Table of contents for Abbey Road in Abbey Road

In December 1970, John Lennon was asked by Rolling Stone magazine if he considered himself a genius. The former Beatle’s reply – “If there’s such a thing, I am one” – might seem conceited, but to say anything else would have been ludicrous. If the term can be applied to anyone in the pantheon, then it must surely be bestowed on the man who broke down the limits of what popular music could say and do, who wrote Help!, Don’t Let Me Down, Strawberry Fields Forever, A Day In The Life, Come Together and all the rest. Lennon was an easy artist to worship but a harder man to love. Born at Liverpool Maternity Hospital on 9th October 1940, the singer, by his own admission, had a cruel streak as…

It was the summer of 1969, and as they embarked on Abbey Road, The Beatles were hanging by a thread. Following the clashes of the previous year’s The White Album – and the venom of the Let It Be sessions – this 11th album represented the line-up’s unspoken last stand, a chance to either reignite the spark and bonhomie of the early years, or establish that a split was inevitable. In retrospect, Abbey Road did both of these things: the album stands among the dizzy peaks of the band’s studio catalogue, but its creation also confirmed that nothing could save The Beatles now. From the moment work began on 22nd February 1969, Abbey Road was a melting pot of musical styles and a tug-of-war of opinion. From Paul McCartney’s viewpoint,…

Even now, a half-century later, the savvy motorists of North London know to avoid the stretch outside Abbey Road Studios. All year round, in every extreme of weather, the pilgrims arrive from dawn until dusk, a steady trickle of Beatles disciples visiting the band’s favoured recording facility and spiritual home. Each visitor will add their scrawl to the jumble of tributes on the dedicated graffiti wall. They will peer at the one-time Georgian townhouse that was reborn as a state-of-the-art recording studio in November 1931. And, of course, they will process in a four-man lineup across the zebra crossing, recreating the deathless sleeve art of 1969’s Abbey Road album. Rewind to the summer of 1969, and the late Scottish photographer Iain Macmillan didn’t anticipate any of these cultural ripples when…

You know an album has legs when even its shortest song travels miles. At a slender 23 seconds, Her Majesty was a last-minute addition to Abbey Road, tacked on after the intended finale of Side Two, The End. Yet this fleeting afterthought has since been deemed substantial enough to warrant covers by a host of disparate artists, from anarcho-punks Chumbawamba and jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd to grunge icon Eddie Vedder and US indie-folk types, The Low Anthem. More than half a century on, it’s a perfect illustration of Abbey Road’s enduring power. The fact that the album is stuffed with great songs is merely one facet of its longevity. Daringly experimental, it’s a statement of intent in changing times, its progressive moments pointing the way out of the ’60s and…

Sly & The Family Stone released their breakthrough album, Stand!, which became one of the top-selling albums of the decade. It went on to sell half a million copies by the end of 1969 alone. What you may not know? Bassist Larry Graham is the uncle of rap star Drake. Jimi Hendrix is arrested by Canadian Mounties at Toronto’s International Airport for possession of narcotics (specifically, heroin). Hendrix was released on $10,000 bail yet still managed to play his scheduled concert that night (3rd May) in Toronto. Bandmates Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell both, separately, later claimed the drugs were “planted” in Hendrix’s guitar case. The ten-day Battle of Hamburger Hill began on 10th May. It would prove to be the most costly US Army offensive of the Vietnam War,…

“ELVIS HAS STAYING POWER IN A WORLD WHERE METEORIC CAREERS FADE LIKE SHOOTING STARS”NEWSWEEK’S REVIEW OF ELVIS’ 1969 VEGAS SHOWS After seven years off the top of the charts, Elvis Presley hits #1 on the Billboard singles chart with Suspicious Minds on 1st November. On 7th November, The Rolling Stones open their US tour in Colorado, USA. It’s the first overseas show with Mick Taylor as new guitarist – and the band’s first tour for two years. Billboard magazine changes its policy of charting the A and B sides of 45 singles on its pop chart. The former policy charted the two sides separately, but the new policy considers both sides as one chart entry. The Beatles are the first beneficiary of the new policy as their current 45 single…

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John Lennon went crazy in Hamburg. He was 19 years old, obsessed with rock ’n’ roll and high on speed. When he wasn’t fighting with members of the audience or playing guitar in his underpants with a toilet seat round his neck, he would antagonise the club’s German patrons with Nazi salutes. Once he even urinated from a window onto some passing nuns… just for laughs. Lennon was playing eight hours a night, seven days a week with his band, The Beatles. Little did the young men know that within a few years they would be the biggest group in the world. But for the moment, they were just going off their heads and having a blast. The sound of The Beatles in Hamburg is best described as raw power.…

