
And we did it in one day.
Should we do it on the second verse?
Yeah.
Hello?
So we came in nice and early. Set up. Got ready.
And then just played everything we knew.
The engineers and everybody were up the stairs, would just mix 'em.
They were actually mixing as they went along.
They knew how loud the drums had to be, how loud the bass drum should be,
so they kind of had it all balanced.
And, in fact, in those days, they were called "balance engineers."
The idea is to capture a band as a live performance.
This is them straight from the Cavern Club into Abbey Road.
I just worked them very hard.
And just recorded them almost like a-- like a broadcast, you know?
Where all I had was two tracks.
That's the band just playing live in the room.
And on track two…
…we have John's ripped vocal.
And Paul and George are singing live with him.
And we did it just under 12 hours from start to finish.
You know what I mean? It wasn't like, "Oh, I'm so tired. I'm this"--
No, man. If we were playing…
That was the great thing about the Beatles was we all were in it for the music.
You know, we were playing. That was what was important.
And, uh, you know, it worked out pretty well for us.
Music being one of the most important things in my life,
we said we'd take a risk, a gamble, if you like,
and, uh, come here to England to see whether I could find a job.
September 19th, 1960,
I duly reported at the Abbey Road Studios.
So that's how I started.
-I say if you were there-- -But I wouldn't be this bad.
If she were-- Just what I was going to say!
-I think that's enough. Let's go and play. -It's fine by me.
-Yes. -Are you happy with the sound?
-Absolutely. Absolutely. -Good. Come. Come on.
Jacqueline du Pré was the perfect person to record with
because she never got impatient
however much time you took to get a satisfactory balance.
And with her bulges of sound, she was a very difficult person to record.
-That's fine for balance.
Play from the repeated D's.
Many musicians that I admire recorded here.
And many of my, sort of,
-favorite recordings were made here. -Yeah.
Artists like Jacqueline du Pré, Daniel Barenboim.
These people, I grew up with their sound.
And the sound that I grew up listening to was recorded here.
We used to listen to a lot of music in the car on car journeys.
And my parents had a CD of her recording of Elgar Concerto.
I would've been five or six years old.
When you listen, you really feel that she is giving everything,
all of her soul, to every single note that she plays.
Jacqueline du Pré's recordings of the Elgar Concerto was made here,
and a few years ago, when I recorded the Elgar Concerto,
it was in this very, um, studio.
Probably in this exact spot that I'm sitting in.
It's a massive honor for me, of course, and incredibly special to think about.
Now, Jacqueline, in July '71, it was announced
that you had nervous exhaustion and were going to rest for a year.
And everyone had said, "Oh, poor girl. She's been overdoing it."
Then we realized that it wasn't just nervous exhaustion.
No, it turned out, in fact, to be multiple sclerosis.
One is, naturally, very frightened by it.
But I was lucky, you see,
because my talent was one which developed very early.
So that by the time I got the symptoms of MS
severely enough to interfere with playing instruments,
I had done everything I could've wanted to with the cello.
After the illness had taken hold of her,
Daniel, one day, rang me and said,
"What is your number one studio doing tomorrow?
Can you book it under the title 'Daniel Barenboim test'?"
So he said, "We will try and record something.
Don't be disappointed if nothing transpires."
I thought you'd be interested in this.
These are the engineer notes for her last recording here.
Sessions, but two of them are crossed out,
so I guess that might mean that only two were used.
It says she was ill after two sessions. I see.
Wow.
There's something incredibly vulnerable and fragile about this.
I absolutely love it,
and for us to be able to listen to that now, I think we're very, very lucky.
Started opus five, played the first few bars,
put the cello back, and said, "That ends the entertainment for the day."
That was her last appearance in the studios.
Brian Epstein and my father had a very, very good relationship.
Yeah.
And they worked as a team, so they, I think in 1964,
I think they had 36 weeks at number one out of 52 in the UK.
Which will never be done again.
I mean, if you think about-- You know, it's just crazy.
And that was with, obviously, Cilla Black,
Gerry and the Pacemakers, and the Beatles.
And they were all from Brian Epstein's stable,
all produced by my dad, all at Abbey Road.
Cilla, do you think you could've got to the top
without Brian Epstein?
-No, I don't think so. -Why not?
Um, because I came from Liverpool.
Well, at the time, nobody wanted to know anything about Liverpudlians,
until Brian Epstein came on the scene.
I mean, it was a bit of a handicap to anybody who did come from Liverpool
because of the way they spoke.
-Move it along a bit now. -Right.
Okay, Burt. Here we go.
Get running, please.
One more.
It was good, darling. We may--
-Hello, Brian. -Cilla, it sounds lovely.
-Hello there. How are you? -Fine.
Good.
-It's sure feeling better out there. -Yeah.
But I don't I wanna go on at it all night though.
-With each performance, it gets better. -Actually, yeah. There's--
-What's wro-- I don't want to have to-- -Yeah, I know, but we need…
Burt Bacharach was extremely persistent about doing take after take.
