Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Abbey Road Studios

Guest post by Nick.

For the last year or so Milo has been pretty obsessed with The Beatles. It started with watching the Beatles cartoon from the 60s and snowballed from there. One major bonus is that he will usually request listening to The Beatles for breakfast which makes a nice break from The Wiggles.

When we were still commuting from the new house to old nursery, Milo would often request the bus that went via Abbey Road so we could see the famous pedestrian crossing (invariably with a lot of tourists queuing to take photos and holding up traffic) and what he calls 'The Beatles studio'. So a few months back when I read that Abbey Road were opening their doors to the public for a tour and talk I jumped at getting us a couple of tickets.


When the big morning arrived (10am on a Sunday) Milo was really excited to finally see inside the studio and was bouncing around and chatting away with other Beatles fans as we queued to gain entry. When we finally gained admittance I’d only ever seen him more excited when we visited Disneyland – his eyes wide as saucers trying to take in all the music photos than lined reception and the hallways. Downstairs it was all signed movie-posters – to commemorate the film soundtrack work which is now the studios bread and butter – including to Milo’s excitement – all the Star Wars films (apart from the first one).



Eventually we found our way into Studio 2 – the second largest studio (Studio 1, the largest room at Abbey Road was off-limits as it was being used by an orchestra to record) where a selection of old recording equipment and instruments (most including photos of The Beatles playing them) including a Celeste that was used by both The Beatles on Abbey Road and Pink Floyd on Dark Side of The Moon.


The centerpiece of the day was a presentation by Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan - authors of the book Recording the Beatles; who took a decade by decade approach to the history of the studio, including advanced in recording techniques. This was pretty chat heavy so I was surprised Milo managed to sit through everything – although they did include plenty of audio recordings an occasional video clips – lots of Beatles, some great candid footage of The Hollies, the first ever recording at Abbey Road Sir Edward Elgar conducting his composition ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in 1931; but my favorite was Burt Bacharach conducting Cila Black recording ‘Alfie’.


Famous red chairs - 


After a few final photo opportunities, we made our way back out – trying to take in as much of the atmosphere as possible.