Sift through any biography of The Beatles and the chances are that at some point there will be a reference to ‘the fifth Beatle’. It’s a phrase first coined by the media at the advent of Beatlemania in late 1963, and it’s one that over six decades on shows little sign of waning. The ‘fifth Beatle’ refers to any individual whose skills were pivotal to the band’s trajectory, someone who was trusted and attuned to the band’s sensibilities, their ambitions, John Lennon’s sometimes caustic comments and their idiosyncratic wit. In the course of the band’s eight-year existence and beyond, there are a number of key people who have been referred to as ‘the fifth Beatle’. Here are the main contenders for the title… “WE DIDN’T HAVE THE PUSH TO DO…

TRACK 1 COME TOGETHER Very much John Lennon’s song, Abbey Road’s opener started out as Let’s Get It Together, a campaign song for Timothy Leary, standing against Ronald Reagan for Governor of California. Lennon kickstarted his lyric with a phrase from Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me (‘Here come old flat-top’), but neglected to cut the line from the finished recording. Berry’s publishers initiated plagiarism proceedings but settled out of court in 1973 on condition Lennon record three of their songs (hence 1975’s Rock ’N’ Roll album). With a thinly-veiled Lennon as central protagonist, Come Together is a groove-based espousal of the counter-culture, rich in self-confessed ‘gobbledygook’, that references Yoko Ono (then recovering from a car accident in a hospital bed actually located in Abbey Road Studios) and features the…

When Abbey Road was released in the UK on 26th September 1969, only insiders knew that The Beatles were ceasing to function as a genuine group. Nevertheless, there were major clues things had been going awry. Time magazine noted in its review of the record, published on 3rd October 1969, there was something “special” going on and got to speak to John Lennon about the album. “We were more together than we had been for a long time,” said Lennon. “It’s lucky when you get all four feeling funky at the same time.” Lennon was talking about a recording session in the summer that produced the latest Beatles record. Appropriately titled Abbey Road in honour of the group’s favourite studios in London, the disc proved lucky indeed – for listeners…

The Sixties was a decade of extremes. Simultaneously it saw the emergence of the hippie movement and the horrific war in Vietnam. The world’s superpowers raced to reach the Moon, always with their fingers on the nuclear trigger. However, 1969 left perhaps the most profound mark on history, with events that still resonate over half a century later… THE VIETNAM WAR After four years of fighting in Vietnam, American forces were no closer to victory over the North Vietnamese, and support for the war was beginning to wane. In May, the Battle of Hamburger Hill was a particularly bloody operation, the futility of which grew more support for the already strong anti-war movement. Protestors around the world demonstrated against the war, and students in particular voiced their opposition. The 27th…

After a performance at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium, Jim Morrison of The Doors was arrested for indecent exposure during the show. Morrison was officially charged with lewd and lascivious behaviour, indecent behaviour, open profanity and public drunkenness. Morrison was sentenced to six months in prison and a $500 fine. Jim Morrison died in Paris (in 1970) before the jail term could be enforced. The Who release Pinball Wizard as a single. It was the lead single for the band’s later 1969 concept album Tommy, yet Pete Townshend once called it “the most clumsy piece of writing [I’ve] ever done”. UK blues-rock band Free release their debut album, Tons Of Sobs. It failed to chart at all in the UK, but it did reach #197 in the USA. With the band…

“NO ONE CHOOSES THE RIGHT SYMBOLIC OCCASSION; ONE TAKES WHAT’S AVAILABLE”EDMUND WHITE, NOVELIST AND MEMOIRIST, ON THE STONEWALL RIOTS John Lennon and Yoko Ono host another ‘Bed-In For Peace’, this time at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada on 2nd June. The couple recorded the song Give Peace A Chance live in their suite with Tommy Smothers, LSD guru Timothy Leary, and several others. Mick Taylor joins The Rolling Stones, after the sacking of co-founder Brian Jones. Taylor later reflected, “The Beatles and The Stones were basically inspired by American Rhythm & Blues.” On 7th June, the newly-formed band Blind Faith played a free show In Hyde Park. The band was Eric Clapton (guitar, vocals), Steve Winwood (lead vocals, keyboards, guitar), Ric Grech (bass, violin) and Clapton’s ex-Cream colleague…

A Hard Day’s Night 1964 A Hard Day’s Night was described by one critic at the time as the “Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals”. Big words but the film is great. The musical performances like If I Fell and I Should Have Known Better are complemented by some good acting by The Beatles and old lags like Wilfred Brambell (old man Steptoe of Steptoe And Son TV show fame). Like the Beatles flicks that followed, Ringo is the star of the show. The scenes of him shuffling around old London causing mayhem are hilarious. The opening shot of the lads being chased by hordes of screaming girls is simply iconic. Help! 1965 A bonkers mess of cults and mad scientists with a bemused (and apparently stoned) Fab Four stuck in…

In any other band, George Harrison would have been the main event. A master guitarist with poster-boy looks. An accomplished singer whose cultural antennae was receiving everything from the wisdom of Hare Krishna to the sitar-playing of Ravi Shankar. A songwriter capable of cutting diamonds like Something, Taxman, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Here Comes The Sun. Some felt it was the guitarist’s great misfortune to be in a band alongside two principals of the stature of Lennon and McCartney – but Harrison seemed content to operate as the ultimate second fiddle. As Dave Grohl put it, “He was the secret weapon.” On 6th February 1958, when Harrison joined The Quarrymen on the strength of his chord knowledge and a virtuoso rendition of Bill Justis’ R&B hit Raunchy, it…