Wanted to get something that nobody else could see.
-Just touching up the edges now. -Me?
And I remember sort of doing a great take
and going on to about 15 takes.
And everybody getting very, very tired and the orchestra getting fractious.
And I said to-- Pressed the knob and I said to Burt,
"Burt, what are you looking for?"
And he said, "I just want that little bit of magic, George."
I said, "Well I think you got the magic on take four."
And of course we had.
Take four was the one with the precision.
-I think that's it there. Done.
The Beatles were one of Britain's biggest export industries.
And Brian had them as this-- as this boy band in a way.
And it was scary, it wasn't enjoyable.
And so they needed to just basically either split or go into a bunker.
And that bunker was Abbey Road.
If you never toured again, would it worry you?
No, I don't think so. Uh, if we're not listened to then,
and we can't even hear ourselves, then we can't improve in that.
-We can't get any better. -Hmm.
So, uh, we're trying to get better with things like recording.
It got too, sort of, horrible, so we started to hatch plans of what we'd do.
So, this is gonna give us a lot of time to record.
And the other great thing about Abbey Road, it was free.
In our contract, we had limitless recording time.
Don't need that.
I think it'll probably be another day singing it.
No, this was our home really.
We spent so much time here.
We talked through what we were gonna do. And, uh…
You know, he'd say, "What we should do,
we should make a record and kind of send it on tour."
Uh, and so we started making Sgt. Pepper.
It opens with a, uh, real interesting, uh,
nostalgic recall of old vaudeville.
And good old times.
It goes on, "With a Little Help From My Friends."
A statement of communal purpose.
The next is like a statement of imagination.
"Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," as being an element of importance.
With Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
-the rules had changed. -Concentrate.
They wanted to use the studio as a playground.
And they wanted to paint pictures with sound.
Two!
One of my best beginnings that.
The lunatics started to take over the asylum.
We sometimes would have one mix going on up in the control room here in number two.
Then we'd have another one going on in number three.
So you had the run of the building.
And then, you know, there's lots of equipment around here.
So we'd sort of say, "Can we play that? Or could we do that?"
And they had a Lowrey organ
which I use for the front of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."
There was an artist called Mrs. Mills who had a particular--
There it is!
And we'd knock around on it, you know,
and just, sort of, "Wow, it's got a great sound!"
It's a good rock-and-roll piano.
And then there'd be, like, Daniel Barenboim's classical Steinway.
Uh, so there was all this stuff.
And I think that's one of the reasons the Beatles' music was always interesting
from the instrumental point of view.
I was there about, uh, '62 I think.
And "When I'm Sixty Four" amused me. It's a lovely song.
The last is, uh, "A Day in the Life" which I thought was the best poem.
Probably the most momentous song on the album, "A Day in the Life,"
began in a very simple way.
And we caught the rehearsal take, take one. The very first time I heard it.
Have the mic on the piano quite low, this.
Just keep it in like maracas, you know?
John counts in by saying,
"Sugar plum fairy, sugar plum fairy, sugar plum"…
Sugar plum fairy, sugar plum fairy.
"Day in the Life" arrived when John came to my house for a little writing session.
And he'd been reading the newspaper.
And I think we then wrote the second verse
looking in the newspaper for clues.
"A Day in the Life" seems incredibly complicated…
…but it's just beautifully simple in the way it's done.
All they had was four things they could put together to create this wall of sound.
Even the orchestra is just on one track.
It's the four of them in a room making a sound together.
John is singing a guide vocal here.
But he overdubs his vocal later.
And here's the master take of his vocal.
-Which is just an extraordinary sound.
It's, in essence, "A Day in the Life."
Then I added in a bit that I had.
That was, "Woke up, fell out of bed."
And Paul brings it, sort of, back to the real world.
And they-- they had no idea how to connect the songs.
They just left a gap.
And they also didn't know how to end the song.
I remember it was, like, we started talking about this and that.
I said, "It would be great if we could have a symphony orchestra.
I've got some ideas." You know?
Paul said to my dad,
"I think what I'd like to hear is an orchestral orgasm."
My dad said, "Oh, right. Okay, Paul."
That was the other great thing about coming here.
The tools for that were there. It was available.
George Martin, number one studio.
It was all kind of here, you know? So we took advantage of it.
So we did that on "Day in the Life." We had the big orchestra and, um, idea.
The instruction I gave them was for them all to start
on the lowest note on their instrument and to go through all your notes
till you reach the highest note on the instrument.
And also you have to play from very, very quietly to as loud as you possibly can.
But you have to meet in tune and in time at the perfect time.
They kind of looked at me a little bit like,
"We don't normally get that kind of instruction." You know?
So George kind of laid it out a little bit more for them.
He said, "I think you should've reached halfway by this point,
and then if you can go to the big crescendo 'round about here."
Six, seven,
eight, nine, ten, 11, 12,
13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
-18, 19, 20, 21!
