All the things you never knew about London’s legendary recording studio by its biographer, music journalist David Hepworth ahead of the Chipping Campden Literature Festival
It’s June 6, 1962: an ordinary Wednesday evening (ordinary in the way that most extraordinary moments start out like any other). A recording session has been booked at Abbey Road, EMI’s North London recording studios. Norman Smith (wartime glider pilot; jazz aficionado) is in the control room. Norman has been working as a recording engineer for some three years; he got the job even after telling his interviewer he didn’t think much of Cliff Richard. (Actually, that’s the sanitised version. What he said was, ‘…that sort of music nauseates me’.)
To Norman’s surprise, George Martin himself has turned up to oversee the session. The great George Martin of Parlophone, currently riding high with Bernard Cribbins of The Hole in the Ground comedic record-fame.
Through the goods entrance enter four young men with Liverpool accents and scruffy equipment. (Regional accents? A comedy group, then, surely?) The boys play three numbers. (That’s all there’s time for.)
The session, it’s fair to say, is not an out-and-out success. George Martin doesn’t pull punches as the last chord reverberates. The company would only record them if they were more impressive. Besides which, they needed to invest in new amps.
Did the lads have anything to say in return?
Yeah, says George Harrison. ‘I don’t like your tie.’
DAVID HEPWORTH HAS A BIT OF A COLD. ‘I was lying on the bed, feeling sorry for myself,’ he says, when I phone. (Early-ish in the morning, to be fair.)
I don’t need to mention this. Obviously I don’t need to mention it.
But in his book, Abbey Road: the Inside Story of the World’s Most Famous Recording Studio, details such as this turn into the most fabulous of anecdotes. Ordinary details: 1950s kids thrilling to the twang of an arrow hitting an oak tree on The Adventures of Robin Hood, blissfully unaware the sound was George Martin flexing a ruler.
Pink Floyd in the Abbey Road canteen, mid-The Dark Side of the Moon. Nick Mason tucks into egg, sausage, chips and beans, with a cup of tea on the side. Dave Gilmour drinks milk. (The life of a demi-god rock star in those heady days of 1972, hey?)
And – as David Hepworth himself snuffles – a vignette featuring the cold virus: John Lennon’s rendition of Twist And Shout on Please Please Me – which sounds (as David wonderfully describes it) ‘like it was the last he would ever sing’ – achieved thanks to Lennon having flu. (Listen intently and you can hear him coughing at the end.)
It’s funny, I say to David: some things are like reverse alchemy; the more you see the base ingredients, the less you see the gold.
But, with Abbey Road – and his book – it’s the polar opposite. The more you learn of the constituent parts, the more you marvel; the stronger the magic.
Ah, yes, he agrees. Take Dark Side of the Moon and Pink Floyd. In those far-off days, sound-effects (see above) were things you provided yourself.
‘So, they used to go to Hazel Yarwood [started at Abbey Road in 1947; no relevant experience other than familiarity with her dad’s classical record collection, and an ability to read music]. She was the doyenne of the cutting department. The mastering department. And she had a fabulous cut-glass voice because she’d trained as an actress.’
Could you do an airport announcement for us, the band asked.
‘Half the magic of Dark Side of the Moon that people still remember years later is not even Pink Floyd; it’s Hazel Yarwood’s voice.’
The Irish voice at the end? Saying, ‘there is no dark side of the moon’? Gerry O’Driscoll, studio doorman.
And the glorious ‘oh-ohs’ of the psychedelic single-angel chorus on The Great Gig In The Sky…?
Session singer, Clare Torry.
‘They wanted her to come in on Saturday, but she couldn’t because she was going to see Chuck Berry in Hammersmith. So, she went on a Sunday and got paid double-time – which was not a lot of money. £40 or whatever. [£30, actually, according to his book.]
‘And they just played her a track and asked her to sing. There was no song. She did her best. They stopped her and said: Could you do it again without saying ‘Baby’? Which is a very Pink Floyd thing to do.
‘She got her money and left, thinking she would never hear anything of it again.’
A few months later, Clare was in a record shop, heard what was playing, and thought, hang on a mo, ‘That’s me!’
‘About 10 years ago, she took legal action, and so she gets part of the writing-credit nowadays.’
DAVID HEPWORTH IS A MUSIC JOURNALIST of distinction. Helped launch and edit magazines such as Q, Mojo, The Word and Smash Hits.
He’s also a man who can entice a shy anecdote into eating out of his hand.
(Odd metaphor. But it’s how I picture him.)
In short, the perfect man to write the story of Abbey Road, the most famous recording studio in the world. What’s more, he owns – so his blurb tells us – more records than he’ll ever get round to listening to (some made at Abbey Road).
‘People have always got a tendency to confuse songs with the records. And they’re not the same things at all,’ he muses, as we chat.
In the sense that...?
‘A song is a written-down thing: a set of instructions, if you like. Whereas a recording is the capturing of a performance of that particular song by these particular musicians at this particular point in time. And so, it has a lot more to it than just the song.’
It’s interesting, he says, that people have this confusion.