On 6th June 1962, four unknown scruffs from Liverpool tramped into an elegant Georgian townhouse in North London. As Paul McCartney reflected in a recent TV interview, Abbey Road Studios – or EMI Recording Studios, as it was then known – didn’t roll out the red carpet when the fledgling Beatles arrived to audition for the record label in Studio Two. “I remember the very first day we walked into Abbey Road as four twenty-something boys. We came in the tradesman’s entrance, because we weren’t allowed to come through the control room, that was for the grown-ups. So we came in, like, ‘Wow, a studio’. And George had a black eye, because he’d got smacked by some guy at The Cavern the week before.” Since its grand opening in November…

TRACK 1 HERE COMES THE SUN During April 1969, London’s meteorological stations registered more sunlight hours than during any other month of the Sixties, and during this month George Harrison decided to “sag off” yet another Apple business meeting with “dopey accountants” to spend the day truanting in the garden of Eric Clapton’s house in Ewhurst, Surrey. These were the circumstances under which Harrison conjured up Here Comes The Sun on a borrowed acoustic guitar. The brightly beaming hopeful light to I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’s ultimately oppressive shade, Here Comes The Sun represented the relief and optimism Harrison felt when removed from the grind of The Beatles’ business machinations and ever more incessant infighting. By the time its outwardly straightforward (if slightly complicated by Indian influence) chords made…

One Friday morning in August 1969, photographer Iain Macmillan hoisted up a stepladder in the middle of Abbey Road in north-west London. He took six shots of The Beatles as they filed across the zebra crossing outside EMI Studios, where the band were applying the final touches to their final recording. Paul McCartney chose one of the stills for the cover of Abbey Road, released the following month. In doing so, a casual moment became deeply symbolic. Here were all four members of the world’s biggest pop group, briefly in step with one another during a fractious time, walking away from the studio that had been home for their entire recording life. By extension, they were also walking away from everything. Before Abbey Road was even in the shops, John…

At the start of the year, Paul McCartney demos an early version of Let It Be. Jimi Hendrix plays an impromptu version of Sunshine Of Your Love past his allotted timeslot on the BBC1 show Happening For Lulu. He and Cream’s Eric Clapton had been friendly since the US guitarist arrived in London. Both were within The Beatles’ immediate orbit. Hendrix covered Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band live just hours after its release. Clapton had played on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, written by George Harrison in 1968 (on The White Album). Both were partners of model Pattie Boyd. Ex-Beatles drummer Pete Best won a defamation lawsuit against The Beatles. Best had originally sought $8 million (approximately $58 million in 2019 value), but ended up being awarded an apparently…

The Beach Boys filed a lawsuit against their label, Capitol Records, for $2,041,446.64 in unpaid royalties and producer’s fees for main songwriter/producer Brian Wilson. In 2019 terms, that’s over $14m. Capitol retaliated by deleting most of its Beach Boys catalogue, severely limiting the band’s in-shop income. Seems like sonic innovators/rivals The Beatles and The Beach Boys weren’t the only ones battling big business. The L.A. Free Festival in Venice, California, ends early following a riot of audience members, 117 of whom were arrested. The Who performed their first complete performance of ‘rock opera’ Tommy. Bizarrely, it was debuted in Dolton, Devon, UK, a small village of (then) only 900 residents. John Lennon officially changes his name from John Winston Lennon to John Winston Ono-Lennon. John & Yoko, the first recording…

The United States’ Apollo 11 became the first crewed mission to land on the Moon, on 20th July 1969. Just five days before the mission launched, David Bowie’s Space Oddity was released and became the singer’s first hit. Bowie said the song was inspired by the Stanley Kubrick-directed movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was also the opening track of his second studio album, simply called David Bowie, and became one of Bowie’s signature songs. The character of ‘Major Tom’ was revisited in Ashes To Ashes in 1980. An estimated 20 per cent of the Earth’s population watched the first manned Moon landing – Bowie had his timing spot-on. Former Rolling Stones member Brian Jones was found dead on 3rd July 1969, drowned in the swimming pool at his home…

On 10th October, The Beatles’ press officer, Derek Taylor, responded to the ‘Paul is dead’ gossip, saying: “Recently we’ve been getting a flood of inquiries asking about reports that Paul is dead. We’ve been getting questions like that for years, of course, but in the past few weeks we’ve been getting them at the office and home night and day. I’m even getting telephone calls from disc jockeys and others in the United States.” News moved slower in those days. US radio station WMCA despatched Alex Bennett to the Beatles’ Apple Corps headquarters in London on 23rd October, further to his extended coverage of the ‘Paul is dead’ theory. There, Ringo Starr told Bennett: “If people are gonna believe it, they’re gonna believe it. I can only say it’s not…