"A Day in the Life."
This is take eight, and it's the choir for the end.
Choir?
They originally thought, "Wouldn't it be great to have this choir going of 'ums'?"
What's the note? Shall we just double-check?
It's one of the, sort of, biggest anticlimaxes ever.
It's like this big orchestral crescendo, then it's like…
…three, four.
Then…
They had four grand pianos, and we had 'em…
And we could all see, and we all had a count in, and we went--
Right.
-It was very good. Thank you. That's fine. -Hey?
I think that will do for the vocal backing very nicely.
We'll get the musicians in now.
I think that that period felt special
because there was a great upsurge of energy and consciousness.
It was like a sort of mini-renaissance.
It was so close to the end of the war,
and those of us who'd been born in the war,
our memories were all in black and white.
But it gradually got better and better and better.
By the '60s, it was technicolor. You know, it was all…
So here you were in London, which was on fire.
You'd have artists, novelists, poets, painters.
If you wanted an album cover, for instance, you knew lots of artists.
Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, you know, who were on the scene.
You know, and Peter Blake obviously did the Sgt. Pepper cover.
He and his then wife.
It was the '60s, late '60s, and it was so exciting.
Music was exciting. London was exciting.
Everything was exciting.
And I always say I was so grateful to be around at that period of time
because you're never gonna see a time like that again.
And for me, um, it was the start of my journey in a way.
I mean, I spent three years in a van with Bluesology.
And I was fed up with that, and I wanted to do something else.
Uh, write songs is what I wanted to do.
I never thought I'd become Elton John singer, songwriter, artist.
So I started to do sessions.
"He's Heavy, He's My Brother" take one.
Oh, take it, broth--
And I did a lot of session work here.
One, two, three, four.
Reg Dwight was a songwriter that we knew,
and he did the keyboards for us on "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother"
as a session musician
which, uh, I think he got about twelve pounds for that.
He'd probably want more today.
Oh, no. He wouldn't actually. He'd probably do it for nothing.
Reg with the grand piano at the bottom of the stairs.
Me on the drums nearby.
We didn't wanna move the grand piano because you could knock 'em out of tune.
So I put the drums next to-- uh, to Elton.
And there was Bernie Calvert, our bass player, on bass.
That's all the basic track was. With Clarkey singing the guide vocal.
Uh, and Elton counted it in.
It's still on the tape somewhere.
You can tell that's me playing on that record.
It's my piano style.
I was so lucky, um, because once word got around that Reg could play the piano,
um, Reg was hired quite a lot.
And, uh, you know, I was getting paid money by Dick James Music as a songwriter.
Fifteen quid a week.
But the extra money that I got as a session musician
made me able to buy the records I loved, and there were so many of them,
buy some clothes, and pay the rent.
And I have so many memories of coming in here.
The smell of Abbey Road.
I was actually the smell of fear when I came in.
"Am I gonna mess this up?"
You know, it formed me as a man.
It formed me as a musician.
It made me be good. Because I had to be good in three hours.
I had to deliver.
I remember playing on a Barron Knights session here.
And "Hey Jude" had just come out.
So I was standing with Bernie. Um…
And your dad came in the door and said hello to the Barron Knights.
And that is the first time I'd ever seen anyone that famous in my life.
And I kind of froze and Bernie did too.
And the Barron Knights asked Paul to play "Hey Jude" on the piano, and he did.
And Bernie and I have never forgotten it.
It's like, "Oh, my God. We saw Paul play 'Hey Jude'
at the time the record came out."
Can you imagine?
For a young kid from Midd like me? It's like, "Oh, my God."
Um, and that was just startling.
How can you not dine out on that story?
And it's still-- Bernie and I still talk about it.
And it was incredible.
So, um, your dad's given me a lot of pleasure in my life.
So much pleasure.
And he has no idea what that moment meant to me, but, hopefully, he will now.
I was a studio musician.
And so I was coming in here probably about the age of 17 on.
Seventeen, 18, 19, 20, and on.
Even longer.
Jimmy Page, what is a session guitarist?
It's a guitarist who's called in to make records.
Not necessarily doing one-night stands,
hoping that they'll get into the hit parade,
but only getting an ordinary fee.
So how did you become a session guitarist?
I don't know. Perhaps they thought I had the feel for it.
Obviously, you know me as an electric guitarist,
but I can also play acoustic guitar.
So, uh-- And I could play harmonica.
So I was booked it on sessions doing harmonica, blues harmonica,
or be it finger-style guitar playing, folk guitar playing,
as it was then very much the sort of vogue.
And then electric guitar and slide playing and all this sort of stuff.
What is it like working with some of the big names of show business?
Disappointing.
Why is that?
Well, they don't come up to how you expect them to be.
Rather disappointing on the whole, I would say.
See, well, that's probably bad news for some record fans.
Done all manner of things at big studio number one,
where they did the film music.
And that's where the Goldfinger track with Shirley Bassey was recorded, in there,
and I was on that session.