‘I don’t think they particularly appreciate what makes a great record great. A classic example of this – and this is an act more identified with Abbey Road than just about anybody – is the Beatles. Really, we talk about them as great songwriters. All right. Fair enough.
‘But what they really were was great record-makers. The classic case of this is when they go in there to record She Loves You.’
Sixty years ago this year.
(NB, reader; I was going to use this section to tell you more about David himself. No idea if I’ll have time. Because the anecdotes come thick and fast and I – for one – cannot resist them.)
So, here we go: it’s the height of Beatlemania (at one point, screaming girls breach the studio’s security, tearing hysterically through corridors seeking Beatles). The group have had a couple of hits. (Three, if you count Love Me Do.)
‘And Norman Smith [again: see above], who’s the engineer, looks at the lyrics lying around and thinks, ‘They’ve blown it this time; they’ve gone too far this time. There’s nothing there at all. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.’
‘As a song, there was nothing there at all. Nothing.
‘But as a performance – as a recorded performance captured – there was everything there. It’s the projection of personality. The capturing of personality on the record.’
Quite.
And looking at the history of Abbey Road – the history of recorded performance – it wasn’t just the public who started out confused. Early attempts at this new-found technique provoked bafflement, sometimes downright hostility, from performers, too. Emma Calvé, the great French soprano, was horrified on arrival at her first recording studio in 1902, refusing to alight from her carriage and four because the place looked more like a thieves’ den than a venue for an artiste of her standing. Only 100 guineas could change her mind. Once inside, she had to be ‘discouraged from breaking into dancing while singing as she did on stage’.
German pianist Hans von Bülow fainted on hearing the playback of his own performance of a Chopin mazurka. (No idea why, but I love the story.)
Another classical pianist, Artur Schnabel, fretted that records meant performances might be listened to by the wrong sort of people. ‘He was further concerned that he would not know how those people might be dressed…’
Indeed, when Sir Edward Elgar officially opened the ground-breaking Abbey Road studio in November 1931, he conducted Land of Hope and Glory on stage with his orchestra ‘apparently ready to give a performance rather than make a recording’. The audience included George Bernard Shaw, alongside EMI bigwigs.
Goodness, I can’t properly précis this incredible history. But I will say this: one of the fascinating side-effects of the story of Abbey Road is how it helped narrow the gap – once the size of the Great Rift Valley – between classical and pop/rock.
There’s a practical reason.
‘In Abbey Road – and it happened there more easily than anywhere else because it was the full-service recording studios - they’d be having dance bands, comedy records, classic records, pop records, all under the same roof.
‘If you wanted somebody to play the French horn, Abbey Road would know somebody.’
Not that there weren’t still differences.
‘I don’t know if I put this in the book, but Pink Floyd were at Abbey Road when Yehudi Menuhin [violinist] was recording. Somebody brought him in, and they said, ‘Would you mind playing a bit on our record?’
‘He said, ‘What would you like me to play?’
‘And they said, ‘Anything’.
‘He said, ‘I can’t do that. I can only play when music is put in front of me.’
David Hepworth was in Abbey Road 12 months ago when Noel Gallagher was putting strings on his new record. The string section was downstairs.
‘He told me, “You don’t speak to them directly. You speak to the arranger, who speaks to the conductor, who speaks to the musicians.” And so, the ways of doing classical music are pretty much as they were.’
THERE’S SO MUCH MORE. Cliff. Bowie. Travis. Kanye West. Lady Gaga. Amy Winehouse. Adele. Can’t keep up. Can’t stop reading.
But despite these names, there’s something that makes me laugh. Takes me aback.
Tell me your favourite record, I demand of David Hepworth.
Ah, he says, ask Spotify. Does this thing at the end of the year where it tells you the tune you’ve listened to most.
‘Something I first heard when I was five, which was the Teddy Bears’ Picnic.’
Partly because he has grandchildren. And partly because it’s a great record.
‘I’m talking about the Henry Hall Orchestra version. That record has an atmosphere to it - simultaneously comforting and slightly spooky. That’s what keeps me going back to it again and again and again. There is something in that version that you’ll never hear in anybody else’s – and there are millions of versions – but none of them sound like that one. It silences a room.’
Wasn’t made at Abbey Road, sadly. ‘I wanted it to have been. It would have made a whole chapter.’
OK. So, nominate a record that was made there. The one where he’d give anything to have been a fly on the wall.
‘Roy Harper singing When An Old Cricketer [Leaves the Crease]… Grimethorpe Colliery Band. It’s the kind of record that, if it were made today, they’d say, ‘Oh you can get that sound from a synthesiser or whatever’.’
But, no. They used a whole colliery band.
‘It’s an absolutely magical record. I’m not the world’s biggest Roy Harper fan; but I just think, not many artists get the opportunity in their life to make a great record. The Beatles did it a dozen times. Roy Harper did it once.
‘And that’s something. A hell of a something.’
David Hepworth will be speaking about the history of Abbey Road recording studio as part of Chipping Campden Literature Festival on May 26 at Cidermill Theatre: campdenmayfestivals.co.uk/literature
Abbey Road: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Famous Recording Studio, by David Hepworth, is published by Transworld, hardback £25.