Oh, sorry. Can we do--
Take 11. Overdub over the whole lot.
John Barry is running it through.
It's absolutely, like, spine-chilling when it starts off,
and I'm sort of playing along.
And they had the enormous screen.
And I had to sing "Goldfinger"
to what was happening on the credits, you know?
I wasn't that far away from where she was. I'm more or less in the front line of it.
And all the orchestral stuff is behind them.
Fifteen, take 15.
Right at the end of the take, she had a really powerful voice,
I can hear her doing this sort of last note.
But then when we got to the end, and the credits didn't seem to end
and I had to hold this note.
And it was, like, forever.
And the credits are going and going and going.
And he's going, "Hold it, hold it." And I was like…
-Then she collapses on the floor.
It was absolutely so dramatic.
And, of course, when she sings, she's doing all the histrionics and things.
It was something that you'd never, never forget. Absolutely.
They gave me water, you know, sort of patted my hands with water--
ice-cold water and everything. I was just…
Cruel business, show business. It's very cruel.
But I had a world success with it.
John, where would you be today without Mr. Epstein?
I don't know.
I understand that, uh, Maharishi, uh, conferred with you all.
Could I ask you what he-- what advice he offered you?
He told us to, uh, not to get overwhelmed by grief,
and whatever thoughts we have of Brian, to keep them happy
because any thoughts we have of him will travel to him, wherever he is.
His death creates a monumental change in the Beatles.
There was an anchor they could tie themselves to.
Who'd been with them before they were famous.
And that's the key thing. That's what people need.
They need the reference point of knowing who they are before they become famous.
And he'd gone.
It can't be overemphasized. That's what changed things.
Oh, we were all like, "What do we do?"
It's like what happens when anyone exits your life.
You have a period of grieving.
And then you emerge, and you think, "Well, we ought to do-- We got to do this.
We got to make a good record now. We've got to keep going."
It's a decision which voice to use, you know?
-I think it's better quieter. -I do too.
It's slightly sad.
I had a guitar very similar to this.
And, um, I'd just written it.
And, actually, the soundman has put a cloth here so my foot won't bang.
However, on the record, I am. I am banging.
And I'd go…
Yeah.
And then finish--
I think that, you know, I just sort of forgot the format.
"Bebe Daniels," take one!
When it came to the White Album, I loved the White Album 'cause we--
It wasn't really mentioned, but we knew we wanna be a band again.
And, uh, my favorite track is "Yer Blues."
Where we took everything into a room…
not as big as this carpet.
We just, like, rocked it.
We just, you know, turned into this incredible, closest band.
It's one of the all-time great memories for me.
Abbey Road was the album I didn't think would ever be made.
Because, prior to Abbey Road, we had recorded an album called Let It Be.
It was an unhappy record.
I was losing control. Uh, my voice wasn't heard.
And I got very dispirited indeed.
Let It Be fragmented and distorted them as people,
and they just abandoned it.
And Paul McCartney phoned up Dad and said,
"Listen, we wanna go back and make a record like we did.
And it'll be our last record."
He said, "Yeah, but none of the messing 'round."
Said, "As long as you come in,
and we make the album like we used to make albums. Properly."
So, I would just, you know, write songs and then ring 'em up.
And it was like, "Hi, Ringo. How you doing?"
-We knew it's Paul.
And Paul would call and say, "Hey, all right, lads."
"Um, what do you think about, you know, making a new album?"
"Should we go back in the studio?"
"Oh."
'Cause they were quite happy sunbathing.
If it hadn't have been for him, we'd have made, like, three albums.
Instead of eight.
So, we came back in here and did the album that became Abbey Road.
We were in one of the studio's control rooms
and starting to mix the album.
And we were thinking, "What are we gonna call it?"
We didn't think Abbey Road.
We thought, the next album, we've got to go to, like, Egypt and the pyramids.
Or we have to go to some volcano in Hawaii.
You know, we always had these big conversations.
And then we said, "Ah, sod it. Let's just walk across the road."
I drew a little picture of a level crossing with four people.
Now, you can't drive your car along there without getting stuck.
The staff always referred to EMI Studios as Abbey Road.
But, after this album,
Ken Townsend, the studio manager, made it official and changed the name.
Ken invested a huge part of his life in Abbey Road,
starting as a trainee engineer in 1950.
And, eventually, retiring as chairman in 1995.
Abbey Road has always felt like a family to me.
I think it's because most of the staff begin their careers here
and are nurtured to work their way up.
The technicians here have always been top-notch.
And it's their innovation
that sees Abbey Road enjoy the reputation it does today.
They're very cool boffins that work here.
And they're artists in their own right really.
But we challenged them.
I think it was intriguing for them.
"Could we do that? We've never done that before, but maybe if we did this."
And, you know, they're boffins,
so they're just, like, trying to work out the enigma machine.
When someone's got a problem, they say, "Go and see Lester."
If someone wants a battery, or a nut and bolt
or a valve, or a anything, "Uh, Lester's got some."
What's that you're working on, Lester?
Uh, a 1960s microphone that's been dropped,
and there's the broken parts that I'm gluing together.
-Who dropped it? -No one ever owns up.
I mean, Abbey Road has the best equipment in the world.
Something like Dark Side Of the Moon or Sgt. Pepper stood the test of time
because they're great records, but they're also technically brilliant, as well.
And they don't sound old.
And that's the key.
Syd's first idea for the name for the band was "The Tea Set."
We got a gig, and, um, they said, "You can't be 'The Tea Set.'"
"We've already got a band called 'The Tea Set.'"
And that's when Syd came up with the name Pink Floyd.
We'd signed a deal, uh, with EMI.
And that sort of brought us here.
And we were in Studio Three,
which is where we are now.
And the Beatles were in Studio Two.
And we were-- I won't say "granted an audience,"
but there was an invitation to go and sort of see what was going on.
Yeah, it was very much a sense of we were the new boys, and they were the prefects.
It's a sort of fascinating kind of piece of history.
Oh, my goodness. We were in Abbey Road when they were making Sgt. Pepper
and we were making our first album.
And, um, it came out,
and we were driving up to a gig somewhere in the north of England in a Zephyr Six.
And June Child, who was driving us, pulled over into a lay-by.
Ooh, and it was about--
And we sat in a lay-by and listened, uh, to Sgt. Pepper, and I was just…
And it was. And it is, obviously.
And I believe it freed a whole generation of young Englishmen and women
to be given permission to write songs about real things.
And having the courage to accept your feelings.
Uh, I became a member of Pink Floyd because, um, Syd Barrett,
my predecessor and my friend, um, had lost his marbles.
Not to put too fine a point on it.
It was his band. He had basically, um--
I mean, he didn't start it, but he was the very obvious talent.
I mean, he was a poet and a painter and a very talented guy.
And, um, he was two to three years younger than all the others,
but he was definitely in charge in his brief tenure.
And, uh, and when he went, he went so fast.
And so completely and utterly gone, you know?
And never came back.
It was, um…
It was deeply, deeply, deeply shocking, and still is.
The great thing about Abbey Road in those days,
was that they were all the same people working there
when we made that first record,
as were still working there when we made Dark Side of the Moon.
Which was, like, six years later or something like that.
There are many things that make it very, very good.
The lyrics are very, very good,
and Roger's concept and lyrics, you know, was…
Yeah, I think he had taken a step forward in, um, his abilities.
So…
And all those things together
tie up into something that's, um, yeah, has obviously worked.
And the struggle…
Feedback jump.
…was part of, um…
Don't worry about that.
…what made it interesting.
And what made it work.
Right.
Where would rock and roll be without feedback?
There are nostalgic, um, moments of thinking,
"God, you know, some of those fights were really ugly,"
but, you know, you were still back at it the next day.
And the fights were about getting the very, very best
and, um, having disagreements about how that could be achieved.
Could you get me a fruit pie and cream?
I don't know. I was really drunk at the time.
Dave always wanted the voices to be so you couldn't hear them.
And I'd go, "Well, no. No, you gotta be a--
If you can't hear it, what's the point of it?"
So it was like that. It was just…
We were young and arrogant
and thought we knew exactly what we want to do and how we wanted to do it.
And wouldn't listen to good advice half the time.
-So that's the one.
Suspect there's things you have to do.
You have to have a lot of self-belief, and you could call it arrogance.
I think it's a really good record.
I think it's really well crafted.
And of course, you know, Rick contributed "Great Gig in the Sky."
And let's not forget "Us and Them."
And it's a great song.
I'm so glad that I have that collaboration with Rick from those days.
'Cause he-- You know, he had something very special.
When you're making an album, you record everything separately.
So, you've never listened to the whole of what you're doing until it's all done.
And then press the play button, then you sit there and listen to a whole album.
Um, it's absolutely magical.
It was the-- I mean, the best time I ever heard it.
I took it home, okay?
And I played it to Judy, who was my first wife.
And when it finished,
I turned to say, "What do you think?" Like that.
And she was sitting there crying.
Look at that."
That is very special.
We achieved something in Pink Floyd with that record.
And we could well have gone… …"We're done."
Like the Beatles did.
But we didn't. We were too frightened to do that.
And, in a way, I'm kind of glad that we did struggle on.
Um, because we did some good work after that.
You know, there's Wish You Were Here and Animals
and The Wall and The Final Cut.
We made those four albums together.
And they're a pretty solid, you know, block of work.
Well, it's--
How can one not be extremely pleased to have been so fortunate as
to have had something that has clicked with, uh, the world's music listeners
so deeply and for so long
over all these, um, nearly 50 years since it came out?
It just seems, um…
It just seems quite extraordinary to me that that is-- can be done.
The first time I met Fela was here in Studio Three.
He was an obvious leader. You knew that.
You meet some people, they have that charisma about them,
so you know that they're a strong personality.
But he was absolutely charming.
The minute he walked into the studio with the musicians,
he became a different person.
He became this magical music man.
Jeff.
-Yeah? -I want to take--
-We'll take it, uh, Fela. -You take it.
So that was on the first day of recording.
Oh, I think we recorded pretty much a whole album on that first session.
When the light's on. Here we go.
One, two, three, four.
-No. I'm tired. Let's play back. -That's fine for me though.
I was born in 1936, and I joined Fela's band
1965, February.
My role was to play the baritone saxophone.
At that time, his recording company wanted him to record in Nigeria,
but the studios were not very good.
So Fela was the very reason why we went
to Abbey Road Studios in London.
Because he insisted on recording
in a standout studio.
On the second time that we were in the studios, Ginger Baker came along.
And we had arranged to record that particular album live that night.
I'd like you to meet Ginger Baker!
Everybody, big hand. Come on, everybody.
People already knew we were coming.
Fela himself, he had friends.
And of course some of us had our friends over there,
and so the news spread like a wildfire.
"Fela is in town!
-Fela is in town with his band." -Yeah.
Don't worry now. That's enough. That's enough.
The record is moving. The record is moving. Now, let's start.
One, two, three, four.
We had the late Tony Allen.
Allen was on drums.
And then we had Ginger Baker on drums too.
Before we left,
we had already rehearsed the songs that we were going to record.
Very, very important,
because by the time you decided to go to the studio,
the whole sound is in everybody's body.
It was received worldwide, not only in Africa or Nigeria.
All over the world.
And today you can-- you can testify to the fact that Fela is everywhere.
Yeah.
Here, what's the difference between EMI and the Titanic?
At least the Titanic had a good band.
1979 has been a year of despair for the record industry.
Profits have plummeted and the '60s bands just aren't selling records anymore.
I started in, uh, May 1979.
There was lots of smaller studios springing up
all over the place at that time.
And, you know, in fairness we were-- we were more expensive.
I'd get phone calls from Ken Townsend who had run the studio.
And he'd say, "Oh, you know, another group has taken over the ownership,
and they've come in and they brought in accountants who are saying,
'Do we need all this rubbish? What is this?
Get rid of this! Sell it all.'"
And he said, "Would you take it?
You know, 'cause I wanna see it's got a good home. Someone who cares about it."
So I took a lot of that equipment.
This is what happened. 1980. We had so much stuff.
We had a two-day sale. A Saturday and a Sunday.
Everything was about Abbey Road for Ken.
It was for the good of Abbey Road. And he-- he fought as hard as he could.
Because sometimes we weren't quite as busy as we should've been.
Number One stayed empty for month after month.
We laid out white sticky tape, uh, for our badminton area,
and we used to go in there every lunchtime.
There was all sorts of rumors going around
that we might change it into a lot of smaller size rooms.
And I think there was even talk about turning it into a car park.
But, I mean, I always thought that was ridiculous.
But then somebody said they saw the plans.
So yes, something had to be done.
We needed to move into another area.
Our arrival at Abbey Road was-- was a happy thing.
We had a wonderful movie. Harrison Ford was fabulous.
Everyone was in a great mood. I just remember playing that silly march
and having the trumpets blow the roof off the place and it was great fun.
There was a big scoring stage down in Denham.
And we heard that that was closing down,
and I think Ken approached them about maybe bringing their operation down to us.
We had to buy the projectors.
We had a 35 mil projector in Studio One
and an eight-foot screen in Studio One, as well.
It was another means of income for Abbey Road.
And we needed it to be able to survive.
We all loved London.
An American group coming, and we were so happy to be there.
We loved it so much.
The whole atmosphere of the studio was so different.
Abbey Road was sort of younger and lighter,
and we just had a great time.
And then the film came out, and the audience loved it.
So things were right. Things were working.
And there wasn't any question that we would come back to Abbey Road.
Always knew someday you'd come walking back through my door.
John Williams and George Lucas came back to do Return of the Jedi
which was, again, pretty amazing.
Part of the Star Wars franchise. I mean, who doesn't want to do Star Wars?
I first began to work on the score for Star Wars.
It emerged more and more every day as I wrote more
that this score needs a symphony orchestra.
It can't just be a pickup band of some certain amount of players.
And our music director at Fox Studios said to her,
"Why don't you hire a symphony orchestra in London?"
And I said, "Well, great. Let's do it.
We'll try it with the London Symphony Orchestra." Which we did.
And that was thrilling for me. I said at the time and I say it now,
it's kind of like driving a Rolls, you know?
You think, "Oh, whoopee, this is-- Wow, what a-- what a sound.
What perfection. What balance, you know? What sonority."
The real thrill was going to Abbey Road, hearing it with a full orchestra.
'Cause they would run through it once just to play it,
to see how-- where they were.
6-M-7 new. Take 106.
It was amazing. You know, it was like…
Suddenly, it was like opening a Christmas present.
We went to Abbey Road because it was available and it could do the work,
and we stayed there and wanted to come back because it did it so well.
There's no reason to think that we'd ever wanna go anywhere else to this day.
Perfect.
-And, uh-- -Just-- Just what it needed.
-Good. -It took…
The recording session was the most fun part. Especially with Johnny.
And it was like a second home.
You know, you'd go in and you'd go to the canteen,
they had pictures on the walls.
And you did spend eight to ten hours a day there.
So it's an important space to be in that's comfortable.
Well, the canteen is a particularly British thing, you know?
We don't have that.
Well, we have studio commissaries, uh, but they don't serve alcohol.
It didn't seem to extend the length of the intermissions that I noticed.
And everyone came back from lunch maybe a little more relaxed.
Which was good.
-Ah!
This piece is beautiful.
-Does it work all right? -Yeah, it works great.
That's a key scene there.
Abbey Road is very, very special. Very individual.
The room has a sound. It makes a noise that is its own.
It didn't seem perfect by size and configuration. Seemed too small.
It's a little-- little bit of a shoebox.
You know, whereas the old shooting stages, something like we had in Hollywood,
have a huge amount of volume.
So it's a-- a very long echo and a beautiful bloom,
which can detract from the articulation and specific instruments.
Abbey Road seemed perfect. It was dry enough. Not too reverberant.
And-- And-- And not so dry that it didn't have a nice bloom about it.
It has a nice face, a nice sound.
Okay, Shawn. We can take, please.
Ideal, really, for that size orchestra
and that kind of work.
It's a gift to music, I have to tell you.
And I haven't gone around and tapped the walls,
but whatever they are, they're right.
I don't believe there's another studio in London
that's anything close with it, that I know of.
Or perhaps in the world.
Bravo. Intermission.
We started Be Here Now here in '97.
In-- In '97, we were a bit boisterous and we were asked to leave.
Uh...
Which we were quite proud of at the time. Getting kicked out of Abbey Road is--
The Stones never got kicked out of anywhere.
Well, I may remember having a party here one night.
I mean, there was talk of us getting kicked out of here. That never happened.
I don't think.
And we smashed it all up. Whoever come in here and smash things up
needs smashing up themselves. You know what I mean?
That would never have happened. You know what I mean?
Oh, the reason we got asked to leave was
we were in here one night and we-- all the lights were off,
and we played all the Beatles albums back-to-back in the dark,
at excruciating volume.
And I think one of the things got blown up.
I remember us staying here one night late
and we were all just, like, sort of just spaced out,
like, just in corners just, like, having a little drink,
listening to Rubber Soul and Pepper, and all that stuff and…
That's about as mad as it got. You know what I mean?
When we did our last record, uh, together, so we did the entire thing here.
The second time they came in, we were a bit more prepared for them,
and we set up a kind of cozy area in the studio for them.
Put settees in, so if they wanted to relax and things.
I remember going downstairs and it was about 9:00 in the morning,
and Liam appeared all dressed up with this really nice hat.
And, um, I said, "Oh! Hello. You're here early.
We weren't expecting you, you know, quite as early as this."
And he goes, "I've been up for ages trying to decide what to wear
for my first day at Abbey Road."
I'd be the first in here and I'd be the last one out.
You got to feel it, haven't you? You know what I mean?
You got-- You can't just pop in and…
You know, like, "Give us a shout when-- when I'm needed."
I can't have that. You know what I mean?
You gotta let it all seep into your veins. You know what I mean?
And your soul and that, I think.
No, it was like going to church, innit? Coming to Abbey Road.
I think that might've been the end of it.
I think that was the last record, sort of. Dig Out Your Soul.
You know, a-- a huge, massive part of my record collection was made in this room.
My musical language was born in this room.
My hairstyle was born in this room.
There was no bigger Beatles fans than us than maybe the Beatles themselves.
It must've been such a privilege to be in your 20s in the '60s.
You know, it starts with the Beatles, and then The Stones appear,
and then The Who, and then The Kinks and all that.
I mean, what a time to be alive, you know?
That's drugs for you, innit?
Do you know what I mean?
Or maybe not. All this whatever-- the swinging-- Whatever it was.
It was like it all went a bit from the war period and all that to just like a bit of…
You know, people will call it drugs, people will call it this and that.
People will call it the miniskirt, people will call it everything,
but you could just see everyone just seem to go.
Let their hair down a little bit.
Subsequent generations tend to look back a bit more.
Whereas that generation that came out of the horrors of the war,
there was nothing to be nostalgic about.
Rationing and the Blitz. No, thanks.
So they were forward-looking.
And God bless them, you know,
because they gave us some of the greatest musical art of all time.
Abbey Road is just not a studio of the past.
But it is certainly a studio of the future.
Maybe it's just because I'm old school
and because I love what Abbey Road represents in my life, I wanna share that.
Because people taught me music by sharing with me
what other music had meant in their life.
-Elyse. -Hey! Oh, that's how you pronounce it.
Yes.
So many massive rock-and-roll records were made here.
Uh, people don't believe that it was just done by accident.
They think that there is some magical thing in Abbey Road.
The truth of the matter is I feel like that magical thing exists in the artist.
But artists are superstitious.
And Abbey Road in a strange way, as soon as we walk in,
a lot of that bonding that needs to take place between artists and producer
happens almost instantly.
So, I find that Abbey Road is the great leveler in our relationship.
It doesn't matter what your, like,
-taste in music is or-- -Different passions.
Yeah. Or what your passions are.
They do lie on like-- in the walls and on the desks and everything here.
So it's like coming is-- It's almost like being able to smell the inspiration.
-It's just, like, "Ah! I'm in this room…" -Yeah.
"…that so-and-so once sat in."
And it then makes you feel like
-you can be part of Abbey Road's history. -Yeah.
I'm so excited.
As far as I'm concerned, that's the record. Just leave here.
-Thank you!
-That's the right start. -It's cool though.
Yeah, "Whoop! Good God!"
Making this film and collecting these stories,
I've found artists are inspired to push creative boundaries within these walls.
Like Kate Bush, who brought her third album here,
which saw her start to produce her own music.
We were working in Studio Two.
It still had the valve desk that the Beatles had used.
And the live room was completely untouched since they'd been there.
There was a genuine fear that the sound in the room might be changed
if they even repainted it.
We shot the video for the song "Sat In Your Lap" in Studio Two.
It was a lot of fun and the first time I directed.
So many commercial studios have closed.
But Abbey Road hasn't just survived, it continues to evolve.
Studio One was built for orchestral performances.
The first live recording was Edward Elgar and the London Symphony Orchestra.
And 70 years later, Kanye West and John Legend brought it full circle.
You just want this?
I was-- I was definitely aware of the-- the history of Abbey Road.
And that's one of the reasons why it felt so important.
Yeah, and we put so much time and effort in just…
We came out way in advance and-- and practiced so hard
'cause we wanted to live up to the tradition.
We wanted to live up to the-- the mystique of this legendary studio.
Performing at Abbey Road was just--
It's one of those type of things
when you're dreaming of being a musician or a rapper,
you don't even fathom that.
And when it's brought up, it's like, "Oh, wow! W-We can actually do that?"
And we did a lot of orchestrations.
And just-- It was a no-brainer for us to work with the strings.
And I thought it would bring this performance to another level.
This another class of hip-hop.
Yeah, Abbey Road, it felt like a kid in a candy store or a artist in a art store.
You just get all these paints and say, "I can do this! I can do that!"
And, you know, having John be there with the piano,
the instrumentation, the orchestration.
All that just-- It sent my mind racing.
Thank you!
My seminal moment was coming here for the first time.
Really, I think you never forget doing something for the first time and--
So many people that have passed through here
and made such significant pieces of music
that have changed the way a people or a person look at something.
And with that, it kind of encourages you to want to elevate your performance.
It's just something about the space.
And if you read into it and you take it,
then that's where you make something really moving and genuinely beautiful,
I think.
When you enter a place with so much history around it,
it's kind of sacred in a way.
All that's gone before you.
You know, people want to come here. They want to record.
They want the sound of Abbey Road.
You only get these-- these fleeting moments as they go by.
And if you make connections with people that are meaningful,
and filled with emotion and love and all of that.
And some of that happened in Abbey Road. It was very special.
I always feel that I was born in that corner of Studio Two
and that Abbey Road brought me to life and taught me how to do it.
It started here, and it might one day end here. I don't know.
But it's-- it's that big for me.
Studios are great gathering places of like-minded people.
The same as record shops, and the same as pubs,
and the same as football stadiums.
And it's where…
hanging out with other musicians and making music with other musicians.
It's a-- It's a very spiritual thing. It can't be overstated.
You know, with Abbey Road, you can't ignore the legacy.
And I think it's a bit like, um, you're never meant to clean out a teapot.
You know you're meant to leave the residue of the tea
because then the tea infuses.
And I think studios are a bit like that.
You walk down into Studio Two,
and you feel as though the walls are saturated with great music.
The songs that we recorded here,
um, are incredible memories.
The people that we worked with are fantastic.
So I've got great, great memories.
You know, if these walls could sing.
I have someone for you.
-Hello? -Hello!
Ah! Hi, guys.
-How's it going? -Hello.
-Good. We're done! -Good! We're done.
-Oh, you're done? -Yeah. There you go.
-Listen, I love you. Take care.
-Yeah, I love you. -All right. Bye.
-See you later. -Bye.
Were you a fan of any of the music?
-Hello. -Ask him that question again.
-Oh, fantastic. -I was about to say why are you…
I love it.
All these really cool people.
Where's my picture?
Can't believe he nearly ran him over!
Power's gone off. I can't work with this environment.
-Press 15 amps. Press play. -Oh, it's already-- Sorry.
That's your lot.